What Is a Parent?

The error of Matt Walsh, and a defense of a social definition of woman, largely marketed to people who disagree.

Matt Walsh has a new documentary titled “What Is a Woman,” in which he discusses trans related issues. The fundamental thesis of the movie, as the title suggests, is that those who grant the legitimacy of transgender people cannot give an adequate definition of the word woman—it must be defined biologically. Some try to define woman as a person who identifies as a woman—which is a hopelessly circular definition. After all, that would just mean they identify as a person who identifies as women, which means that they identify as a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a woman…which means that fully unpacked the definition bottoms out as “a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a person who identifies…with an infinite number of loops of this before a woman.” This leaves fully unexplained what they’re even identifying as, just adding in an infinite number of identifications. So, this is a bad definition.

However, there is a good definition on offer, which is, a woman is someone who broadly has a large number of traits associated with the female sex. This avoids being regressive, sex is biological. However, it also avoids the pitfalls of a purely biological definition like the one Walsh gives, which we’ll explore in a moment.

A clear analogy of the word woman can be seen with the word parent. What is a parent? Well, the reductive biological definition of the word parent would merely be the people whose sperm and egg produced a child. However, this definition is obviously much too narrow. It leaves out step-parents, adoptive parents, and other people who fill the social role of parents, while not being responsible for the fertilization of the egg which became a human. However, a parent is not merely someone who identifies as a parent—that would be regressive and circular. Instead, there are some social roles associated with the strictly biological notion of parent. A parent is someone who fulfills a reasonable number of the social roles associated with a biological parent.

In the movie, Walsh asks a man how he knows that he is a man, to which he replies “I got a dick.” Similarly, one could imagine asking a person how they know that they’re a parent, to which they’d reply, “cause I fucked my wife and a kid popped out.” However, such a definition would be unsatisfactory—after all, adoptive parents are still parents. One could imagine Walsh in an alternative world accusing those who expanded the definition of parent to include adoptive parents of playing a political game. This would, however, be clearly absurd—there are obvious benefits to having the word parent including adoptive and step-parents. The same is true when it comes to gender—the biological definition is explanatorily poor and makes people’s lives worse.

One advantage comes from making the lives of transgender people better. There is good data that indicates that referring to trans people by the gender which they identify as makes their life better, reducing rates of suicide and depression. This is clearly a reason to use this definition.

Another advantage comes from being able to accurately describe people. It would be bizarre to describe Buck Angel as a woman, Blaire White as a man, and this person as a man. These descriptions would be just as bizarre as describing an adoptive parent as not a parent, if not more so.

Thus, we have a very good reason to include trans women as women and trans men as man, in our definitions of the words. The categories were made for man, not man for the categories.

Now one might at this point worry that the definition provided would entail that transgender people’s preferred pronouns shouldn’t be used across the board. After all, there are many transgender people who still fill the social role of the gender they were assigned at birth, such that one would ordinarily mistake them for the gender they were assigned at birth, even though they currently don’t identify as that gender. This is not the correct implication. To see this, let’s consider an analogy with names.

What is a person named John? Well, it’s not really a person who identifies as a person named John—that definition would be circular. Really a person named John is someone who is generally described as named John, by most people. If a person who was named Ralph at birth decides they want to be called John, prior to them telling anyone, it wouldn’t quite be accurate to describe them as a person named John.

Similarly, what is a former addict? Well, it’s someone who was addicted at one point, but who has put their addiction firmly behind them. In the most reductionist sense, it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call a person who has been sober for two weeks a formal alcohol addict.

Finally, what is an American? It’s not just a person who identifies as an American—if the Taliban called themselves American, they’d be wrong. However, if a person recently immigrated to the U.S. and valued American culture, but wasn’t yet really part of American social life, I’d call them an American if they wanted me to.

Similarly, if a person wanted to be called John or a former addict, I would do so. I’d especially do so if there was solid evidence that calling John by his birth name would make his life a lot worse, and that calling people who have been sober for a week former addicts makes them less likely to go back to their addiction.

A lot of this discussion is shrouded in culture war talking points, so if you’re a conservative or similar, you likely feel a visceral rage at some points I have made, or phraseology I’ve used, in much the way I’m often irked by phrases like “psychic violence¹.” Here, I’ll explain some of the arguments I’ve used and language I’ve employed.

Conservatives often feel irked by the phrase gender assigned at birth. Gender is not assigned, they argue, it’s observed at birth. This, however, misidentifies what’s meant by the term gender. Remember, gender denotes the social roles associated with one of the sexes. Thus, while sex is observed at birth, the cluster (or clumper as I originally wrote, combining cluster and clump) of traits associated with a particular gender is assigned at birth. One could perfectly coherently imagining referring at birth to a biological female as a male, using he/him pronouns to refer to the person, and naming them Greg. If this was done, the person would be assigned male at birth, despite being biologically female².

Additionally, one might, when reading this article, raise worries about transgender people in sports, and other such issues. In this article, I am taking no stance on any of that. There are clearly purposes for which biological sex is useful to take into account—one could hold the view that trans women are women, but shouldn’t be able to participate in women’s sports perfectly coherently. Superman is a man, but he shouldn’t be able to participate in man’s sports.

One might think this definition is a bit wishy washy—after all, it doesn’t give a clear way of objectively determining whether someone is a woman. Several points are worth making. First, the same is true of nearly all words. The word parent is analogous, as we saw before. Similarly, the word knowledge is notoriously tricky to define. For a while, it was thought that the definition of knowledge was justified true belief, but then we discovered some counterexamples to this. For example, if I see a clock says it’s 11:58, I’m justified in believing that. If the clock is broken and always says it’s 11:58, my belief would be justified and true, yet it would still be bizarre to describe that as something I know. Philosophers can never define simple concepts in a way that’s fully adequate—there’s always a counterexample. To give another example, what is an alien? One might say life on another planet, yet that would exclude hypothetical life on stars, and would include astronauts on Jupiter. One might say that it’s life that originated somewhere in the universe not on earth, yet this would say that if people had a baby in space, they’d be an alien. There might be some definition, but even a word like that is tricky to define.

Second, the biological definition is tricky and imprecise. One might say a woman is someone with XX chromosomes, but as Aella points out, there are people born females, with female genitalia, who were raised as women, but who have Swyer syndrome, resulting in XY chromosomes. Those people should still be called women. The biological definition involves a series of traits, none of which is single handedly necessary or sufficient to make one a woman.

One might object to the notion that we pick what a woman is—after all, there is a fact of the matter about whether a person is biologically female. However, while we don’t pick the biological reality, we do pick the definitions of words. When it’s decided that a definition doesn’t capture the essence of what a word means, we change it—and for good reason. When choosing definitions, we should choose the ones that best describe the world and make the world better.

One doesn’t need to wade into the culture war issues to agree with this. To accept this, all one has to accept is that a definition that makes people’s lives better and makes it easier to describe the world is the definition that we should use.

1. Unless it’s used to describe the attacks of the Pokémon Alakazam

2. Note, I’m very much not endorsing doing this, I’m merely using it for purposes of explanation.