Womanhood, transgender women and tedious definitional debates

Years ago, Scott Alexander wrote a good essay entitled:

“The Categories Were Made for Man not Man for the Categories”

In that essay, he argued that:

“There’s nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or incorrect with [the ancient Hebrews] calling a whale a fish.”

Not only was it not wrong for them to call whales fish, but it was also useful for them to use the word that way.

And equally, there’s nothing wrong, false, or incorrect, about calling trans women women. It’s one way you can use the word woman. Conversely, I reluctantly admit, it’s not factually incorrect to use the word “woman” in a way that excludes trans women either if you want. However, I think it is a mistake in values- morally incorrect- to use the term in a way that excludes trans women.

Both cultures and indviduals can stipulate what they mean by your own concepts. Definitions, as a rule of thumb with some exceptions, are not the kind of things that can be true or false. Rather, statements made using given set of definitions are what can be true or false.

Scott is not the first person who has made this point. He will not be the last. Yet the message isn’t getting across. People act like there’s some kind of deep mistake going on when you call a trans woman a woman, so I thought it could be useful to lay out an my view about how concepts work in this regard. Maybe this is naive, but I sincerely think that there are people- maybe not many, but some- who are on the wrong side of this debate because of a conceptual confusion about how definitions work and I want to clear that up.

An aside about trans men and toilet usage

I will primarily use examples that refer to trans women simply because people are obsessed with them, and discussion and criticism is usually focused on them. Thus it seems important to mount a defence. However, there are almost as many trans men as trans women, and there are also a lot of trans people who don’t identify as either male or female.

I think one of the saddest case studies in this matter was a trans man who was using the women’s bathroom because the rules said he had to use that bathroom. He was assaulted by people who assumed he was just a cis dude in the women’s bathroom. When he said he was trans they assumed he meant he was a trans woman. This tells us two things:

1. Our culture is hyperfocused on trans women instead of trans men. I’m not sure why. My guess is that it is because trans women play a psychodramatic role. They are used as a cipher by both cis men and cis women to project their anxieties about men’s sexuality onto. Ultimately though, I don’t know.

2. This has never been about people using the “right” bathroom. Bigots will always be made anxious and violent by any toilet usage by trans people. Bigots simply don’t want trans people to exist, at least in public.

Any rule that says trans people must use women’s bathrooms is going to result in people like this being forced into the women’s bathroom:

Now don’t get me wrong, the guy in this image looks both friendly and handsome. But I think a lot of women are going to be bothered by sharing a bathroom with him.

How do we choose the nature of our concepts?

There’s a line of objection to trans people (almost always framed in terms of trans women) which goes as follows.

1. As a matter of fact, trans women just aren’t women because a woman is [insert biological definition, perhaps “someone who has XX sex chromosomes”]

2. Therefore for society to recognize trans women as women would be to defy reality. Kind of like pretending the emperor is wearing clothes or whatever.

Call this the metaphysical argument against trans people.

This has always seemed to me like a bad argument. Trans advocates don’t think we should use the word “woman” to mean “person with XX chromosomes”. They think we should use the word woman to mean something more like “a person who identifies and wishes to affiliate with a particular cultural category of womanhood”. The debate between the trans advocate and the transphobe is therefore a semantic debate, not factual debate.

Our words refer to certain things and mean certain things on the basis of how we use them. We use them and craft their references and meanings, on the basis of human needs. Our needs are endless: to know the truth, to be known, to communicate, to teach, to protect, to respect, to create, to affiliate, to flirt, to obfuscate, to apologize… The meaning of words does not fall on us from the sky, we choose them through social and individual processes.

Choosing to define a word a particular way does not, in and of itself, inherently take any position on the nature of reality. Of course, particular conceptions of words can become bound up in debates about reality. However, if Bob uses the word woman to mean “someone who affiliates with a socio-cultural category of womanhood” and Emma uses the word woman to mean “someone with XX chromosomes” there’s no real disagreement between them about the facts, when one calls Charlotte a woman and the other doesn’t. It’s not as if, as is sometimes made out by dishonest critics, Bob thinks Charlotte really does have phantom XX chromosomes or was born with an invisible vagina or something.

What Bob and Emma do very likely disagree on is values. Especially this question of values- how we should relate to people without XX chromosomes, but regard themselves as women.

Thus, the debate we need to resolve here is a debate about values. Would society be better off if we defined our word “woman” based on a sense of affiliation to the cultural category of womanhood, or would we be better off if we defined it in terms of XX chromosomes?

Different cultures have tried different things with respect to gender. Despite perceptions that this debate is new, there are millennia worth of debates on related subjects to this across many cultures. I can’t resolve all of this here, but I want to make two points:

1. Prima facie, it’s best to respect people's identity and also let them do what they want. If you want to deny that we should respect someone’s identity the burden of proof is on you.

2. As I’ve tried to establish, there is no metaphysical barrier to regarding trans women as women, the debate is an axiological debate about which approach to the use of a term would make our society better off.

No, this is not some kind of second-class womanhood either

Some people will accidentally or deliberately read this essay as saying that trans women have a kind of secondary or participation trophy womanhood because you could use the term woman in a way that includes them, or you could not. This interpretation is absolutely wrong.

Yes, it’s true that some conceptions of womanhood include trans women and others don’t. It’s also true that, while I think the right concept of womanhood to use is one that includes trans women, I can’t strictly say that those who disagree are making a factual error, “only” (as if that were any less important!) a moral error.

But it’s also true that for every single woman on the planet there are conceptions of womanhood that don’t include them. For example, some people use the word “woman” to refer only to female members of their own culture, regarding apparent women from outside their culture as subhuman and thus not really women at all. There’s no factual mistake here, there is “only” (as if that were any less important!) an error in values. Again- if you use the term woman to only include members of your specific tribe you haven’t made a factual error. If being covered only by some conceptions of womanhood makes you a second-class woman, all women are second-class women, all men are second-class men and all humans are second-class humans.

But aren’t some differences in word usage based on factual mistakes?

Yes, but not all.

Consider again our example of someone who thinks that no one from outside their tribe is a person.

There are two possibilities here. One is that he thinks this because he doesn’t know enough about people from outside his tribe. For example, he thinks they are demons wearing masks. If only he spent some time getting to know them he’d recognising that the category person, as he defines it, does apply to them because they are not demons wearing masks.

The other is that there’s no factual error. He’s just defined person in such a way as to only include tribe members, and no factual learning- or at least no factual learning alone- could change this.

While some differences in word usage are based on factual mistakes, others represent fundamental conceptual differences, not factual disagreements.

But couldn’t you just start using the word up to mean down!

The most obvious objection is- what if you go nutty with it? What if you start using words in silly ways. Wouldn’t this logic imply that you wouldn’t be wrong?

Suppose you started using the word “up” to mean “down” and vice versa. Sure enough, what I’ve said implies you wouldn’t be wrong about the facts but it wouldn’t be a useful way of talking. True, when you said the Paris catacombs are up from the Effiel tower, you’ll be correct, but it wouldn’t allow you to fly, or get over walls or anything. It wouldn’t change the real, material relationship between the Effiel tower and the catacombs. The reality remains the same and only the words will have swapped.

The advantage of using the word woman to refer to a kind of affiliation is that it allows you to respect people. Also, it allows you to capture important features about how people feel, how people are likely to dress, and so on. It has advantages in both conveying information and helping people. The up-down swap has no such advantages that I can see.

Even so, despite its lack of advantages, the up-down word meaning swap isn’t strictly wrong it’s just stupid and impractical.

But what about rigid designators

Some philosophically sophisticated people object to the story I’ve told so far on the following grounds. Consider gold. People have used the word and its predecessors for thousands of years, all that time, although they did not know it until recently, it referred to the element AU, atomic number 79. This essence of gold is somehow magnetic to our language, our word attaches itself to this atomic essence almost without our even knowing it.

Now, they continue, the word “woman” is like this. It attaches to a biological essence- maybe having XX chromosmes- and it has attached to it for a very long time, long before we even knew there were XX chromosomes. Consequently, people who think they are using “woman” to refer to, say, some kind of cultural category, are just wrong. The word “woman” refers to a natural kind, and its meaning isn’t just in our head.

Okay then, let’s take gold as an example. Imagine someone wanted to call all shiny metals of a golden hue gold. Once they told everyone that’s what they had in mind by gold, reference magnetism would cease to bind them to meaning Au 79 by the term gold. If they wished to carry out scientific research specifically on Au 79, no problem they can specify that in those words.

Reference magnetism, then is defeasible. It might pull your words in a specific direction, but you can get around it by saying- as an individual or as a society- that you don’t mean them so. Even if we grant reference magnetism applies in this case - and personally I don’t think it does- it doesn’t prevent us from using “woman” to refer to a person with a kind of cultural affiliation if we want to.

No, this is not going to lead us to relativism- the case of Smiglish

A charge often bought against the claim that use sets meaning and you can mean whatever you like by terms is that it leads to relativism. Not so!

Suppose that on another planet, Smiglish developed. By pure chance Smiglish is exactly like English, except in one regard. “snow” means rain and “rain” means snow.

Now suppose that we met Smiglish speakers through space travel. We would accept the fact that the conclusion that when they said “it is raining” that would be true under different conditions than when we said, “it is raining”. In no sense whatsoever would this create any kind of relativism. As for how we’d use language going forward, maybe we’d come to some kind of agreement- perhaps based on a coin toss- to standardize Smiglish and English in this regard, or perhaps we’d keep the difference and accept the linguistic divergence. We’d make the choice on practical grounds, not on the basis of who was “right” about rain and snow.

Now in exactly the same way if there were two cultures, one of which used “woman” to mean the same thing as“identifies with a certain cultural category of gender” and the other used “woman” to mean the same thing as I dunno, “has XX chromosomes” in no way would this threaten to create any substantive relativism, any more than the Smiglish case. They’re both just using words differently.

A relativist, in a proper sense, is someone who thinks that even given a single meaning of a word, the truth can vary depending on your point of view. Differences in definitions do not alone make relativism.

Nor do these ways of talking lock you out of the discovery of certain things. If you use the word “woman” to refer to a person with a certain kind of affiliation, you can still talk about things that tend to be true of all and only people with XX chromosomes. All you have to do is say “person with XX chromosomes” instead of woman.

Simple decency isn’t the only reason to prefer an account of womanhood focused on affiliation

Biologically based theories of womanhood have counter intutive results.

For example, if you define a woman as someone with XX chromosomes, you’ll run into the counter example of a woman who, despite having almost no cells with XX chromosomes, gave birth:

Herein we report the extraordinary case of a fertile woman with normal ovaries and a predominantly 46,XY ovarian karyotype, who gave birth to a 46,XY female with complete gonadal dysgenesis. The karyotype of this phenotypically normal mother was 46,XY in blood, 80% 46,XY and 20% 45,X in cultured skin fibroblasts, and 93% 46,XY, 6% 45,X, and <1% 46,XX in the ovary. The family pedigree on the mother’s side was notable for the presence of seven individuals over four generations with either sexual ambiguity, infertility, or failure to menstruate, including one individual with documented 45,X/45,XY mixed gonadal dysgenesis. Both the mother and the 46,XY daughter were screened for mutations in a number of genes known to be involved in mammalian testis determination. In all genes screened (see below), the open reading frame was found to be normal. This suggests that a mutation in a novel sex-determination gene or a gene that predisposes to chromosomal mosaicism may be responsible for the phenotype in this family.

You’re going to tell me that this mother who carried and gave birth to a child- who looks anatomically like a cis woman in every respect and regards herself as a woman- is actually man?

Now at this point there’s a few options open to the critic:

1. Bite the bullet. Say “yes, he’s a man who got pregnant and had a kid”. The problems with this approach are obvious. This doesn’t really seem to be about biology in an overall sense, just gene fetishism.

2. Search for another single criterion or dividing line. The problem is that they all have counterexamples.

3. Try to eleborate their theory. For example, perhaps make it disjunctive. Maybe a woman is an adult human with XX chromosomes OR a woman is an adult human who, at some point in their life, has been, or will be able to get pregnant. I’m been doing philosophy for long enough to tell you that attempts at eleborating definitions like this always turn into a confused mess.

4. Say something like “I’m giving a definition of the vast majority of cases, there might some edge cases of people who count as women despite not meeting this criteria”. The problem with this response is that trans women could just say they are such edge cases themselves. On what principled basis are you going to exclude them, but not this XY chromosomal mother?

5. Say something more like “look, womanhood is a biologically based trait, but it doesn’t depend on just one feature. To determine womanhood one must have regard to a cluster of factors including chromosomes, genitalia, secondary sex, characteristics, other aspects of appearance, fertility status, hormone levels and production and so on. There’s no hard and fast rules, like most concepts it depends on prototypes and balancing tests, rather than necessary and sufficient criteria.”

Of the five, I consider the fifth option to be the most intellectually respectable. Most definitions involve clusters of traits, after all. Nonetheless, it does go to show that the simple cutoff many imagine exists between biological maleness and femaleness isn’t there. An advantage of an approach to womanhood founded in affiliation is that it deals with virtually all cases quite nicely. If in doubt, ask politely.

Bonus section, cladistically, whales are fish

Generally speaking, modern phylogenists prefer Monophylytic groupings of animals. That is to say a clade, or grouping of organisms, should include all animals descended from a common anscestor. Arbitarily cutting some of the descendents out, because humans see them as different, makes little sense.

Mammals are descended from Osteichthyes, bony fish.

Ergo if we consider Osteichthyes as a monophyltic group- and by the rules of modern cladistics, we probably should- mammals are Osteichthyes.

To quote “Fishes of the World” (as quoted on Wikipedia):

“...it is increasingly widely accepted that tetrapods, including ourselves, are simply modified bony fishes, and so we are comfortable with using the taxon Osteichthyes as a clade, which now includes all tetrapods...”

Ergo using best principles in cladistics, whales are fish. Bony fish to be exact. So are all tetrapods, including mammals. So are rabbits. So are you.

Thanks to Paul Griffiths for this argument.