Book Review: What Even Is Gender?

post by Joey Marcellino · 2024-09-01T16:09:27.773Z · LW · GW · 14 comments

Contents

  Why I Picked This Book
  Where we’re coming from
  Gender feels and norms
  Gender categories
  Wrapping up
None
14 comments

I submitted this review to the 2024 ACX book review contest, but it didn't make the cut, so I'm putting it here instead for posterity. 

Conspiracy theories are fun because of how they make everything fit together, and scratch the unbearable itch some of us get when there are little details of a narrative that just don’t make sense. The problem is they tend to have a few issues, like requiring one to posit expansive perfectly coordinated infosecurity, demanding inaccessible or running contrary to existing evidence, and generally making you look weird for believing them. 

We can get our connecting-the-dots high while avoiding social stigma and epistemic demerits by instead foraging in the verdant jungle of “new conceptual frameworks for intractable debates.” Arguments about gender tend to devolve, not just for lack of a shared conceptual framework, but because the dominant frameworks used by both defenders and critics of gender ideology are various shades of incoherent. 

To the rescue are R. A. Briggs and B. R. George, two philosophers of gender promising a new approach to thinking about gender identity and categorization with their book What Even Is Gender? I appreciate that I’m probably atypical in that my first thought when confronting a difficult conceptual problem is “I wonder what mainstream analytic philosophy has to say about this?”, but What Even Is Gender? is that rare thing: a philosophical work for a popular audience that is rigorous without sacrificing clarity (and that’s clarity by normal-human-conversation standards, not analytic philosophy standards). Let’s see what they have to say.

Why I Picked This Book

BG are writing for two primary audiences in What Even Is Gender? First are people trying to make sense of their own experience of gender, especially those who feel the existing conceptual toolbox is limited, or doesn’t exactly match up with their circumstances. The second, in their words, are:

“people who, while broadly sympathetic (or at least open) to the goals of trans inclusion and trans liberation, harbor some unease regarding the conceptual tensions, apparent contradictions, and metaphysical vagaries of the dominant rhetoric of trans politics. This sort of reader might feel the pull of some of the foundational concerns that they see raised in “gender critical” arguments, but is also trying to take their trans friends’ anxious reactions seriously, and is loath to accept the political agenda that accompanies such arguments.”

People with a non-standard experience of gender are known to be overrepresented among readers of this blog, and I suspect people in BG’s second kind of audience are as well, extrapolating from my sample size of one. This book thus seemed like a good fit. 

BG contrast their conception of gender with what they call the “received narrative”: the standard set of ideas about gender and identity that one hears in progressive spaces e.g. college campuses. Reviewing WEIG on this blog provides another interesting point of contrast in The Categories Were Made for Man [LW · GW]. BG make similar moves as Scott but extend the analysis further, and provide an alternative account of gender categories that avoids some of the weaknesses of Scott’s. 

Where we’re coming from

So what exactly is this received narrative, and what’s wrong with it?

BG give the following sketch:

“1  People have a more-or-less stable inner trait called “gender identity”.
    
2  One’s “gender identity” is what disposes one to think of oneself as a “woman” or as a “man” (or, perhaps, as both or as neither).
  
3  One’s “gender identity” is what disposes one to favor or avoid stereotypically feminine or masculine behaviors (or otherwise gendered behaviors).
  
4  It is possible for there to be a mismatch between one’s “gender identity” and one’s physiology (in particular one’s “assigned sex” or “natal sex”).
  
5  The frustration of these dispositions, or the presence of this sort of mismatch, results in a kind of distress known as “gender dysphoria” (or “gender incongruence”).
  
6  The alleviation of “gender dysphoria” is the legitimate purpose of medical transition.
  
7  It is one’s “gender identity”, and not one’s physiology, that properly determines whether one is a woman or a man (or both or neither).” 

This narrative is certainly better from a trans-friendly point of view than “your gender is determined inexorably by your physiology,” but upon reflection leaves us with some questions. For one, aren’t stereotypes supposed to be bad? If gender identity consists in whole or part of the propensity to “favor or avoid stereotypically feminine or masculine behaviors,” maybe the problem is just that behaviors get stereotyped in this way (with certain behaviors more problematic than others), rather than with our conception of gender. And if it is these collections of stereotypes that define the categories “man” and “woman,” shouldn’t we just do away with them to the extent possible?

The concept of gender identity is confusing at a personal level as well. I tick the box marked “male” on forms that ask about my gender identity, but I would hesitate to say I have any deeply felt sense of myself as a man (other than maybe when successfully opening really stuck jam jar lids). This lack of clarity isn’t just a feature of gender being relatively unimportant to my idea of myself; both authors of WEIG are trans and nonbinary (and gender theorists!) and describe spending years agonizing over their “true” gender identities, to little avail. I have plenty of insight into my preferences, including stereotypically masculine ones, so it’s a bit odd that I have virtually no insight into the gender identity that is supposed to either determine or consist in them.

BG don’t like the received narrative much. The existence of important holes in the dominant story of gender isn’t just philosophically unsatisfying, it creates rhetorical vulnerabilities for trans people who might rely on it to justify various aspects of their lives. BG also introduce the idea of a “hermeneutical injustice,” which I found intriguing: that flawed or underdeveloped conceptual resources, developed under unjust conditions, make it especially difficult for society to make sense of e.g. trans lives, and can also serve as barriers for self-understanding. 

The Categories Were Made for Man helps us out a bit here by letting us dissolve the idea of gender identity in much the same way that BG eventually will (spoiler alert). Scott was writing before the emergence of the received narrative as a clear dogma, and so makes only passing reference to gender identity as exclusive of physiology, but the method is still good; rather than assume that there’s some mysterious man-ness inside of me that determines my predilections and preferred pronouns, we instead look at my preference for pants over dresses, disinclination to wear makeup, etc., see that these things are statistically correlated, and call the relevant cluster of properties “being a man,” with more borderline cases being decided by individual preference. 

While this spares us the task of trying to locate gender essences in ourselves, some of the thorny questions remain, especially with respect to categories. In particular, we’re left with both ethical and metaphysical dilemmas. Metaphysically, thinking about gender categories as trait clusters makes the question of category assignment substantially objective. We can allow self-determination for cases on the margins, but the closer someone is to the centroid of one category, the more allowing them to identify as a member of another looks at best ad hoc and at worst deceptive or irrational. This is a problem to the extent that we want universal gender self-determination to be a feature of our theory.

On the other hand, moving closer to the centroid of a category looks like embodying more and more of the traits statistically or conceptually typical of members of that category, which bake in unfair stereotypes and unjust restrictions on behavior. If the lifestyle changes trans people make are made in the pursuit of stereotype conformity, then we might have an ethical obligation to push back against them, to the extent that we think those stereotypes are harmful. This is obviously at odds with the project of trans inclusion, and the underlying worry is contradicted by the reported experience of many trans people, so we desire an analysis that makes it more evident why attempts at stereotype conformity aren’t the best explanation of transition. 

Gender feels and norms

BG challenge the received narrative with their own replacement for gender identity. Like Scott, they eschew talk of an underlying unified identity in favor of directly considering gendered traits and links between them, the latter of which they call “gender norms.” People’s subjective experiences with these traits are then cashed out in terms of “gender feels”: in their words, “attitude[s] or disposition[s] about the fact or possibility of one’s possessing [a given] trait.” As with our attitudes and dispositions about other things 1) these need not necessarily cohere into a tidy description, and 2) the individual feels themselves are much more introspectively accessible than some kind of gestalt. I have yet to find a good way to concisely describe my taste in cinema, but have no trouble deciding whether or not I like a given film. 

BG distinguish a few different groups of gendered traits, while cautioning that their particular taxonomy is just serving as a starting point for analysis rather than making any deep claims about the nature of the traits in question. First is “sexed biology,” consisting of those physiological characteristics that are gendered in a particular society (more or less all gendered traits are relative to their cultural context, so assume that qualifier is implicitly there for the remaining discussion). This includes familiar objects of discussion like chromosomes, genitalia, etc., but also things like “having pierced ears.” BG are careful not to endorse the sex/gender distinction as made in the received narrative, but do allow that distinguishing sex categories in the traditional sense might be useful in a scientific context. I think they are overly equivocal here, although as they’re mainly concerned with gender as a social phenomenon it doesn’t blunt their actual argument. 

Next is the very broad category of “gendered behavior,” consisting of everything from clothing choices to hobbies, interests, and career decisions. This roughly captures the “gender” half of the traditional sex/gender distinction, minus the associated attitudes.

Breaking with The Categories Were Made for Man, BG consider “gender categories” as their own sort of trait (more precisely, the fact of belonging or being assigned to a particular category), rather than as reducing to the previous kinds of traits. They point out that, even on an analysis like Scott’s where the category “man” isn’t metaphysically distinct from its associated biological and behavioral traits, it’s at least conceptually distinct, especially concerned as we are with gender feels. I can have attitudes about being categorized as a man that are (in principle) completely independent of my biology and behaviors, and of my feelings about the same. In the end, BG will analyze gender categories as also being metaphysically distinct, but we’ll get to that later. 

With this division of traits in hand, we can understand putative gender identities in terms of biology-feels, behavior-feels, and category-feels. Conceptually disentangling categories from biology/behaviors and traits from feels makes the assumption that the lifestyle changes of trans people are directed at conforming to stereotypes look much less reasonable; on this account, the relationship of dress-wearing to the category “woman” need not have any bearing on someone’s desire to wear a dress (contrast this with an account where dress-wearing, or the desire for dress-wearing, in part comprises the category “woman”). 

That said, the relationship of biology/behavior traits to categories and to each other are nonetheless interesting. Gendered traits interact at the societal level via gender norms, “social expectation[s] linking two or more gendered traits, which [are] considered generally applicable or binding.” In principle BG want to distinguish these from simple statistical generalizations by their quasi-coercive character; norms concern what society thinks ought to be the case, and deviation from them is (often) met not just with surprise but disgust, offense, etc. In practice they sometimes blur the line between these concepts, especially when talking about biology, where statistical generalizations are not only fairly robust and practically useful but proceed from underlying causal structure. Still, the framework is good for picking out where precisely the ethical problems with our current system of gender lie. 

Category-behavior norms, for instance, are the main target of traditional feminism, and also play some role in gatekeeping categories for trans people. The more familiar problems for trans people are category-biology norms and biology-behavior norms, although BG note that the latter are often mediated through categories, or can be analyzed as such. “People with breasts shouldn’t refer to themselves using masculine pronouns” as stated is a norm linking a sexed biological trait with a behavior, but if you asked someone defending this norm to justify it they’d probably reference the different categories associated with breast-having and masculine-pronoun-using. 

Though they’re generally suspicious of gender norms, particularly those involving categories, BG allow that some norms are obviously good (e.g. “people with prostates above a certain age should get prostate exams”). They don’t have too much to say about how to distinguish which norms we should keep and which we should get rid of; rather, they suggest eliminating coercive enforcement, which would also satisfy what they think are the root complaints of many (e.g. some radical feminists) who would prefer to get rid of gender entirely. Since getting rid of biology and behavior isn’t really a possibility, the latter option looks like somehow abandoning gender categories. BG instead argue that unfair norms are the real issue, that it isn’t clear the existence of those norms depends on the associated categories (even if they’re presently mediated through them), and that categories play important roles in people’s lives. 

Gender categories

Here I’m going to go a bit out of order. BG spend the next chapter of WEIG defending people’s gender feels as generally meaningful and deserving of respect, including their category-feels. This is despite still having not given an account of what these categories actually are. In the end, BG think the success of the project of trans inclusion doesn’t depend on the answer, and the structure of the book reflects this, but I’m ultimately here for the juicy metaphysics, so I’ll skip to their analysis of categories and talk later about why they matter.

To reiterate: The Categories Were Made for Man explains gender categories as trait clusters that tend to be found together, similar to astronomical categories like “planet” or zoological ones like “whale.” This view entails what BG call the “dispensability of categories”: 

“Whether someone is a woman or a man (or both or neither) is fully determined by facts about their sexed biology, gendered behaviors, the biology-behavior norms, biology norms, and behavior norms they are subject to, and their feels about biology and behavior.” 

As noted earlier, combining this analysis with a principle of gender self-identification opens one up to charges of drawing unnatural category boundaries. BG contend that coherently allowing for self-identification requires gender categories that are irreducible, in the sense that they can’t be identified either as lists of or probability distributions over any set of underlying traits. 

Calling any kind of category “irreducible” sounds mysterious, but BG give lots of examples of categories where membership isn’t a function of additional facts about the members. Among them:

• names: the set of people named “Kevin” don’t all share any one trait, nor do they form any sort of natural cluster (other than mostly being Western men). Much can be said about philosophy of names, but at first glance they’re a good candidate for an irreducible category.
• Teams or clubs: BG give the particularly crisp example of Pokemon GO, where players choose to associate with one of three teams that are functionally indistinguishable except for their respective color.
• Marriages or other mostly symbolic legal statuses: the set of married couples doesn’t naturally separate from the set of couples in civil unions, the set of long-term cohabitating couples raising children together, etc., other than maybe along particular societally contingent dimensions like tax burden.  
• Subcultures or fandoms: two sets of teenagers might share virtually identical taste in music, clothing, etc., but identify as respectively “goth” and “emo,” and defend to the death the difference between these categories. Alternatively, one kind of person might enjoy watching every game of a particular sports team, tracking stats, playing the Fantasy version, and making bets, but do it all alone in their bedroom, while another kind might go to every tailgate and game day party but have no interest in the actual sport, and both kinds coherently identify as fans of that team (a third might participate in all of the described behaviors but grudgingly for the benefit of a friend or partner, and so not identify as a fan).

What these categories have in common is the property that membership happens “because someone said so”: either an official body, in the cases of names, marriages, and teams, or the person themself, in the cases of subcultures (and sometimes names as well). This is the only relevant fact, and it’s binary rather than taking values on some distribution. The remaining facts either don’t cluster, or the clustering doesn’t suffice to separate out the categories.

Perhaps surprisingly, BG don’t think the relevant “someone who says so” in the case of gender categories is the individual. Rather, gender category membership is conferred by one’s community, in treating you as a member of category X (thus “gendering you as an X”) . They think the criteria communities ought to use to determine who gets gendered as an X are the expressed category-feels of the individual, but not every community presently works like that. The question of who “really is an X” is then either ill-posed, irrelevant, or just equivalent to “who gets gendered as an X.” 

Names, teams, and subcultures are nice analogies, but gender doesn’t quite seem to exactly match any of them. Instead, BG conceptualize gender categories as “historical lineages.” Being gendered as a man puts me in a certain relation with all the people gendered as men in the past (and present), that isn’t contingent on anything else about me. BG use the example of the historical lineage « Nissan Sentra ». Many cars made since 1982 belong to this lineage. They tend to resemble each other from year to year, but Sentras made in 2006 after the model design was updated are just as much Sentras as those made in 1999. This is because the only determining factor for a car being a Sentra is whether or not Nissan says it is; belonging to the historical lineage « Sentra » is a conferred status. 

On this analysis, it’s not especially confusing why people care about the category they’re gendered as (or at least no more confusing than why they care about things like marriage status or subculture membership). Irreducible categories, especially self-sorted ones, form important parts of many of our identities, and when they reference historical lineages these can be points of pride or provide a sense of belonging or community. Combined with the general presumption that we ought to take people’s self-reported subjective experiences seriously, this makes a strong case for respecting people’s category-feels. 

Wrapping up

BG reject the dispensability of categories for the explicitly political reason that they want their theory to be compatible with gender self-identification. Are there other independent reasons to prefer their analysis over e.g. a cluster-based one like Scott’s?

I think there are, in some situations. We can pose the question “what’s the most useful way to think about gender categories?” in a few different ways. One might be “what categorization scheme will let me make the most accurate predictions about a person, only knowing their category?”, but this is begging the question in favor of clusters. Another might be “what’s the best way to understand what someone means when they say ‘I am a woman’?”. This might vary from person to person; someone with relatively weak category-feels might be thinking more or less in terms of clusters, e.g. “I see that I have a vagina, like to wear skirts, and have been addressed using feminine pronouns my whole life, same as all these other people who call themselves women, so I guess I’m a woman too,” whereas someone with strong category-feels might be referencing the personal significance of having a connection with figures like Marie Curie or Simone de Beauvoir. 

A third question might be “these categories sure seem important in society. What’s the best way to understand the role they play?”. Here I think the god’s-eye, what-boundaries-would-an-unsupervised-learning-algorithm-draw approach is badly outclassed by BG’s approach. Categories serve as scaffolds of personal identity, backdrops for interaction with other people, and elements of what BG call our “shared social imagination.” In this respect they no doubt evolved from natural clusters (the way a subculture might be started by a relatively homogenous group of individuals) but have since taken on additional significance that is seemingly unrelated to statistical facts about their members. Clusters are useful for carving reality, but when we move to the societal level of collective fictions they can fail to capture what’s going on.

BG don’t talk much about what the future of gender in society might look like, but among their many analogies for gender is stylistic genre, and I think there’s an interesting parallel here. People talk about the “death of genre” in music, as artists draw inspiration from increasingly diverse sources, stylistic conventions become less rigid, and listeners are increasingly unable to summarize their preferences. I wonder if we might see a similar trend with gender; the 20th century saw the upending of loads of category-behavior norms that were previously treated as inviolable, and category-biology norms are frequent subjects of national news in the 21st. Ironically, the death of genre in music makes a cluster approach to musical categories arguably the best way to communicate now (“I like the sort of stuff made by artists X, Y, and Z”), but I agree with BG in thinking that we’re not there with gender yet.

What Even Is Gender? is available for free as a PDF under a Creative Commons license at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003053330/even-gender-briggs-george. 

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