A Response to Siggy on Gender Metaphysics

We interrupt our TLS shenanigans for a brief digression on the language and metaphysics of gender.

Siggy recently authored a response to some common issues in the ongoing TERF/trans contretemps. Some of the things he says caught my eye as worthy of discussion so, without further ado, let's get started.

I have a very Wittgensteinian perspective. Ultimately, gender is defined by pointing.

So far, so good; I pretty much agree with the above from a purely descriptive stantpoint. I think the bulk of humanity has templates for gender terms, templates which encompass a wide variety of consideration, and that the designation of something as being a particular gender involves finding the best match among the templates.

But then he goes on to say

As it happens, a lot of people (both cis and trans) have strong feelings about what gendered judgments should or shouldn’t be made about them, and I don’t know why that is but maybe it’s a human psychology thing? I believe in resolving the language ambiguity in a way that reduces harm. That means not second-guessing people’s expressed genders, and reconsidering my snap judgments when they mismatch a person’s expressed gender. Under this model, I suppose you could say that the “essence” of gender is whatever that human psychology thing is, but there are exceptions to that rule, and really it’s just better to understand that there isn’t any essence at all.

So there's an obvious tension (bordering on contradiction) between the above and "definition by pointing". Given that he "believe[s] in resolving the language ambiguity in a way that reduces harm", I wonder if "understand" is really the best word to describe his stance? If you replace "understand that" with "act as if" it lessens the tension significantly; the two views can be reconciled by saying "people define gender by pointing, but in the interest of justice I choose to proceed as if the concept of gender has no substantive content".

Note that this dovetails with my observation that defining gender in terms of self-identification leads to content-less gender categories. This is also, I think, going to be a problem for Siggy momentarily.

Movin' on:

TERFs contend that trans women are reinforcing oppressive gender stereotypes by using symbols of femininity like makeup or dresses. I think trans women adopt feminine expressions because society is enforcing gender stereotypes upon them, and society refuses to treat them like women until they adopt sufficiently feminine expressions.

The above implies that society could, and presumably should, treat trans women like women without them having to adopt feminine expressions. Here's where I think that Siggy's stipulations pretty much blow up in his face; to what does the "women" in "like women" refer? According to Siggy its a gender term without "any essence at all", which makes it very difficult to conceive of the phrase "like women" having any substantive content either.

Again, I wonder if Siggy really means something slightly different. Substituting "treat them like" with "acknowledge them as" resolves the difficulty above; I can acknowlege someone as a woman ("you're a woman") even if the category itself is semantically empty.

And one last comment:

My theory is that if you actually abolished gender (instead of half-assing it like TERFs), it would not be much of a utopia.

Yeah, but Siggy... you see... I think you've already abolished gender. Let me posit a question: If neither "man" nor "woman" have "any essence at all", then what distinguishes one category from the other? Nothing, by definition. So the rational thing would be to just discard them as a linguistic atavism, right?

And yet people cling to these labels as if they have substantive meaning. Siggy says as much:

I suspect that whatever the human psychology thing is that makes people want to be seen as a man or a woman, would likely persist into a genderless future.

Yes! I agree, vigorously! But this is also strong evidence, contra Siggy, that gender concepts have substantive content. I raised this exact issue not so long ago:

This isn't what happens in real life; almost everybody says 'trans' in a way which suggests that the term is laden with meaning (ditto for the term 'woman'). So what gives?

"What gives", indeed?

Laying it out, bluntly: Siggy is between a rock and a hard place. In the interests of inclusivity he wants to treat gender as if it has no substantive content, the end result being that anyone can self-identify as any gender they prefer. But the outcome of this treatment is to render the whole notion of self-identification meaningless; why make use of a label if the label has no content?

Definitions exclude; that's the whole point of definitions. They draw (frequently fuzzy) boundaries around categories, designating things that are, and are not, members of the category. In this case there is discomfort with the idea of defining gender terms, because such definitions will inevitably exclude somebody. The proper response, IMHO, is to discard the terms entirely:

• From a purely pragmatic standpoint there's no consensus about what gender terms mean, a consequence of which is that the use of these terms frequently sheds more heat than light.
• As a matter of semantic hygiene we should reject meaningless terms. This is a stance that goes all the way back to (at least) Thomas Hobbes and his railing at the Catholic Church for saying things like "incorporeal substance" and "incorporeal body".

This fence-straddling, where sometimes gender has meaning and sometimes it doesn't, does absolutely zero in terms of productive dialogue. Knock it off already.