The question of womanhood, how exactly we define “woman,” has been going around the blogosphere for a while and I thought I’d take a stab at it.
Others have pointed out that defining woman as “a person who identifies as a woman,” is untenable for circularity reasons; if we try to unpack it, the definition of woman becomes “a person who identifies as a person who identifies as a person who identifies as…” ad-infinitum, and in the end we’re no closer to actually understanding what someone means when they say “I am a woman.”
Kit Fine gave a talk in which he argued that this kind of circularity is acceptable or even desirable in this specific instance. I’m sure some will think of Scott Alexander’s The Categories Were Made For Man blog post when they read the abstract.
The dictionary definition of woman is “adult human female” (AHF). I made a post a while back on personhood in which I posited three criteria a “good definition” should meet, and this definition is at least passable, and arguably even good (and not obviously circular).
I think what we’re really interested in, though, is less the exact definition of womanhood, and more the basic question of whether womanhood is something that I will call internal, i.e., determined by subjective experience, or something that I will call external, i.e., determined by objective properties and assessment. The definition of womanhood, I submit, is really just a proxy war in the overarching battle to determine if gender is an internal or external property; it can settle the latter question, but it isn’t the thing we’re really interested in.
If we like Fine’s account of things, womanhood will be an internal property. If we like the classical AHF definition, womanhood will be an external property1. So who’s right?
I think it helps to consider really bizarre edge cases that can help clarify our intuitions in this instance. Imagine overnight your mind was transplanted into a body of the opposite sex. Now, I don’t necessarily believe this is even metaphysically possible, and I admit I have trouble squaring this thought experiment with my physicalist inclinations, but let’s indulge ourselves a bit. I’m convinced that if you woke up in someone else’s body (of the opposite sex), we would be inclined to say you were “a man stuck in a woman’s body” (or vice-versa). And I think that terminology is telling, because it means we think of gender as something binding on a person’s internal landscape, something that doesn’t just ebb and flow with their visible body2.
Of course, we’d probably have a pretty high standard of evidence, in practice, to accept that someone is genuinely a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice-versa. We’d really put someone through the wringer and grill them until we were satisfied of their claim. How could we be sure?
Well, in a movie body swap scenario, we could quiz someone on their old identity, ask them questions only the real owner of their body would know the answer to. In real life we have to settle for a bit less certainty.
Our intuitions can go either way here, I think. The internalist can argue that our intuitions show gender identification is an internal thing, completely divorced from the body; the externalist, especially one with physicalist leanings, can argue that our intuitions are not wholly reliable here and that, in fact, in order to achieve such a body swap in the first place, you’d need to achieve a neural swap, and that swapping neurons is the thing that leads to the man-trapped-in-woman’s-body effect.
I’m going to argue that, whichever way we go, the trans advocate must make some concessions.
Let’s start with the externalist view. There are a lot of possible variations on an externalist view, but let’s pick one of the most plausible sounding ones and run with it, namely the view that a woman is a person with certain neural features typically associated with adult human females. That is to say, you’re a woman if and only if you have, in some sense, an AHF’s brain.
It seems prima facie plausible to me.
Lifted from Wikipedia:
A first-of-its-kind study by Zhou et al. (1995) found that in a region of the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a region which is known for sex and anxiety responses (and which is affected by prenatal androgens),[9] cadavers of six persons who were described as having been male-to-female transsexual or transgender persons in life had female-normal BSTc size, similar to the study's cadavers of cisgender women.
There are a few other studies like this the Wikipedia page mentions that show trans peoples’ brains being more similar in some relevant respect to their biological sex, but that’s not an insurmountable problem for this view; we only need a handful of traits on which the trans people show more similarity to the gender they identify with, and then we can, if we are so inclined, define those by fiat to be the relevant neural features.
There are, however, two other gaping problems with this view:
The inauthentic transwoman
The involuntary transwoman
By (1) I mean that, of necessity, on any reasonable externalist view3, there will be some people who profess to be transwomen but don’t meet the objective criteria for womanhood; even if most have the right neural correlates, some will slip through the cracks. And symmetrically, we have (2), where someone who identifies as a man, has lived his whole life as a man, might by happenstance have the wrong neural correlates and be considered a woman. Any reasonable externalist view will also have this consequence.
In principle, I’m willing to bite these bullets; the neural correlates of gender that we have at present aren’t fine-grained enough to rule out lots of cases of (1) and (2), but I suspect that’s a failing of science more than the definition. In a hundred years, our knowledge of the neuroscience of gender may be so advanced that only a very small minority of people—almost no one—ends up relegated to (1) or (2).
The rub, though, is that once you tie gender to something objective, you do have to accept that some people will simply be mistaken about their own gender identity. And there is no free lunch; if a trans advocate wants to avoid this consequence by going with a Fine-esque internalist view, they need to wrestle with another consequence, and I don’t just mean circularity.
They need to wrestle with the question of transracial identity.
Consider: if, as some suggest, race and gender are both social constructs, then why not transracialism? Surely there’s an even stronger biological basis for gender—its correlate, biological sex, is coded into us at a chromosomal level—than for race, so if gender is mutable, then race surely must also be mutable.
Objection 1: It’s a Non-Issue Because Nobody Is Transracial
Two hundred years ago you’d be forgiven for thinking nobody was transgender. Either you’d have been right and something is turnin’ the frickin frogs gay, or almost all transgender people were closeted because this is what would’ve happened if they came out:
“Confound it all Robert Edward Lee, run and tell the slaves to fetch me my musket, I'm a-fixin to shoot me a witch!"
I confess to complete ignorance on the historical treatment of transgender people, but I suspect it would’ve gone something like that. Hopefully someone will be along in the comments to ackshually me if I’m wrong.
Now, granted, no one’s going to shoot anyone for coming out as transracial today, but it’s not anywhere near socially accepted. Feminist philosopher Rebecca Tuvel dared to just write a paper defending transracialism in 2017 and this was the result. From Wikipedia:
Tuvel was called transphobic, racist, crazy, and stupid, and was accused of having engaged in "epistemic violence".[17] Several feminists referred to her as a "Becky".[24][47][48] The article was called violent, crap, and "wack shit".
Objection 2: It’s Not the Same Thing; There Are Neural Correlates of Gender, Not of Race
And that’s a fair objection, but then it seems like we’re right back where we started, at an externalist theory of gender. It seems disingenuous to reject neural correlates as an externalist theory of gender only to then use them to buttress an argument against an internalist theory of race. It very much feels to me like trans advocates get to pick one and only one of those things here.
Objection 3: You Are the One Who’s Being Disingenuous; You’re Just Muddying the Waters
If I didn’t really believe that transracialism would be a thing in the near future, this might be something like a fair point. I’d just be playing semantic games to try to win rhetorical points (which, admittedly, I do on occasion).
But I do believe transracialism will be a thing, and in the relatively near future. I think trans advocates are going to come to grips with the dilemma I’m presenting and side with internalist views of gender (and race).
It's just such a clear consequence of internalist gender theories that I firmly believe race dysphoria, transracialism, or something equivalent will be a diagnosis in the DSM by the year 2040. And if you’re thinking “no way,” and rolling your eyes, ask yourself if you would’ve thought, eighteen years ago, if being transgender would ever become as accepted as it has. Ask yourself how many openly trans people you knew then and how many you know now.
I take it as uncontroversial that adult, human, and female are all external properties; if that’s at all unclear to you, I ask you to consider whether you’d have any hesitation to label a sow adult, pig, or female, or a buck adult, deer, or male. If something is an external property for animals, it ought to be an external property for humans as well. And obviously if adult, human, and female are all individually external, then their agglomeration AHF is external.
If, like me, you’re a committed physicalist and all this talk about mind tranplants and internal landscapes sounds vaguely dualistic and is making you uncomfortable, you can mentally replace mind transplant with brain transplant and references to an internal landscape with references to the neural correlates of an internal landscape; more on that later.
For examples of unreasonable externalist views that no one espouses, take “every adult human is a woman,” or “no adult human is a woman.”
I think that when people say "woman" they ordinarily mean "adult human female." If we want to construct a definition intentionally, we can try to create one that solves the trans inclusion problem, but it would have to be meaningless. As Tomas Bogardus says, the trans inclusion problem cannot be solved because “no matter what it means to be a woman, it’s one thing to be a woman, and another thing to identify as a woman” [1].
All the talk about neurology and so forth seems rather tangential because (1) this is not the ordinary use of the terms man/woman and (2) this doesn't even solve the issue entirely because you can have involuntary trans people and miss some people. No matter what the external trait is, you can have an internal sense of gender which contradicts it. What to do in those cases? Aella and Bentham argue just be dishonest and respect identity. I don't think we should go that route.
I think the trans movement is sociall harmful and unfortunately results in genital mutilation for many. I think this will be cast aside, rather than continue. I don't think this stuff should be indulged and that articles like Scott's are infohazards (and motivated reasoning). For my view, you can see my article Womanhood is Not Like Parenthood [2].
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-022-00525-9
[2] https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/womanhood-is-not-like-parenthood