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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.

Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:

The imminent publication of Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender-Critical Feminism was announced that same month, and almost immediately no less than two petitions of complaint appeared, one from the OUP USA Guild (the union representing the New York staff of OUP), and the other from "members of the international scholarly community" with some connection to OUP. The latter petition expressed the scholars' "profound disappointment" at OUP's forthcoming publication of Lawford-Smith's book, and suggested various "measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work." OUP needed to confess to a mortal sin and repent. None of the scholars had read the book that they so confidently denounced (since no copy of the book was available for them to read), but this is a mere detail.

This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:

Publishers often commission reviews of a manuscript from (anonymous) experts in the relevant field, and I had to go through that time-consuming process yet again. It was also rather risky, since—as by now you are well aware—the experts in the philosophy of sex and gender tend to brook no dissent. Responding to the (hopeful) publisher’s question, “Will it make for an outstanding book in your view, or simply a work of average quality?”, one expert wrote: “Neither. It is of extremely poor quality.” Another question: “What would you highlight as the ONE feature about this book that might make you recommend it over other titles available?” “None. It shouldn’t be published.” Lastly: “Is there anything superfluous that could be left out?” “Everything—see above.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with harsh criticism; I have doled out plenty of that myself. Maybe my book deserves it. But a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict—that helps both the author and the publisher. If I had made, as the reviewer said, “sweeping claims” that are “often false,” or had “seriously misunderstood” arguments on the other side, it would be a simple matter to give examples. But the reviewer supplied none: not a single quotation, page number, or chapter reference. From my experience publishing in this particular area of philosophy, this lack of engagement was par for the course. In fact, I found the reviewer’s hyperbolic report reassuring: if I had made mistakes, at least they were not easy to identify.

"What is wrong with my argument?"

"Everything."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Just all of it, it's just bad."

This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.

All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?

Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:

Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. And hey, in college that even got me popularity/a scholarship/pussy! Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation/I need to not have potential Bumble dates see anything controversial when they Google me. Can you throw me a bone? Neither I nor 99% of the self-identified socialists in this country believe that there is any chance whatsoever that we’ll ever take power, and honestly, you’re harshing our vibe. So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?

Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation.

FWIW I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one. The right question is not 'are transgender men really men' (or in the case of Byrne's essay 'do Transgender people have gender identities that do not match their sex'/'does a mismatch between gender identity and sex cause dysphoria', or more broadly 'what is gender identity'), but 'does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society?' Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is. Obviously there would still be arguments to had over the costs and benefits in every specific circumstance.

I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one.

Ultimately, the purpose of philosophy is to find the Truth, not to make policy recommendations. We want to know simply because we want to know; there doesn't have to be anything else to it. If a philosopher's own private blog is not the appropriate venue for disinterested truth-seeking, then where, exactly, should the disinterested truth-seekers go?

At any rate, the truth of a trans person's gender clearly does have policy implications, because I think a sizable number of people, rightly or wrongly, carry around an unarticulated intuitive notion that whether someone actually is a woman has an influence on whether we should treat them as a woman. If the underlying truth of the metaphysical questions had no policy implications, then trans activists would not become so apoplectic when people question their metaphysics.

Ultimately, the purpose of philosophy is to find the Truth, not to make policy recommendations.

But the truth is trivially easy in the trans case. No one on either side is really confused.

Ask any empirical question, and the pro- and anti-trans side can answer all these questions the same way:

  • Can transwomen give birth?

  • Can transmen produce sperm?

  • Do trans-women and -men typically have XX or XY chromosomes?

  • Etc.

The fight over the specific words "woman", "man" and "gender" are shallow side shows in my opinion. They're not really part of any deep philosophical discussion. It's a simple classification question - that's philosophy 101. People are just eager to pounce on a relatively uninteresting part of the debate, because they're so sure that they have the one True definition written on the Tablets of Reality, but unfortunately such tablets don't exist, and we can't consult them even if they did.

Can transwomen give birth?

But what is "birth"? A birth can be stillborn, yes? So what is the difference between expelling a dead clump of fetal cells, and expelling an unfertilized egg during menstruation? And if giving birth is just expelling some group of cells from your body, well, any human can do that...

Can transmen produce sperm?

But what is "sperm"? We already agreed to do away with the non-empirical categories of "man" and "woman" and just focus on what really matters, the genitalia, the organs, etc. So let's simply do away with the non-empirical concept of "cell" and focus on what really matters now, the DNA, the RNA, the ribosome and the other organelles, etc. You see where this is going.

Do trans-women and -men typically have XX or XY chromosomes?

But what is a "Y chromosome"? Suppose I have one mutation on my Y chromosome. And then another, and then another, until it is no longer recognizable as a Y chromosome. Or do we define it in terms of total number of base pairs? Suppose we add one base pair, and then another, and then another, until it's the same length as the X chromosome. At what single point does it stop being the Y chromosome?

This is what frustrates me about Scott's "The categories were made for man" post. It doesn't follow its own premises to their logical conclusion. It spends a lot of time discussing whether a whale is a fish, without acknowledging that the category of "whale" is vulnerable to the same attack that the category of "fish" is. It says that boundaries between categories should be drawn to help "people" fulfill their "goals", but what is a "person", and what is a "goal"? It concludes by making a distinction between "questions about category boundaries" and "questions of fact", but fails to notice that any "statement of fact" will necessarily make reference to categories which are themselves subject to boundary disputes. (Perhaps we might finally hit a rock bottom "natural" categorization when we get to fundamental particles? Even here it's not clear. If a particle is "nothing more" than a fluctuation in a field that pervades spacetime, then one could reasonably argue that they have no independent existence at all, the same way that we don't think of holes or ripples in a piece of fabric as independent objects apart from the fabric itself.)

There is no sharp dividing line between the mushy, subjective, philosophical questions and the hard-nosed, empirical, Just-The-Facts-Please questions. Once you accept the skeptical argument in the case of man vs woman, it runs through everything. Quickly you are lead to the view that there is only the primordial Oneness of reality, about which nothing further can be said; any attempt to speak of anything at all is an equally arbitrary attempt to impose categorical boundaries on the raw unstructured data. This isn't an implausible view, mind you. People should just be aware that this is where the skeptical arguments lead, instead of assuming that there is a natural empirical domain of cells and chromosomes where one can take refuge from philosophical analysis.

Scott's idea of categorization is a pragmatic one, so I'm not sure he would agree that it's all that vulnerable to the attack of "what is a whale?" or "what is birth?"

It might be philosophically unsatisfying, but humans do just tend to categorize things in their environment, and pragmatism is fairly happy to take large swaths of categorization for granted. Something like the category "dog" just naturally emerges from a human interacting with a lot of dogs. Likely for reasons of computational and memory efficiency, we're not the kind of animal that looks at one furry quadruped and treats it as a new and completely unique entity, and then encounters a similar furry quadruped and forgets everything we've learned as we try to learn all the new and unique rules that apply to this separate entity. We find patterns, and one of those patterns is something like what we label "dog."

The boundaries of these spontaneous categories are always fuzzy and ill-defined to start. Then, when humans engage in goal-directed behavior, we take all of these spontaneous categories and find the boundaries that are most important to have a consensus on with respect to that goal-directed behavior.

Why do we have words with well-defined boundaries like "cow", "heifer", "bull", "steer", "cattle", "calf", "milk", "beef", etc.? Because for the art of cattle ranching (which groups a number of goal-directed behaviors together), all of those distinctions are important. A steer can't have offspring, but might be suitable for pulling large equipment. A heifer doesn't produce milk, a cow does. And so on, and so forth.

Just by interacting in the world, humans are going to have a fuzzy version of the "woman" and "man" categories in their heads. Depending on our needs, we can change those fuzzy borders into well-defined ones by looking at what we're using the word for. We're perfectly happy to say that Shakespeare's Othello is a "man", even though he's just a fictional representation of a man. As a fictional character, Othello can't do any of the things usually characteristic of a man - he can't actually breathe, can't eat, can't sleep, and he certainly doesn't produce sperm that could impregnate a real flesh-and-blood woman. We're happy to omit the very important context that "Othello isn't real, and any sentence said about him is about the fictional story he belongs to", because most humans can understand the concept of fiction and don't really need reminding.

I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?

I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?

I think this starts to raise questions when there's...

I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.

I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:

  • Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or

  • Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or

  • Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.

Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)

It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.

It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.

I think it's largely a function of what is common in a particular social and material environment, and what expectations are common in a particular question-asking environment.

In a culture that's crazy about pigs, the trivia category "Famous Pigs" will probably be about non-fictional pigs. In our culture, where most people hardly interact with real pigs, the names are going to be "Babe", "Piglet", "Wilbur", etc. In both worlds, additional context can disambiguate (e.g. "Famous Literary Pigs" vs. "Famous Real-world Pigs")

I don’t think this works out as well as you suggest. Most people don’t know any pigs, but these same people know hundreds of women at least. The social and material context is simply too different for “most famous pigs” including fictional pigs vs “most famous women” including transwomen.

Like, I don’t have a deep-seated aversion to and am quite open to treating genuine trans people with their “adopted sex”, like I did before the whole trans craze blew up in the last decade, simply as a matter of convenience and kindness. I also think there’s likely a small number of people who are genuinely “trans” in the sense that something has gone wrong in their neurobiology. But I don’t think the reasoning you put out is a strong justification for why we should treat trans women as women.