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Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?
A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.
But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:
Produces only sperm
Produces only eggs
Produces neither sperm nor eggs.
Produces sperm and eggs.
The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.
But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.
Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.
Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.
I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.
But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.
If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.
But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.
But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."
Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."
Normal doesn't mean "accounts for all cases". There is little doubt that those with very unusual disabilities or those that put substantial effort into mimicking the opposite sex are not normal. And that can be fine, people don't have to be normal. Abnormal doesn't even strictly mean bad. I do not understand this impulse some have to destroy the concept of normal to spare obvious outliers the small pain of accepting the obvious truth that they are not normal. Or at least the reasoning that does make sense for this impulse is very uncharitable.
Sure, being left handed can be abnormal. It is either a, very slightly, unfortunate mutation or maybe a, very slightly, fortunate mutation in some rare cases like fighting or tennis where it can throw your opponent offguard. No one is surprised when a tennis couch says "normally when the ball is here and your opponent is here you'd expect it to come back in so and so way, but with a lefty so and so". These sexual mutations are much more straightforwardly unfortunate as they carry practically no benefit and quite a bit of downside.
In some cases sure, but being sterile is very clearly not how the body is supposed to work. The purpose of the reproductive system is to produce offspring, if it can't do that then it is defective. Being defective is about as dead center of a sound basis for declaring something not working correctly as I can imagine. If you can't rule this as abnormal then I question what you actually think normal could possibly mean.
Normal has a purpose, it lets us treat special cases as special cases and suspend normal treatment as necessary. Which is, possibly uncharitably, what I think is behind this whole shell game. You want trans people to be treated not just as normal, but as normal for their desired sex. Those of us objecting to this want to be able to treat trans people as abnormal members of their natal sex. And I think we have tremendously better reasons to do so. I think you want what you want for laudably empathetic reasons, you see them as suffering and that they deeply want to be treated as normal members of the opposite sex. But this violence you're doing to the concept of normal to try and force them to fit is ridiculous and cannot stand. It is wrong to enforce an incoherent worldview, even if done out if empathy. It can't even stand in its own legs, the norm of cis female needs to exist in order for trans women to even emulate it.
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I mean, if we're going to question the concept of disease and disability why start there? Seems "convenient" to start on an edge case that most people would acknowledge (presumably because there's other factors at play that prevent one assuming that variation is disability - e.g. almost no impact on what we consider right and healthy functioning)
Seems like this easily collapses into a general challenge to the idea of health as a normative category.
So what about people born without an arm? Or many other actually painful congenital conditions? How do we know that's "unhealthy" or a "disability"? Do we just not? Is there no normative sheen to any of this?
I think this leads to strange places that are at least out of step with most people's intuitions.
If it doesn't, then I don't see how this point isn't subject to the same critique being made of this concept of gender: it's a deliberate attempt to occlude the fact of a generally accepted category by using edge cases.
You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.
What about something like autism spectrum disorders? A mild case of autism can be beneficial; how many technological and scientific advances do we owe to people who had autistic obsessions in engineering, physics, programming, etc.? Some autistic people see “normies” as the dysfunctional ones and are able to be very successful and productive in the right environment - but there’s a point where it becomes entirely a disability. Where do you draw the line?
Yes, it was deliberate.
Thats my point: OP criticized the very idea of normative categories due to biological deviations but conveniently picks one deviation that most people would now argue falls outside of the category of "disability" (because such people fall within the normative category of "healthy").
It seems to me that even in his attempt to "problematize" such categories he's trying to leverage their assumptions. Presumably because arguing that "health" as such is a meaningless category is a fringe position.
It's only a "leap" once I accept that there is such a thing as health and it doesn't exclude certain minor deviations but excludes larger ones. On the category skeptical view who is to say?
I want to push him to apply his logic consistently, to cases intuitively considered less thorny.
If he doesn't see this as a problem then I refer back to my OPs final paragraph.
I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.
So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation. Most cases are clearcut so this doesn’t matter, but occasionally you do have ambiguities, like sickle cell traits which offer resistance against malaria at the cost of other health complications - it’s a disease in the western world, but in some African countries it can literally save your life.
So, if categories do carve reality at the joints sometimes, how does this square with:
You're providing one potential grounding and justification of categories - they are tied to important things that are truth-apt. Why is that not enough for grounding, when OP's own examples seem to quite clearly show implicit use of "meaningful" categories?
I think OP is being inconsistently nihilist. He should either pay the full price of nihilism or accept that he's right there with the rest of us and can't just blithely dismiss categories via edge cases to avoid inconvenient exclusions.
Put it another way: can I use OP's argument to dismiss, I dunno, flesh-eating bacteria as a disease? If not, why not? How does the above argument not prove too much?
I don't see how that helps OP. First of all, it's debatable what's objective or not (or what we mean by it). Morality is widely considered objective by ethicists and is even more subject to this criticism.
For another: why does "disease" need to exist outside of humanity? Isn't it enough that OP seems quite clearly able to see that "left-handedness" is only weakly (or not at all) within the disease camp but flesh-eating bacteria would be? Why did he not leverage a more intuitively absurd example? If they know they can't, why do they think they can just dismiss categories when they're quite clearly guiding him?
I don’t agree with OP’s blanket dismissal of categories. “Disease” is a very useful category, my argument is simply to recognise that humans have a tendency to ask “is X a disease” when the real question actually is “should X be cured”, and focusing on whether X is a “really” a disease or not is pointless.
Flesh-eating bacteria neatly fit into the category of “disease”. But, is having sickle cell traits a disease? Is having parasitic worms a disease? You might scoff at the latter - but there’s potential evidence that over-sanitation and elimination of parasites is what is causing the huge spike in auto-immune conditions in the west. So it’s important to ask the real questions, which is “should we cure X”, or “how do we manage X”, not “is X a disease”.
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Legally, this sort of thing could be relevant, I suppose, and it could be relevant in those relatively unusual cases, but yes, ordinarily it's not difficult.
However, transitioning probably puts the person into an unusual case, where it does take some work to decide how to handle things, because of effects of hormones.
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