In the thread from three years ago, there is definitely some rather strong gender essentialism present. He considers the categories meaningful, and he says that empirically he hasn’t ever seen them violated in a specific way. (“I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.”)
Eliezer undoubtedly interprets all of this in an evolutionary way, and one of the ironies of evolutionary gender essentialism is that the gender categories are considered meaningful but still ultimately contingent—unlike older, more metaphysical essentialisms like yin and yang, in which masculinity and femininity are associated with a polarity of being that extends far beyond the animal kingdom. Evolutionary gender binaries aren’t supposed to result from essences, they are a contingent coupling of physiology and personality brought about by natural selection. So the humans with the wombs could have been the hunters, and the humans with the testes could have been the nurturers, but we got locked into a phenotype and a survival strategy that works the other way around.
What Eliezer’s normative views on gender are, I have no idea. He’s a transhumanist so he probably favors radical self-determination. He might be normatively non-essentialist while still employing essentialist categories. People who really disapprove of essentialism would think it a bad thing to even say “you can choose to be male, female, or any mixture thereof”, because it implies that maleness and femaleness exist.
Thank you for the information. Is Eliezer’s position gender essentialist?
In the thread from three years ago, there is definitely some rather strong gender essentialism present. He considers the categories meaningful, and he says that empirically he hasn’t ever seen them violated in a specific way. (“I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.”)
Eliezer undoubtedly interprets all of this in an evolutionary way, and one of the ironies of evolutionary gender essentialism is that the gender categories are considered meaningful but still ultimately contingent—unlike older, more metaphysical essentialisms like yin and yang, in which masculinity and femininity are associated with a polarity of being that extends far beyond the animal kingdom. Evolutionary gender binaries aren’t supposed to result from essences, they are a contingent coupling of physiology and personality brought about by natural selection. So the humans with the wombs could have been the hunters, and the humans with the testes could have been the nurturers, but we got locked into a phenotype and a survival strategy that works the other way around.
What Eliezer’s normative views on gender are, I have no idea. He’s a transhumanist so he probably favors radical self-determination. He might be normatively non-essentialist while still employing essentialist categories. People who really disapprove of essentialism would think it a bad thing to even say “you can choose to be male, female, or any mixture thereof”, because it implies that maleness and femaleness exist.