While this is technically slightly more than saying “I’m a woman now”, it’s only barely so.
I think it’s very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less “manly” probably also has that effect.)
And frankly, I doubt you’d refuse [...]
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to “be” female beyond that declaration, I’d attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn’t, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don’t think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns—e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn’t let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn’t that hard, it’s easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other “male clothing”, so anything a men would normally wear could count as “female clothing”. The latter also isn’t that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW’s comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they’re lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can’t execute that policy without looking in people’s pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in “low-stakes” cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations’ women’s restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances.
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything, but for some reason you still want to use the term, presumably for some of the connotations it inherits from the latter. Generally, using a word that has no referent solely for its connotations is very bad reasoning.
The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
Except you have no way to directly observe internal mind-state, and you are arguing against relying on anatomy and chromosomes, that means in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”. Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
testimony of a psychologist who has examined them
I notice that this is the only item on your list that attempts to distinguish some notion of “innate gender” from all someone faking it out of whatever motive. Given the current state of the “science” of psychology, this doesn’t strike me as particularly reliable.
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3).
Given how you’ve explained your world view this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, I suspect someone could easily change his “gender” on a whim and keep convincing you that the current gender is the real one provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting.
you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
Of course [...] you’d likely find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything,
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map. Please don’t do the “social constructs basically don’t exist” thing, it’s very silly.
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I’ll go digging for it later this evening.
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Well, this fact itself seems like to should falsify gjm’s model. Let’s see what he says about it.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
Legally, maybe so, at least until the error is corrected. You’d have to ask a lawyer to be sure.
ID cards are a physical object, which is not determined by biological sex, since as a question of legal fact one can get an ID card of one’s self-identified gender if one jumps through the appropriate hoops, even without sex reassignment surgery. (At least that’s how it works here in California. I have no idea how it works in other states or countries.)
This seems to me a counterexample to the claim that gender, as distinct from sex, doesn’t correspond to anything. Social interaction is another: for example, women are much more likely to ask each other if they want old clothes before giving/throwing them away, and much less likely to get asked to be someone’s Best Man at a wedding.
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
By far the dominant hypothesis here would be “you’re lying”, but failing that probably yes, gender identities aren’t supposed to be able to work that way.
“Your gender is whatever you say it is” is a social norm, not a factual claim. Saying you’re a woman doesn’t make you a woman. People just don’t generally assert it unless they actually want to be treated as a woman. Creeps, or other people lying for personal gain, seem exceptionally rare—probably because it’s a giant hassle, and the institutions they’d want to take advantage of don’t obey that norm anyway.
If transition ever became socially easy and stigma-free, we probably would need a different anti-creep mechanism.
I agree that genderfluid people might break gjm’s model, although he seems to have some wiggle room as written. Of course, I don’t know if this is a deliberate result of accounting for their existence, or a lucky accident.
Good I’m glad we agree on this. Now, why are you trying to defend positions that rely on denying this claim?
I’m not. I entered this discussion mostly to point out that you were equating “corresponds to social behavior” with “does not correspond to anything”, which is silly.
It’s worse than gender not corresponding to anything. Like in the standard example, it corresponds to multiple things, which don’t necessarily agree.
ETA:
Yes, and creeps, or example, want to be treated as a woman with respect to which bathroom they enter.
Do they? I mean, as a theoretical problem, sure. But to my knowledge this is a vanishingly rare event.
I think it’s very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
it’s not something you can just do on a whim
it requires actual inconvenience and commitment
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less “manly” probably also has that effect.)
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to “be” female beyond that declaration, I’d attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn’t, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don’t think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns—e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn’t let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn’t that hard, it’s easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other “male clothing”, so anything a men would normally wear could count as “female clothing”. The latter also isn’t that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW’s comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person’s gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn’t change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they’re lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can’t execute that policy without looking in people’s pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone’s gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in “low-stakes” cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations’ women’s restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
So you agree that “gender” as distinct from “sex” doesn’t correspond to anything, but for some reason you still want to use the term, presumably for some of the connotations it inherits from the latter. Generally, using a word that has no referent solely for its connotations is very bad reasoning.
Except you have no way to directly observe internal mind-state, and you are arguing against relying on anatomy and chromosomes, that means in practice your policy amounts to relying on “social role”. Of course, if you do observe internal mind state, e.g., by using sufficiently good brain scans or personality tests, you’d like find that most of the people claiming to be “trans” are clustered with their birth gender.
I notice that this is the only item on your list that attempts to distinguish some notion of “innate gender” from all someone faking it out of whatever motive. Given the current state of the “science” of psychology, this doesn’t strike me as particularly reliable.
Given how you’ve explained your world view this doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, I suspect someone could easily change his “gender” on a whim and keep convincing you that the current gender is the real one provided you didn’t remember your previous meeting.
Nope. I think it corresponds to different things in different contexts. (So the rest of your paragraph is addressing an irrelevant strawman.)
To a great extent, yes. (Not entirely; we can often draw inferences about internal mind-state from externally observable behaviour, including things like what answers we get to questions about a person’s gender.) You say that as if it’s obviously a bad thing, but it’s not obvious why.
I think it’s very far from clear that we should expect that.
That’s quite a proviso. Take note also of point 5 and note its consequences for ability to change on a whim in cases where there’s more at stake than what pronouns I use to refer to someone.
This is looking like a distinction without a difference.
The word “big” corresponds to different things in different contexts. (A big baby. A big skyscraper. A big problem.) Is “big” meaningless?
The majority of the population can be divided neatly into two fairly well defined groups according to anatomy, chromosomes, etc. We call that “sex”. There are social and psychological differences that mostly go along with sex, but diverge in some cases. We call those “gender”. In both cases, exactly which features we care about most will vary, which may change how some unusual people are classified. What’s the problem?
(To be explicit: sex has ambiguous and intermediate and anomalous cases just as gender does. Example: If you have XY chromosomes but complete androgen insensitivity, then you are chromosomally male, your externally-visible anatomy is female, and internally you have some features of both and in particular no uterus.)
I’m pretty sure that ID cards and human interaction are territory, not map. Please don’t do the “social constructs basically don’t exist” thing, it’s very silly.
The discussion of a hypothetical person who wants to change gender (but nothing else) every five minutes is giving me a vibe similar to when someone asks “how does evolution explain a monkey giving birth to a human?” It doesn’t. That would falsify the model, much like our hypothetical person would falsify the “gender identity” model.
There exists a group of people who explicitly claim to have gender identities that are not stable over time, but this usually includes behaviors beyond requested pronouns.
Hey, an empirical disagreement! I think this research has in fact been done, I’ll go digging for it later this evening.
So a man getting an ID card with a typo in the gender field makes him female?
How about not “every five minutes”, but whenever he feels like going to the women’s bathroom to ogle/be generally creepy?
Well, this fact itself seems like to should falsify gjm’s model. Let’s see what he says about it.
Legally, maybe so, at least until the error is corrected. You’d have to ask a lawyer to be sure.
ID cards are a physical object, which is not determined by biological sex, since as a question of legal fact one can get an ID card of one’s self-identified gender if one jumps through the appropriate hoops, even without sex reassignment surgery. (At least that’s how it works here in California. I have no idea how it works in other states or countries.)
This seems to me a counterexample to the claim that gender, as distinct from sex, doesn’t correspond to anything. Social interaction is another: for example, women are much more likely to ask each other if they want old clothes before giving/throwing them away, and much less likely to get asked to be someone’s Best Man at a wedding.
By far the dominant hypothesis here would be “you’re lying”, but failing that probably yes, gender identities aren’t supposed to be able to work that way.
“Your gender is whatever you say it is” is a social norm, not a factual claim. Saying you’re a woman doesn’t make you a woman. People just don’t generally assert it unless they actually want to be treated as a woman. Creeps, or other people lying for personal gain, seem exceptionally rare—probably because it’s a giant hassle, and the institutions they’d want to take advantage of don’t obey that norm anyway.
If transition ever became socially easy and stigma-free, we probably would need a different anti-creep mechanism.
I agree that genderfluid people might break gjm’s model, although he seems to have some wiggle room as written. Of course, I don’t know if this is a deliberate result of accounting for their existence, or a lucky accident.
Ok, now I officially have no reason to care about Wes_W!gender.
So you agree this social norm has no factual basis to it.
Good I’m glad we agree on this. Now, why are you trying to defend positions that rely on denying this claim?
Yes, and creeps, or example, want to be treated as a woman with respect to which bathroom they enter.
I’m not. I entered this discussion mostly to point out that you were equating “corresponds to social behavior” with “does not correspond to anything”, which is silly.
It’s worse than gender not corresponding to anything. Like in the standard example, it corresponds to multiple things, which don’t necessarily agree.
ETA:
Do they? I mean, as a theoretical problem, sure. But to my knowledge this is a vanishingly rare event.