Thanks for this summary. I didn’t find the examples of irreducible categories all that convincing. I think that, although more difficult than the average category (e.g. certain physical objects), there are underlying traits that we are pointing at for these.
For example:
Teams or clubs: BG give the particularly crisp example of Pokemon GO, where players choose to associate with one of three teams that are functionally indistinguishable except for their respective color.
The trait here is not within the group but in how it interacts with other groups. The trait is that they collaborate against other teams.
More generally, this argument for self id gender seems to also work for self id racial/ethnic categories. The received narrative would rebut this by reference to the fact that this phenomena is not present among people to the extent that gender dysphoria is. What do you think BG’s position on this is?
That’s a good question. I think BG’s way of thinking about gender categories is potentially useful for racial/ethnic categories as well, particularly the bit about category membership as a conferred status. I think they’d probably agree with this. They don’t really argue that we ought to have gender self ID; they explicitly assume this to be the case, and are more trying to show that it’s coherent. I suspect if you asked them they would probably say that we ought not to have racial self ID, or that it ought to be much more limited than in the case of gender (here are some candidate reasons why one might think this https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-breaking-analogy-between-race-and-gender/), but they’d probably grant that it is at least also coherent.
Perhaps I’ve missed the point of your post, but to me the whole confusion around Gender is not internal validity, after all circular definitions are valid—but not convincing to the outside view.
I see the two main arguments of the book as 1) we should understand “gender identity” as a bunch of subjective feelings about various traits, which may or may not cohere into an introspectively accessible “identity”; 2) we can understand gender categories as a particular kind of irreducible category (namely historical lineages) to which membership is granted by community consensus, the categories being “irreducible” in that they are not defined by additional facts about their members. These stand or fall independently of whether we accept gender self-id, although self-id is compatible with BG’s understanding of categories in a way that it is not necessarily with clusters.
See the last section of the review for reasons why we might sometimes prefer BG’s analysis of categories on the outside view; I think it’s potentially more useful for thinking about the role of categories in society and in people’s lives. I agree this is not a knockdown case, but I certainly think it’s a better framework than e.g. “men are those with the essential spirit of man-ness inside them,” which is also coherent but not very interesting.
Thanks for this summary. I didn’t find the examples of irreducible categories all that convincing. I think that, although more difficult than the average category (e.g. certain physical objects), there are underlying traits that we are pointing at for these.
For example:
The trait here is not within the group but in how it interacts with other groups. The trait is that they collaborate against other teams.
More generally, this argument for self id gender seems to also work for self id racial/ethnic categories. The received narrative would rebut this by reference to the fact that this phenomena is not present among people to the extent that gender dysphoria is. What do you think BG’s position on this is?
That’s a good question. I think BG’s way of thinking about gender categories is potentially useful for racial/ethnic categories as well, particularly the bit about category membership as a conferred status. I think they’d probably agree with this. They don’t really argue that we ought to have gender self ID; they explicitly assume this to be the case, and are more trying to show that it’s coherent. I suspect if you asked them they would probably say that we ought not to have racial self ID, or that it ought to be much more limited than in the case of gender (here are some candidate reasons why one might think this https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-breaking-analogy-between-race-and-gender/), but they’d probably grant that it is at least also coherent.
Perhaps I’ve missed the point of your post, but to me the whole confusion around Gender is not internal validity, after all circular definitions are valid—but not convincing to the outside view.
I see the two main arguments of the book as 1) we should understand “gender identity” as a bunch of subjective feelings about various traits, which may or may not cohere into an introspectively accessible “identity”; 2) we can understand gender categories as a particular kind of irreducible category (namely historical lineages) to which membership is granted by community consensus, the categories being “irreducible” in that they are not defined by additional facts about their members. These stand or fall independently of whether we accept gender self-id, although self-id is compatible with BG’s understanding of categories in a way that it is not necessarily with clusters.
See the last section of the review for reasons why we might sometimes prefer BG’s analysis of categories on the outside view; I think it’s potentially more useful for thinking about the role of categories in society and in people’s lives. I agree this is not a knockdown case, but I certainly think it’s a better framework than e.g. “men are those with the essential spirit of man-ness inside them,” which is also coherent but not very interesting.