An Essay called "A Complicated Attempt to Clarify the Relationship between “Gender” and Sex”, with Particular Reference to Transgenderism"

A Complicated Attempt to Clarify the Relationship between “Gender” and Sex”, with Particular Reference to Transgenderism

Few people seem to realise that the traditional – and still most popular – feminist usage of the word “gender” (as a technical term separate from the specific feminist definition of biological “sex”) is polysemous, having at least two senses worth demarcating. That is to say, the standard first-and-second-wave, pre-queer-theory feminist (including ‘radical feminist’) usage of "gender", used most popularly in the construction “Gender is a social construct”, seems to combine a conception of the concept gender as:

a)      The totality of behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated or bound up (in popular culture, high culture and in our mental models, to varying extents) uniquely with each biological sex (/with the much smaller group of intersex or trans-people readily perceived as women and the much smaller group of intersex or trans-people readily perceived as men),

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b)      The totality of behaviours and mannerisms actually practised more often by one biological sex (/people successfully performing in the distinguishing way that biological sex performs) plus the totality of preferences actually held more often by one biological sex (/people successfully performing in the distinguishing way that biological sex performs).

There might even be a third, ‘internalist’ sense worth demarcating, namely, “gender” as referring to many people’s folk-psychological essentialism about males and females, as two ‘Platonic’ types. This is related to conception (a), because the essentialist categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ in people’s minds are a distillation of all the behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences associated with each sex. It is different because it is not a conception of gender as an ‘external’, ‘social’ entity, but a type of mental category.

 When non-queer-theoretic feminists advocate that we should “smash the gender binary”, I think the majority of them are probably using all these conceptions of gender. That is, they are saying:

i)                    that there should no longer be any behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex in popular culture, high culture or our mental models (which covers the third sense)

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ii)                  that (as a means to achieving this end) we should eliminate the average statistical differences in behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences between the two sexes.

Now, even though the word “smash” is a very strong one, I assume that some of these feminists do not even mean anything this extreme when they use this language; some of them probably just mean that we should reduce the number of behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex (or reduce the strength of the associations), and that we should reduce the extent to which men and women behave differently and have different desires.

I will now discuss another feminist usage of the word “gender” that conflicts with this one. In order to facilitate the comparison, I will henceforth call this conception of the relationship between gender and sex the ‘classical gender doctrine’, and call its proponents ‘classical feminists’ (despite the fact that many different types of feminists have held this doctrine).

As the classical feminist Rebecca Reilly-Cooper notes [https://sexandgenderintro.com/], the standard ‘queer theory’ or ‘trans’ usage of “gender” (very popular on Tumblr and among young people generally, used in constructions like “gender comes from within”), unmistakeably implies something very different: that gender is a metaphysically absolute, phenomenological phenomenon logically independent of sex (sex and gender may typically align but there is no necessary relationship between them). Interestingly, whilst many people who adopt this conception of gender along these lines may also talk of “smashing the gender binary”, Reilly-Cooper is, it seems to me, correct in her argument that this conception of gender crucially depends upon the existence of the gender binary – more precisely, on an ‘essentialist’ or ‘Platonic’ conceptualisation of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as two fundamentally separate types. Why? Because, without the assumed framework of gender binarity, it is impossible to make sense of this usage at all: in particular, it is impossible to make sense, without the gender binary, of a severely gender dysphoric trans person’s claim that they are “in the wrong body”. Both a trans woman’s claim that she has “always been a woman” or a trans man’s claim that he has “always been a man” assume that there is an essence of each gender, because the conception of gender involved is not merely (b) from above. That is, the gender dysphoric who makes such claims is never merely saying that they enact behaviours and mannerisms more often enacted by the biological sex they “want to be” and have preferences and moods more often held by the biological sex they “want to be”. Clearly, that is not what these people mean by these locutions (after all, there are highly camp man and highly butch women who are not gender-dysphoric). Instead, these people are adopting the essentialist conception of gender.

So even if some people who use what I’ve called the ‘queer-theoretic’ usage of gender might also advocate the smashing of the “gender binary” (in favour of a societal adoption of, say, the understanding of gender as a “spectrum”), no sense can be made of this. In any case, the idea of the gender binary being replaced by a gender spectrum is incoherent. It can only be understood if one understands that “gender” is really being used to mean something very close to “personality”.

In my view, the biggest locus of confusion in all feminist debate is over the question of to what extent “gender”, on the classical feminist definition, can be separated from “sex” on the classical feminist definition – which is often very poorly rephrased as the question of whether gender is partly “innate” or merely “socially constructed”. I think that once we get clear on this, we will see that both groups of feminists are in error.

It seems to me that most people who weigh in on this debate think that there ae really only two possible doctrines. The first of these doctrines is what many feminists call "biological determinism" and advocates call "realism": that there are "innate" differences in psychological traits (which manifest in differing behaviours) between the two sexes. The second of these doctrines is what everyone calls "social constructionism about gender". Unfortunately, this notion is very difficult to explicate with any degree of precision. Probably the best way of explaining it is to observe that it is committed to the following counterfactual: if we somehow raised a generation in a society without any “gender” in my first sense (without any behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex), then there would be no “gender” in my second sense (average differences in behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences between the two sexes).

I will claim that these doctrines are not the only possible options, that both are too vague to be taken seriously, and that the best doctrine on this question requires a significantly more expressive vocabulary than is used in the standard discourse.

Both the idea of a trait being “innate” and the idea of something being “socially constructed” are crude notions – although the latter is far cruder than the former.

First, innateness. As Paul Griffiths has argued in a paper called “What is Innateness”? [http://philpapers.org/rec/GRIWII], innateness is really a folk-biological concept which yokes together a cluster of biologically independent properties, which he calls “developmental fixity”, “species nature” and “intended outcome”. There are, of course, scientifically respectable descendants of these ideas: developmental canalisation, species-typicality and adaptiveness. But, obviously, these are still biologically independent properties.

In the paper, Griffiths quickly runs through some of the complexities of developmental biology and ecology which make a mockery of the idea that this folk concept of “innateness” is a scientifically serious term. He points out that, whilst the traditional notion of “universality” (which he says should be re-phrased “typicality” in any case) conflates “the two very different properties of being monomorphic and being pancultural”, “many pan-cultural traits, such as hair colour or susceptibility to early onset diabetes, are polymorphic” [74]. He observes that “neither being monomorphic neither being pancultural has any very strong connection to being the result of adaptive evolution” [74].  Different cultural environments, for example, “can systematically induce different developmental outcomes”, and “in this respect different cultures can resemble the different ecological zones which induce the same species of plant to develop into different ectomorphs, for example, a low-growing shrub at high altitudes and an upright tree at lower altitudes” [74]. He then notes that “The relationship between having an evolutionary explanation and exhibiting developmental fixity is equally problematic” [74]. As he writes,

“Developmental psychobiologists since Lehrmann have documented innumerable cases in which evolved developmental outcomes require a rich and highly specific developmental environment.  In rhesus macaques, for example, the recognition of emotional reactions in conspecifics and the ability to cooperate in agonistic interaction depend on infant social interaction for their development (Mason, 1985)” [74].

Finally, he points out that it is an accepted orthodoxy in developmental science that “universality and developmental fixity cannot be equated” [75].

 Now, it’s important to be clear about what exactly this means: it certainly does not mean that anyone using the word “innate” is saying something meaningless or incoherent (Andrew Ariew’s influential analysis of innateness as developmental canalisation does seem to be sufficient to defend the Chomskyan claim of the ‘innateness’ of the language faculty), but it does mean that the term itself, at least when left unclarified, is not fit for serious, scientific discourse. It is true that the well-known popular scientist Steven Pinker uses the term without much clarification in all his books. I think Pinker probably doesn’t worry about it too much because he’s an adaptationist rather than an Extended Evolutionary Synthesiser: he basically assumes that all developmentally canalised, species-typical or sex-typical psychological or behavioural traits are adaptive. But this is a mistake in any case.

Now “social construction”. The idea of a trait or set of traits being “socially constructed” is hideously unclear. It also seems to imply commitment to the related false dichotomies of biology versus culture, and nature versus nurture. I’m not a greedy reductionist, but it seems to me that claiming that a given trend in human psychology or behaviour is “socially constructed” as opposed to “innate” is basically just a way of avoiding any serious, scientific debate. It’s a slogan. Invoking this vocabulary is a way of jumping up to a higher level of abstraction where biology doesn’t exist (despite the fact that we are biological creatures, not angels, and “society” is a creation of our collective intentionality as biological creatures).

But I know what you’re thinking: surely I would accept some claims involving this vocabulary of “social construction”, for example, the claim that sport is a social construction, or the claim that at least certain features of gender according to conception (b) are socially constructed, like the wearing of dresses by women and the wearing of pants by men.

My response to this line of objection is, by necessity, quite complicated. When I don my analytic philosopher’s cap for the claim about “sport” – treating the statement as a serious academic-grade truth-claim rather than an everyday assertion (a speech act) – I really do think that the vocabulary is still too vague. What does it even mean to say that sport is a social construction? From what I understand, sport or sport-like practices (eg ritualistic warfare in hunter-gatherer societies) are common to a vast number of cultures. Moreover, I see a very high level of plausibility in the common claim that sport exploits the same basic human urges, instincts and proclivities as practices that we are much less inclined to call “social constructs”, like hunting and tribal warfare (male aggression, male belligerence, in-group-out-group psychology (tribalist psychology), as well as exploiting various other basic human desires (the urge for camaraderie and community, loyalty,  thrill-seeking, etc) that nobody calls social constructs. So what does this mean? Well, it means, I think, that to say that “sport is a social construction” is to tell you nothing.

I don’t think that the claim that the association between women and dresses, and the association between men and pants, is “socially constructed” is as unhelpful as that about sport being socially constructed. The reason is that I think this one is easy enough to analyse counterfactually: there is overwhelming reason to think that this gendered sartorial association might easily have been reversed, both because dress (like car-driving) presumably played no role in our evolution, and because the gendered sartorial associations have been different in other cultures (think kilts). It’s more like saying that a specific sport – say, cricket – is “socially constructed”, which similarly admits of easy counterfactual analysis. But “gender”, on the classical feminist definition, is a lot more than just clothes. Ask a slightly different question and suddenly the verdict is very fuzzy, and suddenly this vocabulary of “social construction” begins to seem too nebulous again. Is women’s greater (average) preoccupation with fashion socially constructed? Is it a social construction that makes women more attracted to, say, floral patterns? Is it a social construction that women are more preoccupied with appearance in general? From what I understand, a greater preoccupation with appearance among women – a greater interest in self-decoration and self-beautification – is by no means culturally specific to “the West”. And, of course, there are some plausible evo-psych explanations for why this might have been selected for. This should be enough to give us pause about applying the same straightforward counterfactual analysis in answering these questions.

So, seeing as both these terms are unhelpful, let’s try to actually investigate the question of the relationship between gender and sex without using either.

In The Blank Slate, the main consideration Steven Pinker adduces in favour of the existence of “innate sex differences” is the existence of certain allegedly pan-cultural behavioural and psychological differences between the sexes (and pan-cultural gender stereotypes). Obviously, he also thinks that the hypothesis of innate sex differences is supported by other considerations, like the evolutionary significance of sexual dimorphism (this gives us a reason to expect some average sex differences in behaviour and psychology), and the obvious role of sex hormones in affecting not only contemporaneous behaviour but in affecting the brain over time (prenatally and then again in adolescence) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.23809/epdf]. Pinker may also discuss the extremely compelling evidence of developmentally canalised average psychological sex differences that comes from cases of male babies born with the rare condition known as cloacal exstrophy and surgically “re-assigned” to the female sex at birth (I can’t remember if Pinker discusses this (and I only ever listened to the audiobook version of the work, on Youtube)). Here’s what I wrote about this in my “Formal Defence of Feminism”:

“One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that male and female brains really are different from birth comes from babies born with the extremely rare condition known as cloacal exstrophy. Male babies born with this extremely rare condition are typically reassigned to the female gender at birth. William Reiner, a child psychiatrist and urologist at John Hopkins Hospital, was one of these unfortunate babies. As his name gives away, his role as a girl caused him great anguish, leading him to re-reassign as soon as he could. No doubt influenced by his own history, Reiner started doing research on the psychology of babies born with cloacal exstrophy in 1993. A longitudinal study he conducted on male-born, female-assigned children brought dramatic results. Of the 14 male-born, female-assigned children he followed, 7 had declared they were boys by their teenage years, 5 spontaneously. In the non-spontaneous cases, the change merely came after the parents came clean about the birth. There may even have been more cases of gender dysphoria that emerged later; I don’t know, because my information comes from 2003, in Michael J. Bailey’s controversial book The Man who would be Queen. In any case, it is astronomically unlikely that this massive anomaly (7 out of 14 with extreme gender dysphoria) is a coincidence.”

 Pinker’s main source for pan-cultural sex differences in psychology and behaviour (along with a host of other things) is what appears to be his favourite anthropological conspectus: a 1991 book called Human Universals, by a man named Donald Brown. A summary of the absolute cognitive (emotional, intellectual), and social generalisations Brown thinks one can make about human beings can be found here: http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversals.pdf. Crucially, for our purposes, Brown claims that in all societies ever documented by anthropologists or found in the historical record, there have been gender roles, males have dominated the political sphere, males have been more prone to violence (particularly young men), women have been more liable to gossip, and women have been more involved in child-rearing. This does give us good reason to think that there’s something about the male Y chromosome and testosterone that encourages traits of dominance and aggression, and something about the female biological endowment that encourages traits of empathy and sensitivity and possibly greater sociality or geniality.

 One interesting theory that I have about sex differences, which seemingly no-one else ever entertains, is that our very consciousness of the different bodies of males and females – women’s consciousness of being smaller, on average – may help to shape our psychology in a gendered way. It is a very real possibility (in fact, I think it's a probability) that the very fact of men's being taller, more muscular and having deeper voices than the other, softer and smaller sex, affects male psychology to a nontrivial extent – subtly encouraging males to feel more confident and act in a more dominant way – and affects female psychology to a nontrivial extent also – subtly encouraging females to feel less confident and act in a more meek way. One might take it as a falsification of this hypothesis that the very shortest males are often the most cocky, but even if this is true, I don’t think it counts as a falsification, because my claim is subtler: I think that the more abstract idea of the male being bigger and taller, and the female being smaller and weaker, may affect our own self-perceptions as specific instantiations of one of these two Platonic forms, even if we don’t share the attributes of the forms.

So what’s my conclusion about sex difference? I think that there almost certainly are at least some developmentally canalised, species-typical average sex differences, the majority of which are probably adaptations. Environment obviously matters a massive amount in biology generally, but I think the evidence does suggest that biological females are, on average, across socio-cultural environments, more likely to be caring and nurturant, and males are, on average, across socio-cultural environments, more likely to be cocky, cold and violent (incidentally, evidence suggests that males in the West are at least three times more likely to be psychopaths). This further suggests that these traits may be adaptive.

Relatedly, it does seem to me that the role of ‘cultural environment’ (gender apartheid in toys and kid’s clothes, and the massive role of gender stereotypes in popular culture) in shaping gender is very likely overestimated by classical feminists. Consider these extracts from my “Formal Defence of Feminism”, in which I adduce the evidence which seems to impugn this thesis:

1.) “One reason for being sceptical about the power of corporations to shape gender roles and stereotypes is that there is some evidence that the more you try to eliminate old-fashioned gender stereotypes within a free society, the stronger they become. In fact, there is a fairly strong statistical link between a country’s success in reaching feminist goals and the divergence of its citizen’s preferences along gendered lines. This article is a concise, even-handed exposition of the evidence for this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/do-women-really-have-it-better-in-sweden/article15552596/. The most important point is found at the back-end of the article, and I’ll quote it here:

“Studies of people in more than 60 countries around the world have found that much of gendered behaviour is culturally universal – men in all cultures tend to be more assertive and less emotionally expressive, while women are more nurturing and co-operative. But according to one startling research report, the divergence between male and female personality traits is more marked in highly developed countries.

The researchers believe the reason is that people in rich and educated societies are freer to be self-expressive. As writer Christina Hoff Sommers speculated a few months back in The Atlantic, “What if gender difference turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being?”” 

2.) “There are more female science undergraduates in Sweden than America, but they fall away at postgraduate levels quite dramatically. A nice paper from Leibniz University in Hannover analyses the data on gender representation in STEM across the world: http://www.genderandstem.com/fileadmin/user_upload_genderstem/docs/KathrinLeuze_GenderSTEM_Berlin2014.pdf. The authors of this paper ultimately find four correlates of higher female STEM aspirations: better school performance of girls relative to boys; a small service sector; less progressive social norms (Japan does extremely well, for example); and lower general occupational sex segregation. So the picture is complicated.”

I would clearly not want to claim that socialisation and enculturation are not important (no, boys are not innately attracted to blue, and we should certainly not be nihilists about getting more women into STEM subjects, or reducing rape or domestic violence). But I do think that the case for the existence of some developmentally canalised, species-typical sex differences is pretty strong. I think Cordelia Fine is very successful in arguing that evidence of cognitive differences between men and women is extremely questionable in her book Delusions of Gender, but I am not sold on her total scepticism about all differences. Given all the considerations in favour of the existence of some developmentally canalised, species-typical sex differences, I think that the inference to the best explanation is that there are some species-typical, developmentally canalised sex differences.

So what does this mean for my position on the conflict between the classical feminists and the ‘queer’ feminists? Well, as I said before, I reject both positions. I reject the classical feminist idea that gender is “socially constructed” because it’s too vague. I also reject a metaphysically absolute conception of gender identity which I attributed to ‘queer theorists’, because I am not an essentialist. I don’t think there’s an essence to being a woman, or an essence to being a man (no scientific naturalist does). I therefore don’t think it makes any sense (strictly speaking) to say that one has “always been a woman” or “always been a man”, and I definitely don’t accept the idea of a “gender spectrum”, which, as I said, is incoherent.

On the other hand, I do think that the idea that individuals can be fundamentally more masculine or more feminine makes perfect sense, because there are average developmentally canalised psychological sex differences – because there are neuroarchitectural and neurochemical features that men are more likely to be born with and neuroarchitectural and neurochemical features that women are more likely to be born with (I discussed neurosanatonomical evidence of sex differences in my “Formal Defence of Feminism”). I think that being born an effeminate man or a butch woman has a very large amount to do with prenatal hormones (Baron-Cohen has some compelling evidence of this). I do think that we will probably find some genetic correlates of homosexuality, and I think that sexual orientation and “gender identity” very likely are linked [https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV261Bailey_UQ_Copy.pdf].

Crucially, I think that accepting this basic idea that there are developmentally canalised average sex differences is the only way of making sense of the psychology of strong gender non-conformists: the psychology, that is, of ‘camp’ men, ‘butch’ women and gender dysphorics. The best way a classical feminist could try to explain the existence of camp men, butch women and gender dysphorics would be to say that all humans are born with different psychological and behavioural dispositions (i.e. rejecting some kind of extreme empiricism or blank slate doctrine) but to insist that there is no average grouping of these dispositions by sex. On this view, gender non-conformists would have to be the group of people who are harder to socialise into the gender norms by virtue of the fact that they just happen to be born with a set of dispositions that strongly match the socially constructed norms for the opposite gender. But this is an unnecessarily convoluted explanation (completely defying Occam’s Razor) and, crucially, implies commitment to the false dichotomy between nature and nurture – imagining that it could be the case that a whole gender system could be essentially divorced from biology, which is odd given that we are biology; we are organic systems, built up molecule by molecule in haphazard, stochastic processes, constantly affected by environmental inputs, according to genetic ‘instructions’ which have been altered by aeons of evolutionary history. There is no personality without a brain, and, whilst it is fair to say “the brain is shaped by culture”, it is also fair to say, on another level of abstraction, neurochemistry is independent of “culture”, because on the neurochemical level of abstraction, all there is is chemistry. Chemical reactions aren’t socially constructed. Genetic mutations aren’t socially constructed. Phenotypic expression isn’t socially constructed. Epigenetic effects aren’t socially constructed. Hormones affect gene expression and alter brain chemistry, and hormones do this in complete obliviousness to pop music video clips or children’s toys.

One must never lose sight of the fact that we’re not that different from any other biological organism (culture isn’t some magical cloud that overrides biology), and the classical feminist doctrine seems to entail that we are very different.

So whilst I don’t think that it really makes sense for a trans person to say “I have always been [the gender which doesn’t match my sex]”, I think it may almost makes sense, if they are a trans person belonging to the group Ray Blanchard calls “homosexual transsexuals”, rather than “auto-gynephiles”. Most homosexual transsexuals probably do have a brain that is more likely to be possessed by the opposite sex. Obviously, it is something in their biology that makes them want to transition (it might not be genetic but it could be prenatal), because we are biological creatures. And it is something that resisted all the social conditioning that says that we should conform to gender norms.