No, Women are Not People with a Sufficient Number of "Feminine Traits"

In which I respond to Bentham Bulldog's piece on what a woman is

Does wearing and being interested in makeup make you a woman? Turns out, it doesn’t.

Bentham’s Bulldog has proposed a solution to the evidently not-so-simple question of “What is a woman?” Unfortunately, his solution does not succeed. His reasons for rejecting the conservative, or gender-critical, view on what constitutes a woman are not convincing. Further, his proposed solution to the question should also be rejected on ameliorative grounds. In short, the proposed solution neither accurately captures the group traditionally understood by “woman” nor offers a positive vision for changing the definition of “woman” going forward in order to address social ills. Here, I will offer a brief explanation of why Bentham’s reasoning fails as well as offer a few comments about more productive approaches to the question going forward.

Comments on Part 1: Introduction

In this section, Bentham introduces the question but adds a few comments I wanted to respond to as well.

One important note: what a woman is is different from who we should treat as a woman for many practical purposes. For example, even if I were convinced that some transgender person was not a woman in a purely descriptive sense, I would use the pronouns that they would like me to use. It is polite. It deeply bothers trans people when their preferred pronouns are not used. Conservatives often, in response to this, claim that this is in some way an affront to the truth—but it isn’t. It’s just a basic part of being polite. To illustrate this, imagine a scenario where a person’s real name was Greg, but every day, from 1:00 to 2:00, they became deeply distressed by being called Greg and wanted to be called Gorg. If being called Greg drove them into a deep depression, even if it’s not technically their name, you should call them Gorg. This is not lying or denying the truth—it’s just being nice.

In this part, Bentham introduces a distinction between those who are women and those who ought to be treated as women. This is a distinction other philosophers make but the distinction has always been surprising to me. It seems to me that one should be treated as a woman iff one is a woman. That’s because, if somebody wants to be treated as a woman but is not a woman, we would normally think that individual is operating under the grip of a delusion or set of false beliefs, and the ideal way to respond to someone under the grip of false beliefs is not to simply indulge those beliefs but to attempt to correct them.

Say someone holds the false belief that they are the second coming of Christ. They claim that they should be addressed as Your Holiness. It may indeed make that individual very happy if the people around them refer to him as Your Holiness, and such a moniker doesn’t “cost” the interlocutor anything. Should we then alter societal conventions such that everyone refers to the individual as Your Holiness? Obviously not. The uncontroversially proper way to deal with someone laboring under such a false belief is to try to correct their delusions - to use therapy or psychiatry to get those individuals to accept reality, which is that they are not Christ. Calling such an individual “Your Holiness” would not become obligatory even if the person with the delusion was so severely mentally ill they could never recover and “see reality”.

Let’s say this delusion became a widespread social contagion, spreading across the population like the dancing manias of the 1500s. Thousands of people now labor under the false belief they are the Messiah and wish to be referred to as Your Holiness. In this case, it seems even more pressing not to indulge their beliefs. Indulging their beliefs might cause a short term benefit in terms of increasing the immediate happiness of the deluded individual, but it would have the much worse longer term impact of solidifying their deluded beliefs and encouraging the social contagion. The negative impacts of indulging their beliefs become even more consequential if it can be shown indulging the false beliefs has a negative impact on a traditionally oppressed group.

If the conservative/GC view is correct - trans women are not women, but are simply men operating under a false belief they are women - their delusion represents a relatively modern but growing social contagion, and their behavior has negative effects for women generally. As a result, women may rightly feel they have overwhelming reason not to indulge the false beliefs of trans women, and therefore not to use preferred pronouns, regardless of whether doing so causes frustration or negative feelings among the trans woman. Someone who disagrees will have to find the relevant difference between the case of false belief one is the Messiah and false belief one is a woman.

Comments on Part 2 - A woman is not one who identifies as a woman.

I basically agree with the standard critiques of the liberal conception of womanhood - “woman is the person who identifies as a woman” - in that it is obviously circular. I suspect the liberal would dispute points 2-4, however. The liberal might bite the bullet and assert that the enfeebled person who lacks a self-conception as a woman is not a woman. The liberal might claim that the person who doesn’t truly endorse “I identify as a woman” is unproblematically not a woman, just as the person who says, “I am a Christian” without truly feeling herself a Christian is unproblematically not really a Christian. Finally, the liberal will reject point 4 on the grounds that womanhood has nothing to do with similarity to a paradigmatically feminine person under their conception of womanhood. Regardless of these potential disagreements, I think the circularity problem is ultimately devastating to the liberal position and I agree with Bentham that it is untenable.

Comments on Part 3 - A woman is not an adult human female

The GC/conservative view is that women are adult human females. Bentham disputes this view by claiming that these views clash with common-sense intuitive beliefs about various trans people.

1. It has to say implausible things about people who are women. Blaire White seems like a woman and Buck Angel seems like a man, but on this definition, Blaire White is a man and Buck Angel is a woman.

2. Even conservatives often have to catch themselves to make sure when they’re using this definition. When talking about Blaire White, it’s very hard to refer to her as he. I’ve noticed conservatives repeatedly slip up before correcting themselves to use the pronouns that trans people don’t want to be referred to as.

3. There are strong pragmatic reasons not to use it, as referring to trans people with the pronouns of their birth sex tends to make them upset, and you shouldn’t upset people absent a good reason.

4. It’s just manifestly not what we mean by the term. The vast majority of people wouldn’t call Blaire White a man. If you were at the bar talking to Blaire White, you wouldn’t say “look at that man I was just talking to,” and if you were talking to Buck Angel, you wouldn’t say “look at that woman I was just talking to.” Even if you would, most people wouldn’t, obviously, so you’re just defining the word wrong. If your definition of a term is not how most people use the term, it is a bad definition.

5. If a woman is consistently interested in dating and having sex with other women, she would be either lesbian or bisexual. But one who is interested in dating and having sex with Buck Angel would not necessarily be lesbian or bisexual. Therefore, Buck Angel is not a woman. This is just trivial—a much larger portion of gay men would be interested in Buck Angel than of lesbian women.

Point 3 I have already addressed. But points 1, 2, 4, and 5 all relate to a belief that the fact people’s intuitive beliefs about trans people and the terms they use for them meaningfully challenge the GC/conservative view that women are adult human females. The idea seems to be: “If average people think Blaire White is a woman, ‘woman’ must refer to a group of people that contains Blaire White.”

But this doesn’t follow. It seems obvious that people often use words inconsistently or even incorrectly. As an example, many people would refer to pyrite as gold if they saw it offhand. But that doesn’t mean the term “gold” must necessarily refer to pyrite as well as actual gold. A much more reasonable interpretation would be that people are using the word gold for pyrite because pyrite has many gold-like features (just as Blaire White may have many feminine features), and they are confused or unaware of the distinction.

One difference is that people generally accept pyrite isn’t gold upon being told what mineral it actually is. On the other hand, many people persist in calling Blaire White a woman even after learning White’s transgender status. But there are parallel situations here too. One could clearly explain to someone that a tomato is actually a fruit, yet that person might persist in calling it a vegetable. This, however, still doesn’t indicate anything about the nature of tomatoes. It simply indicates something about the speaker - that they don’t care about the technical accuracy of their statements for whatever reason.

(In fact, there are many reasons someone might use a term incorrectly, and one of them is when the speaker thinks it is obvious the term doesn’t actually apply in its straightforward meaning. Someone might refer to a statue of a woman as “that woman” when giving directions, simply because it’s obvious that the thing being referenced is not an actual woman. In a world where people did believe some statues were women, many speakers might be more restrained to avoid a plausible miscommunication. With this in mind, it may be that some speakers are comfortable calling trans women women precisely because they don’t feel they actually are women and think that is obvious enough there won’t be a misunderstanding!)

For the reasons given above, Bentham is wrong to say “If your definition of a term is not how most people use the term, it is a bad definition.” This should be obvious because the concept of a “commonly misunderstood word” is not at all hard to grasp. There is in fact a very long Wikipedia entry of commonly misused English words. Unless you believe all of those words actually do mean what they’re commonly used to mean - a radical position! - then you should not find it convincing that the meaning of the word “woman” is entirely determined or can be directly understood by common usage.

Point number 5 is particularly unconvincing in this regard. A heterosexual man can be aroused by all sorts of things that are not women - a painting of a woman, for example, or a sex doll that resembles a woman. In that case, their attraction is towards certain feminine features. This shows that heterosexual men can be aroused by something with feminine features without implying that the target of their arousal must be a woman. (The same is true for all sexual orientations.) Further, people who are generally attracted to men or women may not be attracted to any specific man or woman. So a lesbian’s lack of attraction to Buck Angel doesn’t show that Buck Angel isn’t a woman.

Comments on Part 4: A woman is someone with a sufficient number of feminine traits

Here, Bentham suggests that women are those people who have “enough” feminine traits. Exactly how many traits and what those traits are is up for debate, but Bentham presents us with a starter list:

Traits are feminine in this sense if they are associated with adult human females (it must be defined this way to avoid circularity). Examples of feminine traits would include:

1. Wanting to be referred to with she her pronouns.

2. Having long hair.

3. Painting one’s nails.

4. Having a high voice.

5. Having interests that are disproportionately had by adult human females.

6. Having breasts.

7. Being born a female.

8. Wearing lipstick.

9. Wearing dresses.

Etc. There are lots of things that are disproportionately had by women—these would be feminine traits under my definition. This definition is superior.

It’s not immediately clear if Bentham considers this an ameliorative definition - that is, a definition that we should adopt not because it accurately captures the group “woman,” but because it helps us achieve certain positive goals - or an accurate definition of the group “women” has traditionally been meant to describe. The latter seems extremely implausible. I struggle to believe that people seriously believe that historically, human society has used personal preferences or grooming habits to determine whether or not someone is a woman. This flies in the face of basic facts we know about how societies have been organized, as well as the personal experience of virtually all women.

To give a few historical examples: the emperor Elagabalus was infamous for preferring women’s clothing and makeup, and many modern commentators have speculated that he was transgender. But the Romans clearly viewed Elagabalus as a man; otherwise, he would not have been considered in the running to be an emperor. Joan of Arc cut her hair, dressed as a man, and had interests in traditionally masculine arenas, yet the Church ultimately determined she was a woman (and charged her with cross-dressing) due to her biology. Indeed, various gender-nonconforming people throughout history have attempted to hide their natal biology from the public precisely because the public has traditionally used biology, not interests or appearance, to determine one’s status as a man or a woman. Clearly, biology, and not fondness for the stereotypical interests associated with the opposite sex, has generally determined whether a society recognizes a certain person as a woman. Rules against cross dressing show this; cross-dressing would be literally impossible if one accepted the view that gender was determined by the sorts of clothing worn.

Bentham might argue that it’s not just clothes, but a sufficient number of feminine qualities, that determines one’s position in the gender hierarchy. But this is just not accurate. For the vast majority of women, no amount of masculine behavior resulted in their placement in the gender category of “man”. It’s true of course that some women hid their sex by adopting masculine traits, but that has nothing to do with Bentham’s position; in all of those cases, had their biological sex been determined, they would have been seen as women (and indeed faced consequences for violating gendered norms, as Joan’s case shows.)

If, on the other hand, Bentham considers this an ameliorative definition, my only question can be: why? It seems self-evident to me that no amount of personal thriving for the very small number of transgender people on the planet could possibly outweigh the harms done to several billion other women by fundamentally defining them in terms of stereotypes that limit their full participation in society. Of course, Bentham may not share my radical feminist understanding of femininity and its harms for the flourishing of women. But everyone should at least understand why defining women in terms of lipstick, long hair, and dresses is clearly regressive, and women have a legitimate reason to find it concerning.

To clarify this, imagine a similar sort of ameliorative definition proposed for Jewish people. In this framework, to be Jewish is just to have a certain number of “Jewish-coded” traits - intelligence, stinginess, neuroticism, a big nose, curly hair, and so on. (To be clear, I’m not arguing those traits actually correlate in any real way with being Jewish. But they are undeniably understood to be central to Jewish people in cultures where Jews have been marginalized or treated with prejudice.) I cannot imagine someone arguing that a convert’s desire to be recognized as Jewish would justify adopting that sort of definition. The obvious negative effects to Jewish people as a whole - both practically, and just in terms of their human dignity - would be obvious, I imagine, to most people. I hesitate to ever accuse philosophical opponents of misogyny, but I struggle to understand what other explanation there could be here for why this sort of definition provokes no concern.

Bentham rejects the idea that his view is sexist, saying “As long as we accept that there are traditionally feminine traits, we can define being a women in terms of these.” But what he fails to realize is that the majority of traditionally feminine traits he mentions are not in any way innate to women, but the consequences of a particular social system. The entire issue is that this definition grounds womanhood in the patriarchal constructs that women are subjected to. The problem is not that this definition will “exclude” insufficiently feminine women (although this may be an issue) but that it reinforces the link between femininity and womanhood that feminism has historically sought to break.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve tried to explain why Bentham’s definition of womanhood is unworkable. Briefly, his arguments against the GC view are unconvincing and his argument for the adoption of the “feminine traits” view of womanhood is not convincing from either an ameliorative or historical perspective. This does not mean that the GC view is correct either, however. I’ve written critiques of the GC view as well, which you can find here. But I do think the GC view comes far closer to capturing the group traditionally identified as “women” and also is far more compatible with even a basic feminist analysis.