The 'pronoun problem' is difficult because it is about both respect, and the speaker's model of the world. It's also difficult because we don't address people with pronouns, we talk about them in the 3rd person. What are the limits of the ability to dictate how people talk about you?
I concede the point that there is an aspect of respecting somebody when choosing to use or not use their preferred pronouns. The problem is that it is partly about respect, but it is also about my self-respect - am I obligated to use words that falsely describe my model of the world, simply to make somebody else feel better? You also make a great point about the longer run societal costs of doing such a thing.
Regarding part 3 - trans ideologues have essentially repurposed the word 'woman' and have given it a new broader definition. But before the transgender ideologues came about, we already had at least 2 different definitions of the word 'woman'. The first definition is the most stringent and refers to your gametes. But, when we meet somebody we don't sex them by examining their gametes. We sex them by observing their sexual characteristics - face shape, facial hair, hips, etc. In the first sense of 'woman', Blaire White obviously is not a woman. But, she arguably is in the 2nd sense.
I am much more comfortable referring to Blaire White as 'she' because it imposes no mental load on me to do so. I perceive Blaire as a female, so calling Blaire 'her' is easy. It would be harder for me to refer to Blaire as 'he'.
Of course, this is not really a great principle when deciding who is worthy of choosing pronouns. The pronoun game is the most troublesome aspect of gender ideology, and it isn't clear to me what we should do.
With regards to the criticism that the number of feminine traits cannot suffice for womanhood, one way around this would just be to adopt a “property cluster” theory of womanhood (which I think Bentham may have implicitly had in mind), where womanhood is defined as having a sufficient number of traits or properties, but where no single property is sufficient (the exact number of traits which are sufficient is of course vague, not surprising though given that such terms are inherently vague!). So crossdressers wouldn’t be women because they don’t have enough feminine traits to qualify.
You do somewhat address this by pointing out that no number of feminine traits would serve to satisfy, but I think the obvious rebuttal is simply that you place too much emphasis on cultural traits like makeup, and not enough on biological traits like having breast (and to be fair, Bentham’s list seems to have this issue too. Although it’s possible he didn’t intend for every trait to be equally weighted).
You do also mention that the theory that womanhood might be dependent on socially constructed traits just reinforces patriarchal assumptions, but while true, I don’t take this to be a strong criticism of the property cluster theory. Whether it should be the case that “woman” means X, and whether it actually does are two different things.
The advantage of the property cluster theory over the conservative view is that it recognizes that no single biological trait is necessary for womanhood. For instance, having reproductive organs isn’t necessary, otherwise women with hysterectomies wouldn’t be women. Having XX chromosomes can’t be necessary, otherwise people with XY chromosomes who never had their Y chromosome expressed (and therefore have all the other ordinary biological traits associated with womanhood) wouldn’t be women, and so forth.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that a thing is something with X, Y, Z traits...and those traits may overlap with the traits of other things. At the same time a thing can lack a trait of every other thing in its category. we do that for everything else (see schemas of horses, birds, chairs, etc.) in psychology.
I would recommend going one level deeper. Defining dogs and galaxies is easy, because dogs and galaxies do not define themselves. Human beings do define themselves, both individually and in groups, which leads to a difficulty. There are two kinds of definitions.
The outer view, that, like objects, tries to define people by their predictable traits. This is more objective, the issue with that is that it is object-ive, objectifying. Objectivitiy is objectifying, as it ignores the lived experience of the subject, and is generally pushed by people who think the humanities and social sciences should work like STEM, and don't know Verstehen, empathic understanding is a method used in the social sciences since the mid 19th century. And it works. And is necessary. One cannot understand the Napoleonic wars based on dry facts only. One has to somehow try to figure out what was going on inside Napoleon's head. Science is about prediction, and predicting people requires understanding their intentions.
There is the inner view, as people and groups try defining themselves, understanding themselves. This is more subjective, but harder for outsiders to understand. It does not look as sciency. Listening to people looks less like a science than measuring and counting breasts.
Sometimes the inner and outer view comes into conflict. I am ethnic Hungarian and we have always defined it about the language. A nation lives in its language. But now we have third-generation Hungarian-Americans still identifying as Hungarian, supporting cultural causes, and yet they do not speak the langauage. So now their own internal view and our external is a bit in conflict.
My basic recommendation would be to simply keep, preserve and tolerate this tension. We do need to have some sort of an agreement about what words mean, but we should also be OK with people's subjective experiences differing.
Something doesn’t have to be X to be treated like X. A tomato may officially be a fruit but I’ve never seen it included in a fruit salad. And men are sometimes called bitches--since this is a word that inherently means female and used against women, those men ARE being treated like women by being called bitches.
And definitions reflect usage, not some inherent meaning. We after all give words their meanings and we change the meaning of words all the time. The word literally has come to mean figuratively. Go figure . It’s all about context
The saying “if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck...” comes to mind here...woman need not mean “person with eggs in their ovaries”, especially since many women lose those without it changing the fact that they’re a woman. Ultimately, it’s about utility. When you look at people you assume things about them based on what you can observe and how they behave. Why does womanhood have to be some innate or inborn property of a person? Says who? Especially when no one is born a woman because a woman is an adult by definition. So technically, we do become women .
I wish I could edit these comments...but I wanted to add that feminists have long fought to dismantle the notion that certain characteristics are innate (“genius”, for example), so I don’t see why some of them most die on the hill that womanhood is innate and not learned or malleable (or a combination of both, as most things are!)
I would like to provide the perspective of a linguist. The word "woman" is a generic noun, which is to say, anything referred to as a woman is assumed to exist within the class of woman and the stereotypes associated with that. The word "female" and the word "woman" as far as linguistics is concerned, are as separate as "furniture" and "forest", sure they might be associated with wood, and you can sit on a branch or a log all the same as you can sit on a chair, but they are not really the same thing. Furthermore, a woodworker and an agriculturalist might have different understandings of both due to their own experiences. Societally, it would be downright ignorant to imply femaleness and womanhood are not related in the same way that implying forestry is unrelated to carpentry, but linguistically these are just noun classes. In gendered languages, people overwhelmingly use descriptors that would describe their understanding of a particular human gender for objects that share that grammatical gender. A German may see a bridge and identify it as beautiful, a French person may identify the same bridge as durable. They see the same bridge, they both agree it is a bridge, but they believe the bridge to exist in a different class and so treat it differently. They do not do this out of deep rooted beliefs that bridges are inherently ladylike or should only exist to be effective at crossing gaps, but because it feels right.
In this way, each individual person may have a different definition of what "woman" means. Across sociolinguistic groups, this may lead to disagreements. If we asked groups of different sexes, genders, and sexual orientations, to describe womanlike traits - you might get a whole range of different answers based on their biases and level of education around womanhood, feminism, sociology. If you asked them all to define the word "female", it would be quite simple. Sure, there may be female women who lack some of the traits described for whatever reason, but overwhelmingly it is just "whatever feels right". In the same way, if you asked a person to define what makes something a country a person may give, based on their level of education about geography, politics, international law, history, philosophy, a variety of different answers. However, if you asked a person to define what a government is, the answers become a lot narrower. A country is usually ran by a government, sometimes it is not - is a country without a government as legitimate as a country with a government, why?
I do appreciate that this example is not the best. It is not one that I have rehearsed. Nonetheless, this is all to say, even though some people may be excessively educated and opinionated on the topic - when it comes to linguistics the answer is often "vibes". You are asking us to define a word, and we linguists do not even have a definition for what a word is! We are told by our parents, our teachers, our peers, about the things a woman must or must not do, what is ladylike and what is not (do not spread your legs when sitting, but do not cross them in this way, you must not take large bites of food etc.), this compounds into a highly complex but nonetheless loose definition that at the end of the day is just "a vibe". The definition of a word is personal, so a person who identifies as a woman may have a completely separate idea of what a woman is to what a person who sees that they identify as a woman but does not accept that they are, because while the self identified woman believes she conforms to her definition of "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", and the onlooker has some other definition that does in fact require any number of arbitrary boxes be ticked.
You can not determine if ANOTHER person is a woman, because if you take the definition of person A (which has C D and E as their list of traits that make up a woman) and the definition of person B (which has D F and X as their list of traits that make up a woman), while they are both talking about women when they say "I am a woman" and "no you are not (a woman)", what person A really means is "I identify as (a member of a social group with traits C D and E)" but person B takes this word and deregisters it to mean "I identify (as a member of a social group with traits D F and X)". They are both talking about the idea of a woman. However, in the same way that I can never know if everybody else sees the grass as (my) blue and simply calls it green because nobody knows better, we do not argue about whether the grass is blue. We see the grass, and we understand it to be green because we understand that grass is a thing that is green. Unfortunately, society is much more complicated than going "what colour are the spiky leaves pointing out the ground", a person may have a very expansive list of ideas about what a woman is or a very narrow list, we are all talking about the idea of a "man" or a "woman" or a "nonbinary person" but every single human being has a different list of attributes they believe a man or a woman or a nonbinary person to have. Thus when you say if the definition a person has about a word is incongruent with the definition most people would argue it has, then it is a bad definition, you are correct. There probably is a narrow set of traits most people can agree a woman has, but it would take too much time to do it. Thus I think we should look more at the topic as "this person identifies as being a woman (whatever that means to them)" and "I (do not) agree that this person is a woman (whatever that means to me)".
I really dig this write up.
The 'pronoun problem' is difficult because it is about both respect, and the speaker's model of the world. It's also difficult because we don't address people with pronouns, we talk about them in the 3rd person. What are the limits of the ability to dictate how people talk about you?
I concede the point that there is an aspect of respecting somebody when choosing to use or not use their preferred pronouns. The problem is that it is partly about respect, but it is also about my self-respect - am I obligated to use words that falsely describe my model of the world, simply to make somebody else feel better? You also make a great point about the longer run societal costs of doing such a thing.
Regarding part 3 - trans ideologues have essentially repurposed the word 'woman' and have given it a new broader definition. But before the transgender ideologues came about, we already had at least 2 different definitions of the word 'woman'. The first definition is the most stringent and refers to your gametes. But, when we meet somebody we don't sex them by examining their gametes. We sex them by observing their sexual characteristics - face shape, facial hair, hips, etc. In the first sense of 'woman', Blaire White obviously is not a woman. But, she arguably is in the 2nd sense.
I am much more comfortable referring to Blaire White as 'she' because it imposes no mental load on me to do so. I perceive Blaire as a female, so calling Blaire 'her' is easy. It would be harder for me to refer to Blaire as 'he'.
Of course, this is not really a great principle when deciding who is worthy of choosing pronouns. The pronoun game is the most troublesome aspect of gender ideology, and it isn't clear to me what we should do.
With regards to the criticism that the number of feminine traits cannot suffice for womanhood, one way around this would just be to adopt a “property cluster” theory of womanhood (which I think Bentham may have implicitly had in mind), where womanhood is defined as having a sufficient number of traits or properties, but where no single property is sufficient (the exact number of traits which are sufficient is of course vague, not surprising though given that such terms are inherently vague!). So crossdressers wouldn’t be women because they don’t have enough feminine traits to qualify.
You do somewhat address this by pointing out that no number of feminine traits would serve to satisfy, but I think the obvious rebuttal is simply that you place too much emphasis on cultural traits like makeup, and not enough on biological traits like having breast (and to be fair, Bentham’s list seems to have this issue too. Although it’s possible he didn’t intend for every trait to be equally weighted).
You do also mention that the theory that womanhood might be dependent on socially constructed traits just reinforces patriarchal assumptions, but while true, I don’t take this to be a strong criticism of the property cluster theory. Whether it should be the case that “woman” means X, and whether it actually does are two different things.
The advantage of the property cluster theory over the conservative view is that it recognizes that no single biological trait is necessary for womanhood. For instance, having reproductive organs isn’t necessary, otherwise women with hysterectomies wouldn’t be women. Having XX chromosomes can’t be necessary, otherwise people with XY chromosomes who never had their Y chromosome expressed (and therefore have all the other ordinary biological traits associated with womanhood) wouldn’t be women, and so forth.
P.S. Sorry for the late comment! I’ve noticed that your old articles are getting shared quite a lot recently
I think I may have discussed this with Bentham's Bulldog on his podcast, see here if you're ever interested!
https://youtu.be/qaUUrxfYKhk?t=1
No problem, got a lot of comments so might not be able to respond to all of them in a timely manner!
There’s nothing wrong with saying that a thing is something with X, Y, Z traits...and those traits may overlap with the traits of other things. At the same time a thing can lack a trait of every other thing in its category. we do that for everything else (see schemas of horses, birds, chairs, etc.) in psychology.
I would recommend going one level deeper. Defining dogs and galaxies is easy, because dogs and galaxies do not define themselves. Human beings do define themselves, both individually and in groups, which leads to a difficulty. There are two kinds of definitions.
The outer view, that, like objects, tries to define people by their predictable traits. This is more objective, the issue with that is that it is object-ive, objectifying. Objectivitiy is objectifying, as it ignores the lived experience of the subject, and is generally pushed by people who think the humanities and social sciences should work like STEM, and don't know Verstehen, empathic understanding is a method used in the social sciences since the mid 19th century. And it works. And is necessary. One cannot understand the Napoleonic wars based on dry facts only. One has to somehow try to figure out what was going on inside Napoleon's head. Science is about prediction, and predicting people requires understanding their intentions.
There is the inner view, as people and groups try defining themselves, understanding themselves. This is more subjective, but harder for outsiders to understand. It does not look as sciency. Listening to people looks less like a science than measuring and counting breasts.
Sometimes the inner and outer view comes into conflict. I am ethnic Hungarian and we have always defined it about the language. A nation lives in its language. But now we have third-generation Hungarian-Americans still identifying as Hungarian, supporting cultural causes, and yet they do not speak the langauage. So now their own internal view and our external is a bit in conflict.
My basic recommendation would be to simply keep, preserve and tolerate this tension. We do need to have some sort of an agreement about what words mean, but we should also be OK with people's subjective experiences differing.
Something doesn’t have to be X to be treated like X. A tomato may officially be a fruit but I’ve never seen it included in a fruit salad. And men are sometimes called bitches--since this is a word that inherently means female and used against women, those men ARE being treated like women by being called bitches.
And definitions reflect usage, not some inherent meaning. We after all give words their meanings and we change the meaning of words all the time. The word literally has come to mean figuratively. Go figure . It’s all about context
The saying “if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck...” comes to mind here...woman need not mean “person with eggs in their ovaries”, especially since many women lose those without it changing the fact that they’re a woman. Ultimately, it’s about utility. When you look at people you assume things about them based on what you can observe and how they behave. Why does womanhood have to be some innate or inborn property of a person? Says who? Especially when no one is born a woman because a woman is an adult by definition. So technically, we do become women .
I wish I could edit these comments...but I wanted to add that feminists have long fought to dismantle the notion that certain characteristics are innate (“genius”, for example), so I don’t see why some of them most die on the hill that womanhood is innate and not learned or malleable (or a combination of both, as most things are!)
Must**
I would like to provide the perspective of a linguist. The word "woman" is a generic noun, which is to say, anything referred to as a woman is assumed to exist within the class of woman and the stereotypes associated with that. The word "female" and the word "woman" as far as linguistics is concerned, are as separate as "furniture" and "forest", sure they might be associated with wood, and you can sit on a branch or a log all the same as you can sit on a chair, but they are not really the same thing. Furthermore, a woodworker and an agriculturalist might have different understandings of both due to their own experiences. Societally, it would be downright ignorant to imply femaleness and womanhood are not related in the same way that implying forestry is unrelated to carpentry, but linguistically these are just noun classes. In gendered languages, people overwhelmingly use descriptors that would describe their understanding of a particular human gender for objects that share that grammatical gender. A German may see a bridge and identify it as beautiful, a French person may identify the same bridge as durable. They see the same bridge, they both agree it is a bridge, but they believe the bridge to exist in a different class and so treat it differently. They do not do this out of deep rooted beliefs that bridges are inherently ladylike or should only exist to be effective at crossing gaps, but because it feels right.
In this way, each individual person may have a different definition of what "woman" means. Across sociolinguistic groups, this may lead to disagreements. If we asked groups of different sexes, genders, and sexual orientations, to describe womanlike traits - you might get a whole range of different answers based on their biases and level of education around womanhood, feminism, sociology. If you asked them all to define the word "female", it would be quite simple. Sure, there may be female women who lack some of the traits described for whatever reason, but overwhelmingly it is just "whatever feels right". In the same way, if you asked a person to define what makes something a country a person may give, based on their level of education about geography, politics, international law, history, philosophy, a variety of different answers. However, if you asked a person to define what a government is, the answers become a lot narrower. A country is usually ran by a government, sometimes it is not - is a country without a government as legitimate as a country with a government, why?
I do appreciate that this example is not the best. It is not one that I have rehearsed. Nonetheless, this is all to say, even though some people may be excessively educated and opinionated on the topic - when it comes to linguistics the answer is often "vibes". You are asking us to define a word, and we linguists do not even have a definition for what a word is! We are told by our parents, our teachers, our peers, about the things a woman must or must not do, what is ladylike and what is not (do not spread your legs when sitting, but do not cross them in this way, you must not take large bites of food etc.), this compounds into a highly complex but nonetheless loose definition that at the end of the day is just "a vibe". The definition of a word is personal, so a person who identifies as a woman may have a completely separate idea of what a woman is to what a person who sees that they identify as a woman but does not accept that they are, because while the self identified woman believes she conforms to her definition of "a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", and the onlooker has some other definition that does in fact require any number of arbitrary boxes be ticked.
You can not determine if ANOTHER person is a woman, because if you take the definition of person A (which has C D and E as their list of traits that make up a woman) and the definition of person B (which has D F and X as their list of traits that make up a woman), while they are both talking about women when they say "I am a woman" and "no you are not (a woman)", what person A really means is "I identify as (a member of a social group with traits C D and E)" but person B takes this word and deregisters it to mean "I identify (as a member of a social group with traits D F and X)". They are both talking about the idea of a woman. However, in the same way that I can never know if everybody else sees the grass as (my) blue and simply calls it green because nobody knows better, we do not argue about whether the grass is blue. We see the grass, and we understand it to be green because we understand that grass is a thing that is green. Unfortunately, society is much more complicated than going "what colour are the spiky leaves pointing out the ground", a person may have a very expansive list of ideas about what a woman is or a very narrow list, we are all talking about the idea of a "man" or a "woman" or a "nonbinary person" but every single human being has a different list of attributes they believe a man or a woman or a nonbinary person to have. Thus when you say if the definition a person has about a word is incongruent with the definition most people would argue it has, then it is a bad definition, you are correct. There probably is a narrow set of traits most people can agree a woman has, but it would take too much time to do it. Thus I think we should look more at the topic as "this person identifies as being a woman (whatever that means to them)" and "I (do not) agree that this person is a woman (whatever that means to me)".