What type of automobile should you buy? Coupe? Sedan? Pickup? Mini-van? SUV? Those little roller skate sized things with asymmetrical rear windows? A cloth top Jeep without doors? One of those things with a strange number of wheels and no storage space?
Man… that’s a lot of different types! Why bother? Well, what type of automobile you choose depends a lot on what your needs are, right?
If you want to look flash and pick up women a mini-van isn’t going to do it; something sportier might work better. On the other hand, if your attempts to pick up women go really well, you are going to need something with a few more seats for the kids. More than two kids, and that mini-van starts looking pretty sexy.
Or do you need something for storing inanimate or non-human cargo? Can’t get a ton of cargo in a Jeep, so… oh.
Well… I guess you can, but do you want to? Probably best to get a pick up, or maybe a box van, something like that.
The point is, there are lots of types of automobiles. They have lots of different traits that matter when it comes to use and people’s preferences, and we have lots of different words to describe them. If you need a pickup, but ask for an “automobile” and receive a Mini Cooper, you are going to be unhappy. Not that there is anything wrong with a Mini Cooper for the right person, but it isn’t right for you. Having the right words to describe what you want more granularly than “car” is pretty important.
So, why am I talking to you like you are five? I want you to fixate on the fact that detailed categorization based on features people find important is normal for humans, and having words to define these relevant categories is terribly useful to make society work a little more smoothly.
I want that because now I am going to say that this business of demanding genetically male/female people that have transitioned into looking like the opposite sex be called “women/men” is the opposite of useful behavior. “Trans-women are women” is as bad as “Mini Coopers are mini-vans.” Yes, they might be roughly the same general shape and appearance, but if you want to put a bunch of kids inside, only one is going to work out.
If this seems like merely Doc. Hammer talking shit about trannies, let me assure you that the opposite is true! I have pretty much no interest in who or what consenting adults want to fuck; I mean, the set of people' whose sex lives I am concerned about isn’t empty, but it is a very small set. I also have zero interest in what people want to name themselves, what sorts of surgery they want to have performed on them, whatever. If you can find someone to perform surgery for some agreed upon price you pay yourself, go nuts. You do you just as hard as you can. I won’t even complain if I don’t like the results; it just isn’t my business.
It is my business, and that of everyone in society, when it comes to what words we are allowed to use to describe these things, however. There are important differences here, and we need to be able to differentiate our speech to clarify. As the highly reputable Parrhesia writes, the distinctions between “women” and “people who identify as women” are much more important than “parents” and “people who serve as parents”.
The crux of Parrhesia’s disagreement with Bentham is the notion of whether the social definition of “woman” is sufficient to define women outside of chromosomes, gametes, etc., leaning on “well, women are sort of like this [cluster of traits] so if someone with some of those traits identifies as a woman, she’s a woman”, much like how someone who performs all the roles of a parent to a child is a parent to the child, whether or not it is actually their grandma or adopted parent or whatever.
Note though, that unlike “man who acts like what we think of as a woman and has had surgery to look like one from the outside”, we have lots of different words for people who act like parents to a child but were not involved in mixing up the requisite baby batter, and words for those who were. We have “biological parents”, “adopted parents”, “legal guardians”, and probably a few I am unaware of. Parrhesia doesn’t bring it up, but even the social definition of parent isn’t sufficient, and we use many terms to clarify the important distinctions, even though the primary distinction is who has rights and takes responsibilities related to the kid.
What he does point out, a bit too far down in the essay I think, is that the use of the word must convey some information based on its definition. If you say “This automobile is a truck,” that must convey information about what features the automobile does and does not have, or else your statement adds no more value than if you had said “This automobile is named Lewis.” The words used must connote distinctions of type or else they are useless.
What sorts of words do we need, what sorts of distinctions matter when we think about sex, gender, trans, and all that? The question is one of use, that is, what do people need to know about someone regarding these issues. Some of the questions about sex might be, in no particular order:
Who do you like to have sex with1?
Can you produce children?
If yes, what gametes are you contributing?
What were you born as?
XX or XY?
XXY, mosaicism, hermaphrodite, etc.
If you are transitioning, where are you on that process? Pre/post op? On hormones?
Do you cross identify only, that is, you cross dress but retain functional reproductive plumbing from your birth sex?
It seems to me there are two types of questions these traits are relevant for: personal relationships and administrative relationships.
Personal relationships are pretty cut and dry, and the example of the gay male typology show the use case. Someone seeking a partner needs to know whether a particular person is:
The sort of person they are attracted to under the clothes, and vice versa
What their child bearing capabilities are
Are they going to be very different, in shape or function, at some point soon
Clearly, just calling everyone who identifies or sort of looks like a man or woman a man or woman isn’t going to cut it here. There are too many different preferences to avoid embarrassment upon getting into bed if we just say “Eh, that looks like a man, and that looks like a woman, so it’s fine.” Looking at dating as a market, there is a lot of efficiency to be gained by accurate categorization for advertising. There is a lot of value in being able to write “X looking for Y”, even if X and Y are actually lists.
Administrative relationships are a bit more complicated. If I need to answer “What prison should this convicted criminal be sent to?” I can’t just trust “what did they write on their intake form under sex?” If I am in charge of Title IX administration in some college and I get student applications that are 100% female one year, should I just take their word for it? Should we just let “women’s sports” turn into the “open division?” When is identification not enough? If someone claims to be homosexual on their diversity statement for some job application, should I demand to see them prove it, or just take their word?
It seems that administrative purposes require caring about all the categories, except perhaps whether or not someone is capable of producing children. If you don’t want female prison inmates getting raped, for example, you are going to have to start keeping anyone with a penis out of women’s prisons, regardless of how they identify2.
If you want to ensure Diversity3 in your workforce or student body, you need to know a lot about people’s sexual preferences, genetics and commitment to their gender identity. (Five or ten years ago I scoffed at the idea that young men would be willing to claim to be women in order to e.g. get jobs, win in sports, or get into a good school. Now I think that while the number might be low, it certainly is a lot higher than I believed.) Administratively, if I claim to be a women on job applications, do I have grounds for a civil rights suit if the hiring committee turns me down on the basis that I piss standing up while wearing pants and a short haircut? As it stands, it looks like the answer is “Yes.” I am tempted to find out, which suggests to me that a rather large number of other people are, too.
So what are our options here? It seems that we need to break down men and women into types thereof, at least for administrative ends. We can assume that people looking for romantic partners will sort things out for themselves, but we need to have some categories for people so we know how to treat them when they come into contact with the bureaucracy. Maybe we can draw out a spectrum of sex based on physical characteristics? Something like:
Man (XY chromosomes, all the bits generally there save those removed via e.g. accidents, as opposed to surgery)
Post-op-Trans-man (non-XY chromosomes, but some surgical work that looks/functions like male bits, and identifies as male)
Pre-op-Trans-man (non-XY chromosomes, no surgical work that looks/functions like male bits but on hormone therapy, and identifies as male)
Pre-op-Trans-woman (non-XX chromosomes, no surgical work that looks/functions like female bits but on hormone therapy, and identifies as female)
Post-op-Trans-woman (non-XX chromosomes, but some surgical work that looks/functions like female bits, and identifies as female)
Woman (XX chromosomes, all the bits generally there save those removed via e.g. accidents, as opposed to surgery)
Whew, that was exhausting to type out, but surely someone who is better at naming things than I am could come up with better terms4. Note that “man who dresses up like a woman and identifies as woman, but not on hormone therapy or undergoing surgical processes to transition” isn’t on the list. That’s because everything on the list has some sort of provable requirement attached, to keep out the riff raff as it were, otherwise anyone could claim to be not man/woman and who could say otherwise? For personal relationships that doesn’t matter so much, but for administrative rules based uses things need to be delineated in a way that can be proven to an outside observer. Otherwise everyone can just claim to be the most advantageous category.
Why go to the trouble of having at least six categories and confirming whether or not people fit in them? Well, from a perspective of the people in those categories, it is very much to their benefit if they have differing needs or preferences. Returning to the prison example, we probably want to put everyone with penises in one box and everyone without in another at the very least, but perhaps there should be a third type of prison for those who are pre-op while they await surgery, or some other set up.
There probably needs to be a third type of sports league for those who are using hormones to alter their chemistry away from their birth sex as well. That is to say, if we are going to retain women’s sports, people with XY chromosomes probably need to be put into a different league, and likewise those with XX chromosomes but taking male hormones probably should be in a different set as well. One could make men’s sports the open category if one wished while leaving women’s sports as just for XX born and non-transitioning people, but if there are enough people in the middle categories for a third division it might well be worth doing it.
There might well be a simpler way for school admissions, businesses and other governmental functions to handle the categories, however: just stop discriminating based on sex. Crazy, I know, but hear me out. Should schools treat students differently based on their chromosomes and how they identify, outside of dorm room assignments? If you go to get your car fixed, does it matter what systems the mechanic has under their hood5? Do we want to force businesses to inquire into people’s most private lives before giving them a job? Are there any times we want the government to treat people substantially different based on their sexual characteristics, outside of which cell they want to force them into6?
I propose the answer to all those questions is “No.7”
Our struggles with categorization and discrimination are self imposed. We must distinguish and categorize sex exactly because we wish to discriminate based on sex. Stop discriminating based on sex and we can stop worrying about distinguishing and defining sex.
But we can’t do one without the other. Attempting to collapse all categories down in to “man or woman, period” doesn’t work if you have goals where the exact nature of an individual’s reproductive plumbing matters. If you want to discriminate based on sex, but let people identify as whatever sex they want, then you are either giving up on discrimination (because people just identify as what is convenient) or not discriminating based on identified sex but some other aspect.
In other words, if you want to discriminate based on categories, you have to be very discriminating about your categories. You cannot be both “inclusive” in your categories and discriminatory in your behavior.
Where does that leave us? Well, we need to step back from “people are whatever they identify as!” There are cases where that is sufficient, but it isn’t universal. There are cases where we need to distinguish between the sexes, however many categories you want to make. The more you do that depends on the attributes that define categories, the more categories you need. For personal relationships there are probably dozens of useful distinctions to be made. For administrative relationships, you can have a huge number, but it is probably worth minimizing the categories as much as possible if you want to have any pretense of equal treatment. They also need to be subject to external validation, lest you lost all the control you were seeking.
If justice demands treating people differently, justice also demands creating categories to properly sort people by.
I am given to understand the gay community has extremely fine grained distinctions based on body type, preferred body type, personality, etc. Those guys know the importance of a good system. (There’s a long, long Google hole to go down searching for “types of gay man.” I stopped when I realized there were a lot of sites I didn’t want to link to coming up, but trust me, the one I linked is just a drop in the sea.")
Then again, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of concern about rape in men’s prisons, so maybe a base level of prison rape is considered a feature by those making these decisions. Let’s just go with “We want to avoid prison rape as much as possible” as a laudable goal here.
Note: Big D diversity, the type that cares about everything but diversity of thought, and whether enough white males are represented in the group.
I used to keep lizards as a kid. All of them shared the same naming convention of “Mr. [species]” unless some other family member gave them attention. Mr. Iguana lived for like a decade and I never came up with a better moniker.
Or what junk resides in their trunk, for that matter.
Possibly the military has an interest here as well, but that’s a voluntary arrangement at the current time. The prison thing seems to be the biggest issue at the moment.
I will also accept “Hell no!” and “Who the fuck would actually think that is a good idea?!”
"As the highly reputable Parrhesia writes..." Much appreciated 🙏🏻