Brief remarks on gender and pronouns

Maybe I should paywall the second half...

I.

If you’re pro-trans, you may think that transwomen are women, which makes it ungrammatical to call them “he”; likewise, if you’re anti-trans, you may think that they’re men, which makes it ungrammatical to call them “she”. But (a strong version of) the underlying assumption—that “she” cannot grammatically denote men, and “he” cannot grammatically denote women—turns out to be subtly wrong.

Following Sudo (2012: §4.1.2), consider the following sentence.

Exactly one student believes in herself.

If your linguistic judgments are like mine, you’ll think that this sentence is false (or, at any rate, has a false reading) if exactly two students—Jane and John—each believe in themselves. After all, “That’s not true! Both Jane and John believe in themselves!” is a perfectly natural reply.

But consider the truth conditions of sentences with this schematic form.

Exactly one F is G.

A sentence of this form is true if, and only if, (i) at least one F is G, and (ii) no other F is G. For instance, consider the following sentence.

Exactly one Substacker posts good content.

This is true if, and only if, (i) at least one Substacker posts good content, and (ii) no other Substacker posts good content.

Now, recall our original sentence.

Exactly one student believes in herself.

This is true if, and only if, (i) at least one student believes in herself, and (ii) no other student believes in herself. Given that Jane believes in herself, condition (i) is satisfied. So, for the sentence to be false, condition (ii) must be violated—that is, some other student must believe in herself. By stipulation, though, this other student can’t be anyone except for John!

Of course, on its own, “John believes in herself” sounds horrible—the pronoun “her” can’t ordinarily refer to men. But when the pronoun “herself” functions as it does in our example sentence, it seems to successfully range across even the students who are men.

Something similar is going on, I think, in a sentence like the following.

The boys all brought their own lunches.

In the same way that “she” successfully denotes men in our earlier sentence, “their” successfully denotes individuals in the one above, even in idiolects of English which don’t ordinarily allow singular “they”. This doesn’t go all the way to showing, of course, that people with such idiolects must be okay with singular “they” in general. But it’s still an interesting party trick of sorts. Similar considerations apply to the argument in this section: while, technically, gendered pronouns have some uses on which they can denote people of the opposite gender, this doesn’t show anything about their usage in other cases.

In general, there are two usages of pronouns, which we’ll call “free” and “bound”. Following Heim & Kratzer (1998: §9.3.3), consider the ambiguity in the following sentence, with an elided verb phrase.

Jane brought her own umbrella, and John did too.

If we read “her” as free, this means that Jane brought Jane’s umbrella, and John brought Jane’s umbrella too. Meanwhile, if we read “her” as bound, this means that Jane brought Jane’s umbrella, and John brought John’s umbrella too. Notice that, on the bound reading, what John did is described by “brought her own umbrella”! The general lesson is that properties expressed with bound pronouns can, in certain cases, be true of people who do not match the pronoun’s gender (or number).

This is all, admittedly, somewhat beside the point—sorry, but did you expect academic philosophy to be useful?

II.

Set aside, now, bound uses of pronouns: should we call transwomen “she”? Some very tentative considerations suggest that the answer may be “no”.

II.1

Apparently, the sexological literature shows that a substantial portion of men who are specifically attracted to some target group—say, amputees or stuffed animals—are also attracted to the idea of belonging to that target group (see Lawrence 2009 for an overview). Does something like this hold—perhaps at much lower rates—when the target group is women? If this is a general feature of male sexual attraction, it would be more surprising for the answer to be “no” rather than “yes”. Of course, we would predict self-reports to underestimate the true rates—people may deny, even to themselves, that their gender identity has anything to do with sexuality, out of shame or in order to access medical transition.

At any rate, if this drives a fair amount of transfeminity, then perhaps we should be less accommodating of transfeminine identity. See also the paywalled section in Amos’s post.

Miscellaneous thoughts on the philosophy of gender

II.2

Another consideration is that—contra Dembroff & Wodack, How Much Gender is Too Much Gender (2021)—tracking sex may serve an important social function, in a way that tracking something like race doesn’t: males—including transwomen—have a far higher propensity and capacity for violence, particularly sexual violence. The first graph in the following post from Aella is quite striking.

Are trans women actually as scary as cis men?

Kathleen Stock (2021: Ch. 5) puts the point rather well (as you might expect, given her book’s title—Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism). I’ll quote from her at length.

In a context where men – understood as adult human males – are responsible for more than three times as many violent and sexual assaults as women, headlines such as ‘Woman, 41, pretended to be a boy to groom a girl’ (Metro website, 1 October 2018), ‘Gang of women repeatedly stamp on man’s head in 2am brawl at Leicester Square underground station’ (Daily Mirror website, 26 June 2018), ‘Sheffield woman found with over 1,000 indecent images of children hauled before the court’ (Daily Star website, 19 July 2019), ‘Woman who once shoved policeman onto Tube tracks jailed for spitting at officer’ (Daily Mirror website, 17 February 2020) and ‘Woman who “bragged about being a paedophile” approached boys at Remembrance event’ (Wales Online, 15 May 2020) seem to demonstrate a flagrant, even provocative disregard for women’s interests. The underlying message on the part of media organisations seems to be: we care more about deferring to the inner gender identities of criminally convicted males than we do about transmitting the misleading message to the public that women, as a group, have hitherto unsuspected capacities for paedophilia, sexual predation and violent assault. When the crimes in question are then recorded as ‘women’s’ or ‘female’ crimes within the criminal justice system, the affront is compounded. Data we might otherwise have tried to use to combat violence against women in the original sense is now significantly compromised. (Stock 2021: Ch. 5)

II.3

That’s not to say, though, that the analogy with race is totally uninstructive. For instance, we might be more sympathetic towards black-to-white transracialism (for instance, to escape from slavery in the antebellum South) than towards white-to-black transracialism. The general idea: a member of the oppressed class escaping that oppression is more sympathetic than a member of the oppressor class masquerading as a member of the oppressed class. If so, we might think that female-to-male transgenderism could be more sympathetic than male-to-female transgenderism. Indeed, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) defends something like this view.

In summary: trans men are men, because we have reason to believe them when they claim to feel like men (there is no reason to think they are mistaken about what being a man feels like), and because there is nothing particularly at stake for men in accepting them as men. But transwomen are not women, because we have reason to think they are mistaken when they claim to feel like women, and because there is a great deal at stake for women in accepting transwomen as women. (Lawford-Smith 2021)

I’m not sure that the three considerations I’ve glossed in this section are decisive, but I think they’re interesting and worth more consideration.