I have been thinking, on and off for several years, about what is wrong with the question “what is a woman?” as has been recently popularised by right wing culture warriors. There seemed to be something off with the form of the question and not the various answers people give to it. The question is now sufficiently embedded in the public conversation that one risks looking evasive by raising it as a question about the question rather than answering it directly. There is a substantive position that I hold on the underlying matter, and I will state it before the end of the essay so that the reader who is interested only in where I come down can skip ahead. But the position I hold is not separable from a particular view about what kind of dispute we are actually in, and I cannot state the position without first stating the view.

The view, briefly, is this. When somebody asks “what is a woman, really?” and presents the question as though it were a request for the discovery of a factoid about the world that has been there all along waiting to be correctly described, they are not, despite appearances, doing what they say they are doing. They are not standing outside the practice of using the word “woman” and reporting a finding about its true reference. They are, instead, advocating for a particular use of the word, against other particular uses, and presenting their advocacy as a description in order to spare it from having to be defended as advocacy. The conversion of normative preference is framed into ostensible description.

This will sound like the kind of ‘dissolving’ move that pragmatists are always being accused of making in bad faith, so I should say what I do not mean before I say what I do. I am not saying that biology is irrelevant or that the world makes no contribution to our talk about it or that we can carve concepts however we like without consequence. The world pushes back through causal pressures. A person who tried to insist that the term ‘tiger’ picked out a kind of butterfly, when everyone else has a different understandign of those terms, would not get very far with anyone, including herself. What I am in fact saying is that the dispute over how to use the word ‘woman; is not a dispute about How The World Anyway Is, even though one side of it has presented itself as if it were, and that presenting one’s preferred use of a word as the discovery of a fact is a rhetorical strategy with a long history and a generally bad record.

Through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the same essentialist idea was made, with great institutional confidence, about race. There were natural kinds called races, the argument went; the question was an empirical one, settled by anthropology and craniometry and various other sciences whose names now embarrass us; and the ordinary classifications people made of one another were attempts, more or less successful, to track these natural kinds. Anyone who proposed that we might do better to talk about human variation in some other way (through ancestry, through specific genetic markers, through cultural communities) was take to be failing to track the relevant facts. One side presented itself as describing the world while the other side was accused of failing to describe the world correctly, or of letting political preferences distort their descriptive judgement. It took most of a century of political struggle to jettison this idea and the it was jettisoned not because the underlying facts changed (chromosomes are still chromosomes, ancestry is still ancestry) but because we came to see that the question of which classifications to use was a question about what we wanted classification to do for us, and the answer was given to us by the ‘the World’. Rorty made this point more elegantly than I am about to:

It is often said, for example, that we should stop using the concepts of “race” and “caste,” stop dividing the human community up by genealogical descent. The idea is to lessen the chances that the question “who are his or her ancestors?” will be asked. This line of thinking is sometimes countered by saying “but there really are inherited differences — ancestry does matter.” The rejoinder is: there certainly are inheritable physical characteristics, but these do not, in themselves, correlate with any characteristics that could provide a good reason for breaking up a planned marriage, or voting for or against a candidate.

I think the analogy with the current gender debate is there. Yes, there are biological markers that statistically distinguish populations along sex lines. Yes, those markers matter for some purposes - medical, primarily. No, those purposes do not settle how the social term ‘woman’ should function across the dozens of other domains in which it is used, inter alia; legal documents, athletic categories, prisons, shelters, public addressing conventions, intimate life, self-description, the politics of recognition. The domains vary and the category rules can rationally also vary, and the question of which rules to use in which domain is a question about what kind of social world we want to live in.

What the gender-critical position needs, if it is going to be taken seriously rather than merely defeated, is to be reframed as what I think it actually is, which is a substantive normative position with normative reasons in its favour. There are people who think that the political coherence of feminism depends on its remaining anchored in the experience of female-bodied life; people who think that certain kinds of physical space have functioned as protections for women specifically because of their sexed character and that broadening the category dilutes this protection; people who think that the medicalisation of gender variance in young people is producing harms that exceed the harms it is meant to relieve. They are positions I very largely disagree with but the disagreement is a disagreement about consequences, about competing harms, about what a humane society looks like, specifically not about who has correctly described the metaphysical structure of sex. To construe these positions up as descriptions of how the world is rather than as advocacy for how the world should be arranged, is to claim a kind of authority that no party to a dispute of this kind is entitled to.

The same charge can be levelled at some of those on my own side. There is a version of the trans-inclusive argument that proceeds by trying to specify what gender really is, in some interior or essential sense - gender as a brain state, gender as a soul-feature, gender as a thing one truly is underneath the cultural overlay. The presupposition here is one familiar to the gender critical feminist. If the question “what is a woman, really?” is the wrong question when the gender-critical writer asks it, it is also the wrong question when the trans-inclusive writer answers it. I will not be giving a better answer to a bad question. I’d rather refuse the question’s metaphysical framing and to ask what the social practices around gender are for, who they are serving, who they are failing, and how they might be reorganised so that fewer people suffer. This is the question that has always been at issue however dressed up in metaphysical clothes by either side.

So here is the substantive position, finally. I think the linguistic and social practices around gender should be reorganised to be substantially more inclusive of trans and intersex people than they currently are, and that this reorganisation should not wait on the resolution of an unresolvable metaphysical question about what gender most fundamentally supposedly is. I think this for the same kinds of reasons that anyone reorganises any social practice, i.e., because the current arrangement produces a great deal of avoidable suffering in a population whose existence is not in dispute, because the alternative arrangements would produce considerably less of that suffering at modest costs that can be addressed individually, and because the burden of proof on those who would maintain the current arrangement against this kind of cost-benefit consideration is one I do not think they have met. I hold this view as a normative view. I do not hold it because I have correctly identified the essence of womanhood. There is no such essence and there does not need to be, and the demand that I produce one before I am allowed to advocate for the position I hold is an instance of a bad rhetorical move I have spent this essay trying to refuse.

What is left, after the metaphysics is jettisoned, is an ordinary political argument about how to arrange a corner of social life, conducted by people with different views about what arrangement would be best. This is, I think, what arguments of this kind always were, and what they always will be, and there is nothing unusual or distressing about that fact. The unusual and distressing thing is the sustained pretence, by parties on all sides, that the argument is something other than this, that it is being settled, somewhere upstream of us, by chromosomes or by gametes or by the inner truth of the soul or by the natural meaning of the English word “woman”. It is not. It is being settled by us, in conversation with one another, under the pressure of the consequences our choices produce. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can have the argument that has actually been going on the whole time.