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God is not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.
—James Henry Leuba
The interminable philosophical quarrels over what “exists”—God, souls, gender essences, biological kinds—strike me as symptoms of a deeper cultural ailment. We remain, as Hegel diagnosed, in thrall to onto-theology, a compulsion to anchor our claims in some nonhuman reality, some metaphysical bedrock immune to the flux of human needs and practices. This compulsion is as old as Plato’s Forms, but its persistence in debates between atheists and theists, or between gender essentialists and their critics, reveals how little progress we’ve made in shrugging off the urge to seek foundations outside ourselves. When atheists insist that theists are deluded about God’s existence, or when theists accuse atheists of ignoring divine reality, both sides mistake the function of religious language. They treat it as a set of propositions about the world rather than as a vocabulary for coping with it. The same error repeats in gender debates: whether one invokes chromosomes or lived experience, the assumption is that getting the metaphysics right will resolve the politics. But this is like arguing over whether hammers “really” exist instead of asking what we want to build.
The problem is not that these questions lack answers, but that they are framed as if answers mattered in the way their askers suppose. When someone demands, “Does God exist?” or “What is a woman?”, they are not—despite their protestations—seeking clarity about the furniture of the universe. They are, consciously or not, advocating for a way of speaking, what mouth noises and scribbles we should make. The theist wants to preserve a language of transcendence; the atheist wants to replace it with a language of immanence. The gender essentialist wants to naturalise certain social hierarchies; their critic wants to denaturalise them. But because we remain Platonists at heart, we dress these preferences in the robes of metaphysics. We pretend we are describing reality when we are really negotiating power.
In other words, in the final analysis, the only relevant question in the disputes, the one that we actually engage with in practice, is the question of how we may best carve out our linguistic and social practices to contribute to our goals and interests. The reflection on the ontological status of religious entities or the will of a purported deity only comes to the fore in hindsight, after questions about whether talk about such entities serve relevant social and normative goals.
This is why Wittgenstein’s later work feels like a gust of fresh air. By shifting the question from “What is X?” to “How do we use ‘X’?”, he reframes philosophy as a therapeutic project—one that dissolves metaphysical puzzles by exposing their roots in linguistic confusion. To ask “What is a woman?” is to assume that the word “woman” corresponds to some essence waiting to be uncovered. But if we instead ask, “What do we do when we call someone a woman?”, the debate transforms. We stop arguing about chromosomes or social roles and start discussing what we hope to achieve by structuring our language this way. Do we want to uphold norms that alienate trans people? Or do we want to reshape those norms to reduce suffering? These questions are unabashedly normative, which is precisely why metaphysicians recoil from them. They force us to admit that our language games are ours to justify, not Reality’s to dictate.
Yet the onto-theological itch is hard to resist. Even those who claim to reject metaphysics often smuggle it back in through terms like “biology” or “human nature.” When critics of gender inclusivity insist “sex is real,” they are not wrong in the trivial sense that there are biological differences between human population clusters. Likewise, a spectrum of the shades of human skin tones and human hair textures, human facial morphology and physique certainly does exist; there certainly are slight variations in human genes; there certainly are statistical frequencies in alleles within human population clusters that results in some people having darker or brighter skin tones. Critics of gender inclusivity are wrong in the consequential sense that they treat those differences as mattering in ways that transcend human interests. It is as if saying “sex is real” settles the question of how we should organise bathrooms or sports leagues, when in fact it does no such thing.
In medical contexts, understanding genetic and hormonal differences may be important, but not for most other contexts. So, the questions "Do these gendered categories exist in the way we traditionally thought?" and "Should we continue to talk of them in these ways?" are pretty much the same.
What these moves share is a reluctance to take responsibility for our vocabularies. To admit that our language is a tool for shaping the world, rather than a mirror for reflecting it, is to concede that we have no alibi for our choices. There is no appeal to a higher authority—not God, not Science, not Biology, not Reality—that can spare us the work of justifying ourselves to one another. We are stuck with each other, with our messy, contingent histories, and with the obligation to keep revising our practices in the hope of making them less cruel.
The same sleight of hand occurs when people appeal to a divine or metaphysically distinct authority in disputes about how to carve our linguistic practices; as when theists cite divine commands as justification for moral norms: God’s will is always suspiciously congruent with the speaker’s preexisting convictions. What is being presented as a metaphysical mandate, in other words, often merely reflects whatever happens to be part of the linguistic norms the individual is socialised into in their respective linguistic community, and adding metaphysical weight to this norm, such as in claiming that it is part of “Human Nature” or corresponds to “Reality”, is nothing more than a table thumping exercise.
The current moral panic over transgender identities exemplifies the costs of onto-theology. Reactionaries like Matt Walsh and J.K. Rowling did not stumble upon some eternal truth about gender; they are defending a linguistic status quo that privileges their comfort. Their insistence that “woman” must have an essential definition is a political stance to freeze language in a shape that legitimises their anxiety. The pragmatist response is not to propose a better essence but to reject the question altogether. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that gender categories are “socially constructed.” So what? All categories are socially constructed, in the sense that they are products of human practices. The salient question is not whether they are constructed but whether they are useful—whether they help us live in ways we can persuasively defend to those affected by them. To the parent of a transgender child, the metaphysics of gender is irrelevant next to the concrete stakes of their child’s survival. To the theologian preaching social justice, the ontological status of God matters less than whether religious language sustains hope in the face of suffering.
None of this means that “anything goes” or that we should abandon rigorous thought. It means shifting our rigor toward the consequences of our speech. The test of a vocabulary is not its fidelity to Reality but its capacity to address the plural and shifting human needs. This is the lesson Richard Rorty drew from Hegel: philosophy’s job is not to ground our practices but to refine them, to help us tell better stories about who we are and who we might become. The stories will always be provisional, but that is their virtue. It is when we mistake them for eternal truths that the suffering begins.
The western philosophical tradition, from Plato to Chomsky, has been a 2,500-year quest for a vocabulary immune to critique—a “God’s-eye view” from which to finally silence dissent. Representationalism is the theological core of this quest, the insistence that our words must answer to Something Beyond Us.
The persistence of questions like “What is a woman?” or “Is gender real?” is not an accident of intellectual history. It is the logical endpoint of a tradition that treats language as a mirror—a passive reflector of a reality “out there,” waiting to be decoded by those clever enough to parse its grammar. Representationalism rests on three premises: reality has an intrinsic structure; language mirrors it; this mirroring is inherently worthwhile. This understanding is smuggled into our everyday speech with the corrosive assumption that words like “woman,” “man,” or “sex” must latch onto something *beyond* human practices, something that *justifies* their use. This is how metaphysics pretends not to be politics. When we ask, “What is a woman?”, we are not asking for a definition. We are being asked to take sides in a war over who gets to control the ‘mirror of nature’—and who gets to say what counts as a ‘true’ reflection. To abandon representationalism is to stop asking whether our words “match” reality and start asking what work they do.
Gender essentialism—the belief that categories like “man” or “woman” have fixed, transhistorical cores—is representationalism’s bastard child. It arises from the same anxiety: the fear that without a “real” foundation, our language will collapse into arbitrariness. Essentialists act as if the word “woman” must hook onto something *beyond* the messy contingencies of culture, something that preexists our squabbling over pronouns and bathroom signs. For some, this hook is biology (“chromosomes don’t lie!”), while clinging on to the fantasy that somewhere, buried under the noise of history, there’s a *right* answer—a way to silence the debate by appealing to Nature.
But this is nonsense. Chromosomes are certainly 'real'. But they do not have the power to dictate how we organise our social worlds. To say “sex is biological” is as trivial as noting that rocks are hard—it tells us nothing about whether to build houses or throw them. When essentialists invoke biology, they want us to believe that because certain traits cluster statistically in populations (e.g., most people with uteruses identify as women), those traits *must* govern how we categorise people. But this is like arguing that because most chairs have four legs, a three-legged stool isn’t *really* a chair.
It has been held, for instance, by those against reforming this part of our language, though usually implicitly, that the truth of sentences containing the word 'woman' depends on necessary and sufficient criteria, typically including some notion of biological features such as having XX chromosomes or gametes. Essentialism provides the "fixed categories" that representationalism seeks to describe, while representationalism offers a philosophical justification for the essentialist views. When confronted, essentialists will thump their fists on the table and assert that we are beholden to a non-human entity called 'Reality' which their descriptions accurately represent, and it is on this basis alone that we should act.
These figures are gender essentialists. Gender essentialists typically hold that certain properties or traits are necessary and sufficient for determining one's gender. From this perspective, one's biological sex (typically defined by traits such as reproductive organs, gametes, chromosomes, or secondary sexual characteristics) is seen as both a necessary and sufficient condition for being a man or woman. In the case of "woman", an essentialist view might hold that having XX chromosomes, female reproductive organs, egg cells, are necessary conditions. This means that to be a woman, one must have these biological markers. If someone does not have these biological markers, they could not be classified as a woman. These markers would also count as sufficient condition; that is to say, they would be enough to classify someone as a woman. Put together, having these criteria (for example: XX chromosomes/female reproductive organs/egg cells) are both necessary and sufficient conditions to the meaning of the term ‘woman’ to obtain.
Today’s anti-language reform conservatives justify this essentialism by reference to ‘how things anyway are’—what a woman is just is that way! And the radical feminists typically justify essentialism by reference to sex-specific political considerations (such as protecting “real” women), but in fact, it ignores how gender oppression operates not through chromosomes but through social schemas—the expectations, laws, and violences that oppress women and also police who counts as a “real” woman and who gets cast out as an impostor.
Gender essentialism is not merely politically regressive or ethically dubious, it also collapses under the weight of its own logic. Even if we grant essentialists their representationalist premise—that words like “woman” must latch onto a pre-discursive, biological essence—their definitions crumble when pressed. The problem is not that they are wrong but that they are impossible. Essentialism, like all forms of Platonism, delivers only circularity, exceptions and arbitrary line-drawing.
Essentialism hinges on the notion that categories like “woman” can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions—traits that are universal, immutable, and exclusionary. For gender essentialists, these conditions are typically biological: XX chromosomes, ovaries, a uterus. But this is where the shell game begins. As soon as we look closely at these criteria, they dissolve into contradictions:
Chromosomal exceptions: While essentialists fixate on XX/XY binaries, human biology is far messier. Roughly 1 in 100 people have chromosomal variations (e.g., XXY, XYY, XXX, mosaicism) as a natural spectrum of human variation. To exclude these individuals from the category “woman” (or “man”) is not a scientific judgment but a normative one—a decision to privilege certain traits as “essential” while dismissing others as “deviant.”
Phenotypic plasticity: Androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), for example, results in individuals with XY chromosomes developing typical female anatomy. Essentialists face a dilemma: do they define “woman” by chromosomes (excluding those with AIS) or by anatomy (excluding those with XX chromosomes but atypical development)? Either choice exposes the social decision making of their criteria. For example, all the people in the image below have Androgen insensitivity syndrome, thus XY chromosomes, but society would still classify such individuals as female, based on practical considerations such as morphology/physical appearance, despite their XY chromosomes.
Intersex realities: Approximately 2% of live births involve intersex traits—a rate comparable to the number of redheads globally. If essentialists dismiss intersex people as “exceptions,” they reveal their project’s true aim: not to describe reality but to enforce a simplified fiction.
Importantly, you cannot make an essentialist claim and then admit counterexamples. It there are counter examples, then gender essentialism fails. In other words, you cannot have necessary and sufficient conditions for the category ‘woman’ yet admit exceptions. This is gobbledygook. In there are exceptions to what is claimed as necessary conditions, then they are not in fact necessary. Likewise, when there are instances where the supposed sufficient condition doesn’t invariably result in inclusion in the category (for example XX chromosomes does not always mean ‘woman’) then it is not, in fact, sufficient. Labelling these exceptions ‘abnormalities’ does not resolve the conceptual issue; even one exceptions collapses essentialism.
Essentialism’s reliance on a rigid reality/appearance dualism—the idea that “true” categories exist beyond the mess of material variation—is a relic of Platonic metaphysics. Consider the Nazi logic: Jews were deemed “non-human” not because they lacked human traits but because fascists invented a mystical “essence” of humanity that Jews allegedly lacked. This is the dark heart of essentialism: it weaponises circular reasoning to exclude. The same pattern repeats in gender debates. When trans women are dismissed as “not real women,” it is not because they lack some metaphysical essence but because essentialists define that essence in ways that exclude them. The criteria are rigged from the start.
If you want to expose the absurdity of essentialism, try defining a chair. Go ahead. List the “necessary and sufficient conditions” that distinguish a chair from a stool, a sofa, or a tree stump repurposed as seating. Does a chair require four legs? Tell that to a three-legged antique. Must it have a back? Then beanbags aren’t chairs. Is it defined by function? Then a rock becomes a chair when you sit on it. The harder you cling to essentialism, the faster the category disintegrates. Chairs, like gender, are family resemblance concepts—networks of overlapping traits, none of which is definitive. A chair is a chair not because it embodies some eternal “chairness” but because we use it as one. The same applies to “woman,” “man,” or any other category essentialists try to freeze into dogma.
The same applies to defining what a ‘sandwich’. Is a hot dog a sandwich? The U.S. Supreme Court once debated this, not for philosophical rigor but for tax purposes. The answer depended not on the “essence” of sandwichhood but on what lawmakers wanted the term to do. This is Wittgenstein’s point: meaning is use. We learn words not by memorizing definitions but by watching how they function in context. A child learns “chair” by seeing people sit on things called chairs, not by studying a checklist of chair-essences.
The same goes for “woman.” We gender people based on cues like clothing, voice, or morphology—not chromosomes. When essentialists insist otherwise, they reveal their own linguistic illiteracy. Walking down the street, and we come across the humans in the image below. Most people will almost always identify the person on the left as ‘woman’ and the person on the right as ‘man’, despite their chromosomal make-up and gametes (both individuals are in fact transgender). That’s because we rely on clusters of traits (morphology, presentation, social cues) that resemble cultural prototypes. These prototypes are not etched into nature but shaped by norms. When a trans woman is recognised as a woman, it’s not because she “fools” anyone, it’s because she participates in the same social grammar everyone else uses.
The fatal flaw of chromosome-based essentialism is that it is practically incoherent. If “woman” means “XX chromosomes,” then:
No one knows who is a woman. Most people never test their chromosomes. By the essentialist’s logic, we’re all guessing—a absurdity, since gendering is a routine, immediate social act.
Intersex people vanish. An individual with XY chromosomes but a vagina, estrogen-dominant physiology, and a female gender identity would be excluded from womanhood, a conclusion so at odds with lived experience that even essentialists balk.
Trans women are erased. A trans woman who passes flawlessly in society, with hormones and surgeries aligning her body with cultural norms of femininity, would still be “not a woman” to essentialists. But if language is supposed to serve communication, what use is a definition that contradicts what everyone sees and interacts with?
Essentialists respond with a mix of evasion and tautology: “Well, true women have XX chromosomes and…” But this is like saying “true chairs have four legs and…”—a desperate attempt to mask the arbitrariness of their criteria. An essentialist might argue, “But most people don’t mean ‘trans woman’ when they say ‘woman’!” So what? Language evolves. “Marriage” once excluded same-sex couples; “human” once excluded Black people. We changed those meanings not because we discovered new essences but because we decided broader definitions made life better. The same applies to gender. If expanding “woman” to include trans women eases their alienation—and it does—then the metaphysical debate is a distraction.
Again, we ought to stop framing the transgender issue as a subject of metaphysical investigation concerned with getting at the ‘true’ essence of ‘womenhood/manhood’, rather than what it actually is in practice: a normative debate on how we ought to carve out our concepts related to gender. The question in the latter sense is therefore not ‘is there really such a thing as p gender/sex/race/caste/sexuality’ but ‘how should we talk about p gender/sex/race/caste/sexuality, if at all?’.
Categories exist to serve *us*, not the other way around. We’re the ones holding the chisel, carving up the world into swans and chairs and genders. But somewhere along the way, we started bowing to the idols we carved.
It was social consensus, for instance, that determined whether all swans should be white even after we later found their equivalent black ones or whether those black ones in Australia should also be considered swans despite their difference in colour; there was no fact of the matter on what the term ‘swan’ denotes other than our social agreement on how to carve it. Our consensus on the latter description does not mean that, after the fact, we can now say “it was chosen because it corresponds to how the world is”. It did not. The classificatory scheme was carved by human beings.
The ancient Hebrews called them dagim—a term often translated as “fish.” Were they wrong? Only if you think the purpose of language is to mirror the taxonomic hierarchies of modern biology. But the Hebrews weren’t playing the phylogeny game. They were distinguishing creatures of the sea from those of the land and sky, carving categories by habitat, not genetics. Fast-forward to Linnaeus, and suddenly whales are mammals, kin to monkeys and mice. Neither classification is “truer”; they’re just useful for different purposes. Call a whale a dag if you care about where it swims; call it a mammal if you care about lactation and hair follicles. The whale doesn’t mind. It’s too busy being a cluster in multiple conceptual spaces.
Imagine a 3D object in a coordinate system: a sphere that’s red. In the color dimension, it clusters with apples and fire trucks; in the shape dimension, it clusters with globes and marbles. Which cluster matters? The one that serves your aim. If you’re designing warning signs, group it with red objects. If you’re packing fragile items, group it with spheres. The object doesn’t care. Neither should we.
Biologists used to argue about whether there is such a thing as ‘noble blood’. Today, we realise that whether there is or isn’t (the metaphysics part) is unimportant compared to how that discourse about racial IQ harms people. Now, biologists argue over whether Pluto is a planet or whether viruses are “alive,” but in all this they’re still negotiating utility. Is it helpful to call Pluto a planet? Does labelling viruses “living” clarify or muddle our models? These are pragmatic questions. The same applies to sex categories. Sure, the XX/XY binary works well enough for filling out medical charts, for predicting certain medical outcomes, but when conservatives wave it like a scripture, "See, biology settles it!", they’re pulling a fast one. They’ve confused a useful shorthand in medical contexts for a divine decree that applies to all other contexts. The fact that essentialist categories (like “male” and “female”) help us predict heart disease or hormone levels doesn’t tell us anything about how we should organise society. It just means they’re handy for those specific purposes. Handy, that is, until they’re not, like when intersex folks walk into the clinic or a trans woman needs a cervical exam. Suddenly, the crisp binary blurs, and we’re forced to admit what was true all along: our categories are provisional, flawed, and forever up for grabs.
When a biologist insists that birds with ZW chromosomes are “truly female,” or a herpetologist argues that temperature, not DNA, determines sex in turtles, they’re not uncovering metaphysical truths. They’re choosing frameworks that suit their goals in there subject matter contexts. Likewise, when someone says, “Trans women aren’t *real* women,” they’re they’re defending a linguistic habit—one that, like phlogiston or the luminiferous ether, outlives its usefulness.
What’s more, in ordinary life, we don’t give a crap about essences. When you call something “gold,” you’re not thinking about atomic number 79. You’re noticing it’s shiny, malleable, and looks like the stuff in your ring. When you spot a swan, you don’t demand a DNA test. You see a long neck, webbed feet, and a vibe. And when you meet a woman, you’re not mentally checking for ovaries. You’re responding to a constellation of cues—clothing, voice, demeanour—that your culture has taught you to recognise.
This applies not just to the classification of sex and gender, but to any system of categorisation we use—be it related to biological taxonomy, sociological demographics, linguistic semantics, or any other field; they are tools for our (social) goals. Them being tools, of course, doesn’t imply that “anything goes”, some categories are better than other ones for the purposes of carrying out specific goals. A hammer is better than a toothpick if our goal is to hit a nail. But because talking in some way about the existence of atoms or the existence of human categories is better than some other ways for the purposes of a given field, does not make those ways isomorphic representations. And it does not preclude the possibility of different ways of talking to be more suited in different fields.
Consider the former enclaves of India and Bangladesh: until 2015, over 100 pockets of each nation lay stranded inside the other’s borders, relics of colonial caprice and feudal land swaps. These enclaves were accidents of history yet for decades, they dictated citizenship, policing, and identity because borders are tools managing resource distribution. They let us predict which laws apply, which taxes are paid, which languages are spoken. They’re contingent, but they work—until they don’t. When a Muslim family in a India enclave was denied schooling, or a trans man is excluded from “manhood,” the contingency becomes cruelty. The point is: all categories are provisional, their boundaries drawn with interests in mind.
If we can accept the messiness of Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog—a Belgian-Dutch borderland where a single street might zigzag between national jurisdictions, and a café’s doorway marks the frontier—then we can certainly accept a trans woman within the conceptual bounds of “woman.” These enclaves exist not because nature carved them, but because medieval dukes traded plots like poker chips and modern governments pragmatically tolerate the chaos. No one calls the police because a Belgian garden gnome “trespasses” into Dutch soil; they shrug and adjust.
If you cornered Wittgenstein at a pub and asked him, “What is a woman?”, he’d likely shrug and say, “How do you use the word?”. Wittgenstein would find gender essentialists bizarrely out of touch with how language actually works. When Walsh insists on a definition of “woman,” he’s acting like a bureaucrat auditing a poem, demanding it justify its line breaks. But words aren’t invoices; they’re tools for coordinating action. We don’t need a “fixed meaning” for “chair” to sit down, just as we don’t need a chromosome test to recognize someone as a woman. The proof is in the use: if calling someone “she” gets the conversation flowing, the job is done. We rarely have to give definitions outside of technical contexts because theres rarely any pragmatic point in doing so.
To see this more clearly, we shall examine how Wittgenstein analyses the way we form concepts and meanings. First he starts by saying that the rules that govern the use of our language (what he calls “grammar”) do not make themselves up based on a set of independent ‘structures of reality’, on some essences over and above the rules. Rather, he says, the rules are constituted by themselves. That is, meanings and concepts are created by our linguistic practices; by the routines, habits and rules of language usage. The mere encounter with a “horse”, for instance, does not give us the concept “horse”; experience does not, in itself, determine how we carve out our concepts or how we categorise objects. Or in other words, the usage of a concept is not absorbed from an independent object, nor does it come from the mere similarity between a bunch of objects (and nor is there always similarities between objects that fall under the same concept!). And so, there must be something creative, active and dynamic in concept formation, and there must be something over and above the object being referred to. This, to Wittgenstein, is the users of a language and their linguistic practices; the way language users use different symbols to communicate intentions.
From this understanding of rules of language grammar, Wittgenstein takes the meaning of words to be coextensive with their use. And use is a rule-governed activity; its reality is created by human practices. Collectively, we agree on using this word in that way, and that rule is created by us giving it that force (think of rules for etiquette or rules of rights, rituals, laws and games). The act of reference to a rule constitutes its reality just like the act of reference to a ‘right’ or a ‘law’ constitutes its reality. There is no reality to rules other than people following them Think of a game like soccer. The rule “no hands” isn’t written into the fabric of the universe. It’s just something we agree to so the game stays fun. Break the rule, and you’ll get a yellow card—not because the cosmos demands it, but because the other players do. Gender works the same way. The “rules” for using “woman” (dresses, pronouns, social roles) aren’t handed down by Biology or God. They’re conventions we’ve cobbled together over time. When transphobes yell, “But biology!”, they’re like soccer purists screaming, “But gravity!” when someone invents a new kick. The point isn’t to obey some preexisting law; it’s to keep the game inclusive and lively.
When people appeal to a “reality” to which a word corresponds to, what they are in fact doing is appealing to an implicit intersubjective standard of rule-following, where that reality is just a bunch of other people’s habituated readiness to make a similar appeal to a rule and act on it. Essentialists love to thump the table and say, “A woman is an adult human female—that’s reality!” but what they’re really saying is, “The rules in my linguistic tribe uses the word this way, and we’ll punish you if you don’t comply.”
It happens that the rules of our language games tend to be shaped by reference to how expedient they are with coping with our environment, coping with external causal pressures. Such pressures often force us to adopt conditionalrules as heuristics such as ‘if we want X, we should follow Y rule’; but the way we talk about those causal pressures is ultimately a matter of human convention and agreement. And so in this sense, langauge is a tool for coping rather than a medium of representing.
Donald Davidson’s thought experiment—the alien encounter with a radically foreign speaker—cuts to the heart of what language does. When two strangers meet, they don’t swap dictionaries or debate metaphysics. They fumble, gesture, and gradually align their noises and marks until they can predict each other’s next move. Success isn’t about “matching reality” but avoiding surprises. If the alien points at a rock and says “glorp,” you don’t need to know what “glorp” “really means.” You just need to notice when they say it, so you can duck when the rock is thrown.
This is language stripped of its pretensions: a tool for navigating causal pressures, not a divine codex. The alien’s “glorp” isn’t a representation; it’s a signal, a way of coping with you as you cope with them. When we argue over definitions like “woman,” we’re not dissecting reality—we’re negotiating how to move in sync.
Sometimes it may helps to think of language as we do numbers, since numbers invariably elude essentialist definitions. Take the number five. What is it? Is it the sum of 2 and 3? The halfway mark between 0 and 10? The atomic number of boron? None of these descriptions capture its “essence,” because numbers don’t have essences. They have uses. When a child counts five apples, they’re not consulting Plato’s realm of forms. They’re following a rule: point, say “one,” point again, say “two,” until the basket is full. The meaning of “five” isn’t in its metaphysics but in its function. Gender essentialists are like mathematicians obsessed with “true five-ness,” demanding we define “woman” as if it were a prime number. Just as “five” works because we agree to stop counting at the fifth apple, “woman” works because we agree to recognise certain patterns—clothing, pronouns, social roles—that keep the conversation flowing. The demand for an essence is a demand to freeze the game mid-play.
Yes. Consider the word “bull.” Most of us use it loosely, calling any large, horned bovine a “bull,” even if farmers reserve the term for uncastrated males (technically, castrated ones are “steers”). Does this looseness “misrepresent reality”? Only if you’re a pedantic rancher. For everyone else, “bull” gets the job done. The child who points to a steer and says “Look, a bull!” isn’t wrong—they’re just playing a simpler language game, one where “bull” means “big cow-thing.”
If someone interrupts your rant about tech to demand, “Define ‘computer’!”, you’d rightly suspect they’re either a philosophy undergrad or a troll. I wouldn’t have an immediate ready answer at hand. But, with Wittgenstein, I will wonder what the point of asking this was, and think, in Wittgenstein’s words: “Why do you put it so oddly?”. Is she questioning my grasp of the English language, my competence with technology? What does she want to be reassured of, exactly? If she responds “I just wanted to make sure you knew how sentences in which the word ‘computer’ figures correspond to Reality in a non-contextualised way” or “I just wanted to make sure you can specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of the sentences in which the word ‘computer’ figures”, I will be baffled. What would it mean to utter a sentence that is divorced from context and its conditions does not correspond to reality? You don’t need a definition to complain about your laptop crashing. You need a shared sense that “computer” refers to the glitchy box on your desk.
What we gather from Wittgenstein is that the final analysis of the ‘what is a women?’ question is in the end a reference to our pragmatic and normative goals: ‘how should we talk about gender and sex, if at all?’. In our current society, if our goal is to reduce the number of human suffering, then we should probably move away from a completely sex-based understanding of gender and admit variability in what the terms ‘man’ and ‘women’ denote, and accordingly change our linguistic practices towards intersex and trans inclusive understandings of the terms.2 What follows is that statements like ‘I am a woman’ are not understood as communicating something about the speaker’s genitals, gametes or chromosomes but something context-sensitive (which would include, in at least some contexts, the avowal of the speaker’s gender expression).
In effect, this would be how we have always talked about ‘women’ and ‘men’ throughout human history, as people have grasped those concepts without ever having any knowledge about what gametes and chromosomes even are. Children, too, begin to grasp such concepts at a very young age, often before they have any comprehensive understanding of biological sex or sexual reproduction, meaning that our understanding of gender is not reducible to an understanding of differences in biological markers. Children learn about gender roles and norms not (just) through explicit instructions such as “a man is such and such and a woman is thus and so”, but rather implicitly through their observations of others. They see how people are treated differently based on perceived gender, and they internalise these lessons. They then begin to identify with a certain gender and internalise the norms associated with that gender long before they understand what gametes or sex parts are. When a trans child says, “I’m a girl,” they’re not rejecting science; they’re rejecting a script that conflates identity with anatomy. This isn’t “indoctrination.” It’s how culture works. We inherit stories about knights, presidents, and heroes—and revise them when they exclude too many people. Gender is no different.
So, what may be useful references for the designator ‘sex’ in biological discourses, may not be so useful elsewhere, such as when treating someone as their preferred gender or using preferred pronouns, or getting people the affirmative medical care they need. Both the terms ‘gender’ in our ordinary discourse and the term ‘sex’ in scientific discourse are socially construed parts of our language, and the only disagreement between essentialists and anti-essentialists is about the sort of ways we want to use language—everything else is someone attempting to smuggle in their provincial normative goals and social practices into the definition, and then saying it is ineluctable because it represents the intrinsic nature of things.
Don’t like it? Propose a better story. But make sure it holds more hope and harms fewer people.