CW: Sexual assault, misgendering, TERF talking points, simplified interpretations of third gender/nonbinary/transmasculine individuals etc.

In response to claims of circularity and lack of clarity with regards to the definition of self-identified genders, I wanted to try to clear up definitions.

Let us first consider sex, and let us disregard fundamental fuzziness in defining any concept. For organisms that reproduce sexually in a binary form, there are subsets which all (mostly) can produce offspring with those of the opposite subset. This corresponds often to sex-determination genetic or environmental markers, and to specialized anatomy. Leaving aside all sorts of exceptions and corner cases, we can consider it in principle knowable for an individual human being whether or not they belong to a male mating type/reproductive sex, or a female mating type/reproductive sex. Leaving, again, exceptions aside. This specifically refers then to whether gametes from the one can work to fertilize gametes from the other in a spontaneous setting.

Under real-life circumstances animals cannot sequence each others’ genomes very often. Assessing whether mating with another can produce offspring therefore becomes usually-efficient guesswork, helped by phenotypic properties – secondary sexual characteristics – which tend to associate with the primary sexual characteristics implementing the mating type. Historically, telling this apart, and various strategies expanding outwards around that, has been a big deal for survival, so all sorts of culture and behaviour and perception of meaning – some of which having neural underpinnings, making for a form of invisible secondary sexual characteristics – have evolved, genetically to some extent, but primarily memetically (and with more and more such encoding likely migrated from genome to memeplexes as cultural memetic carrying capacity expanded).

We can refer to gender as the social construct surrounding sex (with sex referring to many different forms of bimodally distributed biological properties in a species – chromosomal or reproductive anatomy or secondary sexual characteristic sex, but here left primarily referring to mating type). Humans tend to divide other humans based on which mating type they believe them to have, in their perceptions and representations of the world, in their language, in their organizing of social circles and group activities, and in how they come to feel about each other, and what associations they will place upon each other, and what they will expect from each other.

Essentially all of these divisions are describable as mental or social activities undertaken by humans; the division always has a divider executing it, sometimes consciously, usually unconsciously and by habit. This is what it means that the divisions themselves are social constructs. The divider is every human being all the time. The specifics of the division will differ between individuals, between cultures, and across history. The specifics of how it is done have been shown to differ some based on biological properties of the divider – specifically, the tendency of any one person to place themselves into the construct according to their mating type/reproductive sex or not (either not at all or as the other mating type/reproductive sex) is somewhat predictable based on features impacting neurology (genetics and hormonal exposure). This suggests that the social construct of gender is not merely something which was invented de novo, like the social constructs of money or flags of countries, but which has specialized neural underpinnings. Many human beings are primed to learn how to divide in this manner, and will experience some instincts towards doing so.

To then first address claims of circularity: gender as a social construct thus has a definition which ties into the somewhat less complex concept of reproductive sex. The process of dividing by gender is largely one of trying to infer reproductive sex (though it does not always have to be so, as stated below), and labels and associations of gender are mostly inherited from those of reproductive sex. However, reproductive sex is a state of anatomy, whereas gender is an ongoing set of actions and emotions and thoughts and perceptions – it is a social construct. The concern would be situations of “I identify as X. What is X? X is that which I identify as.” But the social construct is not reducible to the category it results in, it rather consists of the process of establishing that category.

This process then draws on the external labels and properties of reproductive sex to inform the construction of gender, and does involve a division which mostly will place individuals having a certain reproductive sex into the gendered division group with the same label, where most other such individuals probably but not necessarily also will be found. However, if the process also considers other features, this result is not guaranteed, and this still poses no challenge for the consistent definition of the social construct of gender as a set of divisive processes building on top of and drawing labels from reproductive sex. Gendering is an activity, not in itself the same as its resulting category, nor is it the same as any statement about any property of that category. It is true then that we have a hard time writing a concise dictionary definition of gender without using qualifiers to link it to a time and a place and one or more sets of people. But the same essentially holds true for concepts like “religion” or “justice” or “nationalism” or “value”, concepts which likewise play important roles in our lives sometimes because they remain despite our best efforts to the contrary. These things too we can only define through fairly complex schemes which sometimes may appear circular at first glance, whereas in fact they rather refer to sometimes large sets of historical and ongoing practices and exemplars. This is no argument against the validity or utility of gender as defined here.

(I do not think gender as a social construct will ever evolve so that it loses touch with reproductive sex entirely, on a statistical level. But if it did, yet still remained the anchoring point for the instincts and emotions which underlie conditions like gender dysphoria, and for oppressive practices like sexism, then nothing useful would have been lost, and we would still have available the necessary starting point to work to improve situations with regards to those conditions and practices. Were it not for the fact that it is reproduced regardless of our views on the matter, we ought to have discarded as useless long ago anything which essentially is a classifier for reproductive sex, so it does not matter if gender is made a less accurate such classifier.)

(There is one other nominal aspect here worth mentioning. I am saying here that gender is a particular process and activity of dividing humans, mostly drawing back onto reproductive sex, in how we think, feel, speak and act with regards to them. This the meaning of gender as a concept. One can also use the word to refer to the “gender of a person”; this would refer to the label resulting from that process, in the context of a particular person or collective carrying out the division, and a particular person being placed. As an example: If in the schoolyard, teacher A says to child B, “go play with the other girls over there!”, pointing to C, D and E climbing rocks, then the gender of B (and C, D and E) in the framework of A at this point, is female. A is probably assuming, or at least considers the possibility salient, that B will produce human eggs some day, as well as most likely expecting a number of other ways in which B, C, D and E should have more in common with each other than with F, G and H playing over by the swings. So yes, we can also speak of the gender of a person in this regard, and it will refer to a particular label resulting from a particular gender construction process. Or if K says, “I am lesbian”, she is referencing gender assignment such that any partner X of hers, will have to have been assigned a female label by her own process of constructing gender, as she herself has. Whether or not X must also have ovaries as an implication of this, or whether K herself must, will then depend on the specifics by which K divides humans into genders.)

Thus, gender can be the placement of an individual across divisions made on the basis of beliefs about mating type. However, despite the neural underpinnings, as a social construct, the framework of dividing by gender is malleable, which has also been shown experimentally. On one hand, we can unlink peripheral properties from gender by taking them out of the division. This is vast, ongoing work undertaken by feminists, including myself. We can and should prune down the divisive structure as far as we can, removing gendered stereotypes and unfair expectations. This is the most crucial political issue in the history of the world (to my mind, even more important than that of capitalism or racism, both of which also are more important).

However, beyond that unlinking of peripheral associations with gender, we do eventually come to points where further unlinking is difficult, may take much more time, or may require biological engineering in itself. Among others, beyond having a prepared learning capacity to divide into genders based on beliefs about mating type (and in this division process, be inclined to make use of information such as the statements of others as well as secondary sexual characteristics), most humans may have a prepared learning capacity to prefer and be motivated to act in line with placement of themselves along the side of a division, based on a feeling of positive-emotional sameness with those surrounding other humans placed on that side. While this is by no means anywhere near absolute or universal, it may mean a tendency to seek out same-gender (and thereby same mating type) interactions, as seen often in young children growing up. This would be expected as one mechanism by which gender role behaviour would be taught more easily, thus providing indirect genetic support for memetic inheritance.

That is, I postulate that to some extent, humans will divide (i.e. gender) each other, compare themselves with the resulting groups, and seek to place themselves with the one group rather than the other throughout the process of collective gender divisions. There is an instinct in most humans to polarize themselves in the context of gender divisions at all levels. It may not be strong and is by no way the main driver behind the construction of society, and may not be as visible in adulthood when many more social constructs have come online (though by then it may have deposited itself through gender roles). In most people it is rarely recognized. Most people further seek to polarize throughout gender divisions so that they group with those who have the same reproductive sex/mating type (they are cisgender). Likely some of this need-for-sameness underlies some of body dysphorias experienced by cis individuals when their body is atypical for their reproductive sex with regards to some secondary sexual characteristic; there may exist a drive towards being the same in these regards as the rest of one’s side of the gender division, when compared to those on the other side.

In some people, well-documented throughout history and different cultures (constituting perhaps 0.5%-2% of the population?), and with a number of hormonal and neural correlates weakly predicting this state, suggesting complex sex-atypical differentiation, the instinct to polarize oneself in the context of gender divisions is not aligned with reproductive sex. When dividing in their mind and actions people into genders, based on beliefs about their reproductive sex (informed by the statements of others, and informed by secondary sexual characteristics), these individuals will create the same divisions, but will experience an instinct to polarize themselves not so that they group with others having the same reproductive sex, but with those having the opposite reproductive sex (they are binary transgender) or along a more complex pattern (they are nonbinary transgender). This is not the same as not caring about the divisions (that is, being agender). This is instinctually caring about the division, just as most cisgender individuals do, but having an instinct to polarize with a group that does not actually match one’s reproductive sex (and as such, usually not one’s genetics, anatomy, secondary sexual characteristics, history of being placed along gender divisions by others…). This caring about the outcome of the gender division process, in the sense of having an instinctual preference with regards to one’s own polarization into gendered groups, is what we might mean by the term gender identity. Most probably have one. This is not the same as having any love for the process of gendering in itself, or wanting to preserve it. This is about caring about what its results are, when it in fact does occur.

Moreover, with this mismatch, in many transgender individuals it takes place persistently over time, with the instincts for polarizing large enough that the mismatch causes a strong and significant decrease in flourishing – gender dysphoria. This will manifest differently in different individuals, depending on their individual histories, environments, coping strategies, privileges and temperament. I believe most or all expressions of gender dysphoria can be traced to this one mechanism. For some, they will note their own bodies having one set of secondary sexual characteristics, which are the same as those of the sex/gender division group that they are disinclined to be grouped with, and different from those of the group they are inclined to be grouped with. This mismatch develops into body dysphoria, and the resulting emotions may drive development into depression, self-loathing, dissociation or any number of other issues.

Analogously, observing a separation in social roles, behaviours and expectations will remind of the underlying polarization with the wrong gender division group, similarly causing cascading effects. These downstream effects may be the visible phenotype, or they may be masked by coping strategies against the dysphoria, so that for some, it becomes apparent that something was wrong only by the effects with regards to happiness resulting from beginning to fix it. For some the impact of the mismatch between gender identity and assignment within gendered divisions becomes apparent early in life, whereas for some it does not. Many are sufficiently afflicted, whether directly or by cascading effects and resulting secondary mental health issues, as well as by sometimes resulting social misalignment, to commit suicide – rates are unknown but at least 40% of US transgender individuals have attempted suicide pre-transition.

We are able to treat this unhealth through a two-pronged approach. The underlying issue remains for as long as the individual experiences gender divisions (which, again, are ongoing – gender being the social construct around reproductive sex) place the individual in the group mismatched with what their instinctual (and thus existing implicitly as a descriptor of that instinct) gender identity requires. We know of no way to change that instinct. While it is true that the process of gender division here most relevant is that of the individual themselves (the dysphoria stems from you yourself understanding yourself as being polarized with the group opposite to the one your instinct points to), we also know of no way to make an individual stop performing gender divisions in how they understand and interact with the world. Even those politically strongly opposed to the concept (like myself!) find themselves falling into these patterns, likely precisely because they have neural underpinnings; while they are social constructs they are not taught to a blank slate.

Instead, to help transgender individuals flourish, if we want to do so, we need to combine individual processes of transitioning, with societal processes of modifying the criteria by which we perform gender division. These two efforts, by transgender people and by allies, respectively, synergize to reduce dysphoria at the root.

Returning again to sex, there are plenty of secondary sexual characteristics we can safely and efficiently modify medically, over time. Surgeries cannot quite switch reproductive sex, though it can move an individual from one reproductive sex to no longer being effectively of the same mating type. Social transitioning, aided by changes in secondary sexual characteristics from medical transitioning, changes the way an individual is perceived by others and by themselves, compounded by building new habits, and body changes in themselves likewise changes the self-perception of the individual. When what is there is different, what is seen correspondingly becomes different. This is the goal of transitioning, which the individual transgender person may undertake.

Is this somehow false, or a lie? After all, gender as a social construct is built around reproductive sex at its core. Is it then somehow a falsehood if a person with one reproductive sex is placed on the side of a gender division that is labelled after the other reproductive sex? Only if gender is expected to be a statement of facts about the material world. As I’ve outlined above, it is rather reproductive sex itself which is that fact. Gender, instead, is the set of activities by which we relate to such facts, and one way of such relating, which here allows to improve human flourishing, is to deny their propagation into downstream perception, emotion, thought and action. This is not a delusion. If we would want to fertilize an egg with another egg, we would not use intercourse, we would use laboratory equipment. Facts remain treated as such for purposes of applications where this affects efficacy of our strategies. But denying them a place in our social constructs is not dishonest.

But might it still cause problems? Less than feared. In the process of gendering, even if we seek to make divisions based on reproductive sex, that is not actually how in practice we make most such divisions. Observing a person with a certain set of secondary sexual characteristics, we are often likely to place them into the gender division group we associate with those secondary sexual characteristics, even if we know them to have a reproductive sex different from that which this gender division group is named after and originally evolved to correspond to. Even knowing this (as in, knowing that this person – who can be yourself, or another person – is transgender) we are still more likely to spontaneously place them into the gender division group corresponding to their gender identity. As such, altogether, a transgender person can change their social presentation, can change their body, and compound these changes by observing the recognition of those around them, and in so doing, come to change what group they place themselves in when they – involuntarily, like all of us – divide people into gender in their perception, emotion or action.

That is to say, they may gradually come to understand themselves as being placed in the gender which is aligned with their instincts, those within which their gender identity is the implication. This then reduces dysphoria, and improves chances of flourishing.

The second prong of our strategy is that of changing how gender is constructed. This is where allies, unknowing or knowing such, help. As stated above, the processes that construct gender by dividing humans in our thoughts, emotions and actions did evolve – likely – to identify reproductive sex. Knowing reproductive sex of someone certainly informs our gender construction process regarding them, and the groups we divide into are labelled a priori with the expectations of reproductive sex. But as stated previously, gender as a social construct need not stay just a predictor of reproductive sex, even if it evolved for this purpose. We cannot change everything about it, because it has neural underpinnings. But we do learn about gender from each other, and how we construct it evolves over time across societies. We use the views of others when we make our own divisions of people into categories (and this is why your perception of the gender of a transgender person matters to them, whether they want to or not – as pack animals we cannot help but listen to each other when relating to the world!).

This means that it is possible to formulate and propagate the idea that we should take a person’s own stated gender identity into account when we perform gendering. That is, when we divide humanity into groups labelled after reproductive sexes, with respect to our thoughts, words, actions, emotions, we are able to assign weight to what we know of the self-identified genders of others. This is not cleanly a choice; when encountering a person with very clear secondary sexual characteristics, it may still be hard to feel that they are not the gender corresponding to the reproductive sex which we associate those characteristics with, we may still end up – involuntarily, as with all things here – them to the one or other gendered division group that their appearance reminds us of, even if we want to take into account their stated instinctual need to be polarized with the opposite group, their gender identity. This is why a two-pronged approach is needed, individual transitions are also needed. But even so, coming into the habit individually and as a society to treat self-identified gender as a prominent source of input for the processes inside us of constructing gender socially by dividing humans into groups with respect to how we think, feel, speak and act with regards to them, this will eventually make that input more and more salient for this process.

That is to say, by explicitly letting gender mean, primarily, self-assigned, self-identified gender, and propagating this meme, we change the collective social constructs of gender. This has no impact for the 99% of people who are cisgender (claims that it weakens certain feminist efforts are false), but for the 1% that are transgender, it synergizes with their own transitioning, reduces their dysphoria, and improves their chances of flourishing.

Transgender people are blessed by those cisgender allies who, for no gain of their own, are willing to participate in this social transformation by changing how we think, feel and speak. It takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, it takes a society to transition. Older societies like Native Americans and others did similar things (modifying the social construct of gender to allow reduction of dysphoria for their transgender individuals) in creating and recognizing third genders, and this is now how we do it. I honestly feel gratitude, ongoing such, is in order.

So, to stop and take stock. Where has this rant gone?

First, I have reanchored the concept of sex, which can mean different things. A transgender (and transsexual) man who is on HRT and has had a mastectomy, but still have ovaries and a uterus, he still has a female reproductive sex, which he would lose if he also had a hysterectomy. This would not gain him a male reproductive sex, even so. Neither procedure grants him male chromosomal sex. However, he is mostly anatomically male, he is hormonally and neurologically male. So depending on what sex we are referring to, he is either male, female or neither. His gender is male as that is where his own constructs place him, and it is where we place him also, he is socially a man, his gender marker is male, and we should treat him as a man in every regard except not solicit him for sperm donations or purchase of medications against erectile dysfunction. He is all these things even if he wears pink frilly dresses and works in childcare. This is how we should think and speak of him. Moreover, another man who loves only other cisgender men, he should in turn think of and speak of his sexuality not just as “gay”, but as “gay, cis only”, so as to help disentangle his gender preference from his anatomy/oirigin preference (both are valid, of course, but assuming the first implies the second runs counter to how I hope we will work with language!). We should do this because all of those things are aspects of how we construct gender socially, by dividing people in word, thought, action and emotion, and there we have a choice on whether to make those constructs such that he is recognized, and we ought to make this choice such, for him and for others like him. But yes, sex has (several) meanings that are not the same as gender, and that are neither social constructs nor malleable in the same sense. In some senses a transsexual changes sex, in some sense they cannot as yet do so.

Secondly then, this is also why we need to recognize gender as an even more relevant concept. Some have stated that sexism is understandable not as discrimination by gender, but as discrimination by sex; cis men assaulting and raping cis women choose them based on the material fact of their reproductive sex, not based on their gender identity. As I’ve outlined, gender identity is not the label others place on us, but the label we need placed on us in order to flourish, so that is beside the point. More relevant, in my above description, gender is the division of humans with regards to our actions, words, emotions and thoughts about them, into categories labelled as and anchored to reproductive sex, and driven and informed – among others – by observations and knowledge of reproductive sex. While it is possible that a hypothetical cis man rapist would shun transwoman victims even with identical anatomy, but would seek out transman or nonbinary AFAB victims, he is still under my definition constructing gender here, it is just that his process of doing so largely does not respect the gender identity or self-defined gender of any other person. That is to say, in this as well as in other cases of sexist oppression and unfairness, gender as I have defined it does describe and capture specifically those behaviours we seek to prevent and modify. Altering how gender is constructed – including by unlinking many stereotypes, expectations and power imbalanced practices – is how we would go about fighting these oppressions, and as feminists this is what we will do. While the challenge has been posed that gender, as opposed to reproductive sex, is somehow ill-defined through circularity, I have outlined above how this is not the case; by understanding it not as a standalone label but as the description of a process drawing, among other things, on reproductive sex, such circularity is not a concern for the clarity or validity of its definition.

Third, I have outlined my current beliefs on the cultural and biological basis of gender, especially insofar as thus gender identity arises implicitly (it may not be something one can look directly at and “feel”) as a property of instincts human beings have on where to try to polarize themselves across gender divisions anywhere in life. I have argued here that it is a strong but mostly invisible instinct, which underlies several forms of potentially lethal and debilitating dysphoria in the small fraction of people who are either binary or nonbinary transgender. While manifestations can vary a lot between individuals, this is a severe and significant obstacle to the flourishing of such people. Moreover, it is not a choice, nor is it a political standpoint to somehow prefer the social construct of gender to remain in place. Rather, it is a need to use particular strategies for navigating gender when it does manifest whether we wish it to or not, and those strategies remain perfectly compatible with the víew and agenda of dismantling both many of the associations of gender, and the process of gender divisions as a whole. However, we must also accept that we did not evolve to be blank slates; only transhumanism could bring us there. We as we are will face and live within manifestations of the social construction of gender as a division of human beings with regards to how we feel, think, act and speak about them, for now and for the foreseeable future. We can and should work againt that in itself, perhaps, but we must also do what is needed to cope, and to let as many of us flourish as much as we can.

Fourth, I have outlined how I regard the effort to reduce the dysphoria of transgender individuals as a two-pronged effort. On one hand, there is the individual journey of transitioning – changing one’s sex insofar as is needed and possible, for one who is transsexual, and working from one’s own position to make one’s gender such as to minimize dysphoria, minimize the mismatch between the groups one is placed in, and the groups one have an instinctual preference to be placed in. On the other, there is the society-wide effort to alter how gender is constructed, so as to recognize maximally self-identified stated gender (which is a proxy for gender identity which is an implication of the abovementioned instinct) as a feature informing the processes by which we do divide individuals into genders, on those occasions we nevertheless find ourselves doing it (and we probably do that all the time, because our brains work that way). This makes gender as a social construct less efficient as a neural net predictor of reproductive sex, but makes it more efficient at not preventing transgender individuals from flourishing. These two prongs come together in that what matters for dysphoria is whether or not the individual transgender person is able to find themselves placed in the gender division group their instincts point to (which need not have any bearing on detailed gender roles or stereotypes, which are anyway things we should unlink off of gender!). Whether or not they can will reflect both their individual transition journey and the surrounding societal recognition of their self-assigned gender as informing gender divisions, since all people use their perception of the views of other people to inform their own perceptions, no matter how independent they may believe themselves to be. Thus, successfully reducing dysphoria also builds crucially on top of the work of allies in changing the meaning of gender in public discourse and culture to mean self-identified gender more and more. We are deeply blessed to have you do this, and gratitude is, again, in order.