The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: So wrt gender you think that facts don't matter, but only the opinion of the person referred to? The reasonable opinion here is of course that pronouns refer to sex, which people can decide in most cases based on bodily features. If the situation is less clear you should take what a person says about themselves in good faith. Of course, when they say they were born as a man but now decided to live as a woman, so you should refer to them by female pronouns, this means their sex is probably male.

‘facts don’t matter’ - how someone identifies is a fact. What was written on their birth certificate is also a fact. We are debating whether we want to use a concept of gender that means 1) or 2) or something else. Disagreeing about which facts should be most relevant to category membership is not ‘thinking facts don’t matter’. 

Ideas about there being two distinct genders always had edge cases and have lots more edge cases now that there are more options available for various kinds of transition. I think that opinions about how to sort the edge cases should justify themselves in terms of the degree to which they match the experiences of the people referred to, the degree to which they are flexible enough to account for more edge cases in the future as even more options for transition become available, the degree to which the information you’re trying to use for sorting is available to most people doing the sorting, and the degree to which they capture our intuitions about gender (but keeping in mind that our intuitions are malleable). ‘sort edge cases by identification’ does much better along these criteria than ‘sort edge cases by what was written on birth certificate’, which is why I prefer it. 

There are of course other opinions, like ‘sort edge cases by genitals’ and ‘sort edge cases by physical appearance’ and ‘sort edge cases by some kind of legal gender-change process and a social agreement to respect legal gender’ and ‘sort edge cases by DNA testing for chromosomes’ and ‘sort edge cases by haircut’ and so on. Most of these do pretty poorly by the ‘match the experiences of the people so categorized’ criterion and the ‘the information you’re trying to use is available to most people’ criterion, and on the whole the sorting procedure that achieves the most of my desiderata remains ‘sort by identification’. 

If you cared a lot less than me about describing the experiences of the people you’re discussing and a lot more than me about stability of a rule over time or something, then you might prefer a different rule, but I still don’t think you’d end up with ‘birth certificate’. (And if you tell people ‘yeah, you’re an edge case and I decided on a sorting procedure for edge cases which abjectly fails to capture your actual experiences, because I didn’t value that very much and I cared a lot more about stability of a rule’, then they are entitled to go ‘well, my sorting procedure for identifying assholes who I don’t want to waste any time on just flagged you big time’.)

The reasonable opinion here is of course that pronouns refer to sex…

I don’t really find that opinion very reasonable. Like, to be clear, what you’re attempting to do is propose and defend a sorting procedure that handles edge cases, yes? Your proposed procedure is kind of underspecified, because I don’t know what you mean by ‘sex’ - genitals? chromosomes? hormone balance? the way the body would have developed absent medical intervention? the way the body would have developed with medical interventions but not ones related to the desire to transition? (so you can capture people who needed hormone supplementation for non-transition reasons?) - but more than that, I am really not seeing any reason to expect that your proposed sorting procedure captures more of what I care about than mine. You’d need to do better than asserting it uses facts and is ‘of course’ the ‘reasonable’ one. 

• 26 February 2017
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