The Matter Of “Material Girls”, Part 4
Mother’s Ruin
Some Lazy Thinking About Words, Causes, And Perception
Orientation
This is one of a series of articles, beginning here, that discusses Kathleen Stock’s “Material Girls”.
The Central Claim And How It Collapses
The fifth chapter of “Material Girls” aims to negatively answer:
“the question of whether trans women are women” [p142]
The fundamental problem with this is that “trans women are women” is not a question: it’s a moral assertion, an expression of solidarity. An axiom, not a deduction.
Stock’s arguments in this chapter are therefore like a rejection of “all men are brothers” based on quibbling about consanguinity — just straight-up missing the point.
As we’ll see, expressions of kinship, literal or otherwise, aren’t entirely in thrall to proving/disproving statements about “biology”.
The Bigger Picture
Stock is clearly subscribed to the idea, famously discussed by Plato, that a good theory should carve nature at its joints.¹
Her argument is that the word “woman” corresponds to a concept that carves out a theoretically important natural distinction, which would be somehow “lost” by using the word trans-inclusively:
“Getting rid of the concept WOMAN would mean we couldn’t describe, explain, predict or manage these distinctively caused phenomena.” [p152]
There are three big problems with this notion:
Firstly, a lexicon does not define the set of available concepts.
Secondly, the utility of carving has a limit; non-essentialist theories of word meaning illustrate how word use is often best explained in terms of the links between related concepts.
Thirdly, the phenomena Stock cites may be “distinctively caused”, but the cause is not simply “biology” as she assumes.
Together, this means that using “women” trans-inclusively doesn’t “get rid of” anything; it doesn’t prevent any of the description, explanation, prediction or management of phenomena that Stock professes to be concerned about.
Let’s consider each of these three points in turn.
1. A Lexicon Does Not Define The Set Of Available Concepts
Lexicons do not simply map to ontologies: words aren’t a catalog of the things that exist or that we can conceive of.
Just as we discussed in If It Ain’t One Thing, It’s Another, the actual “facts” of a situation can remain uncontested without that uniquely dictating how we superimpose descriptive categories on those facts.
Consider kinship terminology. There is a fact of the matter in terms of the biological relatedness of two people, but different languages use a variety of different terminological patterns to carve up the field.
But the lexical items available don’t limit what we can discuss. We don’t have single words in English that distinguish between maternal and paternal cousins, for example — but we can refer to that distinction by bringing in adjectives (as I did in this sentence) or by using more complex modifiers as needed.
Stock’s own example of “funny jokes” illustrates that what she regards as a concept does not have to correspond to a single lexical item in English.²
Likewise, a trans-inclusive use of the word “woman” doesn’t result in the loss of the ability to express trans-exclusionary or trans-centric concepts: it is easy to distinguish “cis women” and “trans women” by bringing in the appropriate adjectives where necessary.³
So, it turns out that to “describe, explain, predict or manage” phenomena adequately sometimes requires us to use noun modifiers or even syntax; but generally, this is not seen as an insuperable obstacle to dialogue.⁴
2. The Utility Of Carving Has A Limit
Stock specifically calls out usage of the word “mother” as being somehow imperiled by trans-inclusive use of the word “woman”:
“It’s not enough for opponents to point out that, were the concepts to change in the way that gender identity theorists propose, many people who count as, for example, ‘mothers’ now would still count as mothers under the new proposal. For that would be an accident. The concept wouldn’t be picking out their femaleness and its connection to having given birth or raising children.” [p157]
It’s ironic that Stock chooses to advance the word “mother” in this way, as signalling the possession of an essential “femaleness”, because it is a classic example, in the literature of concepts, of a word that requires a non-essentialist account of its meaning.
The idea of non-essentialist definition is famous in philosophy from Wittgenstein’s discussion of “family resemblances” between different uses of a word⁵:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “ — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.
[Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §66]
Clearly, “mother” also has a variety of uses that are connected through a series of similarities or relationships. Here, for example, are some of the uses that we put “mother” to, uncontroversially:
- a biological mother is — in gender critical terms — the person that contributes a large, immotile gamete to the procreative act (this could be an egg donor who plays no further role in child development)
- a birth mother gives birth to the child (this can be distinct from being a biological mother, as in gestational surrogacy)
- an adoptive mother adopts a child, typically caring for them in childhood (although adult adoption is also possible in many countries)
- a foster mother cares for a child, but fostering is (typically) a more temporary situation than adoption
The parallel to Wittgenstein’s example of “games” is exact. There is a series of resemblances between the different subtypes of mother; but those subtypes don’t necessarily have to share any common characteristic (essence) of motherhood. For example, a biological mother need share no properties that define them as a mother with an adoptive mother.
These examples show us that “mother” is, at least partially, a socially defined category, not a scientific one. We can’t turn to biology for a definition of its limits; the term does not simply carve nature at the joints.
Therefore, the term “mother” is not “picking out femaleness” as Stock understands it, as a biological state: only a couple of these examples of motherhood are necessarily grounded in biology. There’s no reason that one should or could assume a biological limitation on who can care for or raise a child as a mother.⁶ And we haven’t even fully explored the scope of how the word “mother” is actually used.⁷
Analysis of words in terms of chains or constellations of linked and overlapping uses (potentially extendable) is the basis of non-essentialist accounts of meaning such as radial category theory. But we don’t need to delve into the theory or further examples to see that this is precisely the understanding of “woman” that “trans women are women” embodies.⁸
3. Distinctively Caused, But The Distinction Isn’t Biology
Stock quotes Marilyn Frye in support of the idea that “women” picks out a class of people whose shared experiences of oppression have a common cause:
Being a woman is a major factor in not having a better job that I do; being a woman selects me as a likely victim of sexual assault or harassment; it is my being a woman that reduced the power of my anger to a proof of my insanity. If a woman has little or no economic or political power, or achieves little of what she wants to achieve, a major causal factor in this is that she is a woman. For any woman of any race or economic class, being a woman is significantly attached to whatever disadvantages or deprivations she suffers, be they great or small. [Marilyn Frye, The Politics Of Reality]
It is baseless, though, to suggest that trans women don’t experience these things — there’s no biological inevitability to the patterns of social subjugation picked out here. Trans women live as women (often “passing”) and therefore experience the same types of discrimination.
But Stock and other “gender critical” anti-trans commentators don’t think of trans lives or existence as continuous, tangible, and real. Stock even cites an opinion columnist⁹ saying:
“they haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts” [Elinor Burkett, quoted on p171]
But of course trans women routinely experience objectification and the gamut of other forms of misogyny, because they are routinely perceived and treated as women. The “gender critical” assumption that misogyny only exists where biological prerequisites are met doesn’t make sense.
If we return to Frye’s list, we can note that trans women are very far from hailing from a place of financial privilege; nor are they teflon-coated against abuse. These experiences of women are also the experiences of trans women, sometimes additionally spiked by the intersectional effects of being trans:
The pay gap is greater for trans women: for each $1 earned by an average worker, women in general get 87¢ (13% less), but trans women get 60¢ (40% less).¹⁰
Trans women experience exceptionally high rates of sexual assault and harassment: almost half of trans people are sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime; experiences of violence, hate, harassment and other discrimination are endemic.¹¹
Anger expressed by trans women is absolutely taken as a proof of insanity: besides the normal dismissal of a woman’s anger as “hysteria”, the anger of a trans woman is also taken to affirm being trans as mental illness. A near-universal acceptance of mockery as an appropriate response means basic respect is, apparently hilariously, too much to expect; dismissive scoffing the go-to response to any push back against discrimination. (Examples of that are obviously littered throughout “Material Girls”).
Little or no economic or political power: the economic status of trans women is indicated not only by the pay gap, but also the fact that more than a quarter of trans people have been homeless. Women in general are underrepresented in positions of power, but trans women have negligible representation.¹²
Frye’s list shows us points of “family resemblance”, not points of difference.
Stock, in fact, dedicates a whole chapter of the book (Chapter 3) to putting forward similar examples that she believes compel the reification of (binary) sex into (binary) gender. She takes it for granted that all of the gender-correlated phenomena she mentions have a biological basis, and that they therefore do not correlate with the experiences of trans people. But this is wildly incorrect: socially modulated phenomena are not, generally, caused solely by biological factors associated with sex.¹³
For example, she simply assumes that rates of eating disorders or self-harm are markers that differ between trans and cis women. But those rates are comparable (see previous discussion in the “Natal Distraction” section of the article Three “Gender Critical Mythologies). Very little of what she discusses in that chapter comes down purely to biology; less still if we start to consider the physical effects of medical transition.
It appears that an insistence on the exclusion of trans women itself impairs the ability to correctly “describe, explain, predict or manage” phenomena.
Of course trans women do generically have some distinctive biological characteristics, such as being prone to specific medical conditions¹⁴ and an inability to become pregnant. But none of those things compellingly create a boundary condition for “women”; one could whittle all manner of groups out of womanhood on such a basis.
Credo
The obvious credo on display here is that “trans women are not women”.
The belief that this statement should be “provable” leads to some extraordinarily wacky positioning on matters of bodies, language, and perception.
A Universal Female Body
Inclusion in the category of women is a matter of solidarity, not a question of fact that can be decided objectively:
When we ask, “What is a woman”, we are really asking questions about ideology: about how discourse has contoured the category of “woman” and about what is at stake — politically, economically, and socially — in maintaining or dismissing that category. […] Partly in an attempt to achieve political consensus, feminists have often assumed a universal female body, an assumption that has usually left some women silenced, inhabiting the borderlands. Clearly, any definition of the category woman necessarily produces exclusions and leads to divisions among women.
(Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury — Introduction to “Writing On The Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory”).
This notion of a “universal female body” is central to “Material Girls”: assumed by the book to be an aspect of “material reality” that must exist, it is in fact a metaphysical confection.
Stock draws attention to difference (or, frequently, putative difference) as a means of othering trans women, in an attempt to locate them outside this hypothesized universality.
But commonalities (family resemblances) between cis and trans women, whether bodily or socially grounded, are more salient for many people than such differences. Inevitably so, because “the question of whether trans women are women” retreads extremely familiar territory within feminism: the contestation of inclusion.
Predictably, Stock doubles down on exclusionism in response¹⁵, advancing an argument that being aware of historical injustices doesn’t imply that one should think in inclusive terms — because a rational, scientific view might suggest otherwise:
“People used to think that whales weren’t mammals; this doesn’t mean mackerel are mammals now.” [p262]
But, of course, pseudo “scientific” and philosophical defences of racism and other forms of bigotry are utterly commonplace; “Material Girls” is just another item on the list of such blighted works.
Incredibly, Stock dismisses Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” by pointing out that sexual violence, forced pregnancy, and the abuse of children are intrinsic features of slavery, stating that slave owners would:
“unproblematically acknowledge black women as women — not least because many slave owners instrumentalised black women’s pregnancies to keep the machinery of slavery going” [p166]
It’s hard to conceive how anyone might think “unproblematically” is a word to use here. This is a dehumanizing abomination of a statement, and one very revealing of the crudely reductive nature of “gender critical” views on what a woman is.
A Carve Up
Stock does genuinely seem to believe in a formulation of the lexicon as an adequate ontology, a carving of reality’s joints.¹⁶
We see this invoked in naive appeals to the notion that there should be an isomorphism between vocabulary — “concepts” — and pre-existing facts:
“Concepts, when working well, pick out what is already there” [p145]
Perhaps they sometimes do. But they often don’t: as the example of “mother” we reviewed above shows, the social institutions and practices that we live by — which are often highly malleable¹⁷ — are just as important and real to us as “what is already there”.
Whether “trans women are women” is not an issue of fact, to be arbitrated by science, but a social issue, to be arbitrated by people. People exist who don’t neatly fit into a sex/gender binary, and we can see that different societies have interpreted and accommodated that fact in a variety of ways.
However, Stock insists that there can be only one model:
“features of the world, and our collective human interests in them, are not arbitrary” [p147]
But there is a difference between arbitrary and arbitrated.
It’s simply tautologous to suggest that human interests are not arbitrary. The related word uses in non-essentialist accounts of meaning are not conjured up on the basis of random whimsy; the links are explicable through the existence of partial similarities, or metaphorical or ceremonial connections. (All of which are, of course, culturally bound).
Polysemy is not a postmodernist conspiracy to deprive language of coherent meaning.
And the mere existence of the word “woman” is not an a priori justification for the belief that there must necessarily be a universal female body.
An Eye on Things
Stock not only imagines vocabulary to be directly mapped to reality, she also regards perception to also be directly revelatory of reality’s structure.
Referring to the role of perception in concept formation, she suggests that trans existence might throw a spanner in the works for the acquisition of word meanings:
“It’s therefore an interesting question what pointing to a trans woman who has had no surgery or hormones, and telling a child ‘that’s a woman’ and then pointing to a female and saying the same does to the child’s emerging conceptual map of the world.” [p155]
But this is absolutely not an interesting question, for two reasons.
One: there are plenty of situations where categories have perceptual outliers, or where the information presented to a child admits multiple interpretations of what a word means, but conceptual formation proceeds to take these situations in its stride.¹⁸
Two: this presupposes that there is or should ubiquitously be a discernable man/woman distinction, and that it would be somehow problematical to have a “conceptual map” that accommodates gender non-conformity. Which indicates the hypocritical nature of “gender critical” thought in a nutshell.
Stock, in fact, does think that humans simply must be able to reliably perceive reproductive sex¹⁹, and that this capability simply must be mandated by evolution because:
“it’s important to recognise sex for procreation” [p77]
and
“if heterosexual attraction were directed primarily towards gender identity not sex, it would be pretty inefficient in terms of continuation of the species” [p92]
However, the ability of members of a species to reproduce is not contingent on continuous signalling of reproductive role any more than it is on continuous fertility.²⁰ The relatively low degree of sexual dimorphism in homo sapiens means that both human variation and ingenuity frequently belie the direct perceptibility of reproductive sex, as we’ll shortly see.
(The idea that procreation requires an unremitting semiosis of sex is from the same school of absolutist stupidity that tries to figure out why — and is baffled by the fact that — homosexuality hasn’t been eliminated by evolution: as if there are genes that have an unmodulated and immediate effect of exclusive homosexuality that instantly eliminates all carriers from the gene pool.)
Stock does mention that there are exceptions to the general rule:
“To say someone can ‘reliably differentiate’ means only that most of the time, they get it right. Mistakes can still be made.” [p77]
But just as she does in relation to “binary sex” itself, she subsequently dismisses the idea that any exceptions are important. This is notably the case in her argument on pp107–108 in favour of humiliating harassment being dealt out in lavatories to anyone who doesn’t meet the “gender critical” standard of acceptable femininity.
Likewise, mere ‘reliability’ is taken to mean that the following idea is both absurd and unpalatable:
“women, men, boys and girls aren’t beings you can ever directly identify by looking or listening, or by any other perceptual means” [p155]
But androgyny is scarcely novel.
Beyond that, it’s completely uncontroversial that many people have crossed gender boundaries both historically and in the present day, with those around them unable to “directly identity” the gender they were presumed to be at birth.²¹
Besides the famous historical examples — the Chevalier d’Eon, James Barry, Victor Barker, Billy Tipton, and so on — there are countless trans people who have simply lived their lives without perpetually being outed by “perceptual means”.²²
So far this has not, discernably, led to signs of the human race dying out due to lack of procreation.
These examples show that the notion that it is possible, on sight, to out someone as trans is patent nonsense, demonstrably untrue.
Nevertheless, insistence that it is possible persists in anti-trans rhetoric, reaching its nadir in the obvious conspiracy theory of transvestigation, the phantasmagoric outcome of force-fitting celebrities to a panoply of biological sex “tells”. Absurd, sure, but all of the signs of divination that transvestigators use are taken direct from the standard argumentarium of those who insist on the direct perceptibility of sex.²³
All of which is simply to say that transphobes imagine they can see what they believe: but far from being rooted in material reality, this is frequently just phantom-chasing, florid fantasy.
Fundamentally, the idea that sex must be always perceivable is just another manifestation of this assumption of a “universal female body”.²⁴
Starship Stroopers
These themes of body, language, and perception all hook together in one of the most preposterous passages of the book, in which Stock approvingly cites a blog article titled “Pronouns Are Rohypnol” (pp 206–210).
The pseudonymous author of the blog is one “Barra Kerr” (geddit), who begins by discussing the Stroop effect. This relates to the reading of words depicted in different colours from the ones they name: the word “red” coloured blue, the word “green” coloured orange, and so on. The incongruence results in a slight increase in average time for those words to be read.
Recognition of an individual word is a task that takes milliseconds; but we leap from the additional milliseconds needed in a tightly controlled perceptual task to pulp-lurid suggestions of incongruity being leveraged for nefarious purposes. The Stroop effect somehow here becomes transmogrified into a general and pernicious ailment of general cognition:
“Part of Kerr’s thesis seems to be that Stroop-like effects are deliberately provoked by trans women to lower the defences of women to their aggressive sexual attention.” (p208)
Like a snake²⁵ hypnotising its prey, so this story goes, a villainous (possibly moustache twirling) trans woman might launch a deadly attack using the (not-proven-to-exist) milliseconds of confusion caused by perceived incongruity between pronouns and sex.²⁶
This mise-en-scène radiates all of the verisimilitude and gravitas of a Punch and Judy show. How supernaturally fast do these villains move that Stroop-like processing effects might make a difference? Or do they emit a constant stream of pronouns that pin their victims in place?
Attempting to gloss “I find the existence of trans people confusing and annoying” as “trans people are inherently dangerous” through the most thinnest possible layer of science-sounding handwaving is completely insulting to the reader’s intelligence; it’s a conspiracy-addled performance that makes “transvestigation” look like the casebook of Sherlock Holmes.
What else might happen in a world where the brain so completely freezes when confronted with slight incongruities? Confusing street numbering deliberately used to disorient passers-by, making them vulnerable to the schemes of Satan-worshipping urban planning cultists? The christening of gritters leading to the accidental salting-to-death of distracted motorists? Minds being simply erased as the result of too-prolonged observation of Necker cubes? A catastrophic decline in the Roadrunner population being caused by painted tunnel mouths on cliff sides?
Citing “Pronouns Are Rohypnol” — and elaborating on it! — completely incinerates any pretense to credibility.
If anyone can read this book, run across this passage, and not simply burst into laughter, that is a damning indictment of their sense of humour. For this is the “Springtime For Hitler” of philosophical enquiry: ideologically impelled kitsch; the most incredible car-crash of a performance; hard to believe it can have been produced with serious intent.
Next Article
The next article in this series is Like A Broken Record.
Footnotes
[1]
A notion that originates with Plato. In the Penguin Classics translation of Phaedrus by Walter Hamilton (1973), the phrase in265e is given as:
SOCRATES: The ability to divide genus into species again, observing the natural articulation, not mangling any of the parts, like an unskilful butcher.
A pernickety observation on this metaphor is that the cultural diversity of carving patterns suggests that “joints” — of meat, at least — don’t always correspond with boundaries unambiguously delineated by nature itself.
This tallies with some of the observations about boundary lines in discussion of Chapter 2.
[2]
Stock oddly suggests that it may be objectively decidable whether a joke is funny or not (p146) — she believes concepts “pick out already existing real divisions in the world”, and presents “funny joke” as an example. In the absence of a compelling explanation for this position, it does intuitively seem that subjectivity is key to humour, with the yuk-factor very much depending on the audience involved, rather than it being a feature of the world itself:
Perhaps Stock, as an advocate of extreme intensionalism, might hold that the funniness of a joke instead depends on authorial intent — even if no one bar the joke’s instigator is laughing.
[3]
Rather than considering the use of existing adjectives, on pp158–159 Stock walks through a bizarre tangent about the unfeasibility of introducing the neologisms “womyn” and “myn”.
Again, concepts do not need to map 1:1 to lexical items.
This is, I guess, partly reflective of “gender critical” allergy to the word “cis”, which is shorthand for “cisgender”, and simply means “not transgender”. There is, by the way, a long history of diverse uses for “cis”, which originated as a prefix in Latin.
It appears to be the suggestion of equality between cis and trans people that they take umbrage to.
[4]
Transphobes, unsurprisingly, hate the idea that language should be used inclusively or in a nuanced way, as the recipients of their endless dogpiling attacks on the matter can testify.
[5]
Charles Fort, a mischievous soul, anticipates this idea somewhat in The Book Of The Damned (1919):
What is a house? […] A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird’s nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs’ houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos — or a shell is a house to a hermit crab — or was to the mollusk that made it — or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.
[Charles Fort, Introduction to The Book Of The Damned]
[6]
I’m assuming Stock (self-described feminist), would not want to claim that raising a child is a role ineluctably determined by a biological state of “femaleness”, even though she “carelessly” implies that with the phrase:
“femaleness and its connection to having given birth or raising children”
After all, she spends a large portion of the chapter arguing precisely that being a woman does not require conformance to an imposed social role (pp162–177).
[7]
For example, we haven’t considered house mothers, people with a role in LGBTQ+ found families. We’ve also neglected legal mothers, a status which does not align with any of the other categories we’ve seen; a surrogate mother is the legal mother of a child they have given birth to, unless a parental order is used to change this. Then there’s step-mothers, mothers-in-law, and more.
Nor have we considered the fact that parental roles may take yet different forms in non-western contexts, as in mahu faamu adoption. See: Zanghellini, A. (2010). Queer Kinship Practices in Non-Western Contexts: French Polynesia’s Gender-variant Parents and the Law of “La République.” Journal of Law and Society, 37(4), 651–677. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40958936
[8]
There are copious examples in George Lakoff’s book, “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things”. His analysis of “mother” appears on pp74–76 in the 1990 paperback edition.
Ironically the title of the book is taken from R M W Dixon’s study of noun classes in Dyirbal: an example of radial categories in linguistic gender.
Note Stock on pp167–168 seems to think that non-essentialist definitions of concepts are literally inconceiveable. Apparently, unfamiliarity with key notions in the field(s) she’s discussing is one of the hallmarks of her swashbuckling style:
“In this suffocating context, I definitely count as a heretic.” [p9]
(The context is being asked to read the relevant literature and not be transphobic).
[9]
There are a lot of tabloid and op-ed citations in this book, but “blurting out the unexamined contents of your imagination” doesn’t really stand up as a credible source of information.
[10]
Trans men and non-binary people also experience discrimination — the equivalent figure is 70¢ — but there is an even bigger pay gap for trans women specifically. See here and here for sources.
This observed gap is rather inconvenient for the oft-expressed “gender critical” fear that inclusion of trans women as women in statistical data would narrow or eliminate the reported gender pay gap.
[11]
For detailed information:
- The US Transgender Survey 2015
2. The Stonewall LGBT In Britain — Trans Report 2018
3. The Galop Transphobic Hate Crime Report 2020
[12]
For example, no one openly trans has ever been elected or appointed to a seat in the UK parliament; there are no trans editors or columnists working in the UK’s mainstream media; and the results of that lack of representation are utterly glaring.
Issues of grave importance to trans people — such as decades long waiting lists for medical care, or its active suppression — are endlessly neglected, politically and in the media. On the other hand, relatively minor issues like gender recognition reform have been deliberately blown up into a full-scale constitutional crisis in the UK, an attempted culture war distraction from an ongoing political omnishambles.
The void of trans people in the media has led to “gender critical” voices being uncritically platformed, without any balancing input. Literally dozens of outrageously transphobic articles per day are circulated in the British media, with opposing viewpoints almost entirely excluded.
[13]
For example, Stock herself, assuming that the pay gap is solely caused by motherhood, then directly argues that other women experience that gap simply because
females as a whole tend to be disadvantaged in the workplace in relation to their group-associated reproductive role, irrespective of whether particular individuals actually fulfill that role [p102]
Regardless of the accuracy of Stock’s assumptions here (including the framing that women have a “reproductive role” that they “fulfil”), it’s impossible to see how this tallies with the claim that trans women:
“don’t share the same career of socio-economic challenges as females simply by having a misaligned gender identity, because they don’t share the reproductive capacity that gave rise to them” [p101]
One can almost smell the burning psychic rubber left from the screeching mental u-turns. How you are actually perceived and treated only matters if you aren’t trans, just because (insert special pleading here).
(This is using the same kind of magical thinking that is used to prop up “the gamete account” of sex by dividing apart different groups who don’t produce eggs on the basis of “things that are possible if and only if we adopt a very specific sense of possibility that presupposes the division we are trying to prove exists” — see footnote 4 of the discussion of Chapter 2).
[14]
Stock’s claims and citations about the importance of sex in medical matters and in sport should be taken with a large pinch of salt. For example:
“At the time of writing, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, twice as many males as females are reported to have died”. [pp79–80]
Likewise, the universality of:
“the protective effect of endogenous sex hormones or lack of them” [p80]
is supported by citing a summary of a workshop on translational neuroscience in which the word “endogenous” is never used, and which literally suggests that the majority of sex differences in mice “can be abolished by gonadectomy in adulthood” because:
Most genes therefore appear to be sexually differentiated or sexually dimorphic because of the action of hormones in adulthood.
{ Sidetrack: Some level of mistrust about this workshop in toto might be prudent; a different section of the proceedings repeats hackneyed neurosexist myth in the statement that “women have ten times more white matter while men have almost 7 times more gray matter as related to intellectual skill. This suggests a significant sex difference where intelligence is manifested.” }
We might also point to the mythical nature of the central inspiration for Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez, also cited, the gendering of heart attack symptoms:
Likewise her citations on sport are largely blog pieces rather than reflecting a credible survey of the relevant scientific literature.
[15]
Stock has a beef with intersectional feminism — it doesn’t take into account the concerns of women who are bigots:
“Mainstream feminist organisations in the UK have embraced the consequences of gender identity theory enthusiastically. In doing so, they have failed to properly demonstrate, on behalf of women and girls, the ethos of intersectionality to which nearly all pay lip service.” [p265]
This failure is manifested in the fact that these organisations don’t simply assume that all trans women are violent criminals and discriminate against them on that basis. So, the zinger argument here is that if an organisation doesn’t tolerate intolerance, it’s hypocritical. Riveting stuff.
[16]
While Stock repeatedly acknowledges that there are exceptions that show category boundaries can’t be crisply defined, she always proceeds on the assumption that an approximation is sufficient.
But that is often not the case.
[17]
The very begrudging admission that malleability is possible is reflected in Stock’s bizarre description of the evolution of word meanings as though they are regulated by a codified semantic-bureaucratic process, in which people sign off on proposed requests for change by following a process on a flow chart (pp149–151).
This is utterly disconnected from the reality of language use, in which creative and novel uses of words are constantly emerging as we find new ways to portray the world. Meaning is not shackled to majoritarian sentiment.
The example of meaning change she uses, by the way, is “race”, and the framing is that “theorists have proposed” that race is a social category rather than a biological reality. This is true in the same sense that “theorists have proposed” that the Pope is Catholic.
[18]
The analytical philosopher W.V.O. Quine pointed out the inscrutability of reference, showing that there are always multiple different possible interpretations of a word’s meaning.
The processes involved in learning about and interpreting word meanings are a little more complex than the simple “point and label” idea that Stock has latched onto. A huge psychological / linguistic / philosophical literature exists on this.
Somehow we navigate through all the complexity. The discovery of black swans did not undo our ability to recognize swans. Viewing ostriches does not derail our ability to form a conception of birds in general. We take stick insects in our stride. We can survive the bafflement of citrus taxonomy. The existence of the duck billed platypus as a mammal is not an issue of contestation. The existence of foster mothers doesn’t cause the concept of birth mothers is likely to be “lost”. And so on.
It doesn’t seem like “the question of whether trans women are women” presents us with a more substantial conceptual difficulty.
[19]
Equivocating reproductive sex and sex in general is a neat trick of anti-trans writing. See:
[20]
Obvious exceptions exist to the broadcasting of reproductive role:
Nature encompasses many complexities, procreation notwithstanding:
[21]
I use this phrase rather than the more common “assigned gender at birth”, because “assigning” refers to the bureaucratic process of formally identifying a sex on a birth certificate; and that’s a 19th century invention.
Gender critical thought has a very particular and peculiar reaction to the word “assigned”:
“Since talk of assignation makes no sense, I’ll remove reference to it in what follows” [p148]
Strangely seeming to interpret it as meaning “randomly and arbitrarily allocate”, they often instead refer to “sex observed at birth”, referencing the credo that a person’s (potential) reproductive sex is always directly perceptible.
But in practice, this is a distinction without a difference. Whether you call it “assignment” or “observation”, there is decision-making system at work that allocates people into gender/sex categories, and which is clearly sometimes wrong.
[22]
There is, of course, some sense in which their sex was “perceptible” as being in contrast to their gender, or we wouldn’t be able to discuss their gender variance at all.
The idea that this is somehow a “gotcha” gives us another vivid illustration of how dismally reductive and dehumanizing a “gender critical” view of people is. Rather than considering a person’s life as a whole, it requires a myopic focus on (e.g.) post mortem scrutiny of genitalia, because that allows for insisting on applying a label to them in death that they rejected in life.
It’s the same mindset that leads to triumphally declaring to trans people that archaeologists will misgender them hundreds of years after death based on their bone structures. It’s a childish view of the world; inference from skeletal remains is not the straightforward “readout” that the gotch-ists assume. (Not to mention that caring about how one is perceived long after death is a pharaonic trait not widely shared in the modern world).
[23]
Many of those putative symptoms of sex are simply correlated with height, like the Q Angle. They crop up, scattered like chaff, throughout anti-trans argumentation as though they are genuinely consequential:
“Artifical oestregen cannot undo jaw and hand size, for instance” [p77]
It is worth viewing statements this in the light of a very familiar pattern of sexist argumentation: slight quantitative differences in the average values of some characteristic for men and women become reified into qualitative differences between the two groups.
A generic statement like “men are taller than women” becomes treated like a universal truth, rather than correctly taken to mean that there is a slight statistical difference in the average value between two groups who exhibit value distributions that massively overlap.
This reification of gender difference is then further treated as indicative of the two groups having fundamentally different natures; the possibility that the social effects of gender itself might be contributing to these differences is disregarded.
(See the classic Myths Of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling for examples.)
[24]
This belief also underpins material such as the section on sexual orientation in Chapter 3 (pp 89–98), another moribund slog through prescriptive semantics that also aims to “prove” that some people are describing themselves wrongly by insisting so.
[25]
On p154 Stock actually talks about the importance of being able to rapidly recognize a snake — a snide and hardly subtle interjection into her musings on the perceptual recognition of trans women.
[26]
Stock muses that Stroopoid confusion might not be deliberately induced by trans people for nefarious purposes:
“This seems to me to be fearmongering.” [p208]
Introducing crank musings in order to question whether they might be true or not is what we might call an “ancient aliens” move:
Unsurprisingly the pages immediately following this are absolutely larded with straightforward fearmongering about trans women, including a rapid reassertion of how very, very dangerous the use of pronouns can be:
“something that slows down the cognitive processes of women with respect to potential aggressors may turn out to have very serious personal ramifications for them.” [p209]
Anyone perceived as unusual is inherently dangerous because they slow down cognitive processes; that’s the kind of gonzo near-flatline take that “Material Girls” offers for your consideration.
