Some follow-up thoughts on gender
After I published (then re-published) my earlier post on gender and reduction, I had a few thoughts. So, here they are, in no particular order:
- Zucker’s reduction of gender to biology also requires another step, which is that certain behaviors are appropriate to biological givens–i.e. GI Joes to boys and Barbie Dolls to girls. That, or he is not a biological reductionist, but thinks that gender is social, however children shouldn’t be subjected to experimentation and go against social norms. From what I’ve read, I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going on.
- It’s possible that my entire earlier post is framed in such a way that the emergentism, supervenience, etc. debates about gender are themselves reducible to the mental/physical debate. That is, if I’m understanding gender as a “sense of self”, then it is essentially mental, a thing like a belief, emotion, attitude, etc. In fact, it probably could be defined in those very terms (I have an attitude towards myself as a certain gender, emotions about certain toys/colors, beliefs that I am gender X). Then the problem to be resolved is the relationship between the mental and the neurological/physical. (This dichotomy is misleading because few philosophers would say mental is non-physical).
- Further, there’s a question of just how much ethical questions are tied to metaphysical ones. Earlier, I asked about whether we can be mistaken about our gender, and if so, why. However, not all mistakes are ones that we are morally accountable for, or that we treat in the same way. The question of what to do with a child who has made a mistake about their proper gender (assuming that’s your stance) doesn’t necessarily rest upon things like substance dualism, emergentism, etc. Instead, the question has to do with what kind of a thing gender is, morally (does it bind us to act a certain way?) and also questions about the consequences of therapeutic actions (is it worse to torment a child over his Barbie Dolls in the hopes he’ll become more “manly”, or to leave him be and let him use female pronouns and be beaten up at school, in the hopes that society may change?)
- Finally, a personal note: ethical questions about gender have always gotten my philosophical goat, so to speak. When it was tied to biblical hermeneutics, I recall struggling with a strong sense of outrage that god might ask me to subject my will to that of men, and have my intellectual voice be subjugated to my husband (which was my biblical duty). I am unabashedly a critic of patriarchalism and trans/ homophobia, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ask questions about what transgenderism is and what homosexuality is. Nothing is out of bounds for conceptual analysis, but I’ll admit when I have experiential biases, and gender is one of those items.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:31 am
Gender is dead, don’t you know.
May 17th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
I’ll check out the article, George, thanks. Course, I wonder if gender is dead like god is dead, in which case conceptual analysis had a lot to do with its demise!