I was inspired to write this up after looking at this thread on Twitter, in which “stained hanes” claims that her friend asked her boyfriend “what is a woman” and got a word-vomit response. Check it out. It’s amusing… kind of. And kind of sad and frustrating.
The boyfriend writes in a smug, self-satisfied tone, cocksure that his approach is the correct approach to answering this question. Of course, most of us reading it know he’s wrong, and can probably articulate some good reasons for that. In that respect, I haven’t much completely new to say. But I did have a few musings that I thought fit to put down on virtual paper.
So let us begin…
The Perfectionist Fallacy, or the Fallacy of No Dividing Line
I’m not using official terminology here, but the fallacy employed by this guy could be called the Perfectionist Fallacy, or the Fallacy of No Dividing Line, depending on which angle you approach it from.
If you start from the presumption that something called Woman exists, then the Perfectionist Fallacy is to demand that any definition should apply to 100% of things that are Woman and exactly 0% of things that are not. This is really the form that the boyfriend here is using.
On the other hand, if you begin by asking people to make a definition (or any demarcation), and then nitpick it to death, I call it the Fallacy of No Dividing Line, which states: if your definition does not divide all of reality into two clear groups, where 100% of the first group falls under your definition and 0% of the second group falls under your definition, then (choose one or more, based on the situation and/or convenience): a) the thing you’re trying to define doesn’t really exist, b) your definition is useless, or c) the distinction you are trying to make is meaningless.
That form of the fallacy is often invoked in arguments of the type given by the fox character that I’ve highlighted here before. Claiming that you cannot, for example, say exactly what a sperm is, because some sperms don’t have tails, some have two heads, some can’t fertilize eggs, etc., and therefore, any distinction you make between the sexes based on gametes is totally meaningless (or at least, meaningless to whatever extent the fox desires in order to further their arguments).
I’ve also seen it applied to age of consent laws. Since you can’t say that all people equal to or over age X are mature enough to consent, and all people under age X are not mature enough, the age of consent is a meaningless distinction and should be abolished.
The two fallacies, as I said, are just two sides of the same coin. They use the same dirty tactics, but one is used more to prop up bad definitions and distinctions, while the other is more often used to destroy existing definitions and distinctions.
Tables and chairs
Sometimes when people debate this topic, they get into talking about things like tables and chairs. We take it for granted that we know what these everyday items are, but when pressed, few of us could give iron-clad definitions. I don’t consider a yoga ball to be a chair, but for sure, some people sit on them every day while they work on their computers. Is the seat in your car a chair? Is a part of a low wall that’s been fitted with arm rests a chair?
It’s hard to answer conclusively. It’s hard to give a definition of chair, or table, or coffee mug, that captures 100% of those things, and nothing that isn’t one of those things, and this can lead people into a conundrum, wondering if we can really know anything at all, or whether definitions in the end have any reliability.
This is exploited by TRAs (again, see previous essays) in which they like to say, “Reality is just what it is. Our definitions don’t constrain reality.” They say this to undermine our confidence in our everyday common sense and understanding, implying that there is no solid basis for definitively defining anything. But of course, the whole purpose is just to let them push their own definitions, which they can justify even less, without anyone questioning them.
The solution is not to play this game, or alternately, to turn the spear back on them, forcing them to drink their own acid—see The Magical Acid that Dissolves Only What I Want.
The World is Not a Math Problem
The fact is, definitions of real-world objects absolutely do not work the way that is presumed when using this fallacy. Part of the reason that people increasingly act this way, however, has to do with the problem of scientism replacing science.
It can be really powerful for some applications to treat everything like it can be perfectly modeled by numbers and equations. But the fact of the matter is that this is not true. Scientism is a quasi-religious movement that insists this is true, perverting science from a tool into a faith.
In math a circle is all points equidistant from a specific point called the center, and that definition captures all things that are circles and no things that are not circles. But things like tables and chairs are not like circles. They are not subject to such exact definitions.
While taking a break from surfing at the beach, you could mound up some sand, lay your surfboard across it, and put your beers and chips on the surfboard. The surfboard is being used as a table, but is it a table?
A table is not a mathematical construction, and so demanding a definition that is as precise as a mathematical definition is in itself a mistake (or deliberate obfuscation) from the start.
Scientific Definitions vs Mathematical Definitions
There certainly is a need for definitions of real-world objects that fit some kind of “scientific” criteria. The problem is that small-minded people like the boyfriend in this Twitter thread and the misguided fox do not understand the distinction between useful, scientific definitions, and mathematically precise definitions (no matter if they use the Perfectionist Fallacy or the Fallacy of No Dividing Line).
When the fox and similar sophists say, “Our definitions don’t constrain reality” they think they are saying something profound, because they mistakenly think that the definitions we apply to the real world are expected or intended to work like the definition of a circle in mathematics. But they don’t.
Things that fit that definition are circles, no matter whether we like it or not. There are no things that “kind of” fit the definition. Every shape is either a circle or it isn’t. Although we often think of circles as “preexisting” in the mathematical world, it could as easily be said that we create the concept by defining them.
And if you don’t like thinking of circles that way, we could create other mathematical definitions to make this more obvious. I am going to define a number as “fegullous” if it is either a) the square of an odd number, or b) a prime number with the last digit being 7. The first six fegullous numbers would then be 1, 7, 9, 17, 25, and 37.
I doubt anyone has come up with this concept before, so in a sense I have “created” fegullous numbers and “constrained” mathematical reality by this definition. Clearly, they exist, because some numbers can be shown to meet the definition. Also, no one could argue with me that somehow 4 could be a fegullous number. Furthermore, after studying fegullous numbers for centuries, no one would ever discover that the definition was imprecise or overlooked something. Fegullous numbers are exactly what I say they are, and nothing else.
Now, clearly the definitions of table, dog, star and woman are nothing like the definition of fegullous numbers. But people like the boyfriend in the Twitter thread, or the fox, however, like to act like definitions either are like that or must be like that in order to tear down the definitions they don’t like.
And that’s bullshit.
Scientific definitions of things in the real world do not operate like mathematical definitions. They do not constrain reality, but rather give us a way of understanding reality. The more accurate they can be made, the better our understanding of those things can be, but there is no requirement that they divide all of reality into things that either 100% meet the definition or 100% don’t.
The process of science is (at least in part) the process of developing and refining such definitions. Natural science has never started with a definition that is 100% unambiguous, but rather, strives to study its objects further and further in order to gradually remove more and more of that ambiguity.
Demanding, as the boyfriend does, that all definitions should be capture 100% of things they define and 0% of things that they don’t from the start is completely contrary to how science works. It’s idiotic.
Nevertheless, of course that’s not the only objection that can be made to his long, rambling, mistaken analysis. There is the additional issue that he ignores a lot of perfectly useful, non-contradictory definitions of woman that are able to capture “edge cases” rather well.
For example, in appealing not just to what reproductive organs and capabilities a woman currently has, but those which she may have had (but lost for some reason) or would have had but for some interruption or deviation in the process of her body’s development, you can easily capture pretty much all the exceptions you could consider.
There may be extremely rare cases that still cause some trouble, but to take those, which probably comprise less than 0.01% of people, and say that means we should throw out a definition that works for the rest, is absolutely insane.
Furthermore, there is no contradiction in admitting that, for a small number of cases, the categorization may be so difficult that we choose to, for social reasons, to defer to the person’s preference. But doing that for a person with ambiguous genetics and genitals does not entail that we must do that for people who have perfectly ordinary, totally unambiguous bodies.
I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, because I’m sure my readers are familiar with this kind of argument, and that’s not what I want to focus on.
I want to make one last point.
Reductio ad vaginam
A problem I’ve touched on earlier in my essays is that even if we followed some of these suggestions by TRAs to radically redefine what it means to be a woman in terms of unverifiable, subjective feelings, there would still be a need for “people with vaginas” / “people with uteri” / “people who menstruate” or whatever you might call them to identify themselves as a social group for various purposes.
For example, even if we accepted anyone as a “woman” who claimed to have the “gender identity of a woman”, it would still be the case that people who can get pregnant could face discrimination in hiring or restrictions on their rights to reproductive health care.
“People who menstruate” could still be subject to shame and even abuse while on their periods. “People with vaginas” could still be treated like property and subjected to misogyny because of their biology.
TRAs like to say things like, “Abortion isn’t a women’s issue, it’s an issue for anyone who can get pregnant!” and they are correct in a sense. The issue is an issue for people who can get pregnant, no matter what you call them. Calling them something different doesn’t solve the problem for them. It only makes it harder for them to talk about clearly, and thus to organize and advocate for themselves.
So, if we accept the idea of a definition based on gender identity, all these problems that face what we used to call “women” will still face the same people. They just won’t be able to call them “women’s issues.”
That will make it extremely difficult for them to deal with these problems, but if they are going to do so, then they’ll have to have a name for themselves. Maybe they could call themselves “fegullous” people, or how about just “fegules”.
So, then, society will be split into two groups: the fegules, and the others, which we might call “gules.”
The gules will likely try to oppress the fegules based on the fegules’ biological characteristics. Most (though not all) fegules will menstruate and be able to get pregnant at some time in their life, for example, and of course, the ones who can’t aren’t so easy to identify just by looking at them.
Gules, no matter whether they identify as men or women, will generally be sexually attracted to fegules, and thus these gules will try to coerce them into sex or rape them. Some fegules may try to hide from this by identifying as “men”, but of course gules often have a somewhat uncanny sense of who is a fegule, and if they figure out a man is also a fegule, that won’t really matter to them. They may even be more abusive.
In a society of gules and fegules, yes, some gules might dress in women’s clothing and have stereotypical feminine mannerisms and interests, and some fegules might dress in men’s clothing and have stereotypical masculine mannerisms and interests, and that will be all fine and good.
But being a gule or a fegule will still be something really important about you, and it will shape the way the society is structured. It will introduce challenges, most of them to the fegules, that they can’t just escape by the way they dress or act.
Now, some TRAs will try to say, “Oh, but we’re trying to liberate the fegules by allowing them to be men or women as they choose.” But if that’s the case, then it might occur to you that we should just cut out that extra step and instead of having gules and fegules that can be men or women, why don’t we just say, right now, a woman can dress and act however she likes, and a man can dress and act however he likes, and just keep calling them women and men.
Then we can save some time, and just go immediately to working on making progress from there in treating women better and establishing a more equal society with less restrictive gender roles.
That would seem to be the most reasonable way to do things.
But TRAs would rather we mix up all the names first. Some of them may really believe that the biological realities that lie underneath will just evaporate, because they really do believe our definitions are like magic words that create and destroy reality.
Others, I suppose, understand what they are doing, and do it with malice or just don’t care. I don’t know.
The only thing that’s clear is that it’s really, really stupid and pointless.
We have pretty good working definitions of men and women based on biology that capture almost every edge case. These definitions reflect aspects of reality, and are useful. There is no reason to change them (though we can continue to refine them), and changing them would only require us to create new words to capture the reality that the current definitions already capture.
This reality won’t go away with a change in vocabulary. But certainly, new realities of oppression and misery can and will likely be created if we pervert language and make it more difficult for people to talk about reality and identify the source of their oppression.
That should be clear to everyone, but sadly it’s not.