Welcome to the lab. Let’s see what’s on the slab.

Shh. Let the examination begin!

Part -2: How to Think

The pleb-tier way of thinking about gender is rigid, binary and naturalistic. There is penis. There is vagine. And that’s all there is to say about it.

This way of thinking comes in part from certain prejudices favoring the firm, robust, masculine hard sciences (mm!) over the flaccid, effeminate, soft social sciences.

But the thing is, even if you’re a science bro, you should appreciate that this kind of black-and-white rigidity is not really a good way to think about anything.

Even Richard Dawkins, the most manly robust skeptical science man in the world, came up with a thought experiment to illustrate this point in biology. It goes like this. 

Imagine you take a rabbit, and you place her mother next to her. And next to the mother, the mother’s mother. And in a long line you lay out the lineage of rabbits for millions of generations. Eventually, you get to an ancestor that is definitely not a rabbit; it’s, say, the common ancestor of the rabbit and the duck, or whatever the fuck peeps are. So at one end of the line you have an ordinary modern rabbit, and at the other some kind of prehistoric animal that is definitely not a rabbit, though from each generation to the next, the difference between mother and daughter is imperceptible. So, without ever arriving at a definite point where we can say, this is the boundary dividing the rabbits from the non-rabbits, there is nonetheless a continuous genealogy of organisms leading from non-rabbits to rabbits.

So what we have on our hands here is a spectrum of rabbit-ness. You could compare it to the spectrum between boys and men.

A 10-year-old is a boy, a 30 year old is a man, and somewhere in between the boy becomes a man, though there’s no single day where the dividing line occurs.

But the human brain does not like this idea. We naturally prefer binaries to spectrums, which could be why traditional societies usually have some kind of ritual to mark the exact moment when a boy becomes a man, usually involving doing some kind of fucked up shit to kids. What is it with men?

So words like “man” and “rabbit” are nouns, and nouns generally have a binary function in our grammar. We don’t have words for things that are slightly a rabbit, moderately a rabbit, or mostly-but-not-all a rabbit. 

Things are either rabbits or they aren’t. But that’s just a rule of the English language, and nature does not abide by the rules of English.

This kind of discrepancy between the way words are used, and the way biology actually works, is the reason it’s so difficult to explain evolution to people who are new to the idea.

As the beautiful old creationist proverb goes, a monkey cannot give birth to a man. It ain’t natural. But thinking about it certainly turns me on. Mm.

I’m just gonna palpate the interior here. Palpate. Palpate, Palpate.

Part -1: Biological Sex

So the boundaries of the concept “rabbit” seem well-defined at first, but any attempts to actually say what those boundaries are seem to fail. The same is true of pretty much any word we want to define.

So, take for instance the concept of a chair, an example philosophers like to use because they sit on their asses all day doing absolutely nothing useful to society.

How do you decide what is and isn’t a chair? 

One way you could do this is to come up with a list of necessary or sufficient conditions that describe what counts as a chair. So, for example you could say that a chair is a man-made object, with a backrest, that people sit on.

Well, but what about a rock naturally shaped like a chair that people sit on? What about a sculpture of a chair that no one sits on? What if the chair was made by a woman you misogynistic trash?

It’s not really possible to come up with a list of conditions that defines every way we use the word “chair.” Instead what we have are a bunch of related properties, like being man-made, being sat on, and so on, none of which is alone necessary or sufficient to define what it really means to be a chair.

So, with that in mind, what happens when we try to define the biological categories of male and female? Well, the first thing we’ll do is come up with a list of anatomical features, including:

Chromosomes, Gonads, Genitals, Hormones, and Secondary sex characteristics

We might say a female is a person with XX sex chromosomes, ovaries, a vagina, a certain hormone balance, and secondary sex characteristics like breasts and soft skin that you just wanna pour milk all over.

But hold on, we know that there are transsexual women who have female secondary sex characteristics, and hormone levels, and genitals, but not ovaries or XX sex chromosomes.

So insisting that there are exactly two biological sex categories leaves us unable to accurately describe the anatomy of people who don’t conform to our preconceived conceptual schema.

Now some geniuses think they can overcome that problem by pronouncing that henceforth, only chromosomes shall be used to determine sex.

But even insisting on a purely chromosome-based categorization doesn’t always work, because there are intersex people who have just an X chromosome, or XXY, XYY, XXX, or other atypical karyotypes.

There are also people with a condition called Swyer syndrome, who are born with a uterus, fallopian tubes, a cervix and a vagina, but have XY sex chromosomes.

Now if you’re aware of all this, and you still want to insist on strictly binary sexual categories, then you’re trying to force reality to fit your conceptual scheme, rather than adapting your concepts to fit reality. And that, is what bad science looks like.

Bring me another beaker of milk, nurse, this is a big one!

Part 0: Social Constructs

I haven’t even started talking about gender yet, I’ve been so goddamn busy prematurely cock-blocking the penetrating scientific insights of armchair anatomists.

Now, this is the part of the video where I’m sure you’ve already guessed that I say that gender is different from biological sex, and yes, it is a social construct.

But what is a social construct? A common misconception is that something’s being a social construct means it has no reality, that it’s just a figment of the imagination. But that is not the case.

Money is a social construct. But money is very real. All our lives are structured around money to some extent, and the limits placed on us by our finances are often just as restrictive as the limits placed on us by gravity.

However, the difference between money and gravity is that gravity works the same way no matter how humans behave, whereas the very existence of money is contingent on certain shared human behaviors and beliefs.

If our practices change, money changes. Does gold in World of Warcraft count as money? Well, does it work like money? Yeah, pretty much. So it’s money. 

Welcome to cyber-reality (drinks).

And you would be foolish to try to determine the monetary value of actual gold by investigating its chemical properties. Instead you should investigate the economic behavior of human beings, and the symbolic function of gold in our societies.

The same goes for gender. Examining human bodies [speculum] is a lot more fun than doing sociology, but chromosomes and genitals will not tell you which gender wears lipstick, or raises the children, or scars the skin in order to embody the spirit of the crocodile.

So even though social science is soft and girly and totally “un-robust,” if we’re serious about understanding gender it’s kind of the only option we have.

Because not everything is reducible to biology. Sometimes people with XY chromosomes have soft skin that you just want to pour milk all over. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, because it’s my choice as an adult and it’s my right. If I happen to like the way it looks running rivulets down her sweet smooth face that’s not harming anyone so just leave me alone.

Part 1: The Half-Woke View

One popular way of trying to make sense of gender is depicted in a diagram called the genderbread person.

The diagram shows a series of sliders representing spectrums of biological sex, gender expression, and identity. The sex spectrum represents intersex and transsexual people better than the binary categories. The identity slider represents the psychological aspect of gender, including transgender and non-binary identities, and the expression slider represents the social performance of gender.

So this way of defining gender is a lot more sophisticated than the view that refuses to look beyond biology. But the genderbread person is still a massive simplification, since it presents the poles of these spectrums, like masculinity and femininity, as if they were eternal and stable, when in fact, they’re socially constructed and historically contingent.

The 18th century idea of masculinity is very different from, say, the contemporary hipster idea of masculinity.

And class and racial differences are excluded from the diagram altogether.

So if we want to know what gender is in the sense of the social behavior of gender, we should just ask sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, and they’ll tell us that there as many masculinities and femininities as there are cultures.

But that still doesn’t answer what it means to psychologically identify as a man or a woman, nor does it tell me the relationship between society’s norms and me as an individual.

But that’s what I really want to know. I want to who I am inside, what to make of all this emptiness, whether I’m really a man or a woman or something else. I just want to know who I am, doc. [long pause]

It’s 2017 man. I don’t know what gender I am. I listen to synthwave. Let’s do some dabs. It’s fucking 2017 man.

Part 2: Feminist Perspectives

If you want to advocate against gender injustice, you’re going to need to come up with an account of what it means to be a “woman” in order to make sense of what you’re doing. 

And feminists with different political goals will tend to define womanhood differently.

So TERFs who think that patriarchal oppression is based solely on the reproductive anatomy of women’s bodies often end up basically on the same page as the science bros. There is penis. There is vagine. Penis oppresses vagine.

Now a more sophisticated radical feminist like Catherine MacKinnon might argue that the essential thing is not anatomy but a certain kind of power dynamic, womanhood being defined by sexual submission and objectification.

Whereas a queer feminist like Judith Butler might want to place more emphasis on the performative nature of gender, and on the possibility of “queering” practices like drag to reveal its contingent and imitative nature.

And a transgender feminist will more likely want to define womanhood in terms of a psychological state, perhaps a proprioceptive sense of belonging in a woman’s body.

So, which of these definitions are correct?

Well, all of them are, in a way. We should adopt the definition that makes the most sense in a given context. If we’re advocating for abortion rights, it makes sense to take the biological view. If we’re talking about the way women are treated in public spaces, then it makes more sense to take the performative view.

We have to try to always understand a broad concept like gender in a given context. It’s like yeah, in some contexts I want to pour milk on someone else’s face, but in other contexts I like to have warm milk poured all over my goddamn face and tits.

Ah fuck. Uh, Nurse? Get my lawyer on the phone.

Part Infinity: Final Enlightenment

Now maybe you’re not satisfied with this answer. You’re thinking it’s fine to have operational definitions of something for a specific purpose, but you want to know what is gender really? What does it really mean to be a man or a woman?

Well, these are philosophical questions, and the defining feature of philosophical questions is that they have no final answer.

Philosophy can only take you to the end of a cul-de-sac. It can help you understand the cul-de-sac, but that’s just as far is our little monkey brains go.

Once you reach the dead end, that’s it, you’re done. There’s no more thinking you can do. It’s time sit back, relax, and get inspired to live each moment bolder and louder with an ice-cold Pepsi. Because like corporations own us man.