Identity and Essence

“Eugene is not talking about being “male” he is talking about being ‘a man’.”

Well, it’s a guy Eugene is quoting rather than Eugene himself. But how do you derive your claim from what he says?

“Being male is fundamental to who I am in a deeper way than any of these other characteristics.”

I see your point — and I’d certainly rather be me, a non-male human, than a canary — but my guess is that the canary example won’t really work: it is conceivable that this guy could, were circumstances only slightly different, be infertile, 45, or perhaps a biologist; no way is he going to be a canary. Humanity is simply taken for granted in this equation. And, given that gender is basically the FIRST thing people learn about themselves*, and is a definition that continues to be enforced throughout our lives, I’m not that surprised that someone would consider it the most essential label he can give himself.

*As an illustration of this, has anyone seen T3 yet? The female Terminator, in her first moments in our time, looks at a Victoria’s Secret billboard and learns how to flirt & display cleavage; Arnold puts on some star-shaped sunglasses, then rejects them as inappropriate. Gender norms in action, just minutes after “birth.”

I basically agree with Matt’s comment, but I think it needs to be phrased a little more pedantically to be quite right. Let F be the property of having witnessed Australia’s last three ignomious exits from World Cup qualifying. I couldn’t change from being an F to being a non-F and keep my identity simply because I couldn’t change whether I’m an F because I can’t change the past. But these are obviously accidental properties – I might have just ignored the games, and (maybe) it’s possible that Australia qualified. So that can’t quite be the distinction. What matters is whether I could have been different with respect to F-ness.

Fussy fussy I can imagine you saying, and not without justification. But some people think it makes a difference. For example, it is perfectly obvious that it is possible for me to be turned into a horned bullfrog, waiting for a kiss from a charming prince(ss) to turn me back into my current state, and still be me. On the other hand, people say it isn’t so obvious that I could have been born a horned bullfrog. Such is modern metaphysics.

So the real issue is whether Mr Phelan could have been born female, not whether he could have a sex change operation. I don’t see why he couldn’t have been, although the intuitions here are messy. When we imagine a parent saying to a male child “If you’d been a girl we would have called you Cameron”, it is a slightly odd use of ‘you’. (A bit like when we answer the friend’s telephone call and say “If you’d been another bloody telemarketer I’d have sent bullets down the phone line.”) So maybe sex is essential by current standards.

But this should show how absurd it is to try and base ethical conclusions on metaphysical considerations. The evidence for the metaphysical conclusions here mostly consists of intuitions about the propriety and impropriety of certain abtruse locutions. If you want to try and draw moral conclusions out of semantic/pragmatic data, you’re a lot braver man/woman/Holy Roman Canary than I.

Just to back up Mr Phelan on one point though. I think it’s pretty clear from the text that ‘other characteristics’ in the original post didn’t include being human. As a couple of people noted, he was taking for granted that humanity is essential not accidental.

Cool, dude (that was for you, Brad). Brian and I must have been writing at the same time… I was thinking about the male-at-birth stuff, too, but I think Matt’s actually got no worries on this score. He just needs the necessary condition- that F is an essential property of me *only if* I can’t lose it and still exist. He doesn’t need it as a sufficient condition, which is where he’d get into trouble about having watched various sporting events.

I guess that being born male does seem more plausibly essential than being male, but I’m worried about in-vitro sex changes (and various permutations further back as necessary) now…

Over at Easily Distracted, http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/ , Timothy Burke recently blogged about Lisa Ruddick’s essay _The Flight From Knowing_, http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty/ruddickpaper.shtml . There’s also an IA thread at http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000186.html .

Among the many things discussed in these threads is an idea Ruddick calls “analytical slippage”. She says:

“What current critical theory routinely does, though, is to collapse the difference, making the good thing look bad by calling it by the name of its near enemy-saying, for example, that anyone who speaks up for decency is imposing an oppressive social norm.

There seems to be a whiff of analytical slippage in this discussion, as can be expected when essentialism is discussed.

IA says:

“For Ruddick, this slippage — the “summoning the near enemy to discredit some precious ideal that most people wouldn’t part with easily” — constitutes a moral problem. It is the problem of demoralization:”

It seems that reducing the specifics of claims to near constructs, even if not “near enemies” and even if not designed to discredit, in order to apply a logic construct loses important information, human information.

Slippery stuff.

“but I AM the Holy Roman Emperor.”

Sooner or later it had to come out: Brad DeLong has a Charlemagne complex.

Interesting thread. I have to say, I am increasingly suspicious of the extreme social constructivist view of gender. But given the unlevel playing field, the persistence of the American cult of domesticity, and so on and so forth, this is a potentially dangerous concession for a feminist to make.

Lots of philosophers think that genotype fixes identity (Kripke seems to, and the entire debate about Parfit’s non-identity problem turns on this). And most of them assume that genotype determines sex – since sex is a question of chromosomes. But there is a good sense in which this is false. Genetically female rats injected with prenatal testosterone have male genitalia and behavior. The male economist could have been a girl, if his androgens had been neutralized prenatally.

I have no reason to want to defend Eugene’s essentialist correspondent, but if I read him correctly he is *not* saying that being make is a more fundamental fact about him than being human, but that it is more fundamental than his age, profession, or fertility.

“I happen to be 40 years old, happen to be an economist, and happen to be fertile, but I AM a man. I am not a human who happens to be a man. Being male is fundamental to who I am in a deeper way than any of these other characteristics.”

“These other characteristics” must surely mean age, profession, and fertility status, not species.

He’s saying, then, that he’d still be himself if he grew older, or became a lawyer, or became infertile, but that he would be another person if he became a woman. Well, that may not be right, but it certainly isn’t silly. Consider, for example, that most transgender people take new names, and a name is a central symbol of identity.

While a TG may contend that gender is essential, they’re not talking about their physical sex. Which comes around and bites things like laws restricting marriages to physical male/female unions in the, erm.

Deirdre McCloskey certainly seemed to believe that being an economist was more fundmental to her than being a man …

Meanwhile, I will quixotically assert that manhood and economisthood are mere incidents to my personality, but that it is essential to my being that I am 30 years old. It is absolutely fundamental to who I am.

Byword, pg, etc–
You’re right that philosophical considerations about the metaphysics of essence are beside Phelan’s point–we wouldn’t convince him that gay marriage was OK, even if he was reading this and accepted our points. I like thinking about metaphysics more than about how people rationalize their anti-gay prejudices.

Mark–I think the name change may partly be due to the high correlation of name and gender. It would be awkward to go through life as a woman named “Matt” or “Mark.” Anecdotally, most TGs seem to choose names that share an initial with their old one. An interesting tidbit: One TG friend-of-a-friend obtained a new birth certificate with her new name. I don’t know whether that supports or opposes the idea that it’s a new person. The purpose wasn’t metaphysical–it allowed her to get legal ID with her new name on it, because she didn’t think it would be a good idea to out herself as TG every time she had to show her driver’s license.

I think skapusniak has nailed down the nugget of this discussion; therefore, I want to address another issue.

One, I hasten to add, that has already been raised by invisible adjunct: the relationship between gender and identity and societal constructs.

I understand and appreciate the reluctance to admit of inherent male and female identity traits (we can all agree on the male and female physical traits, yes?); it’s a slippery slope from “Many girls tend to play with dolls” to “All women should be legally required to bear and raise all the children they can.” But I think it’s useful to look at it this way:

Starting with the concept that “gender” is a social construct, there’s also “sex,” which covers more innate characteristics. Gender traits are largely arbitrary across societies – whether it’s men or women who wear their hair long, or who expose their legs. Sex traits are less arbitrary (although far from universal) – men fight wars, women tend to infants. Now here’s my point – both of these groups are overlapping sets within and across individuals. I’m envisioning a diagram with 2 centers – male & female. Gender & sex traits are denoted with different colors, and plotted according to relative position. For any number of characteristics, any individual will look like a cloud, usually centered around one of the two points. The sex traits will usually cluster more tightly, while the gender ones will vary much more. There’s a fair amount of overlap in the sex traits – Joan of Arc and George Bernard Shaw are flipped on warrior tendencies – while there’s a huge overlap in gender traits – my sister the rugby player, your father the home cook. Maybe this is pointless, but the mental image is useful for me.

The reason I bring it up is that asserting that there are no sex traits, only gender traits, is counterproductive. People sense (rightly, I think) that their identities are, in some ways at least, derived directly from their sex. Tell them that it’s society that makes a 8 month old boy choose a ball over a doll, and you’ve lost the argument – they won’t buy it. But if you insist that _each individual_ can be all over this map, with broad social tendencies to gather at the respective centers, then you sound reasonable, and you’ve made an argument for tolerance and open-mindedness.

“(we can all agree on the male and female physical traits, yes?)”

Actually, no, some people would not agree with this. At the extreme end of the social contsructivist spectrum, the sex/gender distinction (which was one of the major contributions of feminist theorists in the 70s and 80s) doesn’t go far enough: even to maintain the notion of two sexes is to construct a false binary.

I agree that this is counterproductive. Very few people outside a select subgroup of academics actually believe that there are no sex traits. I don’t think such arguments do much to strengthen the appeal of feminism. But there is so much gender reaction out there that I don’t know how to parse the distinction without lending support to the “boys will be boys and girls will be mothers” crowd.

>>For example, if you define the male/female distinction as “has/lacks an externally visible penis greater than x centimeters”, the only trait that you’ll find common in all males and absent in all females is that same penis.

Depends where you set the cutoff point, as the rabbi said to the bishop.