The Sophistry of "Gender"

The concept of "gender" is both useless and meaningless, and we should stop using it

The word “gender” is ubiquitous these days. It forms the basis of government policies, judicial court rulings, corporate policies, sports policies, medical and psychiatric treatment, even film-making polices. And it also acts as the grounding for a whole new terminology, for example gender identity, gender role, gender expression, etc. But what does “gender” itself mean?

If you have ever tried to get someone who claims to know to explain it to you, you will end up feeling like Alice talking to the Cheshire Cat. I have asked many people, from every day laymen to mental health professionals that have literally written the book on it, to explain the concept to me, and no one seems to have a real clue, despite being absolutely certain that they know.

One indication that there is no actual content to the concept of “gender” is that there is virtually no agreed upon definition of it, even among authorities that are ostensibly establishing policies regarding it. The World Health Organization says that “gender” refers to socially constructed “characteristics”. Web MD claims that it is a “multi-faceted social system”. Medical News Today says that it refers to how people “identify on the inside”. Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry says that it refers to certain “social categories”. The DSM-5 says that it refers to a “public lived role”. All of these definitions refer to different things, and in some cases they are mutually exclusive. A thing is either a social construct or an internal feeling, but it cannot be both.

Even taking the definitions independently and at face value, any attempt to understand them on their own terms reveals some kind of intellectual base-stealing…undefined terms, circular references, or word conflations…rendering the notion to be incoherent. Inevitably this base-stealing involves the concepts “male” and “female”, and their derivatives “boy/man” and “girl/woman”. If you look closely, you will notice that these terms are never defined, and will often be used interchangeably as labels for both sex categories and gender categories, even as it is being asserted that “gender” refers to something completely different than “sex”.

A classic, and perhaps the most troubling, example, is the DSM-5, which is basically the bible of the mental health profession. If the authors of the DSM-5 don’t have a clue as to what is meant by “gender”, it is no surprise that no one else does. The DSM begins by drawing a distinction between sex and gender. It says that sex refers to:

…the biological indicators of male and female (understood in the context of reproductive capacity) such as in sex chromosomes, gonads, sex hormomes, and non-ambiguous internal and external genitalia.

So, then, the categories male/female are biological categories. But there is something odd about this, specifically the parenthetical “understood in the context of reproductive capacity”. Isn’t reproductive capacity precisely what those terms, male and female, refer to? In what other context might those terms be understood, and how would they be understood differently in that context? We are never told, although this does stand as a warning of what is to come. It is also worth noting that, in its list of “indicators”, the DSM fails to include the sole indicator most relevant to the notion of sex, namely gamete production.

In any event, this is in contrast to gender which:

…is used to denote the public (usually legally recognized) lived role as boy or girl, man or woman, but, in contrast to certain social constructionist theories, biological factors are seen as contributing, in interaction with social and psychological factors, to gender development.

So, then, are we are to understand these “roles”, ie boy, girl, man, woman, to be gender categories? That seems to be the implication, but it isn’t entirely clear. And if they are, what does the DSM mean by these terms? For example, how does it define “woman” such that a person knows how to “live in public” as one, and such that the public (or even just the DSM) can recognize that a person is living as one? It clearly does not define “woman” as I would, ie as an adult human female, because that would make it a biological sex category, and it wouldn’t matter how one “lives” in public. So, then, how are we to understand the term “woman”? The DSM leaves us completely in the dark.

Having failed to provide any real clarity at all to the idea of “gender”, the DSM immediately jumps to this:

Gender assignment refers to the initial assignment as male or female. This usually occurs at birth, and thereby yields the “natal gender”.

Hold on a second. We have already established that “male” and “female” are biological sex, not gender, categories. See the explanation of sex above. So, even ignoring the sudden and bizarre introduction of the word “assignment”, the DSM is now conflating sex categories with gender categories, a mere sentence or two from having just told us they refer to different things!

And consider this new term, “natal gender”. Based on the DSM’s definition of “gender”, the term “natal gender” is literally nonsensical. The word natal refers to the time of one’s birth, but at the time of birth, a person has not lived in public at all, much less has the person lived in public playing a particular role. So how can a newborn baby even have a “gender” under this definition?

From there it just gets worse. Gender identity is:

…a category of social identity and refers to an individual’s identification as male, female, or occasionally, some category other than male or female.

This, despite the fact that the previously defined gender categories (roles?) were boy, girl, man, woman, not male/female/other. And, harkening back to the definition of sex above, why is there no parenthetical here about the context in which the terms male and female are to be understood? In the absence of any clarification, we can only assume that they are to be understood in the same context, but then that contradicts the claim that this is a “social” category. Understood in the context of reproductive capacity, the terms male and female are not “social” identities, but are instead biological identities. So WTF is the DMS talking about here?

Ultimately, it seems this is all just a game of sophistry. The fundamental categories underlying the whole discussion - male/female, boy/girl, man/woman - remain deliberately and completely undefined because, within the context of this theory of gender, they do not have any fixed meaning. The explanations of the concept “gender” rest on an understanding of these terms derived from outside the context of gender theory (ie, they are biological sex categroies), even as the theory is explicitly rejecting those understandings. If you try to truly grasp it, it all just collapses into incoherence. And I don’t mean that as just a throwaway dismissal. I mean it literally.

Ayn Rand coined a good phrase for this kind of thing: a floating abstraction. The basic idea is that all concepts are ultimately built by identifying and abstracting out of concrete, real world phenomena the essential characteristics of the phenomena. But if the concept gets used in a way that is detached from the real world phenomenon that gives rise to it, it becomes a “floating” abstraction, separated from reality. This is what is going on with “gender” and the entire lexicon connected to it. Gender identity, gender assignment, gender role, gender expression, etc….these are all concepts that are grounded in, and can only be made sense of in reference to, the objective reality of sex. They have nothing to do with “gender” unless one understands the term to be used simply as a synonym for “sex”, and yet that is an equivalence that the underlying theory explicitly rejects.

Words and concepts are both necessary and useful only to the extent that they help us makes sense of and communicate about the world around us. The concept of “gender” does no such thing. It obfuscates and confuses rather than clarifies. And it is completely unnecessary. We already have a terminology that allows us to make sense of and communicate about the world in the absence of this inexplicable concept called “gender”.

Sex - the two different reproductive body types organized around the production of either large (eggs) or small (sperm) gametes.

Male - a body type organized around the production of small gametes, or sperm

Female - a body type organized around the production of large gametes, or eggs

Intersex - a catchall term for several different disorders of sexual development, some of which result in either ambiguous physical sex traits or the development of physical sex traits characteristic of the opposite sex

Boy/Girl - an adolescent human male/female

Man/Woman - an adult human male/female

Masculine - characteristics or attributes the presence and/or degree of which are correlated with, but neither exclusive nor universal to, males

Feminine - characteristics or attributes the presence and/or degree of which are correlated with, but neither exclusive nor universal to, females

Armed with this basic nomenclature as grounding, I think we can understand and communicate about all of the topics and issues that the notion of “gender” is used to discuss, all without ever appealing to some new concept called “gender”. So, if we do not need a concept of “gender” to understand the world, why do so many people use it? That is certainly something that we ought to try and figure out. If the goal is not to help us understand the world, we should be very concerned about what the real goal actually is.