Ameliorating the concepts
Jon Pike talks about conceptual engineering and That Word:
There is a growing approach in philosophy called “conceptual engineering”. It’s a cool name for an interesting project. Indeed, one of my colleagues at the Open University is heavily involved as a conceptual engineer. They look at our concepts and see if they are doing good work — if they are functioning well. If not, then we should try to improve them (“ameliorate” is the key term). The chief thinker behind this is Sally Haslanger; the title of her main work Resisting Reality: Social Constructions and Social Critique gives you a flavour of what she is up to.
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So far, the term (and concept) “female” has seemed relatively immune from such attempts. The term “female” is straightforward. It’s generally accepted as an ordinary scientific and biological term. You can see that it is unambiguously a sex term rather than a gender term by realising that it applies across species: we don’t have woman squirrels, but we do have female squirrels.
It’s a good thing that we have some fixed and simple terms that apply to regular and important features of the world. It enables us to describe those features of the world in straightforward ways. To have the term “female” is a help in describing features of the world that matter — sexed features. That there are such features of the world seems to me important, and obvious. You only need to look at the work of Caroline Criado-Perez to see why, and the emergence of organisations like Sex Matters is part of a political move to focus on those features of the world where, well, sex matters.
The word is useful, we need it, so let’s not re-engineer it so that it means something else.
Creasy, and others, want to decouple “female” from the reality of biological sex. That project I find intellectually disturbing. It’s lots of other things — I think it’s politically damaging to the party we both support, I think it’s an affront to women, and I think it radically distorts the discussion. In policy, I think a redefinition of “female” would be disastrous, most obviously in health care. In the words of Keir Starmer, it generates more heat than light.
The affront to women is particularly…noticeable, in my view. It’s very affrontful. It’s an absolute classic of the “Well women don’t matter much so…” school of thought.
But my concern is in some ways quite narrow. I write about sport, and sex categorisation in sport. Here, it is obvious that sex matters. I have to be able to refer to biological sex in order to do my job. Creasy, then, is blunting the tools — the words — that I need. I argue for this claim: it is unfair for people with male advantage to compete in female sport. I try to give reasons for that view, to argue for it with governing bodies, to work out ways to apply it to sport policy. Whether people agree or disagree with that substantive view, this is legitimate academic work. In order to do it, I have to use a term to refer to biological sex. If Creasy succeeds, I will have to reorder my position. I will have to say that “it is unfair for people with advantages accruing from Homeostatic Property Cluster One to compete in sport designated for people with Homeostatic Property Cluster Two” or something similar. If we reached that point, there would be a loss to public debate. It would become obscure and technical.
Not to mention just way too goddam much trouble. If we have to use nine words instead of one to name women we won’t be able to name women at all, because any time we try people will just walk away.
And of course they hardly ever talk about redefining “male”.
That’s what I said when cladists wanted to rename reptiles “non-avian, non-mammalian amniotes”, For some odd reason, their term has never caught on. Biology books (and teachers) still use the word “reptiles”, now considered an illegitimate term by some biologists.
Meanwhile, no matter how they try to redefine their way into womanhood by redefining “woman”, most people are going to continue to use “woman” the way they always have, and be able to tell the difference. Bullying may stop some people from using the word, but it’s unlikely it will reach everyone.
Languages as spoken evolve towards simplification, not complication. Chinese, while a bit of a challenge to write in traditional character-script, is a very easy one to learn to speak, because time has shortened its words of all inflections. For example, ‘what is your name?’ becomes ‘ni jeow sumo?’ It is literally ‘you name what?’
If asked that in China, my reply would be ‘wo jeow Omar.’ Me name Omar.’ (As in ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’)
So ‘I was walking down the street yesterday with the person of Homeostatic Property Cluster Two to whom I am married….’ is unlikely to catch on, except among nightclub comedians.
I am typing this with difficulty into the laptop owned by the person of Homeostatic Property Cluster Two to whom I am married and it is a genuine bugger to use, but I have no alternative as we are in a motel room and it is the only one we brought with us. (Who says the Age of Chivalry is gone?) So I will have to leave off here.
On the other hand, probably all of our pets are good boys or girls.
I’m not sure if the author intended it, but that phrasing seems to buy into the idea that woman is a ‘gender word’, which is why women are not exclusively female. But it emphatically is not gendered; it’s a noun that refers to a specific subset of humans, with sex as one of the qualifying characteristics. I’d have phrased it differently in order to step away from this TRA trope.
I wonder what Simone de Beauvoir would have made of all this. Which reminds me, I’ve never read The Second Homeostatic Property Cluster. Past time to remedy that.
lol
Of course it’s only a matter of time before “people with Homeostatic Property Cluster Two” suffers the same fate as “woman”/”female” and is reinterpreted to include people like Thomas and Ivy. So once again we are left searching for another, even more indirect, way of referring to the Sex That Must Not Be Named, which will in turn be appropriated etc. etc. ad Infinitum.
As a non-biologist my working definition of woman is “person with a strong preponderance* of innate physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers”, but as we all know the word “mother” has already been redefined as “parental figure who identifies as female” or something similar. So I have to re-formulate my working definition as something like “person with a strong preponderance of innate physical traits more representative of birthing parents than non-birthing parents”. But then again, who says giving “birth” has anything to do with crude physical… you get the idea. The Redefinition Treadmill never ends, so we might as well stick with “woman” (none of this “cis” crap!) as we should have done all along. Those who want to get it do, and the rest are unreachable anyway.
* A handy way of getting around rhetorical got-yous like “Intersex”, “What about women born without a [insert common female trait], huh?”, “So is someone’s had a hysterectomy, she’s no longer a woman?” etc.
@Bjarte
I think a common biological way of phrasing it is “people who are an on the developmental pathway to produce small/large gametes”.
Size is a continuum ;)
Sonderval, that isn’t a bad approach, but then they’re going to throw “what about women who passed menopause?” You’d need to specify that pathway stretches far enough to include those who are on the end of the pathway, having once produced small/large gametes.
Indeed. To conclude that “woman” is a gender word because it doesn’t pair with nonhumans is … Well, it’s a sort of non sequitur consistent with the TRAs, requiring a suppressed premise along the lines of, “if a word can’t be transferred to another species, then it’s a ‘gender’ word.” From such a premise, we can derive obviously silly conclusions. For example, one might argue that because we don’t have ewe humans, “ewe” is a “gender” word. (I’m keeping gender in scare quotes, as outside this particular topic, the word is and has always been used to refer to male and female.) The real reason we don’t have woman squirrels is revealed by substituting the definition for the word itself, which gives adult human female squirrels. It’s no more profound than noting that we don’t have square circles: it’s analytic. Squares are polygons composed of four sides of equal length that meet at four angles of equal degree.