72 shades of gender

Recent events have been punctuated by strange debates about sex and gender, reminiscent of theological quarrels about Adam's navel. However, these controversies have an origin and an internal logic that this article sets out to explore.uisser.

The 1^er June 2022 saw the release in the USA of a documentary entitled «What is a Woman? Narrated by political columnist Matt Walsh, the film features a series of interviews during which this question is put to a variety of feminists, health professionals and academics. Their answers are by turns embarrassed, confused or obscure; it seems that none is able to solve this enigma.

A therapist, for example, explains that «we now know that some women have penises and some men have vaginas», while the director of the «Women, Gender and Sexuality» program at the University of Tennessee retorts to the narrator: «when someone tells us who they are, we should believe them»; seeking to say what a woman objectively is, he greedily points out, signals condescension and transphobia.

How did we get here?

Up until a decade ago, the term woman had a common meaning that was widely shared across the spectrum of moral and political sensibilities. It referred to an adult female human being. Today, however, the exercise requires knowledge of a rich nomenclature articulated around a metaphysics of sex and identities trans. Produced in concert by LGBTQ associations and certain academic niches, transgenderism consists of a set of revolutionary ideas about human nature and the relationship between our bodily reality and our subjective experience: the assertion that it is possible to be literally «trapped» in a body that is not one's own, that people are the «sex» they claim to be regardless of evidence to the contrary, or that our «sexual» identity is in no way determined by biology.

It's a basket full of theoretical resources for making explicit the experience of people whose ’gender identity« does not conform to the traits associated with the sex they were »assigned at birth«, and for promoting the institutional and linguistic reforms postulated as necessary to defend the rights of these people. This movement raises both philosophical and practical challenges, which are at the heart of the objections formulated by a number of philosophers, psychologists and scientists such as Alex Byrne, Kathleen Stock, Colin Wright, Tomas Bogardus, Debra Soh and Paul McHugh.

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Very much in vogue in recent years, transgenderism is nonetheless a recent seedling planted in the soil of half a century's worth of gender theories. Borrowed from linguistics and originally designating the social and cultural traits associated with each of the two sexes, «gender» took conceptual flight under the pen of feminist intellectuals in the 1970s. The distinction between sex and gender became a tool for condemning the arbitrariness of social norms that subjugated women, and denouncing the «biological determinism» that was supposed to justify them. Gradually, gender came to refer not only to the characteristics associated with femininity and masculinity, but to capture the very meaning of the terms "sex" and "gender". man and woman. The latter are then qualified as «gendered», i.e. no longer determined by sex but by cultural dynamics and social roles. Being a man and being a woman become «socially constructed» categories, like marriage or traffic rules.

It is in the wake of these developments that recent conceptual innovations are emerging. A number of advocates of the cause trans have realized that defining women in terms of «social role» means excluding from this category male transgenders who do not intentionally present themselves as women, or who are not perceived as such by society. A definition based on «social role» implies that only those individuals to whom society assigns the subordinate roles and statuses considered by feminist literature as constitutive of «being a woman» are included in the ’woman« category.

Circular or incoherent theories

This problem of inclusivity therefore called for a new definition that went beyond the distinction between sex and gender, and depended neither on biological reality nor on a «social construct»: the psychology of the individual. In a way, sex becomes gender, which is determined by subjective experience: the only necessary and sufficient condition for being a man or a woman is to identify oneself as such. Canadian actress Ellen Page, who became Elliot in 2020, can thus be considered overnight not only as a man in the traditional sense of the word, but as never having even been a woman. The distinction is between an «assigned» sex on the one hand, and a «gender identity» on the other. The latter designates a person's intimate feeling of being a man, a woman or one of the countless gender identities that escape this binarity (queer, non-binary, two-spirited, xenogenre, etc.). By 2022, there were already at least 72.

While this revision is motivated by a concern for inclusiveness, it nonetheless leads to a definition that isn't one: «a woman is a person who identifies herself as a woman» tells us nothing about what the word designates. This difficulty explains the confused and hesitant reactions to the question «What is a woman?».»

This is not an isolated problem. Gender theories are faced with a series of contradictions and inconsistencies: how can an individual's innermost conviction make him make male, female or neither? Why should we subscribe to a radical dualism between the conscious subject and its body? Why isn't the authority conferred on self-identification in matters of sexual identity transferable to other attributes or categories, such as height or age? How does one define the individual experience of one's gender identity without referring to the singular bodily experience of belonging to one sex or the other? In other words, how is it possible to know experimentally what it is to be something you are not? This list of questions is not exhaustive, and it's impossible to do justice here to the various Byzantine quarrels that animate the field of gender theories.

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Is it possible to resolve these questions convincingly without abandoning some of the assertions and presuppositions put forward? Probably not. Like the ideology of «social justice» (the notorious «wokism» that corrupts our societal debates), transgenderism necessarily requires a form of selective denial of the constraints of reality: biological and evolutionary factors must be ignored, insofar as they counter the belief that the conscious subject is radically independent of the body and that subjective experience has the power to emancipate identity from the objective materiality of sex.

It goes without saying that objections to transgenderism in no way presuppose a questioning of the good intentions that motivate the actors, nor do they suggest a denial of the rights of people suffering from gender dysphoria. However, to quote Claude Habib in the conclusion of his essay The Trans Question (2021), «if a poorly lateralized individual were to propose abolishing left and right on the pretext that these categories have no meaning for him, and that their pseudo-existence ends up vexing him, it would be wrong to concede it to him». For many people, believing that an adult male who identifies as a woman is literally a woman requires a degree of suspension of disbelief that borders on an act of faith.

Olivier Moos holds a doctorate in contemporary history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the University of Fribourg. He is the author of recent critical study transgenderism and its reception among Christian philosophers.

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