Why I Think We Can Do Away With The Term 'Gender'

 

In a recent blog post, and a subsequent video, I’ve been suggesting that gender is a problematic term that has been so distorted and abused definitionally that we could probably do without it. Some folks have found this one hard to swallow – you can almost hear them saying: Even though you’ve been so right on everything else, James, I think this one is a step too far.

But I don’t think it is a step too far – I’ve been debating it for a few weeks now, on the back of responses to my post about sex and coin-tossing, and nobody has been able to convince me so far that I’ve got this wrong. And I’m quite open to being convinced, because my life will probably be a lot easier if I can accept gender as a valid term. But, so far, I cannot. No one was brave enough to debate it with me on camera (the invitation still stands), so I had fun convincing Chat GPT instead.

For a fuller elaboration of my position, you should read (or re-read) my original article Sex And The Gender Agenda. Here I will lay out my position on gender even more comprehensively, and tackle the objections proffered too. I don’t think we need the term gender, and it’s for two principal reasons: 

1)     Sex is a perfectly adequate category for defining males, females, and those in the tiny minority who fall into a category that can be defined as intersex.

2)     Everything else that you can put forward as justification for the term gender is better defined under a broader category of maleness and femaleness. 

That is to say, sex is a comprehensive enough term to define males, females and intersex people, and every subset definition that people claim falls under the umbrella term gender is, I think, already adequately defined on its intrinsic terms, where gender adds no further utility to the equation. In the last few decades, we have learned a lot about how complex individuals are – and numerous revisions of the broadness of the term ‘gender’ have been put forward as ways to foster greater understanding, inclusivity and tolerance. But I submit that what we’ve actually learned is that there is a lot more to being male and female than we ever realised, and that what needs establishing are broader categories that encapsulate the deeper complexities of being male and female.

Consequently, I am compelled to conclude that gender has failed in both the ontological and the epistemological category - that is, there isn't a clear way to define what gender is (ontology), and there isn't a way we can know gender (epistemology) in any objective sense. If we can neither define gender satisfactorily or know what it is for an individual, then the term has no real utility, and promotion of it can only lead to both abuse of the term and confusion. Once you add to that the fact that identity is a melting pot of complex feelings, thoughts and sensations, and the fact that the things we tendentiously assert as being properties that make up the package of gender (masculinity, femininity, sexuality, etc) are perfectly sufficient as descriptors in themselves, it is difficult to make any case for the utility of the word 'gender'

If people identify as something that has no basis in reality - such as if a 50 year old woman claimed to be 40 or a young boy claimed to be superman, we would rightly say they are living under a delusion or a fantasy. It is, of course, slightly harder to identify the delusion of gender than the delusion of being a younger age or having superhero status, but it's still illusory if it isn't based on reality.

Struggles with identity and development are real things - but once we categorise masculinity, femininity, sexuality, hormonal development, etc as traits that can be identified and considered without the need to introduce a vague term like gender, we do not then need to cite those things as being independent criteria to which we can appeal to in order to confirm an individual's claims about their gender.

As an analogy, suppose I describe my garden as having a lawn, some flowers, a shed, 3 trees and a decking area - and you come along and say that gardens should also be underpinned by the descriptive term 'Fairydust'. That is, as well as my telling you about my garden's shed, flowers, etc, you say I have to also define what type of fairydust it is. And I ask what you mean by fairydust, and you say its category of fairydust depends on whether it has a lawn, a patio, trees, a greenhouse, bushes, sheds, etc - I'd be fully justified in saying that the fairydust category adds nothing that is already covered in the descriptive properties of the garden.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be both epistemologically impractical and societally catastrophic in this case.

On top of gender's lack of ontological and epistemological merit, the introduction of the word causes unnecessary additional confusion into the world that wouldn't otherwise be there. People struggling with their sexuality, or with their sense of self-identity, or with anxiety, or with their body shape may say they are experiencing gender dysphoria or that they are born in the wrong body, when what they are really experiencing are things within the realm of being male and female. There are, of course, other motives to ascribing gender to individual attributes - a desire to be accepted, a desire to be different or break conformity, a desire to take the pressure off particular life situations, an incentive to obtain success in other environments (like sports competitions), the need to seek attention, and so on. But so far, those debating with me have remained largely uninterested in these considerations.

Let me now tackle some objections that repeatedly came my way during the debates:

Objection 1: Denying the validity of the term gender discriminates against or trivialises the people struggling with gender dysphoria.

It’s difficult to believe that people would put that forward as an objection – they miss the obvious error in their thinking. I'm denying the need for the word for gender at all, so you can't cite gender dysphoria as a problem, when what we are questioning is the term gender itself. A fundamental tenet of my position is that I don’t believe there can be a mismatch between someone’s biological sex and what they claim as their gender identity, because the latter lacks any empirical clarity or objectivity. So citing gender dysphoria (the very definition of the aforementioned) as a counter-argument still leaves all your work ahead of you, because you haven’t provided a valid definition of gender, much less a superior argument that defeats my two primary propositions.

Objection 2: Isn’t your position denying their humanity and their right to identify however they choose?

The problems with gender that this objection tries to capture are typified by this quote from Cade Hildreth, who calls himself a non-binary LGBTQ+ entrepreneur. He says: “Gender can’t be binary, because it is a personal identity and is socially constructed. One’s gender identity could be woman, man, transgender, nonbinary, or an infinite number of other possibilities.”

Last I looked, there are over 40 listed genders in the UK on standard lists, and it has probably grown by now. How can anyone make sense of the different combinations? I've heard people refer to themselves as they/them, he/they, she/they, he/she, two-spirit - it's not possible to validate these claims. Unless you just say that anyone is anything they claim to be - in which case, it no longer bears enough resemblance to empirical reality to be meaningful. So, basically, gender is your personal identity and there are an infinite number of potential genders. This kind of thinking reflects what is happening more widely among our youth today, where a reservoir of social contagion has washed over our young, and they think that they can choose their gender to reflect their personal feelings about their unique identity. The desired ability for every individual to choose their unique gender makes the term gender utterly meaningless, as there are potentially as many different genders as there are human beings.

Objection 3: Unfortunately for you, humans don’t fit into the neat binary boxes you are trying to force them into.

Well, firstly, I’m not trying to force anyone anywhere, I’m simply questioning the validity of an empirically dubious word that no one so far has been able to define adequately. Secondly, I am not suggesting that identity falls easily into neat boxes – but that does not mean that the categories male and female are too small to encapsulate the properties that others are trying to claim under the umbrella gender. There are many traits that overlap between the sexes, which means females can show up as extreme in more masculine categories, and males can show up as extreme in more feminine categories. In other words, in some traits, females can appear more male than males, and males can appear more female than females. But I believe it is folly to mechanically confuse masculine and feminine outliers with gender dysphoria. The vast majority of people who have atypical personality profiles are still within the natural distribution of male and female identities – they are not ‘born in the wrong body’. In most cases, what is perceived as “gender identity” is part of their personality profile from within a binary sex category, usually related to masculinity and femininity, but confused with one’s sex.

Objection 4: You are disregarding all the cases where someone you know (or know of) has claimed to be so much happier and more fulfilled after they changed course and identified as someone of the opposite sex.

This doesn’t convince in the slightest. I think we all know that such a testimony is absolutely not a reliable metric for truth propositions, and nigh-on impossible to accurately measure, due to all the complex variables. For example, as Christians we all know of many people who claim to have fallen away from belief in God, and no longer want to have a relationship with Christ. In their dozens, they tell us that since they left Christianity, they are happier, more fulfilled and less pressured - but those of us who know the Lord Jesus know that this perceived change for the better is a huge misjudgement. How we say we feel about something is often transitory, incomplete, and not necessarily a reliable measure of what's true and factual.

Objection 5: What about transgender people? – they are being discriminated against in your argument.

Same as with gender dysphoria, if you can’t satisfactorily define gender, then you can’t satisfactorily define transgender either. You can’t keep referring to transgender people without really defining what you mean by gender, how you define a transgender person, and how you explain your metric for defining a transgender person amid the clams people are able to make about themselves in terms of their complex identity. Would you define me as a transgender person if I declared myself a woman in order to enter female weight lifting competitions? If so, why? If not, why not? What are your metrics? If you can't answer these questions, then you can just say so. If you don't know why these questions are important, then you can also say so, and I'll try to elaborate. But if you fail to see the importance of these questions, and either ignore them, pretend they are not necessary, or change the subject, then you're not engaging at the level required to be having this discussion in the way you are trying to.

Objection 6: Denying people the ability to identify as whatever gender they choose is an abuse of their individual liberties.

I'm certainly not trying to gainsay people's individual feelings or internal senses of experiences - I just don't know of a rigorous scientific definition that encapsulates what gender actually means. People can identify as made-up genders if they wish – but it doesn’t mean I have to think it’s a good idea that they do so.

But this works both ways too; there are plenty of people who have had their individual liberties compromised by this wave of gender-based ideology – and none of the people debating this with me are acknowledging any of the costs. For example, in the UK, there have been quite a few high profile cases where men have claimed to identify as a women and won medals in the female categories of sporting events - even in weightlifting and boxing on two rather infamous cases. They have an unfair advantage, and that undermines the sport because it's grossly unfair to the women competitors. There have also been high profile disasters with men in women's prisons, and lots of disgruntled women fighting back against men (identifying as women) being freely encouraged to use female toilets if they wish. My position on this is clear; I do not think anyone born a male should be able to do these things.

And perhaps the greater costs of all are borne by children (and their parents) who are being infected with these disturbing mind pathogens about sex and gender that are invoking confusion and distorted perspectives on reality. What begins as perceived lack of congruity between a person’s biological sex and their gender presentation usually gets washed out in maturity, where one becomes clear about one’s sex and identity. But until then, there is widespread confusion about the distribution of sex-related personality and behavioural distinctions, and this is creating a crisis of irresponsible teaching. Young children shouldn’t be telling us they have been born in the wrong body - but when this happens they should be carefully nurtured towards more facts and greater wisdom, and given time to grow and develop. The trend towards alarmism, pandering to their whims, and worse, irreversible and harmful medical and surgical interventions are a damaging development that needs urgently addressing. 

I think society has become too craven and too ridiculous when it comes to all these daft pronouns on offer: a multitude of superfluous pronouns like co, ey, xie, ze etc that don’t have any scientific basis, and only serve to create attention-seeking demands and misguided attempts to deal with psychological/emotional issues that are best addressed in more empirically evidential ways.

I'm not saying that humans can't introspect and come up with many different feelings, ideas and physiological experiences from which they might wish to lump them together and give them an overarching category called gender. But trying to make sense of an accumulation of human introspections by inventing an abstract term and seeking to categorise all of them combinatorically is proving to be epistemologically impractical, because there is no exogenous, objective definition we can agree on to define gender.

Conclusion
It wasn't difficult to get Chat GPT to agree with me that a society tends to function better when terms are defined more clearly and factually, and when there are fewer ambiguous terms embedded into our discourse, especially in highly emotive areas where reason and facts are often not prioritised - it's just a shame that the social scientists who debated with me couldn't yield to the same kind of rigorous persuasion.

This issue is clearly an issue of high sensitivity, and there are going to be significant costs with whichever position one takes. For me, it's perhaps wise to think of this in terms of type 1 and type 2 category errors. A type 1 error, as you may know, is the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis that is true. An example would be, when a jury delivers a guilty verdict in the trial of an innocent defendant. A type 1 error is generally an error that infers an effect or correlation or causality that doesn't actually exist (a false positive). A type 2 error is the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. An example would be when a jury delivers an innocent verdict in the trial of a guilty defendant. A type 2 error is generally an error that fails to infer an effect or correlation or causality that does actually exist (a false negative).

What we are all doing, for ourselves and on the basis of what we believe, is considering what type of error we are most willing to risk. Because there's a risk that by not calling someone, say, they/them at their request you're making an error that's unfair to that individual (and by extension to the wider society), but there's also a risk that by calling someone they/them at their request you're making an error that's also unfair to that individual (in the longer term, and by extension to the wider society). I've tried to weigh up both sets of circumstances, and tried to undertake my own individual risk calculi, in accordance with what I believe, in conjunction with the arguments I can make and the arguments I hear others make, and that's how I've arrived at the position I have. Those accusing me of being cruel and dehumanising are not even pretending to engage with the depth and severity of the situation.

The upshot of all this is that humans are complex, in terms of having different experiential variables; they have differing levels of masculinity, varying places on the sexuality spectrum, different phenotypical structures, different levels of comfort with their bodies, different affiliations with both sexes, different temperaments, different levels of anxiety, varying emotional connections with others, different tastes, different responses to physical touch, diverse ranges of neurological development, multiple ways of expressing themselves in terms of looks, style and fashion, and a highly complex and dynamic sense of self and personal identity in a multitude of places and stages in life. We know so much about psychological factors related to identity, to hormones, to masculinity and femininity, to sexuality, etc - and what that does, I believe, is show us that being male and being female encapsulates a whole range of subset traits, feelings and identities to do with the above. That doesn't mean that we stop becoming male or female, it means we expand our conceptions of maleness and femaleness.

If you look at male and female personalities in totality, their similarities far outweigh their differences, but there are plenty of differences too, and these play out in their respective relationships, attitudes, careers and priorities (to name but four). Personality differences are significant, but they are not the same as sex differences - hence sex and gender should not be used interchangeably - and the fact that they so often are is not helping the debate, especially for our children.

All of these are profound things to explore and assess, and our best efforts to do so reveal lots of subset elements about the nature of being human. But I maintain that adding the extraneous term 'gender' to all this adds no value to the considerations, and instead imputes needless ambiguity and confusion. What is needed, I submit, is the admission of a broader understanding of the categories of male and female, and the realisation that the traits being claimed to have one foot in one camp and one in the other are really just claims that misunderstand the true breadth and depth of the two fundamental categories.

We can look back at every age that preceded us and identify things they were doing that were absurd, wacky, ignorant and extreme - and I believe it's prudent for every contemporary age to do the same, including us. What are we of today doing that our descendants will look back on with complete horror and incredulity? I am fairy confident that this wanton abuse of the reality of biological sex and the liberal assault on language with the ‘gender’ constructions will be seen as one of them.

In closing, I've spent a fair amount of time discussing gender with scientists in various fields, and despite my open invitation and diligent considerations of their points, no one has been able to justify the efficacy of the word 'gender' to me in terms of its ontology and epistemology, so I remain unconvinced of its merits.