What Is Gender?

Josh Landy
How important is gender to your sense of who you are?

Blakey Vermeule
What makes you a woman or a man or neither?

Josh Landy
And who gets to decide?

Blakey Vermeule
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Blakey Vermeule
And I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Blakey and I teach in the philosophy and literature program.

Blakey Vermeule
Today we’re asking: what is gender?

Josh Landy
Ray is actually going to be joining us our guests in a moment. They’ve got a brand new book called “What Even Is Gender?” So thanks once again for sitting in as host, Blakey.

Blakey Vermeule
My pleasure. It’s fun to be back.

Josh Landy
Okay, so Blakey, what is gender?

Blakey Vermeule
I’ll tell you what gender is. It’s an oppressive system designed to keep women down. People go around saying girls are made of sugar and spice and boys are made of snips and snails, and pretty soon you’re making 80 cents on the dollar.

Josh Landy
Okay, but surely there’s another side to gender as well. I mean, for a lot of people, it’s an important part of their sense of self. They identify as a woman as a man as non binary, and that helps them live the life they want to live.

Blakey Vermeule
But how can it be important to your sense of self to make 80 cents on the dollar?

Josh Landy
Well, you don’t have to endorse all the discrimination. I mean, you can identify as a woman and be a feminist you you can be out there marching for equal pay as a woman.

Blakey Vermeule
But I’ve seen you out there at the Women’s March, Josh, and you identify as a bloke, to use that British word you like so much.

Josh Landy
Yeah. Okay, guilty as charged. I do identify as bloke, or occasionally as laddie, if I’m leaning into my Scottish side.

Blakey Vermeule
Right. So look at you, Mr. Laddie, going on marches for equal rights. You clearly care about fairness, not gender. You don’t need a theory of gender to care about justice.

Josh Landy
Okay. But justice isn’t the only reason people care about things. You know, that great Emma Goldman line. If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. I just think the world’s a more beautiful place because people are different, and get to express their differences. Isn’t gender part of that?

Blakey Vermeule
Oh, contraire, Pierre—gender is a prison. As soon as you’re born, they stamp it on a piece of paper, then it’s on your passport, then it’s on your medical card. It determines who where you can go and what you can do. And in many parts of the world who you can marry. Every time we obsess about gender, we’re making the bars of the prison just a little bit stronger.

Josh Landy
I just don’t think it’s as much of a prison as it used to be these days, it’s easier than ever to change your gender. And many people are signing up to do that, which just goes to show how important and affirming the concept of gender can be.

Blakey Vermeule
What are you talking about? You’re just moving from one cell to another. Even if you change gender, you’re still leaving the system in place.

Josh Landy
Even if that’s true Blakey, I don’t get why this particular prison feels like the one to knock down first. I mean, yeah, sexism is bad. But isn’t racism bad, too, and, and ableism and our treatment of other animals, what’s so special about gender?

Blakey Vermeule
But you’re the one who’s been saying how special it is that it’s a delightful part of our identity, that it makes the world a beautiful place and all that stuff about dancing in the revolution. I just don’t understand why we care so much about our gender.

Josh Landy
Why wouldn’t we care? Isn’t that a central part of who we are?

Blakey Vermeule
But is it though, you you clearly think it’s an essential property but but why? We don’t usually think of our hair color is making us the special person we are or the fact that we’re five feet nine or which hand we use to write with. So why do we think that about gender?

Josh Landy
I’m not sure I have a good answer for you, but a lot of people feel the same way.

Blakey Vermeule
That’s true. For better or worse, people of all ages are starting to question their definitions of gender.

Josh Landy
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out what theories teenagers have been exploring. She files this report.

Holly McDede
While a senior Oakland School for the Arts in California, Cassidy Kanner-Gomes helped produce tbh a podcast by, about, and for teenagers. Cassidy reported on how young people started thinking a lot about gender when they were stuck at home during the pandemic lockdowns. This is an excerpt from that piece about celebrating the freedom of queer identity.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
My friends, and I spend a lot of time on YouTube. It’s where I found much more in depth discussions on topics such as gender and sexuality, and learn more about feminist and queer theory. I absolutely love reading. But YouTube has been the place where I can see other people’s thoughts on different theories. And it’s often much more engaging and interactive. I think when

Khadija Mbowe
we have these rigid ideas of gender, and we don’t acknowledge that it is a cage that most of us are just put into.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
videos like these have helped me solidify my ideas on gender and have shown me new perspectives. Gender Stereotypes are ingrained in us from the beginning. like long hair and makeup are for girls, short hair and sports are for boys. I’ve always found it difficult to fully break free from the centuries old rules our culture assigns us even some of my wardrobe is based on the queers that I see on the internet. To embrace my gender identity outside of the binary. I’ve started to wear clothing styles deemed queer by my peers such as baggy pants, bright colors and flannels. I also started experimenting with my hair and makeup as a way to signal queerness to others. In a recent video entitled What is gender? One of my favorite YouTube posts, Abigail Thorne says the Internet has become its own culture.

Abigail Thorne
In fact, as new social systems are created online, it’s perhaps not surprising that we see some gender identities emerging that under different systems would be interpreted differently or actively sidelined.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
The Internet is a virtual space that connects like minded people in the outside world. And University of Arizona professor Dr. Russ to me is an expert in Family Studies and human development. They study queer youth, like my friends and I and how we connect with each other online. To me, along with colleagues surveyed hundreds of trans and non binary young people on their pandemic experience. They found that the revelations my peers and I had were pretty common.

Russ Toomey
Because of time just like that essence of time and time spent alone during isolation or quarantine during stay at home orders for people to have to reflect on who they are,

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
to me says perhaps the pandemic simply accelerated explorations into identity that were already happening.

Russ Toomey
Many young people talked about being able to do this in a more safe way when they weren’t with their peers at school, their cisgender heterosexual peers that may be more likely to engage in bias or victimization or things like that.

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
That was certainly true for myself and my friends. My friend and fellow classmate Dacia, who we heard from earlier says watching others on the internet sparked conversations with their own family. It spurred them to zoom with a cousin who was going through something similar

Daisha
and talked about like family origin gender, how our family is like the greatest when it comes to talking to him kind of helped me like figure that out. Because before that, I never really like new an older person that was especially like one in my family, especially one that was black. So it was well I can do this that’s crazy. For my

Cassidy Kanner-Gomes
friends and I the pandemic cracked open our sense of selves and rethinking gender was a big part of that

Holly McDede
That was student reporter Cassidy Kanner-Gomes. You can hear the full segment on the podcast tbh from KALW. It was edited by Sarah Lai Stirland. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report. Holly and Cassidy. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague, Blakey Vermeule, and today we’re asking what is gender?

Blakey Vermeule
We’re joined now by Josh’s regular co host Ray Briggs, professor of philosophy at Stanford University and co-author of a brand new book titled, “What Even Is Gender?” Ray Welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
Oh, thanks Blakey. It’s It’s strange to be sitting in the guest chair this time.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you’re on the hot seat. Now you’ve written about logic re you’ve written books of poetry, and what got you interested in gender?

Ray Briggs
So this is not a thing that I mentioned very often on the show or at all, but I’m trans and I’ve been, you know, transitioning for the past several years. And it’s a really strange experience just seeing, like, what changes how people respond differently. So it’s made me really philosophically curious because it’s, it’s sort of so weird to go through this.

Blakey Vermeule
That makes a lot of sense. Ray. So So Josh and I were arguing earlier about what what gender is, he was saying it’s a, it’s an important part of our identity. And I was saying it’s a prison. So who’s right?

Ray Briggs
Well, I think in a sense, you’re both right. So so the important part of of our identity, although I probably wouldn’t put it that way that exists and the prison that also exists, and they both get called gender. And they’re not the same thing. But we use the same word for them. And people often conflate them because they’ve got the same word attached to them.

Blakey Vermeule
So why wouldn’t you say that, that gender is an important part of our identity?

Ray Briggs
Oh, so I think that the idea of identity is really individualistic. So it’s supposed to be something that like it is fixed. And that, you know, just by reflecting on it, and that sort of, is, like, every part of your identity has to be coherent. And I don’t think that any anything called gender has all of those properties. So you could use the word identity and not mean something that has those properties. But I’m a little bit worried about it, because it has those implications.

Josh Landy
And that’s what I take to be the core of your argument here, right, that there is something inside, right. So there are some important beliefs and attitudes that we have about a relationship to what we think of as gender, but they don’t necessarily have to all hang together, they don’t just sort of fit a neat little package, kind of package deal that we’re used to, is that about, right?

Ray Briggs
That’s exactly right. And in fact, my my co author of the book, br George, and I call them feels, because you can have different feels about different things. And we don’t mean this to be dismissive. Feels are like, deserve to be respected and appreciated.

Josh Landy
And if I understand correctly, you’re there were three main kinds of field, right, which you call biology fields, behavior fields, and category fields. So you can have feelings and other attitudes towards whether you think of yourself as a man or woman or something else by category fields, you can have behavior fields, I rather like the idea of wearing lipstick or not. And you can have biology fields, here’s what I would like my body to look like.

Ray Briggs
Yes, that’s right. And they don’t have to line up with each other or match there. And they’re kind of just about different things. And so they can be different, cuz you have different fields about different topics.

Blakey Vermeule
And yet, people have their gender fields, especially intensely. And I’m wondering if you have a sense of why that might be.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, I think it might not be the same reason for every person. But this stuff is like pretty salient in our society. So as you said, Blakey, what you can do and where you can go and sometimes who you can marry are all influenced by sort of how your gender is classified. So this kind of explains why people might have some feelings attached to it. Like if something is socially important, you probably going to have big feelings about it.

Josh Landy
And how does this connect to the you know, good old fashioned sex versus gender distinction, right that people like Simone de Beauvoir introduced, that there’s your biology, and that’s your sex, and then there’s your behavior and attitudes, and that’s your gender. And, and the great thing about that distinction was supposed to be, well, the gender part is socially constructed, so we can change it.

Ray Briggs
Right. So there’s been some discussion, since boudoir, where so one one criticism of this idea is that people think of the sex stuff as totally natural. But it’s not totally natural. It’s messy. It’s influenced by social practices, things like taking hormones, and the gender bucket has a bunch of different things lumped into it. So it’s a super interesting distinction, and I’ve got a lot to say about it. But I don’t want to run over time.

Josh Landy
You’re the best guest ever. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about gender with Ray Briggs, usually my co-hos but today our guest with a new book, “What Even Is Gender?”

Blakey Vermeule
What does gender mean in your life? Is it an important part of your identity or something you don’t think about that much? Is it ever something you struggle with?

Josh Landy
Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Grace Petrie
No you won’t grow out of it, you will find thre clothes that fit.

Josh Landy
What do you do when the gender rules don’t work? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program the questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule, and we’re thinking about gender with Ray Briggs, co-author of “What Even Is Gender?”

Josh Landy
Got questions about how gender shapes us? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can become a subscriber and dive into our library with more than 500 episodes.

Blakey Vermeule
So Ray, you’ve said that gender is a bunch of different things. But why do we care about any of them?

Ray Briggs
Again, different reasons for different ones and different reasons for different people. But let’s start with say, biology. Why would you care about sort of the way your body is biologically configured, because you have to live in your body is one big reason. And I think there’s a kind of like social connection, sex and dating aspect to it. But there’s also just like, I am in my body all the time, even when I’m by myself, and I want it to be a comfortable place for me.

Josh Landy
And that sounds like it sounds like you’re saying there’s actually something positive about gender, and that it varies from person to person. And that’s it, I think it’s one of the very interesting points of your view, that it’s this kind of pluralist vision, where one of the great virtues is variety. It’s kind of a John Stuart Mill type vision of the of the human world where it’s made more beautiful, by virtue of the fact that all these different people are doing different things, and we can endorse what they’re doing. We don’t have to have a cookie cutter regimen that says, No, you must be this or you must be that. So So what are the what are the values of the virtues of thinking about the sort of gendered world that way?

Ray Briggs
So one virtue is that it just gets you more accurate beliefs. I think, like I think philosophers have this tendency to go in and try and formulate a universal generalization. And then any universal generalization you try to formulate in this domain, you just come up with counter examples right away. Like, oh, all women are nurturing. That’s nonsense. I can point to like lots of non nurturing women, there was Maggie Thatcher. Oh, all men have a penis. That’s not true. Either. Some men are trans phalloplasty was invented, because like some men sustained injuries that made them not have a penis anymore. There’s just nothing that is true of all people of any gender category, because that’s an intellectual virtue, right, getting it right. Are there other virtues? Yeah. So I think that there are also kind of ethical virtues, which is that this is stuff that by and large, people should get to decide for themselves. Because, say, the shape of my body, the clothes, I wear, what I call myself, these are not directly harming or interfering with other people. And so there’s a value of freedom and self determination, if I’m not hurting anybody, I should get to live my life and do what I want. And if you’re not hurting anybody, you should get to live your life and do what you want. And we should give each other freedom to the extent possible.

Blakey Vermeule
And I think that’s a beautiful statement of the the ethic of autonomy that runs through so much gender thought in gender talk. The hard cases, of course, are places where my autonomy bumps up against your autonomy. And we can all think of examples, currently in the news of people getting very worked up about this precise question, and I’m wondering if you have a set of thoughts about it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I do think that we have to, like, distinguish between stuff that belongs to me and stuff that does not belong to me. And so I definitely think like, my body belongs to me is kind of a bedrock political principle, I get to decide your body does not belong to me. And that that already gets us sort of a lot of practical consequences. I think. Do you have a tricky case in mind, I should ask. I was sure.

Blakey Vermeule
I mean, there, there are plenty of cases in the news involving girls and women’s sports. And people get very, very agitated about this and worked up about the question of whether trans people should and can participate in competition with cisgendered girls. And that seems to be a case where the ethic of autonomy bumps right up against the ethic of community, or, you know, how would you adjudicate those kinds of cases?

Ray Briggs
Right, that’s a good kind of case. So, one thing I’ll say say is that a lot of sports discourse, I kind of personally find baffling you know, I am, I am not excited about like elite sport or like figuring out who has the best body and a lot of sports issues are not about elite sport, but are about like high school sports or community sports where including, like, it’s really important that trans kids get to have the opportunity to play sports. And so that probably means having trans girls in girls sports, having trans boys and boys sports, definitely figuring out a way that everybody can have the opportunity to do this thing that quite frankly, I did not personally enjoy in high school, but I want other people to get to enjoy it.

Josh Landy
That’s the Milliian spirit—just because you didn’t enjoy it better than everyone else, you get to enjoy it if they if they like it. I have another kind of tricky question that you and I have talked about before, that, for me is sort of the most difficult one which has to do with essentialism. Right, this idea that some people have that there is this essential thing within them? That is there a gender identity. And you we’ve talked about this before that, you know, among my close friends and family members, I know trans folks on the one hand, who think No, I don’t believe in an essential identity. But trans folks who do and who think, you know, their look, the reason I transitioned is because there is this thing within me. Right? I know, I’ve always really known that I’m x rather than Y right? You know? Well, I was I was initially labeled a man, but I really am a woman. And that’s why I’m transitioning. And of course, that’s a very widely held view. And I don’t know how exactly we’re supposed to adjudicate between those who came up for Judith Butler, Judith Butler, famous for sort of opposing the category woman. And she gave an interview where she said, Yeah, you know, some trans folk have talked to me and she said, you know, it was very important that I learned from what they had to say, right? That they they don’t think of gender is performative at all, they think of gender as deep seated and true and a part of who they are essentially. So that seems to me a really difficult kind of conundrum where people will have a very different views. And not just that it’s a difference of opinion, but that some people think it’s dangerous to believe in essentialism. What, what do we do with that?

Ray Briggs
So one thing that we do is we decouple this question about essentialism, from questions about how to treat people. And I think one kind of mistake that people often make about trans rights is to think that you have to be able to demonstrate that you have this essential property in order to be deserving of certain kinds of rights or respect. And I just, I think that’s a mistake. And then I like as to like, whether people do have the property. I can’t detect any such thing in myself. Maybe some people do. And some people don’t like that seems like a theoretical option. But I don’t think that it’s really important for figuring out how to treat people or treat each other.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about gender with Ray Briggs, usually my co host, but here today, as guest with their new book, “What Even Is Gender?” And we’ve got a question from Louise in Amherst, Massachusetts. Louise ays this, I’m a descriptive realist, but a normative eliminative limited list about gender, right, I’m sure you’re gonna explain those terms to us. I also hold that misogyny is not the same as hatred of trans non binary and gender non conforming people. And that this fact should inform debates about women’s spaces and organizations. What do you think about that, Ray

Ray Briggs
So oh, there’s so much in that question. So so she said that she is a descriptive realist, but a normative eliminative. So let me let me unpack that first. So as I understand it, that means she thinks that gender is a real thing. So there really are women and men and non binary people. But she’s a normative eliminate activist, which means she thinks that gender shouldn’t be a real thing. And in a better world, we would just do away with all of this stuff. And so I I agree with her about the descriptive realism. I’m not so sure about the normative Eliminativism. Like, I think that in a better world, one of our options would be to keep these categories and some of the practices associated with them. Like certainly, we should probably keep a lot of the physical features that the categorization is built on, because it would require massive nonconsensual interventions to get rid of them, and that would be bad. So we could keep these things around, but we could remove some of their more oppressive features.

Blakey Vermeule
So what about the other part of Louise’s question that misogyny is not the same disease as hatred of trans How do you think about that?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so that one is complicated. Because on the one hand, that seems right, you could hate women, but not even have the concept of a trans person. So I don’t know how you can hate somebody that you don’t have the concept of, on the other hand, like I think that very frequently they go together and have this common cause where people like to have a picture of a world of a world where like, men are in charge, women are in their place, and nobody is blurring any lines. So like, technically distinct kind of causally related?

Blakey Vermeule
Should this fact inform debates about women’s spaces and organizations in your view, Ray.

Ray Briggs
So I’m kind of curious as to how so one way that I shouldn’t, I think it shouldn’t inform debates as to women’s spaces and organizations is like thinking of women’s issues as completely separate from trans issues, partly because like, a lot of people are both women and trans, like trans women are like a fairly reasonable proportion of trans people. And so that is one type of woman you can have is a trans woman. So we should think of these as overlapping groups. And, you know, there have been trans participants in women’s rights movements for like, decades now, both trans women and trans men who often have like a history with lesbian community. So I think that these things kind of overlap. And it’s not really a question of, of, should we let trans people into women’s spaces and women’s movements? It’s a question of like, how do we acknowledge this thing that has already been going on for decades and is real?

Josh Landy
One issue I’ve seen raised in some corners of feminist thinking, is what’s called the commonality problem, which is, you know, because, you know, I, I’m a big pluralist, I love your pitch about both autonomy and variety. But a worry I’ve seen raised is, you know, what happens to feminism itself as a movement? If there’s, if if we posit that there’s no thing that all women have in common? And yet we’re, we’re advocating on behalf of women? I’m not sure that’s a huge problem. But But is it a problem? And what would you say to it?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, like coalition building is always kind of a practical problem. And I think that that one of the things that women is, is a political coalition, where different people who count as women have different interests, and they also have a lot of common interests. And figuring out how to deal with that is, is super tricky. And yet, I guess to kind of do it case by case like I don’t have a good general thing to say.

Blakey Vermeule
So we also have a question from Kevin in San Francisco. How much is gender talk a residue of grammar? So some languages like English have gendered pronouns, but other languages don’t have any and some have more than two? Is all of this gender talk just an artifact of language?

Ray Briggs
I don’t think so. Because languages vary pretty drastically, as Kevin says, in how they mark gender. But then there’s also a question of like, Are people marking gender in other ways, and those things can come apart? So English does not have actually that many gendered words, it has gendered pronouns. And like, names, I’d say are pretty heavily gendered. But it’s still like Americans and British people and Australians still mark, whether somebody is a boy or a girl in lots of ways, including on their official identity documents.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s a really good point, it gets even more interesting in other languages that, that for which have genders for every single noun, and then there were boarded. Skis done that fascinating work showing that, you know, French people are more likely to describe a bridge of sturdy and German speakers and we’re like to describe it as elegant. Because in one language, it’s a masculine noun and other it’s a feminine noun. So maybe all of the talk of gender doesn’t derive from language, but does some of it in some cases.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that what language you speak is going to influence how you think about things and Lera Bora did ski I’m so glad you mentioned her she has ways of making this idea precise and then measuring when it’s true and whether it’s true and like sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it isn’t. Gender is one of the cases where it is true or language influences how you do tasks that are non linguistic.

Blakey Vermeule
I’m curious what you would say to assist person who doesn’t think particularly hard about gender so that so this person is to quote the title of Judith Butler’s book untroubled by gender. Do you think that such a person should be more troubled by gender or is there just a category of people who don’t think about it very much, and that’s cool.

Ray Briggs
I’m kind of on the that’s cool if they don’t think about it. much side of things like I’m kind of writing for people who are already trouble.

Josh Landy
But you have that nice line in your book that you and your co authors say, we believe many salespeople can also benefit from cleaning up a shared epistemic resources. So what what could a, an average salesperson who, you know, is interested but hasn’t necessarily thought that much about it glean from this.

Ray Briggs
So I think that not worrying about whether sort of being stereotypically on masculine or feminine sort of undermines your being a woman or a man, I think that is a valuable thing for sis people to. I also think that some of the body stuff is valuable first, so people like bodies have a tremendous amount of variation. And what people like their bodies to look like, has a tremendous amount of variation. And I think that’s just like a kind of nice thing to sit with.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s incredibly encouraging Ray. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about gender with Ray Briggs from Stanford University, co-author of “What Even Is Gender?”

Blakey Vermeule
What would you change about the way gender works? Would you eliminate it altogether? Is that even possible?

Josh Landy
Changing the system when you’re part of the system—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Flight of the Conchords
What makes a man, am I am man? Yes, technically I am.

Josh Landy
I think I’m a man… technically. But what does that say about me? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule sitting in for Ray Briggs, who’s here as our guest today, as we ask what is gender?

Josh Landy
So Ray, we’ve discussed a number of problems caused by a current understanding of gender. If you had a magic wand, what would you change?

Ray Briggs
First, I think I would change some of the repressive laws that are getting passed in the US that make it impossible for trans people to get medical care or in some cases impossible for people to say to kids that, that trans and gay people exist. And in some cases, make it possible for trans people to get harassed in the bathroom or for anybody who kind of doesn’t look like the gender stereotype that people are expecting to get harassed in the bathroom.

Blakey Vermeule
Yeah, it feels like a very back lashing moment. And I’m, I’m wondering how we can collectively think about that or or work it out. For ourselves. I mean, we live in San Francisco, California, we it’s a very, it’s a place where there are lots of trans people in those kinds of laws are not coming to California anytime soon. But they are coming to Florida, they are coming to Texas. So where do we go from here?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think we do a bunch of things. Like I think that we lobby, I think that we help people in states where these laws are getting passed. I don’t know I guess donating to their GoFundMe is isn’t a structural solution. But it’s a kind of way of eliminating the immediate problem. I think we keep saying that queer and trans people exist and are okay. Like any any way of giving support that we can think of, I think is valuable.

Josh Landy
There’s a there’s a question I have around this, you know, about around sort of thinking about a better future that I find fascinating. You raise it in your book is there, you say? Is there a way of rehabilitating any gender norms that would make them morally better? I think that’s so interesting, because, you know, you look around at the landscape, the gendered landscape. And not of course, not everything is terrible in gender landscape. But you know, you look at unequal pay, you look at the fact that women very often feel afraid, walking home at night. I mean, you look at all, you know, incidents of assault, all kinds of really deeply troubling things. And it’s easy for people to say, we just need to start again, we need to basically erase all of the ways we’ve been thinking and talking about gender. But you’re suggesting a little bit well, maybe we don’t have to throw everything out. What don’t we have to throw at what could be rehabilitated?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, this is always the question like, do you start over again? Or do you reform and one of my objections to throwing everything out is that I don’t know how to do that. And so what’s the best we can do with the stuff we’ve got? But I do think that there are valuable things to gender. So I think that sort of women’s movements are great. Like women’s moving winds are also a response to widespread sexism. But out of that response to widespread sexism grows a kind of solidarity and meaningfulness. So I like the solidarity and I think it can persist, even as women’s movements sort of gain more ground. I also think that there’s a lot of aesthetic joy that people can take in different kinds of gendered embodiment and gendered expression. So, I don’t know. There’s something like very nice about dapper bow ties. And I mean, kilts are very dapper to for your Scottish heritage, thank you.

Blakey Vermeule
Gender play can be beautiful and kinky and fun and hot, and people seem to really like it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, agreed. And there’s a lot of it isn’t about controlling other people, but is about like taking a harmless joy and the way that you’ve found to make meaning out of your environment.

Josh Landy
So this is the this I’m certainly coming back a little bit to the question that I was asking earlier. But this is sort of the the really tricky thing for me is how do we know when something’s harmless? And how do we know when it’s harmful? Right, because presumably, the thought would be, there’s a way of, let’s say, you know, for agenda, female, identifying person, wearing makeup, wearing dresses, and so on. That’s a healthy expression of their relationship to gender. But then there’s another kind that sort of reinforces certain kinds of stereotypes. And so keeps this machinery of discrimination going, how do we tell the difference?

Ray Briggs
So one place that I like to draw the line is sort of decisions for oneself versus exerting direct coercive pressure on another person. So I’m not very into criticizing women for wearing makeup or looking feminine, partly because sort of, there’s no right way to respond to the coercive pressures around you. And you know, also like makeup and femininity are sources of aesthetic joy. But what I am against is, say workplace rules that require women to wear makeup. So that’s a direct coercive pressure. I am against sniping at other people’s appearance, and kind of trying to force them to look beautiful for one’s own viewing pleasure. So So absolutely, against those things.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it goes along with your emphasis on autonomy and variety. I still wonder like, you know, imagine a scenario. I’m not going to name France, I don’t want to out anybody here, obviously. But imagine a scenario where you’re talking to my good friend, who is trans and believes in an essence, right? I’m trans, because I really know that deep down, I am this and not that. You know what, because one of the things you say is, this belief is actually harmful, both politically and personally, it’s harmful for us personally, because it gets in the way, I love this thing, actually, you write about how, if you’re too busy, trying to figure out who you are, you’re gonna waste a lot of time that you could be spent actually doing stuff. But it’s also dangerous. You say politically, because the more that people talk as though there are essences, the more we’re sort of trapped in this old way of thinking about things. So I don’t know how you would do if, if my friend were here, how would you? How would you talk to them? It seems like it would be tricky to say, well, I sort of endorsed the way you the way you think about yourself. But on the other hand, I’m sort of committed to the view that it’s dangerous, right?

Ray Briggs
I think the thing that is really dangerous is thinking that anybody has rights turn on there be a being able to detect this kind of essence in themselves, or thinking that anybody should like have to detect this essence in themselves, before taking concrete action to change their life for the better. So I’m less worried about the person who thinks I do, in fact, have this essence, I’m really concerned about the idea that the essence has to be linked in any way to sort of rights or action.

Blakey Vermeule
There are several pieces coming out and have come out recently written by by lesbians who say, I was always very, very uncomfortable, being gay, I couldn’t handle it. And so I decided to transition. And now I realized that that was a terrible mistake. And I should have just been given more support to just be a lesbian. How do you talk to such a person? How do you think about that?

Ray Briggs
Yes, so this is a thing that can happen and it is a unfortunate like thing to happen to your life. So I think one thing that we can do is Yeah, provide more support for lesbians and make it be okay to be a lesbian and say, like, a lot more like yes, it’s so Hate to be lesbians and just sort of

Blakey Vermeule
that you can be a tomboy and have a whole range of gender expressions that are, you know, coded masculine. But that, that doesn’t mean that you are male, or that doesn’t mean that you should transition or have to transition.

Ray Briggs
So yes, so I’m I’m absolutely in agreement. And I think we should get that message out a lot more. Another thing that, I think, is that if people do start to transition, and then decide that it’s not for them, we should sort of make it easier for them to change course and not be super rigid about what anybody has transitioned timeline has to look like. And if people start to transition and decide some parts of it are for them, and some parts of it are not, like we should we should clear room for that to be okay, too.

Josh Landy
So that’s advice as it were for the society. What about advice for individuals?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I think the best you can do is try things out and see how you feel about them. And so this will involve probably trying some things that don’t work for you, which is, okay, because a lot of transition steps are pretty small. And what will be one example of that. So telling your friends, like, I want to go by a different name, or telling a select group of your friends, I want to go by a different name, and then seeing how it feels to be called by that.

Josh Landy
Try it out. And yeah, I don’t like it. You go back.

Ray Briggs
That’s right. Yeah. So not not everything is is reversible in life, but a lot of a lot of things that tell you how you feel are small and low stakes.

Blakey Vermeule
So this leads me to a question, which is that, at our current moment, it seems as though gender dysphoria is, is a problem that people think that they have to solve. And I’m wondering, I, my view is that it’s actually could just be a stage of life that you go through, and then you grow out of as In fact, I did in adolescence. And I’m wondering what you think about that? I mean, there’s a kind of solution ism, built into the idea that if you feel gender dysphoric, then you have to go out and try to do something about it.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, I think that, so on the one hand, yeah, part of life is that you are going to feel uncomfortable things about your body and your world. And on the other hand, like I think that people freak out if you do try to do something about it. So it’s sort of this weird pressure from both directions, right? Where on the one hand, like, if you do nothing, then you’re doing something wrong. And the other hand, if you do something, you’re still doing something wrong. It’s a lot.

Blakey Vermeule
It’s very interesting.

Josh Landy
What you’re saying here makes a lot of sense to me. In terms of, well, you know, first of all, you might as well try to be a little happier. And secondly, do that by make taking small steps, seeing how they feel, is there is there a view behind this about self knowledge? You’re a philosopher, it sounds like you’re saying, introspection, just kind of looking into your soul isn’t always the most reliable thing. And it’s might be better sometimes to try out an action in order to learn about ourselves.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think self knowledge requires experimentation, and interacting with the world around you. I think people are really bad at imagining what something would be like that they have never experienced. And so the best way to figure out what something would be like is to try and experience a little bit of it.

Blakey Vermeule
So Ray, what is the most beautiful world you can imagine?

Ray Briggs
So I really like going to science fiction, for answers to this kind of question. Because you have authors like Charlie Jane Anders, imagining a world with a bunch of sexes, that isn’t a utopia, like the sexes all have these stupid, rigid roles, but it’s kind of a beautiful world. And then you can imagine a world where like, people get to change their mind about sort of their social role really frequently. So I think Marge Percy’s woman on the edge of time has half of it set in the kind of beautiful world that I’d like to live in. Also, babies are grown in bats in that world, which is just kind of awesome. I would love to be a baby that tender.

Josh Landy
Yeah, or Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness,

Ray Briggs
Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness where there’s a species that kind of naturally changes sex over the course of their lives the way that many nonhuman species do and an Earth Explorer who is having a lot of trouble coping with this. So yeah, or Octavia Butler, has the Zeno Genesis trilogy, which is definitely not a good world or a world that would want to live in humans have killed the Earth, but the alien species that comes to save them and put them in a nature preserve how As like reproduction by genetic engineering and there’s a special role that is the genetic engineer role. So all of these things are possible. And it’s hard to even pick just one beautiful science fiction world. Ooh, another one. Becky Chambers Wayfarer universe, which just has a bunch of different alien species that have interactions where they can have cultural exchange about their ways of life. I’m probably running over.

Josh Landy
Well, I, you know, I’m not looking forward to being invaded by an alien overlords. But I do feel the real pull of some of these gender utopias, and just in general, it’s been a really utopian conversation today. Thank you so much for doing this Tay.

Ray Briggs
Oh, thanks for having me. Like I said, weird to be on the guest chair.

Josh Landy
But excellent, excellent work. Our guest has been Ray Briggs, professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and co author of a brand new book entitled, “What Even Is Gender?” And thank you Blakey, for taking another turn on the hosts seat.

Blakey Vermeule
My pleasure. We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and dig deep into our library of more than 500 episodes.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Blakey Vermeule
And now, a man who speeds past all gender divides… It’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… I acknowledge the premise that the bottom line for human behavior is that which enables survival of the species. But there are many paths to human continuance. Those who can’t or won’t have kids teach, or lead, or make a beautiful world worth bringing kids into. What traits contribute to our survival? Skin color, tallness, shortness, being tone deaf or left handed? Females supposedly send out signals for a mate, and males that they are available. This, I was led to believe, is what gender is all about. In a nutshell, strutting peacocks and swooning hens making eggs until you just can’t make no more. But these appeals seem to depend on cultural mores as much as biology. I remember pictures of 18th century dandies, who were called macaroni, which referred to a man who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion. This was catnip to the ladies, it seems, who liked nothing better than listen to harpsichord music and give birth. In America, meanwhile, Yankee Doodle sneered at effete Europe, putting a damn feather in his cap, calling it macaroni, which was catnip to a different kind of lady, I guess. Before you know it, revolution. And eventually, advertising. There have been many gender-fed displays of men over the years, cowboys, firemen, private eyes, wealthy playboys, rock stars. – But I want to call your attention to the Big Game Hunter. He was everywhere in the mid-20th Century. Probably came from Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, about a manly man big game hunter and the woman who loves him. He is dying from gangrene poisoning in Africa, like a Victorian maiden expiring from consumption on a couch, which is a sexy thing women did in the 19th century. Ask Greta Garbo. Maybe because there was a sudden influx of wealth in the fifties, enabling men to go on Safari, but it became a kind of aspirational fantasy. It’s weird to think of how many movies there were, with Stewart Granger, Victor Mature, Gregory Peck (in the movie version of the Hemingway story), Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, William Holden and, of course, Trevor Howard, who was born to caress an action bolt Mannlicher, if you know what I mean. There was a uniform as recognizable as 18th century macaroni, the pith helmet, or that Australian hat that folds up on one side, kakhi jodhpurs, a safari jacket, of course, which came to be worn by American film directors, maybe because John Huston was a big game hunter, with pockets built for bullets. A hunter did not carry his weapon. He had native bearers for that. His main rifle was huge, you could bring down an elephant. He had smaller rifles for gazelles and lions, like choosing the right club on the golf course. Aside from stock footage of monkeys and crocodiles, the antics of which the hunter would chuckle with amusement, most of the movie was set in camp, which was like a really nice hotel made of tents. After a long day of hiking and shooting, the cast would sit down for cocktails. The hunter and heroine would contemplate adultery, while her boorish husband was passed out in the tent next door. Good stuff. Sometimes there would be a stampede. An ambush by Mau Maus, or an alien. Or they would stumble upon a lost kingdom. Sometimes Tarzan would appear, and an entirely different sexual fantasy would ensue. I never quite figured out what women got out of the big game hunter trope. Seemed like more of a men’s magazine thing, really, shooting things and brooding — what care men for breathless kisses in a jungle clearing. In the sixties, men’s magazines went by the wayside. It suddenly wasn’t sexy to murder lions and elephants. On safaris, guns were replaced by cameras. In fantasies, hunters were replaced by Jim Morrison, then David Bowie, once considered androgynous. Me, I’m waiting for fedoras to make a comeback. At one time, to the ladies, fedoras were like red meat to lions. Macaroni to cheese. We do still have men striding around, cradling long guns, but today it’s usually at Starbucks. They’re trying to impress somebody, but I’m not sure who. In any event, the message is that sex should not be fun. It’s a solemn responsibility, like learning to like sprouts. And guns, while very very important, should probably be locked up if there’s no lions around. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Jamie Lee, Elizabeth Zhu, Emily Wang, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Trial of the Chicago 7
We are a vegan feminist nonprofit cooperative operating within an anti racist anti oppressive framework for people of all or no genders