What if the biggest mistakes in debates about gender come from treating “gender identity” as one unified thing, instead of a cluster of different feelings, traits, and social norms that can come apart?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Ray Briggs is professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and their work has focused on a range of topics, including chance and decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and gender. This interview was recorded with audio only.
Check out their book with B. R. George, "What Even is Gender?"!
https://www.routledge.com/p/book/9780367513214
2. Book Summary
In What Even Is Gender?, Ray Briggs and B. R. George argue that the familiar question “what is gender?” invites confusion, because there isn’t one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or “gender identity”). Instead, mainstream discourse (including lots of well-meaning “trans 101” framings) tends to conflate a cluster of distinct social, material, and psychological phenomena—conflations that can make trans and gender-nonconforming lives unintelligible and can smuggle in hidden assumptions about what trans legitimacy is supposed to require. The book’s project is therefore largely conceptual: to diagnose where our ordinary talk goes wrong and to engineer a clearer alternative framework that can better represent the variety of lived experience and the political demands of trans liberation.
Chapters 2 and 3 build the book’s core “map” of what the authors call the ‘sex/gender system’. Chapter 2 replaces the overly unified notion of ‘gender identity’ with a more fine-grained account in terms of ‘gender feels’: self-situating attitudes toward different gendered traits, organized (for their purposes) into sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories. This helps explain why different subjective “feels” can come apart (and why lumping them together causes practical and political misunderstandings). Chapter 3 then shifts from subjective attitudes to public structure, distinguishing different kinds of social norms that link categories, biology, and behavior; it treats many of these norms as obvious targets of feminist and queer critique, while warning that some “abolitionist” rhetoric slides illicitly from opposing oppressive norms to condemning the categories or behaviors the norms are about.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn from diagnosis to guidance: Chapter 4 argues that we should treat people’s self-reports of ‘gender feels’ as deserving default trust—presuming sincerity, competence, coherence, and moral respect—unless we have specific reasons to depart from those defaults, and it critiques common patterns of dismissing trans subjectivity. Chapter 5 defends a political principle of ‘gender self-determination’: in general, we should categorize people according to their sincerely expressed wishes rather than outsiders’ projections, and this requires treating gender categories as irreducible (not settled by biology, behavior, or the norms society imposes), without that irreducibility collapsing into circularity or mysticism. The conclusion frames many recurring confusions as a kind of “essentialism” that mistakes contingent links (between traits, norms, and feels) for constitutive necessities; the authors urge “less essentialism, more imagination,” emphasizing both the real variety already present in human lives and our collective power to change gender norms and the rules by which category membership gets socially administered.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Target audience
02:23 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive
06:23 - History and cross-cultural comparison
12:48 - Idealizing gender
15:00 - Gender as a single thing?
19:07 - Gender traits and feels
26:30 - Gender identity
31:34 - Vagueness of gender language
33:17 - Developing categories
35:55 - Second-order gender feels
38:26 - Gender norms
41:24 - Feels and norms
43:14 - Abolitionism
53:53 - Semantic trade-offs
56:15 - Another case for abolitionism
59:45 - Too many categories?
1:03:39 - Self-determination
1:05:14 - Circular?
1:10:22 - Reductive definitions
1:11:35 - Uninformative account?
1:16:11 - My general descriptive view
1:24:38 - Term haggling
1:26:02 - How this might help trans people
1:27:24 - Value of philosophy
1:29:44 - Conclusion
