Abstract
Are words like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ sex terms that we use to talk about biological features of individuals? Are they gender terms that we use to talk about non-biological features e.g. social roles? Contextualists answer both questions affirmatively, arguing that these terms concern biological or non-biological features depending on context. I argue that a recent version of contextualism, floated by Jennifer Saul and defended by Esa Diaz-Leon, doesn’t exhibit the right kind of flexibility to capture our theoretical intuitions or moral and political practices concerning our uses of these words. I then propose the view that terms like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ are polysemous, arguing that it makes better sense of the significance of some forms of criticisms of mainstream gender ideology.
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Notes
My focus is on the term ‘woman’, but everything I say applies mutatis mutandis to the term ‘man’.
“If one asks an ordinary speaker what it is to be a woman, she/he will almost certainly answer in terms of biological traits, most likely genitalia or chromosomes. The same is true of dictionaries.” (Saul 2012: 197)
“...many speakers will sometimes use “woman” as though it is not a sex term after all—this is what they do when they refer to trans women who have not undergone reassignment surgeries as “women,” a usage that seems perfectly acceptable to many of us.” (Saul 2012: 199–200)
Support for the idea is also found within feminism: “…feminists need to communicate successfully both with each other and with those who are not (yet) feminists, feminists should want to avoid large-scale misunderstandings wherever possible.” (Saul 2012: 197)
I follow Saul in employing this terminology but not wading into the controversy surrounding it. For discussion, see Mikkola (2017).
Results like these lead Saul to frame the view as an improvement over Haslanger’s (2000).
Arguably, a version of this case in which it is one of the traditionalist’s using ‘woman’ instead of Ash (as in e.g. a traditionalist uttering ‘You, Ash, aren’t a woman’) might be one in which it is even clearer that the term is being used as sex term, since on some views, speaker intentions play a big role in determining how our words are used. Feel free to substitute such a version of the case if that seems more compelling. I am using Case 3 as it is because I don’t find the alternative kind of case to pose a clearer challenge, and I wish to maintain structural continuity with the other cases in this paper.
Diaz-Leon offers several statements of the view that differ subtly from one another. My presentation of Diaz-Leon’s view strives to illustrate the evolution of the view from Saul, while remaining faithful to Diaz-Leon’s suggested changes.
See Kapusta (2016).
I am not claiming that it is impossible to use ‘woman’ as a gender term in crisis centers. Indeed, YWCA Spokane, which offers domestic violence services, states admirably and explicitly that they “will never turn a person away based on gender identity, sexual identity, sexuality, race, or ethnicity” (https://ywcaspokane.org/hud-proposal/). In such a context, which I’ve chosen, admittedly, based on my anecdotal experience, it’s plausible that ‘woman’ is used as a gender term. But not all contexts are alike. To take another actual but less personally relevant example, Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter states explicitly that “Trans people deserve and must live in safety, and have the equal rights and opportunities that are promised to us all. While some of our core services are not open to people who do not share our life experience of being born females and raised as girls into our current womanhood, we have a collective commitment to see to the safety anyone who calls our crisis line, including trans people. (emphasis mine, https://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/learn/resources/who-we-serve)”. Plausibly, ‘woman’ is used as a sex term in such a context. Case 4 is put forward as a case where the center is more like the Vancouver shelter than the one in Spokane.
By using details involving crisis centers and depression-induced suicides in philosophical examples, I risk implicating that I do not take these matters seriously. Allow me to cancel that possible implicature. Sexual violence, depression, and suicide are all issues that hit close to home. I take these morally significant issues deeply seriously.
Over the course of developing my objection, I came to learn that Bettcher (2017) raises a similar worry with Diaz-Leon’s view. But Bettcher does so in the context of a survey article, and hence only has the space therein to gesture toward the problem. My presentation can be thought of as expanding on Bettcher’s compressed insight.
In correspondence, Diaz-Leon offers a reply in this spirit.
Another reply that Diaz-Leon suggests in correspondence distinguishes between normative considerations that are of the right kind to fix which standards are salient and those that aren’t. Diaz-Leon could then claim of Case 4 that while Jo’s risk of suicide from misgendering is a serious moral concern, it’s the wrong kind of moral concern to affect which standard is salient in context. It’s a normative consideration that can be screened off in the theory of contextual salience.
But it seems that such a response makes Diaz-Leon’s view hostage to a solution to an even harder question – the question of how to distinguish reasons of the right and wrong kind. In other words, the problem with this response is that it involves jumping from the pan to the fire. See D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004) to get a sense of the difficulty of the issue.
Polysemy receives plenty of attention in linguistics. See Vicente and Falkum (2017) for an overview.
Leslie (2015) suggests a similar view explicitly, arguing in the context of the debate regarding generics that it’s the best way to make sense of them.
See Viebahn and Vetter (2016)
Bettcher (2013: 240–244) argues that ‘woman’ has both “dominant” and “resistant” meanings, which map, roughly, onto the polysemous view of ‘woman’ floated in this paper, where ‘woman’ has a meaning in mainstream society that is different from the meaning it has among trans and trans-inclusive feminist communities. This is why the views are similar. Though similar, I hesitate to characterize Bettcher’s view as polysemic not only because Bettcher doesn’t, but also because some of what Bettcher says suggests that speakers can “reject” as “false” attributions of terms with meanings for which they are against, implying that speakers have a degree of linguistic control that is in tension with my understanding of polysemic views. Comparing these views fully requires more space than is available in this paper.
In a recent paper, Bogardus (forthcoming: 23) argues, among other things, that attempts to provide a trans-inclusive account of ‘woman’ that depend on the possibility of conceptual engineering are either “impossible to complete due to unintelligibility” or “impossible to complete, at least in a way that includes all or even most trans women”. There isn’t enough space to investigate Bogardus’ argument fully. But focus on the first disjunct. Note, trans individuals and trans-inclusive feminists engaging in conceptual engineering, such as Jenkins (2016), following Haslanger (2000), use ‘woman’ in an inclusive sense. Note, too, that when they do, they understand each other. This simple fact counts strongly against any argument for the “unintelligibility” of trans-inclusive uses of ‘woman’.
Moreover, Bogardus takes his argument to show that the first disjunct is true because “Ameliorative Inquiry inevitably introduces ambiguity—new homonyms—and thereby results in merely verbal disputes, a change of subject” (my emphasis). Bogardus doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of polysemy. With polysemy in view, it looks possible to engage in at least something close to ameliorative inquiry in Haslanger’s sense without “introducing [homonymous] ambiguity”.
Dembroff (Forthcoming) arrives at conclusions in the same spirit from a different starting point.
As Fogal (2016) points out, “…polysemy is utterly pervasive in natural language…and it affects both content and function words. It also tends to be both systematic and productive, with similar patterns of polysemy applying to similar words across many languages…the default hypothesis for pretty much any ordinary noun, adjective, or verb should be that it is polysemous, and thoroughly so.”
See Recanati (2017).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Robin Dembroff, Esa Diaz-Leon, Nathan Robert Howard, Sofia Huerter, Daniel James, Jennifer Saul, and Daniel Wodak for constructive feedback. Thanks also to audiences at The Nature and Significance of Social Kinds Workshop at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen, Human Kinds Workshop at KU Leuven, the 2018 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, the Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics Research Group seminar organized by Neil Roughley at Duisburg-Essen Universität, and the British Society for Ethical Theory.
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Laskowski, N.G. Moral Constraints on Gender Concepts. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 39–51 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10060-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10060-9