I take your point, and I think I was not as clear as I should have been. My use of “grant” here is related to what Karpel Tunnel talks about at the end of his post in terms of “suspend[ing] disbelief”, but even more so: I would say we “grant” people their declared religious identity, in that we don’t seriously inquire about it most of the time once they’ve stated, “I’m an X”. But you’re right, “grant” isn’t really the right word or concept here.
I agree, I’m not trying to say that it’s not useful, only that it’s not useful by itself: we need to take the examples and pick them apart and make connections to the case we’re examining here. For example, I think your analysis of the 7 year old in high school is useful, and it’s that analysis that makes the example of the 7 year old informative for the case of the transwoman.
So, we should absolutely triangulate, and that’s what I mean in asking, Is this case more like example X or example Y? What is it about e.g. the cagefight that makes us agree that there biology matters, and what is it about the case of the bleach blonde that makes us agree that biology doesn’t matter?
My take is that the bleach blonde case, we ignore biology because we see hair color as superficial anyway, so we’re fine treating bleach blondes as real blondes (contrast Nazi Germany, where blonde-ness wasn’t merely superficial and natural blondes and bleach blondes would have gotten different treatment). And note that we don’t have a blonde league and a brunette league, or a lefty league and a righty league; we treat those differences as superficial, and not salient in the realm of sport. But we see certain biological and physical differences as salient: sex, weight (e.g. boxing weight classes), disability (special olympics, murderball), age, etc. And to a large extent a transwoman doesn’t change in the relevant way when she becomes a woman. For the same reason we ban e.g. doping with testosterone, we ban people who naturally have too much testosterone from the woman’s league, which will include a lot of transwomen.
But it also seems relevant to me that a more complete sex-reassignment procedure could overcome that, right? If we had a procedure that could more fully change a person from a man to a woman in more physical respects, at some margin we shouldn’t care that they are a transwoman or a ciswoman. That tells us that, even in the realm of sport, it isn’t the biological man-ness, it’s some contingent property of biological man-ness that we care about (e.g. increased testosterone, different body mechanics, etc.).
Organizational policy and law are especially likely to have the kind of breakdown I described, because they are advanced to placate a coalition of groups that may each have internally consistent views but whose views are inconsistent together, and who can still get behind the inconsistent policy because they agree with e.g. 66% of it.
But, I think this is a more general problem with coalition politics in a democracy, right? So much of law is inconsistent. In almost every area of law, we can find different parts of the law working at cross purposes, because of some compromise somewhere along the way that brought enough support into a coalition to get something done, if imperfectly. Is it particularly a problem here? If so, in what way?
I’m not sure how to deal with the division between sophisticated and unsophisticated people discussing these issues, because on the one hand, much philosophy is incomprehensible to someone who’s never spent any time with it, but on the other hand, these arguments depend on appeals to intersubjective concepts and words defined across a culture or speaker population made up mostly of people who don’t think too deeply about the issue. So I’m torn between dismissing the perspective of people who hold obviously inconsistent views (like “there’s no such thing as gender” and “transwomen really are their chosen gender”), and needing their perspective to make any of the concepts we’re using meaningful.
To clarify what I mean by intersubjective, because I’ve realize googling around that I may not be using its most common meaning (I picked it up not too long ago from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens; it apparently has some meaning in phenomenology that I don’t understand enough to know if it’s the same thing), I’m using it to refer to things that are true by virtue of shared subjectivity. Here is a quote from the book, cribbed from this review:
There’s an objective element to sex, i.e. biology. But there’s also an intersubjective element, i.e. social sexual roles. That’s certainly true of the language we use (language being a paradigmatic intersubjective phenomenon), but it’s also true of the underlying concepts of social sex, which we can see by the progress of sexual equality and the different presumptions about gendered behavior across cultures.
So when I say that, “There doesn’t seem to be anything requiring that intersubjective facts be mutually consistent”, what I mean is that these concepts can be inconsistent, they can be logically incompatible, and nonetheless be true. It might be that a “woman” is “a female person”, “female” is about biology, and yet “woman” is not about biology (I’m not claiming that, I’m just offering it as an example). The only thing constraining intersubjective facts is what the nodes in a communications network can believe. That leaves open the possibility that inconsistent individual beliefs can get written into a kind of fact external to any particular individual, or that the sum of beliefs may be inconsistent even where the individual beliefs aren’t.
Something I touched on earlier and didn’t go far enough into is the way that all social identities are fictions, and all require some degree of suspension of disbelief, and I think if that’s the case, then it’s not so unsatisfying to say that transpeople are asking for a similar kind of suspension of disbelief.
Complex concepts like “male” and “female” have a lot of associations and connotations tied to the idea in general and dropped as necessary when applied in the specific. Like, if we try to think of the archetypical man or woman, it’s pretty easy to see that most instances don’t match on any number of dimension. And yet when we describe those individuals as “man” or “woman”, those archetypical features come over in part; like C3PO, individual biological men are “made in male-ish form”. Obviously they are more central in the concept of “man”, but in the Venn diagram of man-ness, an individual will only partially overlap with male-ish traits. And every individual will also have a different concept of “man” or “woman”, so that people will disagree about how to classify the marginal cases.
But we suspend disbelief in the sense that we don’t interrogate the specifics too much, we use “man” and “woman” as though they are Platonic forms and we ignore the ways in which we know, upon reflection, that individuals don’t fit, and don’t even mean the same thing we mean when we use them. We use those concepts to sum people up and align expectations, and we’re OK with our expectations being only mostly correct.
I don’t think it’s too great a stretch to draw parallels between the ways in which we shape ourselves towards these identities and the ways movie-makers shape robots towards them. We choose clothes that make our bodies appear more man-like and woman-like; we up- and down- regulate our emotional expressions to convey a more man-like or woman-like mental mode; we cut our hair or wear makeup or engage in activities or select car colors with these ideals in mind. A lot of our choices aren’t about inherent biology, they’re about crafting ourselves towards some intersubjective fiction of what a man or woman should be or do or sound like or drive.
Even more generally that that, the extent that I think of myself as a unified whole, with a consistent personality and set of desires and preferences, is artificial. It’s easier to model myself and the world by conceiving of myself and others this way, but it doesn’t track what we know about people as physical objects or social actors. Once I tell someone my favorite food is X, I am much more likely to choose that food when we’re out to lunch together than I would have been if I just never thought about the question. That’s a case of a quasi-fictional identity feeding back to shape how we behave, who we are, rather than an identity that is shaped by who we are and what we do.
And I think this relates, too, to the conflict between de-emphasizing gender and also respecting (“granting”/acknowledging/privileging/whatever the word) people’s self-expressed gender identity. To some extent, we could find the same tensions in any identity; we can point out that all the concepts we use are fuzzy and less stable than we let on, and still apply them as though they’re sharply defined and fixed.