Gender Is Fundamentally A Subjective Experience

There’s a significant degree to which the sex vs gender debate feels like Groundhog Day.

I’ve been called the same silly names, marvelled at the same scientific and logical illiteracy, and made the same rebuttals, hundreds of times. But now and then, somebody comes at the issue from an angle that’s at least kind of novel.

A few days ago, I replied to a tweet from a well-known trans activist named Katy that went something like this:

Our current understanding of biological sex doesn’t “split all humans into one of two sexes with no exceptions,” therefore we should switch to a method that’s built on misogyny and fairy dust.

I’ve seen this argument countless times too. But Jane, who replies to my reply, takes us in an interesting direction.

(N.B. As usual with Twitter conversations, I’ve done some light editing for flow/avoiding tangents.)

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Katy:

Go on then Paul, do you want to explain the "normal rules of biology" are?

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Steve QJ:

It is genuinely unbelievable how stupid this argument is:

“Pfff, your definition of male/female is 99.98% accurate? Might as well throw the whole thing out. Because *my* definition is rooted in the bedrock of people’s subjective, totally unprovable claims.”

Checkmate science 😎

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Jane:

Yes, gender is fundamentally a subjective experience.

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Steve QJ:

Exactly. Therefore meaningless in law or science. And when you really think about it, meaningless all round.

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Jane:

No? What a baffling conclusion. You say that while experiencing Twitter with your subjective experience. All laws are based on subjective belief, all science an attempt to transfer objective facts into our subjective experiences.

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Steve QJ:

There are no laws governing my experience on Twitter. What are you talking about?

The law is our second best attempt to make the subjective, objective. Science is our best attempt. We don't indulge feelings without any further evidence in either.

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Jane:

I didn't say that laws governed your experiene with Twitter. Twitter and laws were mentioned in two different sentences. I have no idea how you interpreted what I said that way.

Regardless, you seem to be mistaking 'subjective' with 'feelings'. Feelings are subjective. However, so is: Sight and all other senses; pain; hunger; thought; beliefs, ideals, etc. Science features the studying of the objective world - through our subjective lenses.

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Steve QJ:

Yes, and uses experiment and logic and evidence to circumvent the narrow and often faulty filters of our subjective experience. That's as close as we can get to objectivity. As I wrote already.

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Jane:

Well yeah, but that doesn't negate the inherent subjectivity to the process. Or strengthen your assertion that all subjective things are pointless, which would imply

1. Your sight is pointless

2. Observations made in the scientific process are pointless

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Steve QJ:

"Or strengthen your assertion that all subjective things are pointless"

This wasn't my assertion. My assertion was quite specific.

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Jane:

“Exactly. Therefore meaningless in law or science. And when you really think about it, meaningless all round.”

Here you claim that gender is meaningless in law or science because it is subjective. I point out that law and science are inherently based on subjective values/observations - ergo your initial assertion is false. You still haven't picked up on this.

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Steve QJ:

"in law or science"

Again, law and science are both systems that try to take the subjective and make it objective. Not the other way around. You have that backwards.

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Jane:

Neither science nor law "take the subjective and make it objective". And even if they did, gender being subjective would very much make it useful. Please try to argue for your actual argument.

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Steve QJ:

"take the subjective and make them objective"

Yes they do. That, effectively, is exactly what "evidence" means. And both [law and science] require it.

You say something happened, but it's subjective, and I can't share in that experience. So I ask for some information that allows me to verify it.

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Jane:

You mean you're taking the objective and making it subjective? Like, you take an objective piece of evidence. Then you observe it ("make" it subjective). This would describe what actually happens a lot closer. This is also an odd tangent which has little to do with gender.

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Steve QJ:

Again, this is the opposite of what happens. You start with a subjective observation. Or, as Feynman put it, a guess. Then, you try to find evidence to support that observation. If you succeed, and if others can replicate or share your observation, it's (closer to) objective.

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Jane:

A subjective observation can't be made without an objective thing to observe.

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Steve QJ:

How do you know the thing you're observing is objective? If a schizophrenic hallucinates something, is that thing objective? No. It's a part of their purely subjective experience.

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Jane:

How do you know you're reproducing the objective, then? How do you know that the science successfully turned the subjective into the objective? As soon as you start saying "how do you know" the entire talk of objectivity goes out the window.

There is no reason to question our ability to accurately observe reality unless you are trying to derail this entire conversation. Is that what you're trying to do?

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Steve QJ:

"How do you know that the science successfully turned the subjective into the objective?"

You don't. That's why science doesn't produce facts, only theories. But the better your theory is able to predict events/phenomena, the more confident you become in its objective truth.

And no. I'm not trying to derail at all. Though maybe this difference in worldview is at the heart of our disagreement about gender. I mean, at its simplest level, the argument I'm making is that our feelings and intuitions can be (and fairly often are) wrong.

That's why objective standards (and/or evidence) are important whenever we try to formalise something into law or talk about it in science.

So gender isn't useful, because you can't offer me any evidence. And you can't demand a standard of evidence that shows, for example, that I am not a woman. It's exactly like an argument from religious faith. I can't prove you didn't see God. But you can't prove God exists.

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Jane:

You're under the assumption that you cannot provide evidence of subjective experience. If this were true, scientists wouldn't be able to record anything. The act of writing it down, telling somebody, recording it, is literally providing evidence of the subjective.

And don't bother bringing theism into this. One is a subjective experience while the other is a variety of ontological, epistemological, historical, and ethical claims which don't hold up to observation. They aren't in any way comparable and it's pathetic to try.

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Steve QJ:

I'm only mentioning theism because it's the ultimate subjective experience. Or call it spiritual if you prefer. All kinds of claims have been made by religions. Fervently and sincerely believed in many cases. But meaningless. Because they can never be objectively demonstrated.

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Jane:

Religion is more intersubjective but sure. Though if subjective experiences couldn't be studied, then the entire field of psychology, psychiatry, therapy, sociology, etc would never exist. All scientific fields which revolve around subjective experiences.

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Steve QJ:

"psychology, psychiatry, therapy, sociology, etc would never exist."

No. Again, the purpose of all of these things is to verify, as best we can, what's real about our subjective experience. There are limits, of course, by their nature. That's why they're not hard sciences.

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It took Jane a day to respond to this. So I suspected I’d at least made her think.

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Jane:

Ok, not a hard science. Cool. Now apply that to gender.

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Steve QJ:

Gender, even among trans people, is a poorly defined idea about “feeling” like something you objectively aren’t. There is nothing approaching a consensus about what it feels like to be a man/woman. And the closest anybody gets is describing a preference for certain stereotypes (liking/disliking dresses or makeup, wanting to pee standing up).

That’s why there are so many interpretations of gender. And new genders that “feel” like the universe or animals or fluid combinations of various other genders. What we’re really talking about here at least as far as I can see, is a personality. A sense of self that is totally subjective, that will, as we often see, change over time, and that doesn’t require a name. It’s just you.

I, for example, am a man because I’m an adult human male. But I don’t *feel* like a man. I have no idea what that even means. Nor, it’s worth mentioning, has anybody I’ve ever spoken to. Trans or not.

p.s. It occurs to me I’ve been fairly absolutist about gender here. This is how I see it. But I’m genuinely interested to hear how your take. I’m presuming you disagree with me. But could you try to explain exactly why?

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Jane:

Well, my own conception of gender is currently shifting. But for a long time I've stood with the modern biological and psychological developments which point towards gender and sex being a lot less rigid than we used to think.

The subjectivity of it is definitely a big hump to getting over before you can properly understand it all. You can't "objectively" not be a woman as womanhood is as much a subjective experience as it is objective.

But the biggest thing getting in the way is the essentialisation of gender. It can be easy to essentialise male and female dynamics as two objectively binary things when that's all you've ever witnessed. But this binary simply doesn't apply to everyone. The old model doesn't account for all of human behaviour. The new model's a little better.

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Steve QJ:

This is what I find so confusing about this. It seems that you’re using womanhood in this case as a synonym for femininity. But femininity is all the fake stuff and I’m not talking about that at all. Womanhood as I mean it, or being a woman, is simply the objective reality of whether you’re an adult human female.

How feminine you are, which feminine traits and stereotypes you choose to embody, have nothing to do with it. So it seems to me that tying the definition of womanhood to femininity, as you seem to be doing, is far more essentialist.

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One of my biggest insights into gender ideology came while listening to teenage girls talk about why they wanted to transition. 

All of them, every single one of them, talked either about wanting to escape the sexist expectations that their soon-to-be-womanhood placed on them (the focus on their appearance, the belief they were physically or psychologically fragile), or wanting to escape the unwelcome sexual attention their newly-pubescent bodies attracted from men.

It’s incredibly easy to understand why a fourteen-year-old girl, who is suddenly being leered at by forty-year-old men, might want to opt out of that attention forever. Especially when, as is often the case for female transitioners, that “attention” has progressed to harassment. 

And from there, it’s not hard to understand how people like Jane get the impression that the harassment and sexist expectations are what womanhood is. As once-upon-a-time “non-binary” individual Demi Lovato put it:

…for me, it was putting me in a box telling [me] that ‘You are a female, this is what you’re supposed to like, this is what you’re supposed to do, don’t dream bigger and don’t speak louder.’ That didn’t vibe for me because I’m too outspoken for that.

The sex vs gender debate is really a debate about how to address gender stereotypes. 

The gender ideologues’ solution is to essentialise them: if you are willing to embody the sexist stereotypes imposed on women, then you are a woman. Even if you’re a man. 

But the correct solution is to evolve beyond them. To foster a society where men can be vulnerable or timid or even beautiful without being labelled weak or creepy or “girly”. 

Where a woman can be unattractive and disagreeable and even evil without people calling her “manish” or “bitchy” or arguing that the patriarchy is to blame for her bad behaviour. 

Where we let people be who they want to be without denying the objective realities of what they are.

Or, as JK Rowling—that most hateful of transphobes—wrote five years ago:

Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #ThisIsNotADrill

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