Is Self-ID Really Circular?

This post self-identifies as worth reading

Didn’t realize it is pride month when writing this. Happy coincidence, I guess :)

The world is filled to the brim with bigoted scum! Some rationalize slavery with skull-measurements, some want to disenfranchise our beautiful women, and some even reject shrimp’s rights (*cough cough*)! Worst of all, however, are the despicable dissenters of the self-ID view of gender—the view that you have whichever gender you identify as having.

Among their ranks are otherwise ostensibly decent people like

Bentham's Bulldog

and

Tower of Babble

.¹ These stone-hearted ghouls wish death upon all trans people, often going so far as to deny their very right to existence. Despicable!

I jest of course. Still, self-ID has often been pretty quickly dismissed in circles of people who try to think about things for being “circular” and “uninformative.” While not convinced that it's the best way to define gender, I think it has more potentially going for it than has otherwise been presumed, and I shall try to patch up its most fatal flaw.

First, an Aside

Attack helicopters, lol, LMAO! 🤣🤣😂

Very funny!

Literally me

Now, the Post:

The canonical objection raised against the self-ID view is as follows: The definition uses the definiendum in the definiens. So “woman” means “someone who identifies as a woman.” However, if we explicate that, it becomes “someone who identifies as someone who identifies as a woman,” and I’m sure I don’t need to explain where this goes. So the definition is in no way informative!

Seems pretty decisive right? I’m not so sure, as I think there are genuine examples of successful self-ID identities. First a case study of one such, and then I'll try and explain how I think self-ID can avoid the above.

I.

I think I’m a Dane. Why? Because I identify as a Dane (and I mean national identity, not just citizenship here). What exactly do I identify as? I mean, don’t we just run into the same problem as before? When I introspect, it doesn’t feel like we do. What I identify as isn’t some group with a set of conditions for being a member—you must eat this food, be born here, know these songs, and be this tall—rather its just… that group. Being a Dane doesn’t have necessary and sufficient condition; it doesn’t even just boil down to family resemblance. No, being a Dane is a ✨V I B E✨.

Hopefully when you introspect you find something similar for [insert own nationality]. That is, you find that your national identity doesn’t have some object other than just that national identity. You might of course associate all sorts of cultural artefacts and practices with the identity, but none of that constitutes it. When I abstract away all that stuff, it just seems like there is this vague National-Identity-Entity that I identify as falling under, end of story.

Are there many such cases? Yeah! At least I think we can make up many. I hereby declare the group “Wonderers!” “Who is a Wonderer?” you ask. And I answer: “Anyone who feels like it!” There are no criteria other than just identifying as a Wonderer—no questions asked. Members of course share many characteristics, such as often being cool and being subscribed to Wonder and Aporia (which naturally implicate each other):

Was there anything incoherent about what I did there? I don’t think so! From now on, I can make perfect sense of the idea that we are Wonderers—it’s not that deep. Other examples might include certain kinds of sub-cultures, and perhaps friend groups.²

II.

Circling back to what we were actually here for, how do these examples avoid the circularity-accusation? I basically think the way that this escapes the argument is that the “Dane” of the definiendum isn’t the same sense as the “Dane” used in the definiens. The “Dane” I am is the type I belong to: Danes. But the “Dane” I identify as is this intangible vibe, that isn’t exactly anything other than just the feel of the group itself (I hope I’m not sounding crazy here, lol).

Likewise for women: The definiendum “Woman” is the category of women, whereas the “Woman” in the definiens is the vague womanish vibe that someone might feel themselves with.

The crucial question of course is: Is gender identity like these examples? I kind of think so, yeah. When I introspect, I feel like my gender identity is very phenomenologically similar to my national identity. Each might be manifested in things like my language or my dick, but the identity itself is different—it’s just a vibe of being a Dane or a man. I can’t really do more than just ask you to introspect and hopefully find the same to be the case for you.

One thing about these other self-ID categories is that they really actually do seem to have a substantive core beyond bootstrapping themselves into existence. Namely they’re defined by their history. At some point someone stipulatively said: “Let Denmark be, and let the flag fall down to us from heaven!”

And it was so!

That defined what it meant to be a Dane: Identifying as a This *points to the group just stipulated to exist*. But then there really is some content to the group: Namely being the group with such and such a history.³

But any social category will have a history. Doctors have a history, rock musicians have a history; heck, even Wonder and Aporia subscribers have a beautiful history. It might be unclear when Womanhood came into existence, but exactly the same is the case for old national identities like Danishness, so the parity holds. Basically, the criterion of having some history is extremely easy to fulfill.

III.

Due to my generosity and large heart, I’ll suppose that what I’ve argued doesn’t work. In that case I think

Tower of Babble

gets things basically right in saying that self-ID is a very good epistemic criterion for finding out who are women. What then actually makes someone a woman? If you have done the recommended reading of the blog, you’d know that I don’t think there’s a true answer here. Rather it’s just a question of who ought to count as women. This will be highly context-sensitive, but if I had to choose a single definition to use, I think it’d be something like this:

X is a woman IFF X is a female and doesn’t have gender dysphoria, or X is not a female and experiences gender dysphoria “oriented towards” womanhood.

What exactly it takes to have gender dysphoria as specified here is the big question. This has of course been operationalized in clinical contexts, so that might be a good start. However, I suppose we’re really interested in the phenomenon that we’re trying to capture with the diagnosis, rather than the diagnostic criteria. I’m not sure exactly what it is people with gender dysphoria feel like they’re missing, and I take it that it varies from person to person. But I suspect that some kind of self-ID will end up being part of it; you can’t keep running from it.

Whatever it is they’re feeling, though, it surely can’t be circular—I don’t even know what it would mean for a feeling or desire to be “circular”—as people are actually having it, and experiencing a desire for something. Whether the dysphoria has the womanhood vibe or boobs as its object doesn’t much matter though, the point is simply that this definition does what it ought to do.

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1. E.g. here and here respectively.

2. While not obvious, friend groups might work if you take a deflationary ontology about groups. In that case there’s no entity “out there” which people fall under, but rather groups are just ways of talking or something. Then each person might have a different idea of the group in mind—that is, there is no single friend group across persons. So even if Jack and Jill don’t consider Johnny their friends, if Johnny does consider himself a part of the friend group, then he is a part of the Johnny’s-POV-friend-group. That means that being part of the X’s-POV-friend-group is simply a matter of X considering themselves a part of it—something I think is close enough to self-ID.

3. Well, most groups won’t have such a sharp beginning. Rather it will just slowly evolve naturally.