Something something I identify as being right about this argument something something attack helicopter etc.
Enjoyed this a lot, I actually don’t think our views are that far apart. I don’t disagree that the definition “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” can be non circular, either by equivocating on the sense of the word ‘woman’ (the path you suggest here) or by mentioning the second occurrence of woman such that it’s about identifying with the particular sign ‘woman’. The tricky thing is that I think the label of ‘woman’ has content, that is to say when I find out someone is a woman I learn a good bit about her, so we want some explanation of where that content comes from. Here’s where I think our views are actually similar because ‘vibes’ is basically what I take to supply the features of the cluster concept for gender on my view. The difference, I take it, between our views is then about the work that identification is doing.
I think the characteristic feature of the self ID view is that, so long as someone honestly thinks to themselves that they are a woman, they are as such. You give Dane as another example of a ‘self ID category’ but I don’t think it works. If John is a born and bread American, does not know danish or the history of Denmark or even where Denmark is on a map, but proclaims “I am a Dane!” with full honesty, he’s just wrong.
Putting it another way, I think these modified self ID views, if they are to remain self ID views, must have identification as a sufficient condition for inclusion in the category. But I don’t know of any category that works like this! At least not any seriously gerrymandered ones. There are also cases where people genuinely believed they were a woman, and weren’t. Take someone who detransitions, they at one point believe themselves to be a gender that they were not, and they believed that entirely honestly. Basically I think, aside from the logical issues, having mere identification as the sufficient criteria for gender gets you into a bunch of headaches where instead you should just look at whether or not people conform to the ✨vibes✨
I think the part about getting content can be explained perfectly well with statistical correlations. The types of people who would say they ID with the woman vibe will generally have certain characteristics in common, even if none of that has anything directly to do with their gender. As an analogy, learning that a car was manufactured at a Ford factory would allow you to predict a lot about what it will look like. But that has nothing directly to do with whether it was in fact manufactured there, and the factory could conceivably make a replica of a Suzuki instead.
Regarding the nationality point, I'll just copy-paste what I replied to Philip, as I think that's more or less what I'd say here as well:
"Well, I think that might be right. Although I might also be tempted to simply say that I doubt that very many people who don't meet those criteria really feel the "genuine" Danish vibe. And if they do, then I can't see why it would be too strange say that they aren't Danish. Though I certainly also feel intuitions pulling in favor of what you say.
A thing that maybe complicates this slightly (though I didn't think it was important enough to mention) is that I don't think there is a single "Danish vibe." Rather I think that each person has their own idea of what it takes, and so it might be that someone with no genuine connection to Denmark still feel what they take to be the Danish vibe, though it wouldn't overlap very much with what people born and raised would feel. I think this addition makes the picture somewhat more palatable."
As for someone who detransitions, it would depend on the case, but I could see three general ways of accounting for it: 1) They changed their identification, 2) they changed their conceptions of the man and woman vibes, 3) they were bad at introspecting (something I think is very possible. I for one don't have crystal clear awareness of exactly what gender vibe I feel. It's all kind of vague). Or of course a combination of the three.
Firstly, sorry for the delayed response, partly due to my mulling over what you say here and partly me forgetting to respond haha. I'm going to move from the end of your comments backwards because I think I have the most to say about the detransition case (and I think it is the biggest problem for fixed-self-ID views.)
I just want to firstly clarify the point of the case. Let's say that Mark is a detransitioner (MTF, then back to M). I think that it is perfectly understandable for Mark to say, of the period of time that he was presenting as a woman, that he was not one. I think this is true even if Mark, at the time, genuinely identified as a woman.
Okay, given that case, I think (1) doesn't obviate our worry, of course Mark changes his identification but the question is whether he can be mistaken in that identifying act (I think he can). (2) would work, but I think we can reasonably dial into the case that this doesn't change. We can suppose that Marks idea's of femininity/masculinity are fixed. (3) is the most interesting I think. One way that Mark could be bad at introspecting is that he could be wrong about his identification (He did not, in fact, identify as a woman), again I just want to dial this option into the case. Mark really truly did identify as a woman, and correctly identified this. Quick aside, I think it looks like I'm dialing more into the hypothetical than I really am, it seems totally plausible to me that someone would A. have fixed ideas of femininity and masculinity, and B. genuinely identify with one of those ideals while C. later coming to think they were not the gender the identified with despite doing so. It's worth noting also that, although I'm using a detransitioner for this case, I think you could plausibly tell a similar story about someone who transitions. They identify as a woman (say) prior to their transition, later realize they are not a woman and come to identify as a man, and believe that they were a man even when they identified as a woman. It seems to me that this sort of pattern is totally possible, but I think it is ruled out by this and all self-ID views. I'll also mention, I think this is a waaaaay less damning objection than the circularity worry, so I'm not pushing this as a sort of knockdown objection, this seems like a totally respectable view, it's just one reason I wouldn't adopt it.
For the Dane case we might just have strongly conflicting intuitions here, so I don't want to harp on it too much especially considering the essay I dropped in your lap above lol.
Lastly, on the point about content, I think your reply here is totally satisfactory in reply to what I said, but I think I articulated my worry in a sort of muddled way. I'll think about how to articulate it better and either post another comment here, or if it's longer than what I wrote above maybe I'll just type up another post on the subject and we can engage in a good-old-fashioned blog bout.
I agree that self-ID can be noncircular, but you can't self-ID as a Dane! If don't live in Denmark and were not born in Denmark and do not have Danish ancestry, sorry, you're not Danish.
Well, I think that might be right. Although I might also be tempted to simply say that I doubt that very many people who don't meet those criteria really feel the "genuine" Danish vibe. And if they do, then I can't see why it would be too strange say that they aren't Danish. Though I certainly also feel intuitions pulling in favor of what you say.
A thing that maybe complicates this slightly (though I didn't think it was important enough to mention) is that I don't think there is a single "Danish vibe." Rather I think that each person has their own idea of what it takes, and so it might be that someone with no genuine connection to Denmark still feel what they take to be the Danish vibe, though it wouldn't overlap very much with what people born and raised would feel. I think this addition makes the picture somewhat more palatable.
Yeah, I think a more accurate version of the self-ID definition for nationality is that you have to have some connection to the nation, either by living there (or having lived there) or ancestry, and identify with it.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the category of religion. That's a big one where the self-ID view seems to be regularly accepted as defining whether or not someone is a member of a particular religion. You might try to define a set of doctrines that are necessary and sufficient for being a Christian, but you're always going to find some group that calls itself Christian and denies one of your doctrines, or some group that holds them but isn't Christian. It seems that the only real criterion for a religious group being considered a branch of Christianity is that it considers itself to be one.
I was also thinking about including that, but I thought it was plausibly too dependent on genuine criteria beyond mere self ID--namely believing certain doctrines. As you say, it's not crystal clear what the necessary and sufficient doctrines are, but I think that's just because the word or concept is vague enough to allow for edge cases, and not something about the structure of the identity, which I think comes more down to belief than self-ID.
Maybe belief and self-ID simply are the same. But I'm not sure that's the case. I certainly believe that I identify as a man, but I think I might hold many beliefs that have nothing to do with my identity (e.g. that the moon orbits the earth), and I might not have perfect beliefs about my self-ID (it can be hard to figure out precisely what I identify as when I introspect).
I think it's mostly but not entirely a pragmatic thing. And more about self-assessment than self-identification.
"Gender" is one of many examples where the boundaries of meaning effectively come down to whether, when we consider many spectra of characteristics that tend to apply relatively more/less frequently for the instances that we always include within the category versus for those that we always exclude, do those spectra apply in a given instance in a similar enough way that we choose to regard that instance as falling within the category.
Making that choice for "gender" based on a single, prior, physical characteristic (genitalia at birth) is an option. An option that necessarily discounts literally all of the other distinctions and associations that we make about what is masculine and feminine. It instead makes a lot of sense to give strong weight to people's psychological traits and inclinations, and other non-physical factors.
If we have someone identifying as a woman, well then the act of doing that is itself a feminine characteristic. Men don't tend to do it. So that's a factor we might take into account to some degree.
Usually though, what they're really doing is asserting that they feel like they are aligned with the feminine gender. And we're not normally going to be in a position to assess whether they have a sensible basis for that or whether what they have in mind matches what we have in mind.
But there will be pretenders and a non-zero number of seriously misguided or delusion people. That they identify or purport to identify as a woman isn't determinative of whether they are what we mean when we use that term. Self-identification isn't enough.
Something something I identify as being right about this argument something something attack helicopter etc.
Enjoyed this a lot, I actually don’t think our views are that far apart. I don’t disagree that the definition “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” can be non circular, either by equivocating on the sense of the word ‘woman’ (the path you suggest here) or by mentioning the second occurrence of woman such that it’s about identifying with the particular sign ‘woman’. The tricky thing is that I think the label of ‘woman’ has content, that is to say when I find out someone is a woman I learn a good bit about her, so we want some explanation of where that content comes from. Here’s where I think our views are actually similar because ‘vibes’ is basically what I take to supply the features of the cluster concept for gender on my view. The difference, I take it, between our views is then about the work that identification is doing.
I think the characteristic feature of the self ID view is that, so long as someone honestly thinks to themselves that they are a woman, they are as such. You give Dane as another example of a ‘self ID category’ but I don’t think it works. If John is a born and bread American, does not know danish or the history of Denmark or even where Denmark is on a map, but proclaims “I am a Dane!” with full honesty, he’s just wrong.
Putting it another way, I think these modified self ID views, if they are to remain self ID views, must have identification as a sufficient condition for inclusion in the category. But I don’t know of any category that works like this! At least not any seriously gerrymandered ones. There are also cases where people genuinely believed they were a woman, and weren’t. Take someone who detransitions, they at one point believe themselves to be a gender that they were not, and they believed that entirely honestly. Basically I think, aside from the logical issues, having mere identification as the sufficient criteria for gender gets you into a bunch of headaches where instead you should just look at whether or not people conform to the ✨vibes✨
Haha, thank you!
I think the part about getting content can be explained perfectly well with statistical correlations. The types of people who would say they ID with the woman vibe will generally have certain characteristics in common, even if none of that has anything directly to do with their gender. As an analogy, learning that a car was manufactured at a Ford factory would allow you to predict a lot about what it will look like. But that has nothing directly to do with whether it was in fact manufactured there, and the factory could conceivably make a replica of a Suzuki instead.
Regarding the nationality point, I'll just copy-paste what I replied to Philip, as I think that's more or less what I'd say here as well:
"Well, I think that might be right. Although I might also be tempted to simply say that I doubt that very many people who don't meet those criteria really feel the "genuine" Danish vibe. And if they do, then I can't see why it would be too strange say that they aren't Danish. Though I certainly also feel intuitions pulling in favor of what you say.
A thing that maybe complicates this slightly (though I didn't think it was important enough to mention) is that I don't think there is a single "Danish vibe." Rather I think that each person has their own idea of what it takes, and so it might be that someone with no genuine connection to Denmark still feel what they take to be the Danish vibe, though it wouldn't overlap very much with what people born and raised would feel. I think this addition makes the picture somewhat more palatable."
As for someone who detransitions, it would depend on the case, but I could see three general ways of accounting for it: 1) They changed their identification, 2) they changed their conceptions of the man and woman vibes, 3) they were bad at introspecting (something I think is very possible. I for one don't have crystal clear awareness of exactly what gender vibe I feel. It's all kind of vague). Or of course a combination of the three.
Firstly, sorry for the delayed response, partly due to my mulling over what you say here and partly me forgetting to respond haha. I'm going to move from the end of your comments backwards because I think I have the most to say about the detransition case (and I think it is the biggest problem for fixed-self-ID views.)
I just want to firstly clarify the point of the case. Let's say that Mark is a detransitioner (MTF, then back to M). I think that it is perfectly understandable for Mark to say, of the period of time that he was presenting as a woman, that he was not one. I think this is true even if Mark, at the time, genuinely identified as a woman.
Okay, given that case, I think (1) doesn't obviate our worry, of course Mark changes his identification but the question is whether he can be mistaken in that identifying act (I think he can). (2) would work, but I think we can reasonably dial into the case that this doesn't change. We can suppose that Marks idea's of femininity/masculinity are fixed. (3) is the most interesting I think. One way that Mark could be bad at introspecting is that he could be wrong about his identification (He did not, in fact, identify as a woman), again I just want to dial this option into the case. Mark really truly did identify as a woman, and correctly identified this. Quick aside, I think it looks like I'm dialing more into the hypothetical than I really am, it seems totally plausible to me that someone would A. have fixed ideas of femininity and masculinity, and B. genuinely identify with one of those ideals while C. later coming to think they were not the gender the identified with despite doing so. It's worth noting also that, although I'm using a detransitioner for this case, I think you could plausibly tell a similar story about someone who transitions. They identify as a woman (say) prior to their transition, later realize they are not a woman and come to identify as a man, and believe that they were a man even when they identified as a woman. It seems to me that this sort of pattern is totally possible, but I think it is ruled out by this and all self-ID views. I'll also mention, I think this is a waaaaay less damning objection than the circularity worry, so I'm not pushing this as a sort of knockdown objection, this seems like a totally respectable view, it's just one reason I wouldn't adopt it.
For the Dane case we might just have strongly conflicting intuitions here, so I don't want to harp on it too much especially considering the essay I dropped in your lap above lol.
Lastly, on the point about content, I think your reply here is totally satisfactory in reply to what I said, but I think I articulated my worry in a sort of muddled way. I'll think about how to articulate it better and either post another comment here, or if it's longer than what I wrote above maybe I'll just type up another post on the subject and we can engage in a good-old-fashioned blog bout.
I agree that self-ID can be noncircular, but you can't self-ID as a Dane! If don't live in Denmark and were not born in Denmark and do not have Danish ancestry, sorry, you're not Danish.
Nationality as vibes reminded me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32G_BVb18MA
Haha!
Well, I think that might be right. Although I might also be tempted to simply say that I doubt that very many people who don't meet those criteria really feel the "genuine" Danish vibe. And if they do, then I can't see why it would be too strange say that they aren't Danish. Though I certainly also feel intuitions pulling in favor of what you say.
A thing that maybe complicates this slightly (though I didn't think it was important enough to mention) is that I don't think there is a single "Danish vibe." Rather I think that each person has their own idea of what it takes, and so it might be that someone with no genuine connection to Denmark still feel what they take to be the Danish vibe, though it wouldn't overlap very much with what people born and raised would feel. I think this addition makes the picture somewhat more palatable.
Yeah, I think a more accurate version of the self-ID definition for nationality is that you have to have some connection to the nation, either by living there (or having lived there) or ancestry, and identify with it.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the category of religion. That's a big one where the self-ID view seems to be regularly accepted as defining whether or not someone is a member of a particular religion. You might try to define a set of doctrines that are necessary and sufficient for being a Christian, but you're always going to find some group that calls itself Christian and denies one of your doctrines, or some group that holds them but isn't Christian. It seems that the only real criterion for a religious group being considered a branch of Christianity is that it considers itself to be one.
I was also thinking about including that, but I thought it was plausibly too dependent on genuine criteria beyond mere self ID--namely believing certain doctrines. As you say, it's not crystal clear what the necessary and sufficient doctrines are, but I think that's just because the word or concept is vague enough to allow for edge cases, and not something about the structure of the identity, which I think comes more down to belief than self-ID.
Maybe belief and self-ID simply are the same. But I'm not sure that's the case. I certainly believe that I identify as a man, but I think I might hold many beliefs that have nothing to do with my identity (e.g. that the moon orbits the earth), and I might not have perfect beliefs about my self-ID (it can be hard to figure out precisely what I identify as when I introspect).
I think it's mostly but not entirely a pragmatic thing. And more about self-assessment than self-identification.
"Gender" is one of many examples where the boundaries of meaning effectively come down to whether, when we consider many spectra of characteristics that tend to apply relatively more/less frequently for the instances that we always include within the category versus for those that we always exclude, do those spectra apply in a given instance in a similar enough way that we choose to regard that instance as falling within the category.
Making that choice for "gender" based on a single, prior, physical characteristic (genitalia at birth) is an option. An option that necessarily discounts literally all of the other distinctions and associations that we make about what is masculine and feminine. It instead makes a lot of sense to give strong weight to people's psychological traits and inclinations, and other non-physical factors.
If we have someone identifying as a woman, well then the act of doing that is itself a feminine characteristic. Men don't tend to do it. So that's a factor we might take into account to some degree.
Usually though, what they're really doing is asserting that they feel like they are aligned with the feminine gender. And we're not normally going to be in a position to assess whether they have a sensible basis for that or whether what they have in mind matches what we have in mind.
But there will be pretenders and a non-zero number of seriously misguided or delusion people. That they identify or purport to identify as a woman isn't determinative of whether they are what we mean when we use that term. Self-identification isn't enough.