Are Trans Women Really Women?

What does it really mean to say that sex is "biologically determined"? In this episode of American Socrates, we explore the science, philosophy, and politics behind one of the most heated debates of our time. We break down what biology can tell us about sex, what it can’t, and why that matters—not just in classrooms and courtrooms, but in everyday life.

Whether you're curious, skeptical, or just trying to make sense of the noise, this episode invites you to think deeper about categories we often take for granted.

#AmericanSocrates #PhilosophyPodcast #GenderAndSex #CriticalThinking

Transcript

Have you ever been to a modern gender reveal party? A cupcake reveals a blue egg inside, announcing a baby boy or a burst of pink confetti and smoke announces a baby girl to a cheering crowd. Have you never wondered who decided pink is the girls' color and blue, the boys'? And has it always been that way? If we were wound 100 years, would pink still be considered feminine? No. Actually, pink was for boys. Blue, considered soft and delicate, was for girls. So how did these colors get tied to gender anyway? Simone de Beauvo argued that what we consider natural about men and women is often the result of societal choices more than biology. If something as arbitrary as a color can shape our ideas of gender, what does that reveal about the deeper social constructs at play here? Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. Today, we're talking about sex and gender. There's recently been a lot of play on these topics in the media regarding the idea of transsexuality. Are there only two genders? Are there only two sexes? What is the difference between sex and gender? These sorts of questions, most people don't really understand very well. They link to something like tradition. They might suggest something like biology, but most people haven't really given it any deep philosophical thought. So I thought today we might turn towards these subjects and ask the question, are sex and gender biologically determined or are they social constructs? We should probably start off by defining what it means to be a social construct. A textbook definition of this would be a concept or idea that human beings create as a distinction in the world, but exists solely because people within that society collectively agree to give it meaning. Essentially, they create a shared reality through their interactions and interpretations rather than it being some sort of fixed thing or natural truth out in the world. Examples generally include gender, race, class, or even things like the value of money, which can vary across cultures and change within the same culture over time. When we say something is a social construct, then, what we are implying is that it is made up, but not for that reason, is it not real?. So let me say that again. A thing is still real, even though it is made up by human beings, because through our actions, through our deeds, through the way we come to recognize it, we make it real. So even though something like race may very well be made up and have nothing to do with biology whatsoever, it means that the consequences could still be very real. People could be killed for stepping out of line because they were the wrong race. They could make less money because they were the wrong race. They could enjoy certain privileges because they're the right race, so on and so forth. It doesn't make race any less made-up. It just means that the consequences of it are real because people recognize it as real and treat it as real. So let's talk about gender here for a second. I'm going to list off a series of questions, and I want you to imagine in your mind the correct answer to these. The first question is, who has the long hair? Is it men? Or is it one women? And who wears pants and who wears a dress? Who wears makeup? Who is covered in body hair? Is it a man who is the doctor and a woman who is the nurse, or is it the other way around? Who stays home and takes care of the kids? Who's the breadwinner? Who plays sports? Who hosts tea parties? Chances are you have answers to all of these questions, and chances are they came to you as norms in your society. But does it have to be that way? Has it always been that way in every culture? Has it always been that way in this culture? Probably not. We see these norms, and we pick them up, even as little children, so readily that they come to be like the way the world is for us. We have a hard time even imagining it any other way. Of course, men are the doctors and the breadwinners and the ones who wear pants. And of course, women are the ones who wear dresses and makeup and so on and so forth. The point here is, is that this has become so real for us that we believe we're seeing something that exists in the world and not something that we have made up. If that's the case, we often try to ascribe some sort of real-world source for it. For example, gender is biology. So let's take that idea very seriously. Like, what if gender is a form of biology? Now, if it were biological, we'd expect to see certain consistent traits that would map neatly to male or female across these different individuals and in different cultures. There are things that do things like that. Like we can find biological traits in a lot of different things, such as, you know, blood type, right If you're type A or type B or type A B or O, these are genetically determined and they don't really care about what culture you're in or or other aspects of your individuality. When we look at that for gender, though, we don't really find it. You know, we could say like, well, women are all nurturing and men tend to be all dominant. But that's not universally true, right? There are cultures where women are not nurturing and where men are not dominant. And there have been times where that has been more or less true within different cultures. As a general tendency, it might be some somewhat true, but it is not universally so, and that would sort of suggest that it is not biological. This inconsistency, then, is what suggests that these roles are learned. They've become interpretations of nature and not innate aspects of it. However, if gender is not biological, that would seem to suggest that it is a social construct. Gender seems more like a social construct than by default, since we just can't seem to be dependent on biology. It doesn't seem to make any sense to us how the color pink could be a biological condition of being female or the color blue being associated with boys. That just doesn't seem to make any sense from a biological perspective. And so it seems more likely that gender itself is a social construct. There are, of course, numerous examples of cultural variants in gender expectations, differences in what is considered masculine, and differences in what is considered feminine across a broad spectrum of cultures could be all the way from shaving one's head to piercing one's nipples. These would be different in different cultures as related to whether it's men who should be doing them or women who should be doing them. Real easy example of which is high heels. High heels were invented originally for men in Western European cultures.. They later became associated with women, but it was originally for men. The same is true of wigs, makeup, and many other things that we now associate with women. So what I'd like to do next is turn towards a particular thinker, Simone de Beauvoir, and look at her argument for why we ought to look at gender as a social construct. De Beauvoir writes, one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. This question, are there women, really? Do women even exist? What does it take to be a woman? She's arguing here that biological sex alone is not really the determinant of gender. Instead, society imposes these expectations and certain roles onto particular individuals, and that is what shapes them into being men or women. The people who exhibit these roles. So go back to those questions that I was asking earlier, about like who wears the pants, who has the long hair, who wears makeup. If a certain set of them are associated with femininity and you portray enough of those feminine traits, people will start to think of you as a woman. You'll look like a woman. You'll sound like a woman. You'll act like a woman. And so you learn to perform the role of being a woman by exhibiting enough of the traits that we as a society associate with women. So, in this case, biology is not destiny for deauvir. Well, there are biological differences that exist between the sexes. They do not inherently dictate a person's abilities or roles or social status, even. They're culturally assigned rather than naturally given. We decided that women should be doing these things and that men should be doing those things. We, as a society, made those choices. What's interesting about it is that she says the notion of womanhood becomes somewhat idealized in this process, portraying women as inherently passive, as inherently nurturing, as inherently emotional, which limits their autonomy and their ability to self-define. They've been told that they should be all of these things, which leads her to the idea that women are the other in this construction. It's not that men and women sat down together and decided, hey, these are the different roles and everyone should take their part, and this is what men are going to be like, and this is what women were like. And then we all agreed and we said, Hey, that's great. What she suggests is, actually, most of the deciding on this was being done by men for men. So in this sense, there is a subject who defines the gender roles, and they define someone else as opposed to themselves as other than themselves. themselves. I am a man, and so I need to define other, in this case, a woman, in order to, through sheer contrast, define what it means to be a man. Another other way to put this is in a male-dominated world, men tend to define themselves as the default of the human experience, right? It is human to be a man. Whereas women are as seen as the other, right? They're an attachment to man. They're an afterthought. Think about the way women are created in the Bible. They weren't the original design. They were a secondary offshoot from the original. And so in this sense, De Beauvoir writes, she is the other, in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another, meaning that we need this binary for to exist male and female or man and woman at all, right? That you can't have white and black if there are no other colors, right? Like the colors only exist because they contrast with themselves. Same thing here. If there are no women, then there are no men either. We're all just the same thing. We're just people. And so freedom here from this system is going to require some sort of transcendence in her view, some sort of moving beyond it. She's not trying to suggest that we're going to get rid of gender roles. That would be foolish. Instead, what she's suggesting is that women are going to have to take on an active role in defining themselves, defining what it means to be women. What has traditionally happened is that men have defined themselves by defining the other and left women completely out of the equation. It just so happens that men gave themselves all the positive and good traits, like strength, you know, rationality, perseverance, so on and so forth, while they gave all the women the bad traits, like child rearing, emotional, so on and so forth. So to achieve a better sense of equality, women have to rest this concept of what it means to be a woman away from men and make it their own. So she says to achieve true equality, women must reject the limitations placed on them by the gender norms and assert themselves as autonomous individuals capable of defining their own existence. They will be telling us what women are, and we have to listen to them. Okay. So De Beauvoir's version here seems to suggest that biology is responsible for sex, even if gender itself is a social construct. Sex, in this sort of view, is thought to refer to biological characteristics, things like chromosomes or hormones or physiology or reproductive anatomy, which ultimately classify an individual as either male or female, generally at birth. Gender, on the other hand, is a certain set of roles or behaviors, or maybe identities that we often associate with being masculine or feminine. So if you happen to be a male, you should behave in these ways. These can vary, of course, by culture and society, and do change over time. And that's why we were suggesting their social constructs. But is it possible that sex itself could be a social construct? What would a biological determinant of sex really look like? Well, if we think about it, there are three possibilities aside from gender, which we've already ruled out. There's anatomy, which is what kind of you, things you possess. What is the plumbing that you're working with here? Right? Mostly, we're talking about genitalia. Do you have a penis? Do you have a vagina? And those might be the defining characteristics. But it could also be physiology, which is the function of these organs. You know, we could say that women are the ones who can give birth, and men are the ones who can impregnate females, something like that. We could also rule out all of that and just say it's based on genetics, like what chromosomes do you have. Men have XY chromosomes, women have XX chromosomes. That's the end of the story. Which ones do you have? That will determine what sex you are. But when we look really closely at those, we find that every single one of them fails. Let's go back to anatomy. Imagine for a second that you're a man driving down the road on your motorcycle, wearing your leather jacket, the wind in your hair, having a good old time. And then all of a sudden a truck pulls out in front of you, you slide, you fly off of your bike. It's a horrible accident. You wake up in the hospital, and your penis has been torn from your body. Are you still a man? Or did in that moment, in the moment of that accident, you somehow become a woman? If the penis is the defining characteristic of being a man, if you're not a woman because you don't say you have a vagina, but you don't have a penis, so you're not a man. Is there a third gender? This seems to leave a lot of ambiguity about like, what kind of sex or gender you could be if we try to base it on anatomy. If someone does manage to have a surgical operation to change their genitalia, for instance, does that officially change their sex? Or is that not enough? It was, if we have to go back to what you were assigned at birth, then we can't base it on anatomy. What about physiology then? If we say that women are the ones who give birth and men are the ones who impregnate the female or something like that, well, what about all the women who can't have a child? What about young women or old women, or women who, for whatever reason, are infertile? Are they not really women then? That doesn't seem right either. Okay, so physiology seems like a bust as well. What about genetics? This seems much more staple. We could have XX and XY chromosomes, and that's it. The problem with genetics is, is that is an incredibly limited understanding of the complexity and diversity of human sex chromosomes. There are all sorts of chromosomes, such as XO, where you only have one X chromosome. There is XY. There's XYY. There is X. There are numerous ones in there. And that is not even starting to include things like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where an individual has XY chromosomes, but because they were denied androgen in utero, most of their anatomy and physiology is female. They have a vagina. They have a working uterus. The only thing that they will not have is ovaries. Their ovaries fail to develop. And because they have XY chromosomes, and specifically, they can't have a baby of their own genetically. But that being said, if you give them an implanted embryo, they will be able to carry a pregnancy. In this case, you have people, individuals, who have XY chromosomes, who are pregnant with the child and can develop that child in their womb, give birth to the child, and then nurse it on their breasts with XY chromosomes. That seems kind of the opposite of what we generally think of as being male. So if that's the case, then men can give birth. This is the problem. If we look at any one of these three biological systems, they all seem to fail us in describing sex. If we can't find a biological basis, then that does seem to suggest that sex itself is a social construct. Now, we could make the argument that these are only rare exceptions to the general rule, and we only want to go with the general rule here. The problem with that is, again, we're trying to base this on something that isn't about rules. This is about a biological absolute. There cannot be exceptions if it is biologically determined. There's nothing to determine then. Like, like imagine if we were trying to say, like, you know, all numbers that are divisible by two are even numbers, except the ones that aren't. Well, then I don't know why whether in the number is even or not by applying the rule. Just because I can divide it by two doesn't make it even. We can't have exceptions if we're going to use this as a determining factor as to what a person's sex is. It must be absolute. So imagine for a second that, you know, the feminists are correct and that gender and sex are both social constructs. What does that mean for individuals? Should we allow individuals to then choose their own sex for themselves? Should we be allowed to tell them what their sex is going to be? Whose responsibility is it to then do the constructing is what I'm asking. Is it that the doctors? Is it the parents? Is it the child themselves? Who gets to tell you what your sex is going to be, since it's not nature? And so we can imagine then, like a sort of more free version of sex determination. We can imagine a world where people aren't restricted by, say, arbitrary gender roles. A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, De Beauvoir said. It does certain things. Like, it does not exclude the other. Just because someone ishered does not mean that they don't get to have a say in determining themselves. They're not excluded. It does not ignore the distinctive sexual differences. There are needs that people with, say, uteruses and ovaries have, regardless of what their chromosomes or other things might be. And vice versa. There are going to be needs that people with XY chromosomes have, regardless of their anatomy or their physiology. She also says that we'd have to allow both genders to live out in their several fashions, the strange ambigu.iguity of the flesh. What she means by this is our nature itself doesn't really come with all of this stuff. We are adding to it, and it's not wrong of us to create concepts like sex and gender and to use them as we see fit. It's wrong of us to impose them on people when we probably shouldn't. And that is what she is suggesting. She writes, "New relations of flesh and sentiment, of which we have no conception, will arise between the sexes. Already, indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries, complicities, and comradeships, both chaste and sensual, which past centuries could not have conceived." For example, romantic love. Romantic love wasn't always a thing. We invented the concept of romantic love and that it should be the normal relationship between, say, spouses. That was not a relation that people could enter into regardless of their gender, regardless of their sex, until it was. And this will continue to grow. It will continue to change. It will continue to evolve. We do things differently than our parents did them. Our parents did things differently than their parents. We have to expect that our children will do things differently from us. There are challenges here, too, in that acknowledging deeply ingrained ideas of gender and sex as constructs can feel a bit destabilizing. If we have been looking at these things as natural and built into the world, it suddenly seems like someone is pulling the rug out from under our feet and now we just don't know where we stand anymore. But that's not really true. It's always been made up. It was never solid to begin with. You have always been in exactly this position. Nothing has happened to you. You're okay. You're safe. When we realize that second part that we are safe in this world of constructs, it's no longer something that seems so scary or frightening. There's no reason to be that there's anything wrong with it. We've always been here. We've always been doing this. We've always been making it up. So what would this mean for society? Well, gender expectations shape everything we do, from our workplace dynamics to our parenting styles. And sex categories tend to influence access to things like healthcare and rights, and recognition. Challenging the idea of natural hierarchies based on biology can lead us to a broader understanding of how we might want to change some of those things. We might want to see ourselves as capable of changing sex or changing gender, and therefore we want to ensure that all sexes and all genders have equal access to, say, healthcare, or equal rights to a job, or equal access to incomes. Recognizing sex and gender as social constructs doesn't mean dismissing their impact, but it opens the door for reshaping them and making a more inclusive future for everybody. This is a power that we all have, that we all possess, but not everybody is able to utilize it, at least not with the equal force. Traditionally, like many of our traditional ideas of what a woman is like, you know, have come from male philosophers. I'm so sorry to say. The idea that women are emotional and that men are rational, that comes straight from Aristotle, the idea that men are sublime, which means they're capable of great thinking, deep thinking, and that women are beautiful comes from Emmanuel Kant. The list can go on. But the idea here is that there's this constant subscription of men as the positive and women as the name negative. And those ideas have come almost exclusively from men. And so when we look at it that way, when we look at these ideas as who's doing the creating, at the very least, we should take into consideration the idea that we need more voices when it comes to discussing what women are, what they should be doing, what they're capable of. If women themselves had an equal seat at the table and decided none of them should be firefighters, then that's fine. But that's not what's happening. It's men who have all the seats at the table and men who are deciding that women are too weak to be firefighters or doctors or CEOs or a host of other things. Obviously, this could apply to things other than sex and gender. It could apply to race. It could apply to class. Maybe we'll get into those in future episodes. But suffice it to say that when you identify something as a social construct, you should realize that that's actually an empowering experience that gives you the ability and the right to start defining yourself the way you want to be defined, and to stop having to listen to other people defining you for yourself. As De Beauvoir pointed out, the problem is not that gender is constructed, nor that it's constructed in oppositions, like binaries or trinaries or some other kind of assortment. Rather, the problem is who it is that's doing the constructing. If any one person or set of people gets to define others, they tend to do it in such a way that it makes those others feel like lesser people. So if gender and sex are constructions, you're free to construct them for yourself. If so, how can we reconstruct society to build a more equitable world? Try reflecting on your own experiences with gender roles and expectations. And ask yourself, how have societal norms shaped the way you think about yourself and others, both positively and negatively? What constraints have these constructs placed on you? Because whether you're male or female, they have placed constrictions on you. How does that make you feel? What constraints have you placed on other people? Have you ever policed any of these gender norms? Have you ever told someone they should smile more or they should man up? How do you think that would make you feel if you were in the reverse position? And finally, think about the spaces where you have influence. What could you do differently in those spaces? For those people to make a positive difference for them and for yourself? This is how you change the world by ultimately just changing yourself. Thanks for listening to American Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone you think might also love a little wisdom in their life. During us next week, as we explore the world of artificial intelligence, by examining the question, can machines think?