Essentialism Transcript

Hello and Welcome. Categorical thinking is one of the most fundamental tools we humans use to make sense of the world. Consciously or otherwise, we are constantly sorting objects, thoughts, emotions, other people, and even ourselves into discrete groups, which inform, and sometimes even determine our thoughts and behaviors. Of course, we don’t all share the same system of categorization. Each person has their own unique set of labels and categories that they use to understand the world, and I would argue that a lot of human conflict, whether on the scale of societies, political movements, or even individuals, can be understood in terms of interactions between competing systems of categorization. In particular, categories related to sex, gender, and sexual orientation have been and continue to be the subjects of extreme social and political controversy. This is my second video on these subjects. In the first one I talked about my personal experience. Now, generally I’m a proponent of the idea that arguments should be judged on the basis of their merit, irrespective of who’s proposing them. However, there are certain topics, like ones related to a lot of human identity categories, for which there’s an inextricable link between a person’s perspective and their real life experience of either belonging or not belonging to the group in question. This doesn’t mean that the logical soundness of an argument depends on the identity of the arguer, but it does mean that you need information about a person’s identity in order to fully understand the assumptions and motivations underlying their beliefs. With that said, I’m not going to appeal to personal experience as evidence at any point in this video, since I want to make my arguments as convincing as possible to people who don’t already agree with me. My overarching goal is to develop an inclusive, trans-affirmative perspective on sex and gender from as close to first principles as I can manage, and to explain why everyone who disagrees with me is wrong.
To begin, we’ll talk about two different and often irreconcilable ways of thinking categorically, which I’ll be calling “essentialism” and “pragmatism”. An essentialist sees the world as consisting of discrete, well-defined entities, each of which possesses an intrinsic essence that determines it’s properties and behaviors. Essentialist categories are fundamental features of nature, and so they’re thought to be discovered, rather than merely defined or constructed. Whether or not a specific entity belongs to an essentialist category is an objective question which has an answer whether or not we have the tools to find it. A pragmatist, on the other hand, creates and uses categories as tools to help make sense of a world that’s understood to be too messy and complicated to fit perfectly into any box we might construct for it. Pragmatic categories need not have any reality beyond the brains of those who use them, and so there isn’t necessarily any ultimate answer to questions about whether or not something “truly” fits into a given category.
Now, I should admit up front that essentialist thinking is so fundamentally discordant with everything I believe that I had a hard time even defining it in a way that doesn’t make it sound obviously wrong to me. As a reductionist, I believe that the properties and behaviors of any system, no matter how complex, are fully determined by the properties and behaviors of its constituent parts. The macroscopic entities that we interact with in our everyday lives are themselves just useful constructs, devoid of any irreducible or intrinsic essence. In my view, the only physical entities that are even candidates for fitting into essentialist categories as I defined them are the fundamental constituents of the universe, which if my Physics knowledge is still up to date, are thought to be quantum fields. But even then, I’m not convinced that there’s anything to be gained by adopting an essentialist perspective rather than a pragmatic one. After all, the whole point of thinking pragmatically is that the categories we agree to use are merely instrumental; the only guiding principle behind their construction is that they should help us achieve our goals.
At this point, you might be thinking that my definition of categorical essentialism is a straw-man. I mean, does anyone really believe that humans and other macroscopic entities possess some kind of supernatural intrinsic essence? For the most part I don’t think that people are consciously aware of holding these beliefs. Rather, essentialism tends to be implicit in the way people think and argue. In order to explore these phenomena further, I’ll introduce an idealized example.
Let’s say that 2000 people are recruited for a study in which two variables, labeled X and Y are measured for each person. Here’s a graph of the results of our hypothetical experiment where each point represents an individual’s X and Y values. From a pragmatic perspective, we can recognize that there are many different categorical schemes we could use to represent this data. One approach would be to partition the subjects into discrete groups by defining some boundaries. Just looking at the data it seems like it might be useful to separate the space into two or maybe three categories, but there’s nothing preventing us from using more, and depending on the context we might need to. We can even define boundaries so that the categories have overlap if we want to. You’ll notice that using more categories allows our system of categorization to convey more information about the underlying variables X and Y. If we only use two categories, labeled A and B, then knowing which of them a given subject belongs to doesn’t give us that much information about their X or Y values. But if we’re willing to allow for more categories, then our system of categorization can represent the underlying data at a higher resolution. In the limit as the number of appropriately chosen groups goes to infinity, we can forego the use of discrete categories all together and just work with the data as it is. Each individual is in a category of their own, defined by their unique X and Y values.
We’ve now arrived at a fundamental constraint on any categorical system: the simpler it is, the less information it can encode. And because humans are limited in their ability to handle complexity, it’s often necessary to strike a balance between accuracy and accessibility. In fact, I would argue that this limitation explains why we need to use categories at all. Our systems of categorization insulate us from the overwhelming complexity of our surroundings, allowing us to interface with ego-friendly real-time models made up of simple, conventional objects and entities. I think this gets to the heart of why people seem to find essentialism so intuitive. Despite being completely incompatible with a scientific worldview, it feels right to people because it elevates our naive perceptions of the world to the level of absolute truth. When you look at something you interact with every day, like an eggplant for example, you don’t need to care about all the biology, chemistry, and ultimately physics determining how it looks, tastes, and feels. It’s just an eggplant, and the only explanation you need for its smooth skin and beautiful dark purple color is that it’s the intrinsic nature of an eggplant to have such properties.
The prevalence of this style of thinking probably also has a lot to do with the influence of Plato’s theory of forms on literal centuries of philosophical development. To quote Wikipedia quoting notable Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato". Plato’s ideas are relevant here because they bear a striking resemblance to the notion of essentialism that I’ve been arguing against, but because this is supposed to be a video about sex and gender I’m going to avoid talking too much about ancient Greek philosophy. The point is that my depiction of essentialism, far from being a strawman, is actually a perspective that’s been percolating through academia into the public consciousness for about as long as academic philosophy has existed.
Now let’s consider how an essentialist might think about our experiment from earlier. Keep in mind that essentialism often manifests at the level of perception, before a person is consciously aware of making any judgments. So even though this is the data we collected, it isn’t necessarily what the essentialist sees. What they do see might look something like this. Each number represents a subject in the experiment, and the two circles labeled A and B represent essentialist categories into which they’ve been preconsciously sorted. I use the word preconsciously instead of subconsciously because even though the essentialist isn’t aware of the sorting process in real time, they can still answer questions about it retrospectively. So if you were to ask them why a given subject was assigned the label A, they might refer back to that subject’s X and Y values even though their initial judgment happened so quickly that they weren’t even aware of it. Returning to the eggplant example, when I see an eggplant I immediately and involuntarily categorize it as such, but if you were to ask me how I know it’s an eggplant, I’d have to refer to its shape and color.
Notice that the actual computational process of essentialist categorization isn’t any different from that of pragmatic categorization. Both involve drawing up boundaries on the underlying space of observations, in this case the X-Y plane, and then using those to assign labels to each data point. The difference is that the pragmatist deliberately constructs and adjusts those boundaries to best suit their needs, while the essentialist isn’t even aware of the exact boundaries they use until after the sorting process has occurred. This can lead essentialists to mistakenly believe that categories have a causal influence on the entities which belong to them. Let’s say that the essentialist sorted a given subject into group A. We know that the subject’s X and Y values determined their group assignment, but because the essentialist became aware of the subject’s group before consciously processing their X and Y values, they might come to the reverse conclusion: that the subject has the X and Y values that they do because they are in group A. This effect goes a long way towards explaining why essentialists believe in intrinsic essence to begin with: it seems to them as though the properties of objects are determined by their categorization, and not the other way around.
We’ll now turn our attention to something I’ve been ignoring so far, which is that some of the subjects haven’t been sorted into either of our essentialist categories. This is because no matter how the data is partitioned into two regions, there are going to be points on or near the boundary, as well as outliers whose X and Y values are not at all representative of the groups to which they’ve been assigned. I’ll be calling these subjects “group-nonconforming”, but you should keep in mind that this label is only meaningful relative to a given categorical system since you can’t know who’s close to a boundary until the boundaries have been drawn. Group-nonconforming subjects are not a problem for a pragmatist since they can either adjust their boundaries, define more categories, or just accept that some subjects won’t fit neatly into their categorical scheme. An essentialist, on the other hand, is committed to the proposition that each subject has an essence, and therefore a “true” category to which they belong. In principle there’s nothing stopping the essentialist from using new categories, but that would require them to acknowledging the existence of new kinds of essence, or at least essence with intrinsic properties they’ve never encountered before. And because, as I keep emphasizing, essentialism relies on preconscious filtering of sensory data, an essentialist who was conditioned throughout their entire life to only perceive categories A and B might have a lot of trouble retraining themselves to recognize new ones.
This puts the essentialist in a rather difficult position: they feel pressured to categorize group-nonconforming subjects in order to make sense of the world, but the preconscious filtering that they ordinarily rely on isn’t working. One way they might attempt to relieve this tension is by engaging in boundary-policing, which I define as any attempt to alter, conceal, trivialize, or destroy entities that don’t fit neatly into a person’s system of categorization. Instead of acknowledging the existence of new categories and learning to perceive them, boundary policing allows the essentialist to maintain their malfunctioning but deeply engrained mental habits. However, this strategy is doomed to fail from the start: If a person’s system of categorization isn’t complex enough to accurately model reality, then no amount of boundary policing is going to change that. This is a prime example of people trying to force reality to fit their model instead of adjusting their model to fit reality. But because boundary policing is typically performed within an essentialist framework rather than a pragmatic one, it’s practical consequences are often irrelevant to the people engaging in it. The arguments people use to try to justify policing boundaries often depend upon the idea that there’s something intrinsically dangerous or evil about group non-conformity. Under this form of essentialism, we have a moral obligation to act in accordance with our intrinsic essence, which in practical terms translates to conforming to whichever categories the essentialist was conditioned to believe in.
I think we’re ready to start analyzing the effects of essentialist thinking on our society’s perception of sex and gender. This is where I’ll throw out the usual disclaimer that I have absolutely no formal training or expertise in any of the numerous academic disciplines that study these topics. I’m going to start out by describing, in detail, how I conceptualize the two subjects and the intricate relationships between them. After that, I’ll address some opposing perspectives and explain why they’re wrong.
I started out by coming up with a list of as many variables as I could that seem like they might have something to do with either sex or gender. Here’s the list I came up with. It is by no means exhaustive, but I do think it includes most of the variables people tend to associate with sex and gender categories. The first thing I notice when I look at this list is that about half of the variables are about a person’s biological characteristics, while the other half are about a person’s self-perception and how they interact with society. This is where we can differentiate between the words sex and gender. We’ll use the word gender as a broad, overarching term for the variables involving inter- and intra-personal dynamics, and use the word sex as a broad, overarching term for the variables involving biological characteristics. Note that just because we separated out these two categories doesn’t mean that aren’t complicated interactions between variables in opposite groups. It’s clear that a person’s hormones and secondary sex characteristics will have some complex non-deterministic influence on their inner experience, gender presentation, and perception by society. In the other direction of causality, a person’s psychology can, with the help of modern medicine affect their hormones, sex organs, and secondary sex characteristics. As another aside, I’ll occasionally use the term “biological sex” in this video with the understanding that it is not a binary, and encompasses much more than a person’s chromosomes.
We now have some very complicated decisions to make. We’re trying to develop a way of sorting people into sex and gender categories that represents the variables we care about as accurately as possible, while simultaneously minimizing complexity. Let’s start by ruling out some poor choices. A lot of people in our society have been conditioned to think of a person’s chromosomes as the most important variable in determining their sex, but from a pragmatic perspective that doesn’t make much sense. Except in a handful of niche situations, we have no reason to care about a person’s sex chromosomes in isolation from the other variables. People only care about them because of correlations with more relevant variables. This leads to an obvious question: why not just label people on the basis of the variables you actually care about and cut out the unnecessary inferences.  There’s also the fact that even though some people claim to care about sex chromosomes, nobody ever demands genetic testing before forming a belief about another person’s sex. Regardless of which variables a person decides to value in theory, the reality is that when you meet someone you can’t see their chromosomes, hormone levels, or reproductive status.
I’ve argued with and listened to plenty of conservatives on this topic, and I’ve never heard a compelling argument for why sex chromosomes should take precedence over all other variables when defining sex and gender categories. I’ve heard the argument that they’re important because they determine reproductive compatibility, but that isn’t entirely true. While having compatible sex chromosomes is a necessary condition for reproductive compatibility, it is not sufficient. There are plenty of pairs of people who are biologically unable to have children despite one having XY chromosomes and the other having XX. Biology is messy and complicated: sex chromosomes do not correlate perfectly with any of the other sex variables. But even if they did, that still wouldn’t justify the enshrinement of sex categories in the structure of society, or in the language we use to refer to people. After all, not all languages even have gendered pronouns, and most societies throughout history haven’t been aware of the existence of chromosomes.
I’ve also heard people argue that because the words sex and gender already have definitions, prescribed either by biologists, dictionaries, or popular usage, any attempt to alter their definitions is just semantically incorrect.  This is a form of linguistic prescriptivism, which Wikipedia defines as “the attempt to lay down rules defining a preferred or correct use of language”. Just because some biologists use the word sex in a certain way doesn’t mean that non-biologists are wrong when they use it differently. Words usually have different meanings depending on the context in which they’re used, and there’s nothing morally or technically wrong with that. This also ignores the fact that modern biologists tend to agree that the concept of sex is more complicated than the right wants us to think. Dictionary definitions aren’t really relevant in this discussion either, since the people responsible for updating dictionaries don’t have privileged access to the intrinsic meaning of words. Unless you’re thinking about language through an essentialist lens, there’s no reason to believe that words have any intrinsic meaning in the first place. These types of appeals to authority or popularity allow people to avoid actually addressing any of the challenges to their beliefs about sex and gender.
And even if we were to ignore all of these objections and obstinately cling to sex chromosomes as the ultimate determinants of sex categories, we would still be left with more than two sexes, since not everyone has XX or XY chromosomes. Any attempt to weasel around this empirical fact is boundary policing. It’s true that something like 99% of humans have either XX or XY chromosomes, but because there are about 7.4 billion people on earth, 0.05% of the population is still 370,000 people. It doesn’t make sense to exclude large numbers of people from our system of categorization just because they’re a statistical minority. Think of how much simpler the periodic table would be if we removed all the elements that comprise less than 1% of the mass of the universe. To paraphrase Contrapoints, any system of categorization can be perfect if you choose to ignore all the instances where it fails.
Now that we’ve ruled out chromosomes, there are four remaining sex variables from our list to be considered. Basing a person’s sex on their reproductive role is superficially better than using chromosomes, since at least it’s a variable people have valid reasons to care about, but once you start trying to specify how people should be sorted, things get complicated. Obviously, a person’s reproductive capacity changes throughout their life, but even at a fixed point in time, a person’s reproductive capacity can only be defined relative to another person. Also, reproductive compatibility is not a binary, and can depend on sociological variables in addition to biological ones. For example, there exist pairs of people who would be unable to reproduce without the help of medical technologies like in-vitro fertilization. If you base a person’s sex categorization on their reproductive capacity, then a person’s group-membership could change depending on their access to healthcare.
The remaining three variables: Hormones, secondary sex characteristics, and sex organs, are the ones that I think are probably the best choices from the list for building a notion of biological sex. How exactly these variables should be weighted (and whether or not there are more variables that need to be added) is something I think should be left for individual to decide. I could get into the technical details of how to represent the variables and define a notion of distance on the resulting space of sex designations, but again my preference is to leave some of the finer details ambiguous so that our framework is more flexible. We could still use labels like male or female when referring to a person’s sex, but this warrant caution since those words are also sometimes used to refer to gender. One might be tempted to use terms like “biologically male or female”, but those carry the unfortunate connotative baggage of having often been used against trans people. Even if we did decide to use those words, they would not form a binary, and could always be decomposed into components corresponding to the various sex variables under consideration. In this categorical scheme, male and female could be thought of as either points or regions in some kind of high-dimensional space representing sex variables. Being “biologically male or female” in this framework would really just be shorthand for having sex variables that are relatively close to the male or female sets in the underlying space. Being intersex could be shorthand for having sex variables that are relatively far from both the male and female sets. There’s also nothing stopping people from using additional labels for other points in the underlying space. Because this isn’t an essentialist system of categorization, there’s nothing wrong with defining new categories, or with tweaking the set of variables under consideration.
This classification scheme is certainly inclusive of trans people who medically transition since the sex variables I chose to focus on are all ones that can be changed, and I emphasize that I think individuals should be able to decide for themselves which combination of sex variables to use when identifying their sex. Of course, not all trans people decide to or are able to medically transition. There is some evidence to suggest that there are statistical biological differences (for instance in brain structure) between trans and cis people even in the absence of gender affirming healthcare. This provides some justification for having different sex categories specifically for pre- and non-medically transitioning trans people. To my knowledge, words for these categories do not currently exist in English and I’m certainly not going to be the one to coin them, but this is just one way of avoiding classifying pre-transition trans women as biologically male (vice versa for trans men) without doing away with the notion of biological sex altogether.
The system of sex categorization I’ve presented sure to annoy people who insist on words having precise, singular meanings, but I don’t see any grave societal danger in allowing people to decide for themselves which sex variables determine their sex labels. Contrary to popular conservative opinion, its still possible to talk about sex variables in a clear, unambiguous way without pretending that the words male and female have rigid, objective meanings. In fact, forgoing the use of traditional sex categories in favor of the underlying sex variables often allows for greater precision of meaning. For example, the claim that a disease only affects people who are biologically male is less precise than the claim that that it only affects people with XY chromosomes, or that it only affects people with levels of testosterone above a certain threshold.
	Before we move on to talking about gender variables, I want to take a step back and try to explain why so many conservatives cling to binary biological sex labels in spite of the uncontroversial, scientific fact that most of the variables determining biological sex are not binary. I already talked about the role of essentialism in conservative thinking, and that’s definitely a big piece of the puzzle, but I think it would be a bit too charitable to say that essentialism is the only or even the main cause of sex-binary-normativity. We can’t ignore that beliefs about biological sex categories have always provided a pseudoscientific foundation for the enforcement of gender norms, and in particular the oppression of women and gender and sexual minorities. As such, any challenge to the supposed sex binary is also a challenge to the conservative gender roles. Even though social conservatives often claim that their beliefs about men and women are rooted in biology, its more often the case that they view biology through the distorted lens of conservative gender politics. Instead of making an honest effort to faithfully represent the space of human sex differences, conservatives tend to assume the existence of a sex binary and focus exclusively on variables that can be finagled to support that assumption.
Of course, even if biological sex were a binary, that wouldn’t begin to justify the enshrinement of gender roles in so many aspects of human life. To use a particularly clear-cut example, you can never justify the association of the colors blue and pink with boys and girls respectively merely by appealing to biology. When conservatives do attempt to bridge the gap between their misrepresentations of biology and their moral beliefs about how society ought to be organized, they tend to either defer to tradition or religious authority, appeal to questionable results from evolutionary psychology, usually committing the naturalistic fallacy, or go with the more blatantly sexist approach of claiming that women are biologically incapable of fulfilling certain roles. I’ve heard conservatives try to sidestep this problem by insisting that gender and sex mean the same thing, or refusing to use the word gender at all, but that is pure obscurantism. Everyone knows that men and women are treated differently in society, and everyone knows that those differences in treatment are not 100% determined by biological factors. This justifies using different words to refer to the social and biological components of this aspect of human diversity.
	 Part of me feels like there has to be a better conservative argument on this topic, but despite a prolonged search, I can’t find much of anything worth responding to. There’s no shortage of people making fun of radical social constructivist positions, but its genuinely difficult to find arguments for social conservatism that are more than just lame criticisms of strawperson progressives. I subjected myself to well over 50 hours of Jordan Peterson’s lectures, and despite his anachronistic fixation on Jungian archetypes and patterns in the narrative structures of ancient stories, his beliefs about sex and gender seem to be rooted in the same debunked value-laden evolutionary psychology that other social conservatives take as gospel. The reason I’m even bothering to mention him is that even though he’s thoroughly incorrect about sex and gender, I wouldn’t quite call him an essentialist. He actually admits that some sex variables have bimodal distributions which are imperfectly correlated. Bimodal distributions are by definition continuous. In other words, he knows that sex (and by extension gender since he doesn’t acknowledge the difference between the two) exists on a spectrum. He would likely try to deny this unavoidable consequence of his clearly stated beliefs, but I suspect his objection would be more about the phrasing than the content. Peterson tries to justify his binary thinking not by claiming or assuming that men and women have differing intrinsic essence, but rather by claiming that the identification of sex with gender and adoption of a sex binary is necessary for the maintenance of civilization. Does he offer any concrete evidence for this extraordinary claim? Of course not. Beneath all the masturbatory philosophical and psychoanalytic babel about the ontological primality of chaos and order, his evolutionary conception of truth, and the structure of the subconscious mind, Jordan Peterson is a traditionalist religious conservative who’s terrified that social change will lead to societal collapse. The tragic thing about Jordan Peterson’s lectures is that they would be much more interesting and useful without all the reactionary politics mixed in. His worldview is pretty much the polar opposite of my own, and after watching him for such a long time I feel like I have a slightly better understanding of how people like him think. And even though I was thoroughly unimpressed with his attempts to defend his shitty political beliefs, I would rather listen to another 10 hours of his content than a single hour of Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Dennis Prager, or anyone from the fucking “skeptical” youtube community.
	With all that argumentative stuff out of the way, I’m finally ready to start talking about my understanding of gender as distinct from sex. I’m going to keep this section relatively short since this video is already kind of long and I’m likely going to make other videos specifically about gender in the future. Instead of talking at length about individual variables like I did for sex, I’m just going to describe my general approach to understanding the topic. The concept of gender seems to confuse a lot of people, and I can think of several reasons this might be the case. First of all, there are a wide variety of opinions on what types variables should be considered when defining gender. This is also true for sex to a certain extent, but at least we can all agree that sex variables refer in some way to physical properties of the human body. Gender variables, on the other hand, could refer to a person’s cosmetic choices, personality, patterns of behavior, subjective experience, social roles, desired perception by others, and so on. Because so many disparate phenomena are being grouped under a single label, gender is sure to have a fuzzy definition. Secondly, the claim that sex and gender are different is often mistaken for the claim that they are mutually exclusive whereas in reality there are plenty of variables (like most psychological ones for instance) which can only be properly understood when both biological and sociological perspectives are brought to bear. Lastly, a lot of space in the public dialogue on gender is taken up by blatant right-wing misrepresentations of what it means to identify with a given gender label: hence the incessant deluge of unoriginal attack-helicopter jokes.
	The way I try to make sense of gender is by considering the functions it serves in various contexts. On a societal scale, we can talk about gender as a mechanism of social organization and control that works by assigning people different rights, roles and expectations based on sex assignment. On smaller social scales, gender labels can be used by individuals as an efficient means of communicating information about themselves, including how they would like to be perceived and referred to by others. Of course, for this to be effective, everyone involved needs to more or less agree on what information a given gender label communicates. Since this use of gender is so dependent on context, a person might very well choose to use different labels to describe themselves depending on who they’re talking to and what they want to communicate. Intra-personally, gender can play an important role in a person’s sense of self. This is one way to start making sense of what it means to “feel like” a particular gender, and to experience gender dysphoria.
	I could go on like this for a long time, but my point is that the question of what it means to be a particular gender is highly context dependent. If you aren’t careful to distinguish between the political, social, and psychological aspects of gender identity then it’s easy to get confused and fall for bad arguments. I was planning on writing lengthy segments about pronoun inflection and various ways of conceptualizing trans identities, but at this point I think it would probably be best to save those topics for future videos.
	 This has been by far the most difficult video for me to make so far. Sex and gender are extremely complicated and there’s just so much to read and discuss that no matter how much research I did I felt like I was barely scratching the surface. Anyway, I greatly appreciate anyone who managed to make it all the way through this one, and as always I’m looking forward to hearing what people think. Thanks for watching!