gender – Andi Fugard

Little Miss and Mr Men name binariness

Pownall and Heflick (2023) investigated gender stereotypes in all 47 Mr Men and 34 Little Miss books. One of the studies asked (adult) participants to rate the masculinity/femininity of the character names on a scale from 1 (“entirely feminine”) to 5 (“entirely masculine”). The “Mr” and “Little Miss” were stripped off, so, e.g., participants were asked about the word “Quick”, “Princess”, “Greedy”.

I created a name binariness index for each mean rating, \(r\); the distance between the mean rating and 3 (the mid-point), as a proportion of the maximum that distance could be (2):

\(\displaystyle \frac{|r-3|}{2}\)

Here’s a plot of the names, sorted by name binariness. So good candidates for nonbinary characters would be Mx Quick or Mx Lucky. Alternatively, you could rightly reject the premise that any of them are gendered and go for Mx Princess.

References

Pownall, M., & Heflick, N. (2023). Mr. Active and Little Miss Passive? The Transmission and Existence of Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Books. Sex Roles.

Census data on trans and non-binary people in Canada

Canada published census data on trans and non-binary people on 27 April 2022. Here’s a table of the values they presented in a pie chart (why a pie chart, Canada?). Individuals in the census were aged 15 or above and living in a private household in May 2021.

Gender	N	%
Cis man	14,814,230	48.83
Cis woman	15,421,085	50.83
Trans man	27,905	0.09
Trans woman	31,555	0.10
Non binary	41,355	0.14
Total	30,336,130	100.00

Sex versus gender

The distinction between sex and gender seems straightforward. Sex refers to biology, e.g., chromosomes and genitalia. Gender refers to psychosocial processes, e.g., roles and expression. However, they are more complex than this neat division. Like happiness and pain, gender is partly ontologically subjective. Gender identity is ‘deeply felt’ and ‘not necessarily visible to others’ (American Psychological Association, 2015, p. 862).

Sex has social facets. The classic sociological work Doing Gender by West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 127) illustrates how a sex category is assigned at birth:

Sex is a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biological criteria for classifying persons as females or males. […] Placement in a sex category is achieved through application of the sex criteria, but in everyday life, categorization is established and sustained by the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim one’s membership in one or the other category. In this sense, one’s sex category presumes one’s sex and stands as proxy for it in many situations […].

This assigned sex category affects children’s social life in a variety of arbitrary ways, e.g., how they are dressed and expectations about behaviour, and feeds into the development of gender. For the majority of social contexts where sex category is applied, chromosomes and genitals are concealed and irrelevant.

Gender has biological facets: minds do gender identity and are embodied in the brain and nervous system, so even the phenomenology of gender identity has a biological correlate somewhere (Serano, 2013, pp. 138–168). There is emerging evidence that gender identity is a complex trait that is part-heritable and polygenic. A recent systematic review suggests that its heritability is likely in the range 30−60% (Polderman et al., 2018).

The interwoven biopsychosocial nature of sex and gender has led some scientists to use the combined concept sex/gender (e.g., Rippon et al., 2014). This does not mean that the multiplicity of facets blend into an amorphous blob. It does mean that it is important to clarify what particular facets are intended when discussing measurement and theory: chromosomes, genitalia, gender identity, socialisation, etc. The view of sex as only biological and gender as only psychosocial is too simplistic to progress theorising.

Excerpt from Fugard, A. (2020). Should trans people be postmodernist in the streets but positivist in the spreadsheets? A reply to Sullivan. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23, 525–531. [Preprint here]

A Bayesian norm-relevancy account of gender

The core idea of Katharine Jenkins’ (2018) norm-relevancy account of gender is that someone’s gender is defined in terms of the gender norms they experience as relevant – whether or not they comply with those norms. I’m not sure if this is enough to define gender; however, I think it’s a very interesting theory of how people – especially trans and nonbinary people – might decode their gender. Jenkins uses a crisp classical binary logic approach. This blog post is an attempt to explore what happens if we add probabilities.

I’m using Bayesian networks because they are well-supported by software that does the sums (the analyses below were produced using GeNIe Modeler). The direction of the arrows below is not meant to imply causation. Rather, the idea is from the assumption that someone is a particular gender, it is straightforward to guess the probability that a particular gender norm would be relevant. The Bayes trick then is to go in reverse from experiencing the relevance of particular norms to decoding one’s gender.

Let’s get started with some pictures.

The network below shows the setup in the absence of evidence.

The goal is to infer gender and at present the probabilities are 49-49% for man/woman and 1% for nonbinary. That’s probably too high for the latter. Also I’m assuming there are only three discrete gender identities, which is false.

Each node with an arrow leading into it represents a conditional probability. The table below shows a conditional probability probability distribution defined for one of the norm-relevancy nodes.

Norm	Man	Woman	Nonbinary
Relevant	20%	80%	50%
Irrelevant	80%	20%	50%

So, in this case if someone is a man then this norm is 80% likely to be irrelevant; if someone is a woman then it is 80% likely to be relevant; and if someone is nonbinary there is a 50-50 split. I’ve set up all the nodes in this pattern, just flipping the 80% to 20% and vice versa depending on whether a norm is for men or for women.

The idea then is to the use the Bayesian network to calculate how likely it is that someone is a man, woman, or nonbinary based on the relevance or irrelevance of the norms.

I have not yet mentioned the Spaces node top left. This is a convenient way to change the prior probabilities of each gender; so in LGBT spaces the prior probability for nonbinary raises from 1% to 20% since there are likely to be more nonbinary people around. This also captures the intuition that it’s easier to work out whether a particular identity applies to you if you meet more people who hold that identity. See the picture below. Note how LGBT is now bold and underlined over top left. That means we are conditioning on that, i.e., assuming that it is true.

But let’s go back to cisgendered spaces.

Suppose most (but not necessarily all) of the male norms are experienced as irrelevant and most (but not necessarily all) of the female norms are perceived as relevant. As you can see below, the probability that someone is a woman increases to over 90%

Similarly, for the converse where most male norms are relevant and most female norms are irrelevant now the probability that someone is a man rises to over 90%:

Now what if all the norms are relevant? Let’s also reset the evidence on whether someone is in a cis or LGBT space.

The probability of being nonbinary has gone up a little to 4%, but in this state there is most likely confusion about whether the gender is male or female since they both have the highest probability and that probability is the same.

Similarly, if all the norms are irrelevant, then the probability of nonbinary is 4%. Again, it is unlikely that you would infer that you are nonbinary.

But increasing the prior probability of nonbinary gender, for instance through meeting more nonbinary people in LGBTQ+ spaces, now makes nonbinary the most likely gender.

To emphasise again, there are many more varieties of gender identity here and an obvious thought might be that someone could be gender nonconforming but still a cis man or woman – especially if someone views gender as coupled to chromosomes/genitals. I think it’s also interesting how the underdetermination of scientific theories can apply to people’s ruminations about identity given how they feel and what other evidence they have.

The situation can also be fuzzier, e.g., where the difference between one of the binary genders and nonbinary is closer:

We undoubtedly don’t have conscious access to mental probabilities to two decimal places(!), so scenarios like these may feel equiprobable.

So far we have explored the simple situation where people are only aware of three male norms and three female norms. What happens if we had more, but kept the probability distributions on each the same…? Now we’re tip-toeing towards a more realistic scenario:

Everything works as before for men and women; however, something different now happens for nonbinary people. Suppose all the norms are experienced as irrelevant (it works the same for relevant):

Now the most probable gender is nonbinary (though man and woman are still far from zero: 24%).

This is true even in cis spaces:

Finally, there’s another way to bump up the probability of nonbinary. Let’s go back to two gender norms, one male and one female. However, set the probabilities so that if you’re a woman, it’s 99.99% probable that the female norm will apply (and similar for men and male norms). Set it to 50-50 for nonbinary. Now we get a strong inference towards nonbinary if neither or both norms are relevant, even in cis spaces.

In summary:

It is possible to view norm-relevancy through probabilities and as a sort of Bayesian self-identity decoding process.
When there is a small number of norms and (say) 80% chance of a norm being relevant for a particular binary gender, the prior probability of nonbinary has a big impact on whether someone decodes their gender that way.
As the number of norms increases, it is easier to infer nonbinary as a possibility.
Additionally, if there are only a few norms, but the probability that they apply for men and women is very high, then seeing them as all relevant or irrelevant is strong evidence for nonbinary.

References

Jenkins, K. (2018). Toward an account of gender identity. Ergo, 5(27), 713-744.

Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind

“There’s something incredibly powerful – revolutionary, even – about challenging someone’s understanding of gender with your very existence.”
—Emily Brehob

According to dominant ideas in “the West”, your gender ultimately reduces to whether you have XX or XY chromosomes, as inferred by inspecting your genitals at birth, and there are only two possibilities: woman or man. Yes, you will hear how sex is biological and gender is social, but under the dominant norms, (specifically chromosomal) sex and gender categories are defined to align.

The existence of transgender (trans) people challenges this chromosomal definition, since their gender differs from male/female sex category assigned at birth. People whose gender is under the non-binary umbrella challenge the man/woman binary since they are neither, both, or fluctuate between the two.

It is tempting for researchers to ignore these complexities since most people are cisgender (cis for short), that is, their gender aligns with their sex category at birth, and they are either a woman or a man. As the male/female demographic tickboxes illustrate, many do ignore the complexity.

A few years ago, analytic philosophers, having for centuries pondered questions such as “what can be known?” and “is reality real?”, discovered that theorising gender offered intellectual challenges too and could be used to support human rights activism. Although plenty of writers have pondered gender, this corner of philosophy offers clear definitions, so is perhaps easier to understand and critique than other approaches. I think it is also more compatible with applied social research.

One of the politically-aware analytical philosophers who caught my eye, Robin Dembroff, recently published a paper analysing what it means to be genderqueer. Let’s sketch out how the analysis goes.

“… the gendeRevolution has begun, and we’re going to win.”

Genderqueer originally referred to all gender outliers – whether cis, trans, or other. Its meaning has shifted to overlap with non-binary gender and trans identities as per the Venn flags below.

Both genderqueer and non-binary have become umbrella terms with similar meaning; however, genderqueer carries a more radical connotation- especially since it includes the reclaimed slur “queer” – whereas non-binary is more neutral and descriptive, even appearing in HR departments’ IT systems.

The data on how many people are genderqueer thus far is poor – hopefully the 2021 census in England and Wales will improve matters. In the meantime, a 2015 UK convenience sample survey of non-binary people (broadly defined) found that 63% identified as non-binary, 45% as genderqueer, and 65% considered themselves to be trans. The frequency of combinations was not reported.

This year’s international (and also convenience sample) survey of people who are neither men nor women “always, solely and completely” found a small age effect: people over 30 were eight percentage points more likely to identify as genderqueer than younger people.

Externalist versus internalist

Dembroff opens with a critique of two broad categories of theories of what gender is: externalist (or social position) theories and internalist (or psychological identity) theories.

Externalist theories define gender in terms of how someone is perceived by others and advantaged or disadvantaged as a result. So, someone would be genderqueer if they are perceived and treated as neither a man nor a woman. However, this doesn’t work for genderqueer people, Dembroff argues, since they tend to reject the idea that particular gender expressions are necessary to be genderqueer; “we don’t owe you androgyny” is a well-known slogan. Also, many cis people do not present neatly as male or female – that does not mean they are genderqueer.

One of the internalist accounts Dembroff considers, the norm-relevancy account by Katherine Jenkins, defines gender in terms of what gender norms someone feels are relevant to them – e.g., how they should dress, behave, what toilets they may use – regardless of whether they actually comply with (or actively resist) those norms. Norm relevancy requires that genderqueer people feel that neither male nor female norms are relevant. This is easiest to see with binary gendered toilets – neither the trouser nor skirt-logoed room is safe for a genderqueer person. However, it is unlikely that none of the norms for men or women would be felt as relevant. So the norm-relevancy account, Dembroff argues, would exclude many genderqueer people too.

Critical gender kinds

Dembroff’s proposed solution combines social and psychological understandings of gender. They introduce the idea of a critical gender kind and offer genderqueer as an example. A kind, in this sense, is roughly a collection of phenomena defined by one or more properties. (For a longer answer, try this on social kinds by Ásta.) Not to be confused with gender-critical feminism.

A gender is a critical gender kind, relative to a given society, if and only if people who are that gender “collectively destabilize one or more core elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society”. The genderqueer kind destabilises the binary assumption that there are only two genders. Dembroff emphasises the collective nature of genderqueer; as a kind it is not reducible to any individual’s characteristics and not every genderqueer person need successfully destabilise the binary norm. An uncritical gender kind is then one which perpetuates dominant norms such as the chromosomal and genital idea of gender outlined above.

Another key ingredient is the distinction between principled and existential destabilising – roughly, whether you are personally oppressed in a society with particular enforced norms. Someone who is happy to support and use all-gender toilets through (principled) solidarity with genderqueer people has a different experience to someone who is genderqueer and feels unsafe in a binary gendered toilet.

In summary, genderqueer people collectively and existentially destabilise the binary norm. Some of the many ways they do this include: using they/them or neopronouns, through gender expression that challenges dominant norms, asserting that they are genderqueer, challenging gender roles in sexual relationships, and switching between male and female coded spaces.

Although Dembroff challenges Jenkins’ norm-relevancy account, to me the general idea of tuning into gender norms is helpful for decoding your gender, and neatly complements Dembroff’s account. Maybe a trick is to add, and view as irrelevant, norms like “your genitals determine your gender” rather than only male and female norms. Additionally, adding probabilities rather than using binary true/false classical logic seems helpful to revise the account too. The externalist accounts are also relevant since they map out some ways that genderqueer people resist binary norms and dominant ways that (especially cis) people perceive and treat others.

References

Dembroff, R. (2020). Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind. Philosophers’ Imprint, 20(9), 1–23.

Jenkins, K. (2018). Toward an Account of Gender Identity. Ergo, 5(27).

Agential identity

What does it mean to be “out” as queer, when in a gay bar you express your queerness loud and proud but reel it in with homophobic family? What does it mean to have your sexuality or gender invalidated?

These are example phenomena analysed by Robin Dembroff and Cat Saint-Croix’s paper, “Yep, I’m Gay”: Understanding Agential Identity.

Their basic idea is to bridge how we understand ourselves to be (self-identity) and what others take us to be (social position) using the concept of agential identity.

Agential identification with a particular social group follows this recipe:

You self-identify as a member of the social group, for instance lesbian or genderqueer.
You make that self-identity externally available
(a) consciously or unconsciously;
(b) by behaving a particular way and/or displaying perceivable features; and
(c) those behaviours/features manifest or are intended to manifest social properties associated with the group.
You accept or allow that others take you as belonging to the group.

Self-identity isn’t necessarily established effortlessly and it depends on the people around you. Dembroff and Saint-Croix draw on Katharine Jenkins’ norm-relevancy approach in which we decode which groups we belong to by tuning into the norms which seem relevant to us – even if we disagree with those norms. The extent to which this process is deliberate – for instance, how much research someone does on a particular social group and its history – can lead to stronger or weaker self-identity.

Agential identity involves some attempt to broadcast self-identity. Dembroff and Saint-Croix explore the different ways this can be done and emphasise that the social processes involved are often complex. For instance, agential identity can be more or less salient depending on who we are with (pp. 583-584):

“consider a gay teenager who comes out to his parents, but otherwise acts conservatively at home in order to minimize the salience of his gay identity. This same teenager might, in other contexts, deliberately talk and behave in ways that persistently signal and emphasize his gay identity.”

A strong self-identity and salient attempts to establish a matching agential identity may not be taken up in a particular context. Someone could persistently signal their trans identity in all contexts but it is only accepted in LGBTQ+ spaces and ignored or ridiculed by transphobic colleagues. Agential identity depends on self-identity and consent to belong to a particular social group – these are key conditions – and expresses preferred social group membership. However, that preference may not be accepted.

That’s a brief overview – venture over here to read the full article: “Yep, I’m Gay”: Understanding Agential Identity.

Labels are for jars…? (Not quite)

‘What are labels for? They’re not glitter, darling, and if you say “identity politics” then you can tootle off right now to your intellectual dark web videos and Spiked columns. What they do is they help me to understand myself, help other people to understand me and help me to find other people who are like me. Categories are not harmful unless you’re put in one unwillingly. Unless you actually think my sexuality, my gender and my disabilities are something to be ashamed of?’

—Penny Andrews, Identifying As Non-Binary Isn’t About Being ‘Special’ – It’s Just One Part Of Who I Am

Metaphysical isms and theorising gender

I had tried to avoid engaging in grand metaphysical “ism” talk, but it seems that resistance is futile! So here are brief thoughts, in the context of theorising gender.

We can safely assume that there is a reality to people’s gender-relevant experiences and biochemistry which exists independently of our understandings. Taking this (to me obvious) stance is known as ontological realism. Theorising, about gender or otherwise, is done by people who have imperfect and indirect access to reality and theories evolve over time. Our vantage point—beliefs, biases, values, experience, privilege and oppression—has an impact on our theories, so two gender theorists doing the best they can with the available evidence can produce very different explanations (epistemic relativism). This is true of any science where multiple theories are consistent with evidence; in other words, the theories are underdetermined by evidence. It is also true when we theorise about ourselves and try to work out our own gender.

Even with this relativist mess, manifesting as bickering in scientific journals and conferences, consensus can arise and one theory can be declared better than another (judgemental rationality). However, there are often many different ways to classify biological, social, and other phenomena, even with impossibly perfect access to reality (this has a great name: promiscuous realism).

The underdetermination of theories means that something beyond evidence is needed to decide how and what to theorise. Scholars in the critical theory tradition are required to pick a side in a social movement, for instance feminism, anti-racism, trans rights, or an intersectional composition thereof. It is not enough for a critical theory to be empirically adequate; it also has to help chosen social struggles make progress towards achieving their aims. Two theories may be empirically indistinguishable but one transphobic; from a trans rights perspective, the transphobic theory should be discarded.

(For more on epistemic relativity, ontological realism, and judgemental rationality, see Archer et al. (2016).)

Now we can make sense of what it means to be assigned female or male at birth. What is assigned is a sex category. This is not arbitrary, but based on socially agreed and – for cisgender people – reliable biological criteria. However, those criteria could have been otherwise, for instance using a broader range of biological features and more than two categories. Also the supposedly biological male/female sex category quickly takes on a social role that is independent of genitals and operates even when they are hidden.

Critical theory – a clear explanation by Nancy Fraser

‘To my mind, no one has yet improved on Marx’s 1843 definition of Critical Theory as “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.” What is so appealing about this definition is its straightforwardly political character. It makes no claim to any special epistemological status but, rather, supposes that with respect to justification there is no philosophically interesting difference between a critical theory of society and an uncritical one. But there is, according to this definition, an important political difference. A critical social theory frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification. The questions it asks and the models it designs are informed by that identification and interest. Thus, for example, if struggles contesting the subordination of women figured among the most significant of a given age, then a critical social theory for that time would aim, among other things, to shed light on the character and bases of such subordination. It would employ categories and explanatory models which revealed rather than occluded relations of male dominance and female subordination. And it would demystify as ideological rival approaches which obfuscated or rationalized those relations. In this situation, then, one of the standards for assessing a critical theory, once it had been subjected to all the usual tests of empirical adequacy, would be: How well does it theorize the situation and prospects of the feminist movement? To what extent does it serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of contemporary women?’

Nancy Fraser (1985, p. 97). What’s critical about critical theory? The case of Habermas and gender. New German Critique, 35, 97-131.