Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

The nature of gender is at the heart of ongoing public conversations occasioned by the increased visibility of transgender people—for example, when someone born with a Y-chromosome and a penis identifies as a woman, what exactly is she identifying as?  A natural answer is that gender is a primarily psychological type: for example, identifying as “feminine” or “masculine”, where these notions are elaborated in terms of how one thinks and acts. This type of theory faces what Sally Haslanger (2000) calls the commonality problem: it doesn’t seem that there’s anything that all people we would pre-theoretically identify as women have in common in virtue of which they count as women.  In response to this problem, we might shift to a construal of gender on which it is primarily a social type, e.g., “S is a woman iff (df) S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction” (Haslanger 2000, p. 39). This move affords a solution to the commonality problem—probably the only plausible candidate for something that all women have in common is that they have been funneled into subordinate social roles on the basis of their presumed sex. However, characterising a gender in terms of undesirable social roles is in tension with the fact that people positively value their genders. 

We can avoid this unwelcome result and the commonality problem if we adopt fictionalism about gender. Broadly speaking, fictionalism is the view that some portion of our ordinary talk is best characterised as not aiming at literal truth, but rather as constituting a fiction. Just as we can be fictionalists about mathematical talk, talk of possible worlds, or talk of morality, we could be fictionalists about talk of gender.  This enables us to say that there is simply no fact of the matter as to what womanhood (manhood, etc.) really is. On this view, being a woman can be a matter of how you self-identify—it’s just that the self-identification involves a category posited within the scope of a fiction, and so there need be no general, substantive answer to the question “exactly what are you identifying as?”. In short, gender fictionalism allows us to positively value genders without embracing problematic general definitions.