From Protests to Pronouns to Prisons: Understanding Why We Use ‘Woman’

During Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” to which Jackson responded “No … I’m not a biologist.” Republican pundits took Jackson’s admittedly evasive response as indicating that Blackburn had asked something of a “gotcha”; a question that revealed the absurdities endemic to the Democratic Party and the political positions they extolled. Meanwhile, Democrats interpreted the question as one ultimately asked in bad faith, whose purpose was to paint Jackson into a corner in which she had to either concede to a position that undermined the notion that trans women are women or had to openly adopt a position that would strike viewers as too broad or counterintuitive to be meaningful.

While Blackburn likely asked the question with these strategic aims in mind, there is something rather odd, surprising, concerning, or even amusing about our collective inability to define gender categories, despite the considerable material and political power their applications yield. Whether someone counts as a woman or man matters, not just to them and their own sense of identity and social membership, but also at the political level. The gender people attribute to us governs the organizations in which we can participate, the spaces to which we might belong, the funding we might receive, and the extent to which political movements and organizations center the issues that affect us. Without a clear, working definition of “woman” or “man,” how can we make decisions about what someone is owed on the basis of their gender? How can it make sense to have gender-specific organizations, political movements, and entitlements, such as women-only prisons, women-only sports teams, feminist philosophy departments, and so forth, if we can’t even say what women are? Is Blackburn right in intimating that Jackson’s response is a serious problem for the left? Do we render these organizations and movements toothless by refusing to adopt definitions of gender categories that would clearly determine who can and cannot participate in them?

My forthcoming paper titled “WOMAN: An Essentially Contested Concept” was developed in response to these questions. The paper is rooted in the observation of an apparent tension between views that understand gender categories as socially imposed and those that understand them as largely self-determined. While the former risk potentially marginalizing some trans people, the latter remain blind to some of the ways an individual might be subordinated in virtue of being classed as a particular gender by others, as opposed to identifying with that gender. For example, such views cannot reflect the fact that trans men might not enjoy all the privileges of cis men. Pluralist views were an effort to respond to this division by understanding gender categories simultaneously as identities and as imposed social classes that confer oppression or privilege. I argue, however, that pluralist views fail to reckon with the depth of the tension. To illustrate this point, I examine situations in which the way some people are oppressed do not seem to track the way in which they identify. Accordingly, I instead defend a contextualist position, according to which a given gender category’s meaning can shift from context to context, depending on the morally justifiable background purposes of those using the category within context.

To illustrate how contextualism operates in greater detail, consider a Take Back the Night march, discussed and organized by Katharine Jenkins, a proponent of the pluralist view. The march is intended as a woman-only march against sexual violence. The reasons the march ought to remain woman-only are numerous. As she notes, doing so preserves the “symbolic value of conspicuously violating the social norm that a woman ought to be accompanied by a man when walking after dark” (419–20). Moreover, the strength of solidarity built amongst participants of the march depends in part on the extent to which people who are at greater risk of sexual violence don’t feel that their discourse is being surveilled by members of a class that is statistically more likely to perpetrate it.

However, as she notes, excluding trans men on the basis of their gender identities would be a mistake, as they too are at greater risk of sexual violence. Accordingly, she offers a pluralist account of “woman,” according to which trans men could be admitted owing to the term’s role as a socially imposed class, rather than an identity. However, I note that for trans men, this application of the term doesn’t seem to reflect a kind of pluralism, but rather, contextualism, as the fact that they might be socially treated like women and thus prone to greater sexual violence is being given greater consideration than whether their gender identities match up with the gender for which the march is intended. There’s a very real sense in which the way we identify doesn’t always correspond to the way we’re treated by others, and this fact is especially salient when examining the admission of trans men to this march. Moreover, while cis and trans women do identify as women, they are also at greater risk of sexual violence in virtue of how they are classed. Importantly, admitting anyone to the march ultimately turns on the empirical fact of whether they are prone to being sexually oppressed by others in virtue of being classed a certain way. As the purpose of the march is ultimately to build solidarity and resistance among groups that are at greater risk of sexual violence owing to how they’re perceived by oppressive classes, understanding gender categories as social classes, rather than identities, makes the most sense in this context.

Nevertheless, there are many contexts in which the meaning of the term ought to shift to primarily an identity, as might be the case when determining the sorts of pronouns we ought to use to refer to someone. The most basic purpose behind using a pronoun is presumably to refer to someone. However, by allowing people to fix their pronouns to their gender identities, we allow them a greater degree of control in determining how others ought to treat and speak of them; rather than forcing people to have gender categories effectively imposed on them, by referring to someone by their chosen pronouns we grant them the room to self-determine their own identities. Whatever legitimate purposes that underlie the decision to use a certain pronoun ultimately seem best met by an understanding of gender categories as identities.

While a cursory reading of the paper suggests it’s framed as a direct response to the question “what does ‘woman’ mean?”, its ultimate purpose isn’t to propose yet another account of “woman,” but rather to reframe discussions about the sorts of gender-specific entitlements people have. Rather than fixating on what the term ‘woman’ means, and on the basis of this definition, discerning whether someone ought to be allowed access to some gender-specific domain or resource, I hope to shift our focus to the purposes that underly our decision to make these domains and resources gender-specific in the first place. Why are some marches woman-only? Why do we use gendered pronouns at all? Why do we have gender-specific bathrooms, prisons, shelters, and scholarships? The answers to these questions, I argue, ought to fix our understanding of what features a person must have in order to participate in these domains. Because “woman” is sometimes used as an identity, sometimes used as a social class, and sometimes as both, we must make room for an understanding of the term as fluctuating and unstable; expecting one universal account to help us determine to whom particular policies apply will inevitably underserve our needs. Ultimately, a more politically useful methodological approach is one that subordinates the meaning of the term to why we are using it, rather than taking some fixed meaning to constrain which uses we take to be legitimate. In shifting the focus of debates about the meaning of “woman” to our purposes behind using the term, we can begin to ask more fruitful questions about whether those purposes are justifiable.

Madhavi Mohan

Madhavi Mohan is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of language, metaphysics of gender, and animal ethics. Her dissertation, titled "Conceptual Engineering & Contextualism," explores the relationship between conceptual engineering and contextualism in the philosophy of language.