There are books that map out a moral debate with such clarity, that, even if you should you should disagree with the position they adopt, the process of offering a critique is greatly facilitated. This is the case with Kathleen Stock’s recent book, Material Girls. Perhaps this just goes with the territory of analytic philosophy, for which ‘conceptual analysis’ is, of course, ‘stock’ in trade. Stock may also just be one of those gifted teachers who excel in the business of bringing their interlocutors to a fuller & more all-round awareness of complex issues.
Either way, her recent forced resignation from a teaching post at Sussex University seems highly regrettable. Above all, in this fraught area of gender studies, academia could do with a dose of analytic philosophy, and teachers like Stock to administer it! I do not happen to agree with aspects of Stock’s position, as will become evident. But unlike those rebellious students of hers, I sense, from this book, that Stock is the kind of academic who would welcome honest debate, and one with whom a student would benefit much through engaging. Unlike those students, I do not have the privilege of attending her courses. So, I must offer my own response, as it were, to the void – in the hope that some gender-critical voice from Stock’s side of the argument will take up her defence by explaining where I may have misunderstood her!
Stock’s argument
According to contemporary gender theory, as expounded by Stock, the traditional binary system, in which a supposedly biological notion of sex determines male/female genders, needs to give way to the recognition of the existence of a multiplicity of genders not necessarily aligned with biological characteristics. Gender should be seen as a reality distinct from sex, the significance of which it relativizes and renders problematic. Depending on the theorist, it may be seen either as a fundamental aspect of an individual personhood present from early life, such as sexual orientation (‘stick of rock’ theory), or as something mobile and performative (queer theory).
Stock’s problem with this theory concerns its undermining of the notion of biological sex. This, in turn, problematizes the distinction of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and, along with it, that of other kinship roles (e.g. ‘mother’). According to Stock, sex is an inescapable biological reality. Though it may be defined in different ways, it is fundamentally binary both in its essence (chromozones, production of gametes, cluster of physical characteristics) and its effects (e.g. body mass, strength, role in biological reproduction, psychological propensities), and has critical social importance in certain areas of life. Amongst these, she discusses those of healthcare (different health needs of men and women), sport (distinct classes of male and female competitors), sexual orientation (attraction to same/opposite sex), assignment of protected spaces (men and women’s toilets, prisons, hospital wards).
So, Stock restates the significance of biological sex in the face of contemporary theory that would appear to elide it. On the other hand, Stock also claims to acknowledge the reality of whatever it is that renders many people profoundly ill at ease in their assigned gender identity, and drives them, in some cases, to seek gender reassignment surgery. This is, of course, the reality that recent theory designates under the term gender. The latter she explains in terms of an ‘intense identification’ with those of the opposite sex/gender. This she characterizes as an ‘act of personal meaning-making’, that is ultimately a ‘fiction’, albeit one that becomes the basis on which people may construct their personal and social identity.
Stock’s response to contemporary gender theory, then, with its problematization of sex, is to insist on the importance of both the concepts of sex AND gender, while retaining our sense of their distinctness. What the politically correct term would have us call a trans man Stock would insist on describing as a woman (sex) with male gender identity (gender).
Objections to Stock’s argument
These are two-fold.
On an immediate emotional level, Stock’s refusal to grant even passing trans people (those that have had gender reassignment surgery) the status they claim seems grossly unfair. I am not for a moment suggesting there is anything ‘transphobic’ about Stock’s attitude. But when passing trans people have gone to such lengths (life-changing surgery and hormones for life) to be women (or men), there seems something needlessly churlish about not recognizing them for what they have ‘become’.
My suspicion that there may also be a degree of biological essentialism here goes along with a more general and philosophical concern I have about Stock’s characterization of gender as a ‘fiction’, and the resulting implication of a fundamental dichotomy between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. The latter are viewed as essentially independent of each other and as respectively 100% cultural construct and 100% biological ‘reality’.
For a start, this sets me wondering what other ideational constructs Stock might want to assign to the category of ‘fiction’. Gender is far from the only instance of a human characteristic that brings a widely ramifying diversity of cultural expressions into complex relation with a common physiological reality. One obvious parallel – and a case similarly crucial for the determination of kinship and its terminologies – is descent.
In what follows, I want to elaborate a little on this parallel. As the niche interest of social anthropologists, and thus sheltered somewhat from the political turbulence surrounding gender, the topic of descent has, to a greater extent, happily been left in the hands of a discipline traditionally committed to adopting non-ethnocentrism as a cardinal principle. The result is a style of reflection that could, in my view, profitably be applied to the definition of gender.
Let me begin, for clarity of argument, with the purposefully provocative formulation head-lined by the feminist and student of religion, Nancy Jay, regarding the related kinship concept of descent: namely, ‘creating descent through fathers and sons’.
This idea of ‘creating descent’ will strike most of us initially, I suspect, as a contradiction in terms. Our own culture (however, one might wish to define it) evidently has much vested in a hard-and-fast demarcation of ‘family’ – seen as something biologically determined – from all other social and political relationships – viewed, ultimately as elective. The ethnographic literature, on the other hand, would suggest that this anchoring of kinship concepts in a rigorous distinction of nature and culture is NOT universally shared. Rather, the reality that confronts us in the case of ‘indigenous’ and archaic kinship systems is one of a culturally and religiously instituted ‘kinship’ that finds itself extended to practically all significant social, and even political, relationships.
This argument respecting the cultural construction of descent, has also been argued to apply to the characteristic of gender, though, in the latter case, the discourse inevitably becomes more contended in the presence of politically competing agendas of a less conscientiously non-ethnocentric character. But you will find the arguments played out in Marilyn Strathern’s widely-acclaimed though hard-to-understand volume on Melanesian kinship, The Gender of the Gift. It is not so much that we find birth characteristics routinely overridden in the assignment of socially-instituted gender. (That I suspect may be peculiar to modern society for reasons I indicate below). But we do discover gender to be a social category requiring to be ritually and socially instituted, and, through that process, extending its influence into the quasi-totality of socially, politically, and religiously meaningful human activities. The flavour of this alien world is, in my view, admirably summed up by one not untypical ethnographer, who comments that ‘Papua New Guineans’
live in a gender-inflected universe in which polarities of male and female articulate cosmic forces thought to be located in the human body [such that] indigenous theories of human reproduction contain within them an implicit recipe for social reproduction.
Social anthropologists have differed in their response to such ‘kinship terminology’. The earlier pioneers were tempted to view kinship as a kind of metaphorical language clothing certain ‘social/natural’ realities which it was the business of anthropology to identify and taxonomize. Their more recent successors, such as Strathern, have been more inclined to enter into indigenous peoples’ perceptions of their own collective realities. This, in turn, can hardly help calling into question the ‘scientific’ (i.e. transcultural) basis of their – and our – own definitions, and of our own kinship system. And it leads social anthropologists to view with justifiable suspicion those who seek to base the latter in biological or physiological ‘fact’. From this perspective the facile assumption that OUR kinship system has some unique and privileged relation to biological reality begins to look like a flagrantly ethnocentric attempt to ‘naturalize’ our own cultural presuppositions.
But what happens when we seek to apply a conscientiously non-ethnocentric perspective to OURSELVES? This, in my view, is admirably demonstrated in David Schneider’s now rather long-in-the-tooth study, American Kinship.
Schneider begins with a simple, and, from his perspective, all-important distinction: ‘between the culturally defined and differentiated unit as a cultural object itself, and any other object elsewhere in the real world which it may (or may not) represent’. In these methodological reflections, he prepares us for the momentary shock we are likely to experience when he subsequently identifies ‘blood’ and ‘sexual intercourse’ as the principal SYMBOLS determining the American kinship terminology. The surprising terminology of ‘symbol’ marks Schneider’s anthropological commitment to a transcultural perspective, according to which OUR own version of kinship is assumed to occupy the same ideational place as that of kinship in other cultures. If ‘symbol’ jars – and it surely does – this is because according to our own (as opposed to other cultures’) ideational definition:
Kinship is … biogenetic. This definition says that kinship is whatever the biogenetic relationship is. If science discovers new facts about biogenetic relationship, then that is what kinship is and all along, although it may not have been known at the time.
It is not, of course, that other cultures do not naturalize their kinship symbols: they evidently do. The idea of naturalization is implicit in concept of ‘symbol’ as properly understood in an anthropological context. It is just that, in our own case, this naturalization takes a ‘bio-genetic’ form that presupposes a ‘scientific’ approach to nature – well summed up in Schneider’s comment that ‘If science discovers new facts, then that is what kinship is’. Other cultures naturalize their symbols, but are not necessarily compelled to postulate the existence of a nature indifferent to human cultural projects.
Why does Schneider want to argue this? Probably, because the clearing away of biogenetic rationales is necessary to being able to consider cultural phenomena for what they are – to catching a glimpse ourselves in the hypothetical gaze of an outsider for whom the symbolic role that sexual intercourse plays in our own culture, so far from self-evident, might elsewhere be occupied by a different kind of symbol. We are challenged to see our kinship concepts as just happening to coincide with biogenetics – in practice the only way to see them in relation to those of other cultures, and thus see them in their cultural particularity.
The relevance for Stock’s argument
The above discussion gives an idea of the background from which I am approaching Stock’s argument. Here are the implications as I see them.
First, it makes sense to view gender/sex, like other characteristics determining relationships of kinship, as an essentially cultural construct, diversely – though inescapably – linked with human physiology. It makes little anthropological sense to bifurcate gender/sex into contrasted concepts of 100% biology (sex) on the one hand, and 100% culture (gender), on the other – either for the purposes of relativizing one in favour or the other (Butler) or for the purposes in maintaining them in their separation (Stock). In fact, Schneider’s findings as to the uniquely ‘bio-genetic’ character of our kinship constructs raises the likelihood of that radical bifurcation (for whatever purpose) being ideologically motivated and ethnocentric. So, we should stick with a single concept of ‘sex/gender’ (the obvious term for which would be ‘gender’) and just be accepting of its cultural malleability, while nevertheless recognizing the inevitability of its connectedness, however attenuated, with sexual characteristics.
At the same time – and this leads me to my second point – the unusually (if not uniquely) ‘bio-genetic’ character of Western kinship concepts can, I would suggest, help us to understand the cultural role that re-assignment surgery might have in our notions of gender identity. Precisely because we do NOT have socio-religious rituals through which the facts of human physiology can be expanded and supplemented to accommodate the various situational requirements of individual lives, it is easy to see how a surgical procedure designed to alter that physiology could come to occupy something like the same cultural role. Indeed, in traditional societies surgical procedures (circumcision, for example) do often accompany the rituals that mark the transition from one social status to another. It would make sense to see re-assignment surgery, where it takes place, as fulfilling on the cultural level (which is the level with which we are concerned) something like the function of the socio-religious rituals of other cultures in marking the passage from one gender to the other.
In practice, if we follow this approach, we will end up with what Stock describes, somewhat disparagingly, as the ‘medical model’. Men remain men, women remain women, except in the case of a medical intervention that turns the one into the other. Evidently, passing trans people will constitute, from certain points of view (e.g. for purposes of the future health care or sport) a distinct category. But, for any other purpose it seems to me morally unacceptable to withhold from them the social recognition that attaches to belonging in one of the two genders – men and women. As for the feelings of misalignment that would drive someone to undergo medical procedures, these, on the medical model, are viewed as ‘gender dysphoria’, which is seen as a psychological problem that may in extreme cases require medical intervention.
Needless to say, my reservations about Stock’s own position implies no support for the position she is attacking, and detracts in no way from many aspects of her critique of that position. If Stock is wrong to bifurcate sex/gender in the interests of a kind of biological essentialism, to do so in the interests of a politicized concept of gender wholly disengaged from sex is at least equally mistaken, and potentially much more harmful.
Stock’s resistance to the medical model derives from her anxiety about the lengthening queue of youngsters and their parents outside the Tavistock clinic. Evidently, the concern to offer assistance to the sufferers of gender dysphoria will need to be balanced, legally, against the need to protect minors from making premature life-changing decisions. While one might hesitate to attribute all of this suffering to ‘fictional’ identification, Stock directs our attention – very plausibly – to problems peculiar to growing up and identifying as young woman in today’s society – problems which are no doubt endemic in our culture, yet not likely to be alleviated by the newly pervasive but ill-founded new leftist discourse of non-bipolar gender identity.
Other related blogs:
ANGELA SAINI: HOW MEN CAME TO RULE
LOST IN (POLITICALLY CORRECT) TRANSLATION: THE CHALLENGE OF BIBLICAL HIERARCHY