What makes a man or a woman? With the ever increasing interest in LGBTQ+ issues, questions about transgenderism and gender identity are entering the public discourse. The most common of these questions concern the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of gender identity. While these queries are understandable and completely valid, there are people who willingly derail these discussions with gender critical rhetoric. These people claim that gender identity is a fad and is not suitable for intellectual debate because of scientific fact. These statements are misinformed in a variety of ways, a particularly poignant piece of misinformation is the idea that science does not support transgender identity when the opposite is true. The prospect that gender identity exists as a spectrum needs to not only be considered but also treated as fact.
To understand gender identity, we must first ask the question. What is gender? The gender critical view of gender would ascribe it toward the traits that make a person stereotypically male or female. These traits include chromosomes, hormones, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics. However, if gender is defined solely by these traits then where does the transgender person fit in this dichotomy? If a person has the hormones, genitals and secondary sex characteristics of the other gender; then what is the noticable difference between the two?
When asked this question, the majority of people would answer either the chromosomes or the ability to give birth. After all, no matter how much a person transitions they can never be the opposite gender because of these two unchangeable facts. These two answers, however, fail to consider the Swyer syndrome. Swyer syndrome is a condition wherein individuals with XY chromosomes are born with functional female reproductive structures. This means that these people born with male chromosomes are able to grow up, gain secondary sex characyeristics, menstruate, and get pregnant.
People with Swyer syndrome and other similar conditions are known as intersex. And while there is no current accurate scientific probability that measure how common intersexuality is, estimates show that the probabilty of being intersex can be as low as 1 in 500. The existence of the intersex further debunks ideas that include a rigid binary idea of sex of either sex or gender.
Yet this again begs the question. What is gender? Queer philosophers have pondered this question for decades. A famous view on gender is by philosopher Judith Butler. In her essay
“Performative acts and gender constitution”, Judith Butler proposes that gender is performative. She suggests that gender is a social construct because a person’s sex does not determine how they act and present. This means that gender is dependent on how a person acts, looks, and identifies as. She argues that gender is dependent on how the person performs and how people perform their gender is different across cultures and time periods.
Knowing gender, we can now begin to discuss gender identity. Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender. This means that a person’s gender identity can be congruent to their assigned sex at birth or differ from it. This way of viewing gender has given birth to the gender spectrum which includes; cisgender, the gender identity that is congruent to one’s sex at birth; transgender, which is the gender that is incongruent to one’s sex at birth; and Non-binary or the spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine.
There have been many criticisms about this view of gender, mainly from the uninformed public and gender critical feminists. Many of the arguments against gender identity involves a metaphysical scepticism towards the idea itself. The average person does not believe that the gender spectrum exists and that people are only really male or female. However, after hearing the arguments stated earlier most people concede their original metaphysical scepticism toward the subject, while others switch to an epistemological view of gender identity. In other words, “How do you know the things that you know?”. Epistemological scepticism does not contribute to the debate and only suspends the debate indefinitely.
Gender exists as a spectrum. To say that gender is binary by associating it with sex is to disregard the scientific reality that human sex also exists as a spectrum. We must regard gender as what it is, a social construct that changes in accordance with society. Today, people who identify as transgender or non-binary are left bereft of rights because of the mistaken assumption that they do not exist. We must acknowledge the existence of the gender spectrum and fight for the rights of the transgender and non-binary community.
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