It’s very common to hear people nowadays say that there are two related aspects of humans with regards to perhaps something we could call “dimorphism”, or typology associated with form and reproductive characteristics; “sex” and “gender”.
I have started to consider that this commonplace belief is an example of a certain idea - an idea which is buttressed quite a bit by modern cognitive science - which is that humans do not understand things as well as they think they do. And it’s very common to believe in a simple, mental world-image, merely because you obtain it via osmosis from your social community, or because someone provides a simple argument for it, or because you trust in the authority of the person who said it.
Once you start picking apart the notion of gender into two subaspects - anatomical form or “sex”, and a mental essence or social self-conceptualization also known as “gender” - I feel this propels one down a rabbit hole of skepticism, about those categories in their turn.
How can anyone know that there is such a thing as “sex”?
It’s difficult to give a definition of any object, outside of the scope of a human mind, which cradled the very concept of that object. Isn’t it?
In other words, it might be easy to observe the definition of “sex” provided by a human - but to then claim that this definition is non-arbitrary, that it merely describes a thing that already exists in the world, prior to humans arbitrarily categorizing it, seems much harder. A human has to ability to throw together a few definitional properties. Outside of the human, is there anything external “holding things together”, though? (Even just the ability to observe that each individual human body is an instance of the general class of human bodies; we might say instead each thing is it’s own distinct class of thing; there is no grouping).
This is an idea I have been grappling with.
Buddhists especially are emphatic on the idea that outside of the human mind, everything exists much less than we think it does, things lack the inherent existence we perceive on an illusory level as human observers. Matter is mostly empty space; and at the subatomic level questions have been raised about to what extent linear or absolute time even exists. It defies the human imagination to consider what can even be described about the “world totality” absent of a human cogniser. All fundamental categories transcendentally melt. We have no idea if time exists, if absolute size (big or small) exists, and most especially if “objects” exist. Objects are a human invention. Outside of human categorisation, we might first be inclined to say “there are just atoms, the atoms don’t know they are part of a book.” Then we would catch ourselves and realize we haven’t gone far enough: just like gender, just like sex, just like books, atoms are also a mental construct. We keep burrowing down to the bottom of reality: at the bottom, what’s the most fundamentally existing thing it’s all made of, to backpropagate up through the whole system? Now the answer is string theory, multidimensional vibrating strings and quantum mechanical principles which defy intuitive human understanding.
I find this critique devastating and a paradox because it’s clear that we haven’t gone far enough in almost trivially pointing out that gender doesn’t have the inherent existence it was formerly considered to because it’s just a social construct; rather it seems that basically everything is a social construct, including sex, the supposed “objective” counterpart to gender which we now realize is another illusion. How can you define sex objectively? All we can say is there are certain structural patterns that emerge in the biological systems of our bodies.
I can’t formulate my question perfectly because I’m still trying to develop what it is I’m trying to get at but I’m pretty sure the assertion that there is the widely established distinction between sex and gender is more of a rhetoric in vogue in our time rather than something deeply proven. I think I’m getting at a kind of nihilistic paradox which forces you to go back to reconsider that even if something doesn’t exist as much as we thought it does, it still must exist in some way, otherwise we’re left at the pointless conclusion that basically nothing exists. I think Wittgenstein discussed a similar idea in “On Uncertainty”, this tendency for people to assume some proposition is a default truth in the absence of some other held notion lacking firm proof; the counterargument is the opposite notion is equally uncertain.
I think some thought experiments can show us that sex is more of a mental construction than we realize. If I am to objectively define myself as a particular sex, how can I definitively claim I am of that sex? Does it really have a fixed boundary? Is it my genitals that define my sex? There may be many aspects to having a supposed sex. Yet, why is it necessary to lump those things together into a supposed one thing?
Anyway, I can’t sum this up into a strong question or thesis except this:
How can anything be said to exist, as a concept? How do we get from the realisation that in the objective world outside the human mind, we cannot conceive of anything but an amorphous, beyond-temporal flux of space, matter and energy - to the identification of recurrent patterns in matter, to the assertion on a conceptual level of any “thing”?
Is it possible that things exist in different ways? When we take a measurement of something with a device, we think this is a peep at the “objective” world. But even this I’m starting to question.
I’m trying to get at the idea that there are different kinds of existence, different characteristics and perhaps this can apply to the question of if there is any such thing as “gender”.
Because, if anyone takes it upon themselves to define gender, where do they start from? It’s very odd trying to define something which you don’t know what it is in the first place, why a definition is motivated anyway.
Thank you
