I watched a two-hour debate between atheist Stephen Woodford (host of Rationality Rules channel) and sex realist biologist Colin Wright on the topic of gender. The topic was ostensibly about whether gender is a social construct, but it ended up being a captivating discussion on the definition of man/woman and male/female.

It was facilitated by Pete Boghossian who I believe deserves an apology from me because I read his book How to Have Impossible Conversations, but I dismissed it as only having utility to amateurs. Having seen this debate however, it’s played pretty clear that Boghossian is especially skilled at facilitating conversations over contentious topics. So credit to him.

What was refreshing about this conversation is that both Stephen and Colin were operating through the lens of earnest curiosity and did their best to drill down at the specific disagreements they had. Stephen ostensibly represented the “trans affirming” side of the definitional debate, but he did so by avoiding many of the common land mines that are prevalent on his side, such as disavowing gender self-id as incoherent. The summary is that both Stephen and Colin basically agreed that male/female as concepts should be based off of reproductive capacity. The contention was over whether man/woman should have the same cleave.

Colin posits that the definition of man/woman should be “adult human male/female”, which naturally requires the male/female clause to do the heavy lifting. Stephen’s definition meanwhile is that it's a social construct that is typically associated with a phenotype (basically the constellation of observable gendered traits). To reiterate, I’m not a linguistic prescriptivist — I believe that words mean whatever people agree they mean, although it’s good for definitions to be useful — and so I think both Stephen and Colin are slightly misguided, although I believe Stephen has the stronger point in this exchange.

Colin wants to ground his definition on reproductive capacity, essentially whether someone has testicles or ovaries, but whenever he’s pushed to describe what this implementation would look like in real life (such as bathroom policy at the 01:18 mark) Colin acknowledges that genitalia examinations are too invasive and that we should instead rely on phenotype to determine who belongs in which bathroom. This is fine from a practical standpoint, but the problem is you can go down the list of what are putative sex segregation policies on paper and see that almost all of them also resort to classifying by phenotype in practice. Outside of narrow circumstances typically within a medical setting, no one is actually cupping your balls to determine whether or not you're a man. People almost always go by outward appearance — phenotype.

What's most interesting is that Colin claims to disagree with Stephen’s definition, but then practical reality forces Colin to adopt that very same definition he’s allegedly rejecting.

There are holes in Stephen’s framework as well. Because he's ostensibly presenting himself as trans-affirming, he has to maintain a definition of man/woman that is capacious enough to be trans inclusive. But an automated application of Stephen’s definition would mean that a female (as in having ovaries) who presents with the full panoply of masculine secondary characteristics would have to be categorized as a “man”. However, when Stephen is asked this at the 55:00 mark he avoids that categorization and instead says “I’d ask them, I’d just go ‘what are your pronouns?’ or I’d make an assumption”.

Colin refers to this as the “liberal escape hatch” that is deployed to avoid vexing yet inevitable logical consequences of this particular gender framework. Colin also points out that if you just keep handing out these “exception coupons” (my term) to anyone who requests one, then how exactly would this categorization remain useful? The entire category will eventually get eroded into the ocean.

Overall, this discussion showcased why I think both attempts to formulate a definitive categorization system are misguided. Trying to unearth or uncover a so-called objective definition of man/woman that is etched in obsidian and controlling in all circumstances is a quixotic mission and largely serves as a distraction.

Maybe this will come across as a mealy-mouthed answer to some but the only workable framework for tackling these definitions will always be “It depends on the context”.

Are you trying to identify which humans can procreate together? Then yes, not only would you need to check for the existence of testes and ovaries, but also whether those organs are functioning.

Are you trying to identify which humans can “fairly” compete against each other in physical sports? Well, there are an infinite number of relevant dimensions you can examine this question by, including by height, weight, age, number of limbs, hours of training, amount of performance-enhancing drugs administered, and so on. Because weight provides such an undeniable advantage in the context of combat sports, the purported goal of having weight class divisions is to foster a diverse field of playing styles, and to prevent the competitive field from getting dominated by the exact same heavy bruiser archetype. Similarly, sex is also a very useful method of categorization, but crucially not because the capacity to produce sperm versus eggs itself is relevant, but rather because sex is tightly correlated with other physical attributes that we actually care about. In other words, sex just happens to be a really convenient and good enough proxy for other things we might care about.

Are you trying to identify which humans should be allowed in the same bathroom together? Well, again, there is no objectively right answer because it depends entirely on what your goal is in the first place. If we’re prioritizing “comfort using the bathroom together” then the apex examples along this axis would not be based on sex, but rather would include long-term dating partners, or families with small children at the top. Society largely resorts to sex-based segregation in bathrooms on the very generalized assumption (which I repeat without necessarily endorsing) that females tend to be particularly vulnerable in those spaces and should be protected from males. Whether or not an individual has testes or ovaries is not at all relevant, sex just happens to be a really convenient and good enough proxy for other things we might care about.

I plan on expanding on this idea further but overall, this discussion on gender is the perfect manifestation of what I will refer to as the “sticker fallacy”. This is where people try to solve policy conundrums not by contemplating the ultimate objective, but instead they get distracted by pointless debates over definitions with the implicit assumption that the policy conundrums somehow get solved once you settle on which sticker to apply. It’s a sideshow too many people fall for.