What Is a Woman: “In a Red Dress” or “A Weekday Song”? (Column 497)

“This weekday is a day of grace

and in its grace, lines to you are written.”

(“A Weekday Song”, Rachel Shapira)

Alright, I can’t resist and I’m throwing another column your way.

A few days ago I received a fascinating film titled What Is a Woman?, in which a man named Matt Walsh conducts a series of interviews to discover the answer to the seemingly banal question, “What is a woman?” The film ostensibly deals only with that question, but it sparked my thinking on several deeper issues. The inquiry “what is a woman?” is just an example of awkward questions about definitions and logic, about the meaning of concepts and their dynamism, and of course about the relationship between the concept as such and its instances (apropos the last three columns), and more.

A brief description of the setting

The film clearly starts from a conservative premise, aiming to attack the queer world in which gender identities are distinguished from sexual identities and are regarded as fluid and subject to each person’s free determination. The film runs over an hour and a half, yet it’s very amusing and enjoyable to watch. It’s excellently made, though—as I wrote—its second half becomes very tendentious and somewhat eclectic, and I’m not sure about the reliability and balance of the portrayals offered there.

Walsh tours the bastions of queerness, chiefly New York and San Francisco of course, where even random people you stop on the street won’t dare speak in a way that isn’t politically correct. Among other things, he also visits gender studies departments at American universities, interviews doctors and psychiatrists who deal with gender dysphoria syndromes and with sex-reassignment surgeries for children and adults, and he interviews those harmed by these phenomena and those fighting against them. He even goes to Africa to speak with members of the Maasai tribe (who live mainly in Kenya and Tanzania), interviewing them about their gender definitions. This is a fascinating—if predictable—segment, because in an age of politically correct terror it’s refreshing, almost surprising, to encounter people who speak naturally about the definitions of man and woman the way most people in the West think (but many don’t dare say), and who in fact expend not an ounce of energy on it. To them it’s self-evident.

I must say there are parts of the film that are quite cruel—especially the bit where Walsh makes cinematic fun of a foolish gender-studies lecturer (as is customary in the field) who can’t answer his question and seemingly doesn’t even understand it. He speeds up and distorts the lecturer’s voice, giving us the impression of “blah blah blah.” It’s a very cruel trick—but also very funny. It turns out the fellow has devoted his life to researching gender, the differences and definitions of women and men, and yet can’t offer a proper answer to the most basic question in his field. In the end he’s truly offended (apparently acting offended out of embarrassment). It turns out he simply doesn’t know how to answer and is embarrassed by the question, and then hits upon a brilliant solution: he vigorously demands to end the interview. He’s not the only one, incidentally. Several interviewees in the film find the same elegant solution to escape the embarrassing, politically incorrect question. People who can’t give a reasonable answer to it choose to take offense (at what?) and storm out of the discussion in righteous fury, while hurling accusations that the questions are agenda-driven (the interviewer’s agenda, of course. Only his). Their evasive lines are truly amusing.

This was especially funny in the scene with that same lecturer who can’t answer the most basic question in his “specialty.” He keeps asking Walsh what he’s getting at and what he’s trying to achieve, and Walsh keeps explaining that he only wants a definition from an expert for the foundational concept in his research field. He repeatedly expresses a desire simply to clarify the truth about this question (feigning naivety, of course). One gets the impression that the academic fellow has no acquaintance with the phenomenon of people trying to clarify a question not to advance an agenda (in the fields of flimflam such a phenomenon is indeed uncommon), but for some reason he accuses the interviewer of exactly that. In their dialogue, that lecturer babbles himself into a corner, and Walsh plays with the recording and the film makes merciless fun of him. But I think the idiot, like all his colleagues in the field, earned it.

The subject of discussion

The film is divided into two parts. In the first, Walsh goes around trying to extract from various people and institutions an answer to his question—and of course without any success. In the second half, he turns to a somewhat eclectic critique of progressivist madness in general. You can sample the array of arguments he piles up there, where he focuses more on a grab-bag of problematic points that accompany it. This part is highly tendentious, and he doesn’t really give us the other side so we can be impressed and form a view for ourselves. It’s a ridiculing presentation of phenomena that are, in large part, indeed ridiculous.

I don’t intend to address these secondary aspects here. For example, I won’t discuss a person’s “right” to be addressed as they wish (why should it be permitted to force on me a conceptual framework I don’t accept—i.e., to demand I call someone a woman when in my view he is a man?), nor the liberal-LGBT “terror” (which causes an interviewee from the “wrong” direction to appear in the film as a silhouette), nor the degeneration of the West, the debasement of academe, and the stupidity of academics in the fields of flimflam. I won’t get into sports competitions in which transgender women compete with women and easily beat them—ruining their careers. Nor will I touch the issue of transgender women appearing in women’s locker rooms in all their male glory, or the confusion that this conceptual and cultural world induces in children. I won’t get into the right and obligation of parents not to confuse their children and not to cooperate with their capricious demands or with the abuse of doctors and psychologists. I won’t address the ethical lapses of doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists; the hasty application of untested medical and psychological techniques; or even criminal adjudication and jailing because of political correctness. I’ll restrain myself from touching on the fanaticism of the discourse and the unwillingness of believers in the progressive faith to listen to other views, and on the handy tactic of labeling dissenters as heretics and thereby dispensing with the need to respond substantively, and so on and so forth.

All these are numerous, important, and frustrating points—mostly true—that appear in the film (tendentiously) and deserve discussion in their own right. That’s also why I’ve listed them here for your consideration. But returning to this column’s topic, here I’ll address only questions concerning concepts and their definitions—questions that belong to the logical and philosophical plane. In my understanding, those are what stand at the center, certainly in the first half of the film before we move on to the preaching stage. I’ll warn you now: a surprise awaits you at the end.

The queer picture in a nutshell

To my mind, the film’s punchline is the attempt to clarify the question: what is a woman? Walsh usually doesn’t even argue with his interviewees about the content of their definitions (because there aren’t any). He only tries to extract a definition from them—and even that to no avail. He holds up a mirror to them and moves on; in many cases they’re the ones who move on (in a huff). You have to understand the context to see why this is such a brilliant point that’s easy to miss, and why none of his interviewees—the people and theorists of queerness—can have an answer to it. Why is the mirror they’re confronted with so embarrassing?

For that I need to give a short preface about gender identity and queer theory. Learned readers will please forgive the simplicity of what follows and my ignoring the nuances and diverse approaches in the field. These stem from some lack of familiarity on my part and, even more so, from the fact that we’re generally dealing with word games—words and more words—a kind of Orwellian newspeak. Keep this rule of thumb: when you see the word “theory” or the word “critique” in such contexts, don’t look for a theory and certainly not for critical rigor. These are clear markers of nonsense-speak—and needless to say, when you encounter the journal “Theory and Criticism,” which contains both elements together, you can already guess what to expect. So I’ll allow myself to rely on a very simple—and some will say simplistic—picture of the matter.

A basic axiom in this area is the distinction between a person’s sexual identity (sex), determined by physiology (chromosomes, reproductive organs, etc.), and their gender identity (gender), which is a more abstract mental matter. Usually there’s no argument about sex, since these are objective facts that can be checked by sight and certainly in a lab. One can check whether the sex chromosome is XX or XY and which sex organs someone has. But gender identity, and especially its separation from sexual identity, is the core concern of the queer field. The fundamental presupposition is that there is a disconnect between these two aspects—that a person can be male in sex but female in gender, or vice versa. Incidentally, the pedants have recently coined a name for those in whom the two aspects align: cisgender, to teach us that it’s mere happenstance—nothing special. It’s just one more gender among many. Next they’ll probably add it to LGBT so it becomes LGBT-C, and then the discourse will devour itself (which, of course, won’t bother anyone and certainly won’t stop the “deep” discourse).

But it turns out that even this doesn’t exhaust “queer theory.” Yes, there are two different aspects in defining a person’s sexed being: sex and gender. And yes, there’s a disconnect between them. But adopting these two assumptions still isn’t queerness. The question that gets us closer to the heart of the matter is how we should define the gender of a woman or a man. Seemingly, a feminine gender is a set of traits and tendencies characteristic of those whose sex is female. No one disputes that a person with female sex is characterized by different traits and tendencies (leaving aside whether these are genetic, innate, acquired, socially scripted, etc.). Queerness claims that gender has no binding definition whatsoever. That is its essence (or its “theory,” if you prefer). Note that this is a third assumption—and only it brings us into queerness.

If I return for a moment to the film, it opens with a visual presentation of the filmmaker’s own stance (Walsh): he shows the gifts girls receive (dolls and not tractors, of course—it’s exactly what they want—“socially scripted” as they are), and ends with a man’s role being to open the jar lid for his wife (one of the man’s traditional functions). These are the feminine and masculine stereotypes Walsh argues for. In his view, these are the simple definitions of femininity and masculinity, as an antithesis to queerness, which claims there are no such definitions. It’s clear to us all that there are character traits and tendencies typical of women and of men. I think even the queer theorists would agree (and say that’s due to social scripting). Seemingly, that’s the natural definition of gender: someone endowed with the character traits of those whose sex is female has a feminine gender, and likewise for men. The claim is that there can be people whose sex is male but who are endowed with feminine traits and tendencies—thus their gender is feminine—and vice versa.

That’s a fairly reasonable claim, and agreeing to it doesn’t make you a queer theorist. True, if there are men with feminine traits perhaps it’s not right to define those traits as feminine—but it’s certainly a reasonable working definition. There are human beings who lack a hand or something else, and no one would say because of that that having hands isn’t a human characteristic. Likewise, androgynos and tumtum (intersex categories in rabbinic literature) don’t change the sexual definitions of male and female. As noted, these two assumptions don’t make me a resident of Queeristan. Many perfectly sane, ordinary people would accept them. I imagine many would have accepted them in the 16th century as well.

So where does Walsh part ways with the queers? The queers won’t accept his definitions of gender. True, there are feminine traits and tendencies—but they don’t define the feminine gender. In their view, a person may have the gender “woman” even if she didn’t play with dolls, or the gender “man” even if he did. It’s up to one’s free choice and shouldn’t determine gender. The gist of queerness is that, for them, feminine gender is not defined via the set of tendencies and behaviors of women (and not only the familiar claim among them that there are no such tendencies and behaviors, or that they are socially scripted).

In sum, the sex–gender distinction is very much within reasonable debate. One may argue, but that’s not the crux. Nor is the disconnect between them—the willingness to accept that some people’s sex differs from their gender—the essence of queerness. The problem appears when you notice that queer newspeak makes gender definitions far more flexible—indeed completely empty. The common claim is that a person may define their gender as they wish. Someone who feels like a woman is entitled to be treated as a woman, without any link to their tendencies or behavior. As shown in the film, Canada even has a law that mandates this and attaches sanctions. Walsh interviews a man living “in exile,” who claims solely that his “offense” was refusing to refer to his son according to how the son sees himself (as a daughter).[1]

Sharpening the queer thesis

Seemingly, the claim is that there’s a broad spectrum of degrees of femininity or masculinity—hence these gender concepts lack a sharp definition. The matter lies in a gray area stretching between black (man) and white (woman), and therefore for us onlookers it’s hard to diagnose whether the person before us belongs to this or that gender. Perhaps that’s why, for the queers, the diagnosis should be made by the person themselves. If someone sees themselves as a woman, then they apparently possess the feminine traits in a proportion that justifies treating them as such. Only they can know what’s inside.

But that’s not the current queer approach. They claim it’s not a black-and-white question or a diagnostic challenge within a gray area, but a purely subjective definition. The authority granted to a person to define their gender doesn’t stem from our difficulty judging whether they’ve crossed the line from black to white in the spectrum of masculinity or femininity. Moreover, if we were dealing with feminine and masculine traits in the familiar sense, then one could also observe some of it from outside, at least at some resolution. The queer claim is far more radical. It’s not that the person alone can look within and see whether they are a woman or a man; rather, there’s nothing to see at all. The person determines by free declaration whether they are a woman or a man. If someone of this or that sex declares they feel as a woman, then they are a woman—even if beyond their sex, all their tendencies and traits are masculine. Even if they are a tough, violent sumo wrestler who shows no emotion, grows a beard, has male reproductive organs, and lacks any delicacy, empathy, or other familiar feminine traits from the well-known (and in part true) stereotypes. Their claim is that a person has the right to determine their own gender. In short, it’s not a matter of diagnosis but of self-definition. One doesn’t diagnose oneself as a woman; one constitutes oneself as a woman by declaration. The declaration has a constitutive status, not a regulative one.

In the film you can see interviewees explaining to Walsh that the definition is subjective and everyone can define gender concepts as they see fit. There is no single binding objective definition. Therefore, they say, there’s no point asking someone what a woman is or what a man is—at most you’ll hear their own definition. They have the right to define these concepts however they wish. But pay close attention: I’m going one step further. Walsh persists and asks for their definition anyway. He says he’s not interested in arguing; he just wants to hear how they define a woman. What is that person’s subjective definition of their own or others’ gender? Yet he can’t extract an answer from anyone. Why not? Because the queer problem isn’t the subjectivity of these definitions. If we were dealing with subjective definitions, then each person could offer their own. We’d have many different definitions, but each person would have one they use. In the queer picture, however, the problem runs much deeper: it’s not that we have subjective definitions; it’s that there’s no definition at all. A person cannot offer even their own subjective definition of gender concepts. That is, the issue isn’t that the definition is subjective, but that there is no definition. The upshot is that the statement “I am a woman” is not a definition but a declaration. No objective—or even subjective—criterion need obtain for that declaration to be “true.” It suffices that the person declares it—that the words leave their lips.

Walsh persists, asking again and again: what do you mean when you say you feel like a woman? What exactly do you feel? What is the content of the term “woman” for you? He’s effectively saying, I’ll grant for the sake of argument that the definition is subjective—but please, be so kind as to present your own subjective definition. He doesn’t get an answer from anyone—not even to this minimal question. All New York and San Francisco, all the lecturers, researchers, surgeons, protesters, and passersby on those “enlightened,” politically correct streets stand glowering and can’t produce an answer. It’s hard not to recall the famous children’s song “In a Red Dress” by the Nahal troupe, which tells of a little girl, alone and innocent, who stands and asks “why?”—and all the volcanoes and all the storms, and all the lions and all the tigers, and all the notebooks and all the books, and all the cannons and all the soldiers, and all the sages and all the great ones—none find an answer. There, there’s no answer because the question “why?” isn’t defined—it’s unclear “why what?” But to Walsh’s question there’s no answer though the question is defined. It seems here the “answer” is that it isn’t defined. That’s the essence of queerness—and, to my mind, Walsh’s sharp insight is directing our attention to this.

Sharpening Walsh’s punchline

Walsh’s insight is that there’s a fundamental bug in queer relativism. It’s easy to miss the fact that queerness isn’t talking about a gray area in defining “woman” (or “man”) that makes definition difficult. It’s just as easy to miss that it’s not even talking about a subjective definition that varies from person to person. Walsh notices that in the queer picture, gender concepts lack definition altogether—in fact, they’re empty concepts. They’re empty even for a given individual; that is, there isn’t even a subjective definition. To speak of a gray area, we need a good definition of white and black; then, with varying mixes between them, we can imagine fifty shades of gray. But if black and white have no content at all, then we also can’t speak of gray. You say you’re “gray,” but in your usage the term “gray” is completely empty.

Again and again Walsh asks “what is a woman?”—and when he finally gets an answer, it turns out to be circular (he even traces a big circle with his hands so the interviewee—and we viewers—don’t miss it): “one who feels like a woman.” He then asks: but what exactly must a person feel to say “I feel like a woman”? What is the meaning of the very phrase you’re using? You can’t define a concept by using the concept itself. Walsh begs his interlocutors to help him understand whether he himself feels like a woman or a man, but gets no help. It seems the question was ten sizes too big for the great gender scholar interviewed there—as well as for all the other tigers and lions roaming this film. They didn’t stand glowering, though; as described, they feigned indignation and departed to escape the embarrassment.

You must understand: this is a logically intolerable situation. In the queer picture, when a person says about themselves “I am a woman,” it’s no different from saying “I am ‘yikum purkan’” (an Aramaic liturgical phrase), or “blah blah blah,” or “I am X.” All of these are empty terms in this context. In one interview Walsh asks: if I say I’m a cat, are you obliged to treat me as a cat? The interviewees hesitated—and it looked like they were truly considering it (!). In another interview he asks: if I declare I’m brilliant and Mr. Universe, must you see me and treat me as such? There too there was hesitation, ending in a chuckle (at least until they understood where he was going). But note: those questions are much weaker than ours. He attacks them using concepts that aren’t empty. One can define cat quite reasonably, and perhaps one can also propose some definition for intellectual brilliance and beauty. It’s hard to say those are empty concepts; at most they’re vague (gray). There the problem is a wide spectrum and difficulty making a sharp definition. Some will say that a concept like beauty is subjective—not just a gray-zone problem, but an objectivity problem. But as we saw above, gray-zone definitions or subjective definitions are relatively easy. Here, we have concepts that are neither gray nor subjective; they’re content-less. Just strings of syllables that mean nothing.

If gender concepts are indeed empty, it’s very hard to accept the demand made of me regarding someone who declares themselves a woman—that I treat them as a woman. If the term woman is empty of gender content, what remains is the parallel term woman on the level of sex—which, as we saw, has a clear definition. By that definition the person before me isn’t a woman, by everyone’s account. So why should I comply with their demand and address them in the feminine if they are male by sex and if the term woman at the gender level is empty? Note that had we adopted the pre-queer definition of feminine and masculine gender, the problem wouldn’t arise—certainly not with the same force. A man who behaves in a feminine way would be defined as male in sex and feminine in gender. In that case I’d be prepared to hear a demand that I address them per what they are—assuming I accept that address is determined by gender rather than sex. And even if I didn’t accept that, or thought that factually they don’t behave in a feminine way, we’d have a substantive dispute. There might still be room for them to request that I address them as a woman according to their view—if only out of courtesy. But if the term woman is empty—and that’s the case in the queer picture—then in what sense am I obliged to use empty words just because someone decided that’s what they want? That sounds a very odd and unjustified demand. That’s it; ethics isn’t my subject here—except insofar as it serves as an indicator for the logical discussion.

Another look at circular definitions and empty concepts: Who is a Jew?

It’s hard to avoid the association with the question “Who is a Jew?” (see, for example, Columns 336–337 and many more). There’s the halakhic definition, which is relatively clear (though one can split hairs about it). But if someone doesn’t accept the halakhic definition and sees the term Jew as a national or cultural designation of some sort, then it’s really not clear what content the term Jew has for them. Speaking Hebrew isn’t a criterion (there are plenty of non-Jews who speak Hebrew, and plenty of Jews who don’t). The same goes for reading the Bible, paying taxes to Israel’s government, eating hummus or falafel, or serving in the IDF. It’s very hard to see any of these as an alternative definition of Jew. Hence, in this context too, you’ll often hear the circular answer: a Jew is one who defines themselves as a Jew, or one who feels Jewish. Such circular definitions typify empty concepts. I’ll now try to sharpen this point.

Suppose we define the term triangle like this (I don’t claim this is a precise or univocal definition): a triangle is a shape formed by the intersection of three non-parallel straight lines lying on a two-dimensional plane. Note that if we replace the word triangle with any other symbol, nothing changes. We could define: X is the shape formed by the intersection of three non-parallel lines lying on a two-dimensional plane. Nothing has changed; the term is clear to us and we can now use it in language. The label we chose isn’t important—it’s arbitrary. The definition pours content into it. At most, we might add that the sum of X’s angles is 180°. That only changes the label, not the content.

Now let’s return to the term woman. The queer definition offered is: a woman is a person who feels themselves to be a woman. Now replace the term woman with X—as noted, that shouldn’t change anything: X is a person who feels themselves to be X. Do you now know what X is? I’m sure you haven’t the faintest idea. If the definition only gains meaning when the word woman is used, but not when we place X instead, that implies one of two things: either the term itself wasn’t empty prior to the definition (we understood woman before defining it here), or it remains empty after it. But we’ve seen that the term is empty before the definition, since it has meaning at the level of sex but not at the level of gender (the queer thesis posits a complete disconnect). We’ve seen that even the traits of those with female sex don’t define feminine gender in the queer picture. So initially, the term woman at the level of gender is empty. And if it’s empty, then even after that definition it remains empty. A circular definition can only have meaning if we already grasp the term beforehand—if it merely helps sharpen an existing intuition. That’s why “a woman is one who feels like a woman” doesn’t strike us as sheer nonsense: because the term woman sounds to us (mistakenly, according to the queers) as having content before any definition. The tell is that when we put X in place of woman, meaning evaporates. That shows the term’s meaning isn’t poured in by the definition but precedes it. But regarding feminine gender (as distinct from female sex), we cannot have any prior intuition—since everyone relates to it however they wish. As noted, in queer theory one merely declares being a woman; one does not diagnose it.

Complex diagnosis

In medicine and psychiatry, concepts are often defined via some number of features from a larger set. Thus, for example, a psychopath—which we discussed in Column 493—might be defined by several traits from the list given there. There are quite a few mental or physical illnesses for which ten features are listed, and if a patient has some portion of them (say six), they’re diagnosed with that illness. The underlying assumption is that the illness is well-defined, and the features are merely indicators—though not all indicators always appear or are empirically accessible. So if there are enough indicators, we infer the illness. Sometimes there are several types of the illness (but they share something in common—otherwise they wouldn’t be types of the same illness), and each type presents a different cluster of features. Could that be our situation here?

Regarding “who is a Jew,” it seems quite clear this isn’t the relevant logic. Features like speaking Hebrew, paying taxes, military service, consuming Hebrew culture—all of them could be absent and one would still be considered a Jew (think of a Satmar Hasid in New York); and conversely, all could be present and the person would be considered a non-Jew (think of a Druze citizen of Israel). Even a connection (what is that?) to Jewish heritage (what is that?) can’t be a criterion. Someone born to a Jewish mother with no connection to Jewish heritage can immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. Many would see them as a Jew (apparently due to the halakhic definition—having a Jewish mother). A professor of Jewish studies or Jewish history can be a complete non-Jew, despite feeling a deep connection to the subjects of his research.

The same probably holds for gender concepts. We saw that no one requires listing feminine features to define oneself as a woman. One simply needs to feel like a woman, and that’s it. As we saw, this is a declaration, not a diagnosis—there’s no need to seek feminine features, not even a partial subset of a larger set. One feels like a woman, and that suffices. But there is, of course, no concrete content that one must feel—since the term woman is, as such, content-less. It seems that in queer theory there’s only a demand that in the person’s mind the word woman (which is content-less in itself) appear—and that in their own eyes it be linked to themselves. The faith of the queer church rests on the rule: “I have set ‘woman’ before me always.”

Vague concepts

It’s common today to think that ethnos is a vague concept. You can’t define it, but it exists. There’s a sense that I am Jewish or Tanzanian even if I can’t define it through features and criteria. Difficulty defining something doesn’t mean the concept doesn’t exist or is empty.

I’ve often discussed Phaedrus—the protagonist of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and his chase after the concept of Quality. His conclusion is that we have no definition for it, but it’s wrong to infer from that that the concept is empty. There are concepts that are very hard—perhaps impossible—to define, but that doesn’t make them empty. Perhaps the difficulty lies in our capacity to conceptualize and formulate—or perhaps it’s a basic concept that cannot be reduced to more fundamental terms (there must be some such base set on which we define everything else). So maybe woman or man in the gender sense are such concepts? We have difficulty—or even principled inability—to define them, but that doesn’t mean they’re empty. At most, they’re vague.

I previously mentioned (see, e.g., Column 107) Gideon Ofrat’s book What Is Art? After surveying several proposed definitions, he concludes that art is what’s exhibited in a museum. That’s circular, of course—since the curator places a piece in a museum because it’s a work of art. So the question now retreats to the curator: how does he know what to exhibit? In what way did this circular, empty definition help us? I think Ofrat’s point is that we intuitively understand what art is, and therefore, even if we haven’t found a good conceptualization, we can still use the concept intuitively. His way of expressing that is to say that art is what’s displayed in a museum. It doesn’t purport to be a definition; it’s an indirect way to say the concept exists even if we haven’t defined it. Every curator understands what art is, and thus decides what deserves exhibition. He has an intuition guiding him, and we don’t know how to articulate it. The inability to define doesn’t mean the concept art is empty. That’s what we saw above regarding the concept Jew. Sometimes a circular definition is merely a manner of speaking—but that’s always when the concept itself is intuitively clear to us before we define it.

Try to define the concept exists. When I say that something exists, what exactly do I mean? Not any property—for existence pertains to the thing as such, not to its manifestations (see the first dialogue in The Primal Cause). And yet it’s clear to all of us that existence means something. We’re not merely playing with words when we say something exists. That stands in contrast to many statements about the Deity which, in my view, are mostly wordplay (pantheism, etc.).

Can’t we say the same about gender concepts? I don’t think so. We have no intuition whatsoever of what a woman or a man is—once you must entirely ignore sex and also the so-called feminine or masculine traits and tendencies. What’s left? A bare declaration. One declares they feel like a woman or a man—but intends nothing by that declaration. It’s not like art, about which almost all of us have an intuitive sense that such a thing exists, and we can even point, in many cases, and say “that’s art.” There are arguments, of course, but also a great deal of agreement. Hence the sense that it’s not arbitrary or “just a declaration.” There are even various features of art—though Ofrat fails to distill from them a clear, univocal definition. The same with Phaedrus’s Quality. But with gender concepts, the sense is that it’s a declaration alone. There is no relevant feature—even one we wouldn’t regard as strictly necessary—on which the declaration rests. Here it’s not just an inability to define; there’s nothing to define. As noted, it’s not a diagnosis or a definition but a declaration. One doesn’t diagnose being a woman; one declares it. Thus, it’s hard even to call this a vague concept. It’s an empty one.

The principle of charity

From what I’ve described so far, it follows that believers in queer theory are fools, charlatans, prisoners of a conception, or just confused. Is it nevertheless possible to interpret their feeling more charitably? The principle of charity tells us to do so (see Column 440), and I thought it appropriate, in closing, to continue my heroic, generous journey and try to find a reading of gender concepts that doesn’t leave the queers looking like total dunces. That’s how you should read the paragraphs that follow.

As a starting point, I’m inclined to believe that within some people who are, by sex, men and who have no feminine trait or tendency, there genuinely nests the feeling “I am a woman.” Some are foolish, some confused—but in some, they truly experience something real. I don’t know how to define that feeling, and they themselves probably don’t either, yet nonetheless I surmise that some of them do have such a feeling. I mean to say that they don’t merely declare with their mouth “I am a woman”; the declaration reflects something within.

Let me sharpen the claim and explain how it differs from the conclusion of the previous section (where I rejected the possibility that “woman” is a vague concept). We saw there’s no way to find features of the person themselves that would define them as a woman—not even at the subjective level, person by person. We saw we can’t define a spectrum of features with degrees between black and white. We saw it’s not even right to think a person has some percentage of features from a set. All that means is that these people themselves aren’t characterized as some specific gender. But perhaps, even without any feature present in the person themselves, the feeling itself exists within them and reflects something.

Note: I’m speaking of a real feeling, not of hidden features of the person that it expresses. It expresses no physical or psychological attribute of theirs, and yet we can perhaps say there is a real feeling. After all, the person feels something—even if it has no expression in the external world. That raises, for me, the possibility that there’s an abstract concept of woman or man that the feeling reflects. These aren’t vague concepts—since we can’t find any external feature that accompanies them. But the feeling expresses something within. The word woman apparently means something to these people. It’s accompanied by a feeling—or a connotation—even if not by any necessary feature of the person. Think of the feeling someone has when they judge an act and determine it’s a good act. Can one define that feeling? I don’t think so. And yet that connotation grants the term moral its meaning for me.

Here we might return to Kant’s “thing in itself” (the noumenon) and the distinction between it and its properties (the phenomenon), as discussed in the last three columns. In Column 492 I also spoke of love as relating to a person as they are in themselves, independent of their traits. Above I noted that existence relates to a thing as such, not to its traits. So perhaps gender terms in the queer world also relate to the thing-in-itself, regardless of any of its traits. There’s an idea of woman or man, and I feel that I belong to it—even though I have no physical or psychological trait to hang it on or link to it, not even at the subjective level.

I don’t know whether there’s anything to this, but it’s at least a possibility. By the principle of charity, it’s appropriate to interpret this odd, nebulous feeling generously—and that’s the best I could find. If I’m right, then Walsh’s coup collapses, of course. It doesn’t solve all the other problems with queerness and progressivism in general, but perhaps I’ve done them some kindness on the logical plane.

“This weekday is a day of grace, and in its grace, lines to you are written…”

[1] I must say I would check this case before forming an opinion. Walsh doesn’t provide the particulars, nor does he interview the prosecutor or the judge who sentenced the poor fellow. I’m not convinced he was confined solely because of how he addressed his son (with no element of abuse). In fact, I’m almost ready to bet that’s not the full picture. But as noted, I haven’t investigated either.