Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
In AGTRT-BF49, we discussed recent work by Kirk-Gianinni. In it, concept engineering is carried out to arrive at a new notion of gender called “inclusive gender.” We first briefly summarize Kirk-Gianinni’s reasoning here.
Read more about “Inclusive Gender” by Kirk-Gianinni:
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini: another step in the concept engineering of gender
Assume gender so see that:
- A person P has gender-1 if, and only if, P has female gender identity,
- A person P has gender-2 if, and only if, P has male gender identity,
- A person P has gender-3 if, and only if, P has neither gender-1 nor gender-2.
We call this definition of gender co-essentialist because gender categorization (in other words, whether one has gender-1 or gender-2) depends solely on de-identification (and that is what P alone deals with).
Now Elizabeth Barnes has shown that this definition of gender is insufficiently inclusive because in some cases “cognitively disabled” women would not be able to identify their own gender, so these individuals would not be assigned gender-1 (or indeed female gender), and this is (according to Barnes) explicitly undesirable. In other words, co-essentialism leans too much on self-identification to determine gender identity.
Kirk-Gianinni’s conclusion was that a slightly less co-essentialist definition of gender is needed: in some cases, one wants to be able to attribute a gender to a person even if the person himself does not. Kirk-Gianinni shifts the definition marginally in essentialist directions by dropping the strict requirement that one always have a gender identity. This creates what Kirk-Gianinni calls “inclusive gender.” That’s a very ambitious name, though, because it can by no means be ruled out that there were other problems with the definition of gender according to co-essentialism that nevertheless inherited into the new idea about gender as Kirk-Gianinni sees it.
We proposed in AGTRT-BF38 a method for mapping the history of the development of the concept of gender: incremental concept engineering (ICE). In doing so, we start on the essentialist side with the starting definition of gender being bodily gender. In incremental concept engineering of gender, we worked toward definition that is ever so slightly less essentialist (and thus slightly more co-essentialist).
Learn more about our ICE methodology for gender:
Understanding more about how the concept of gender has changed over time is helpful in the discussions at hand
Kirk-Gianinni works off the other side. Kirk-Gianinni takes as his starting definition the most co-essentialist conceivable definition of gender, and works toward essentialism, aiming to increase the degree of inclusiveness. Indeed, transinclusiveness does not appear (according to Barnes) to be the only criterion for co-essentialists to consider.
We can immediately suggest the next step: in addition to gender-1 and gender-2, there is also gender-3 (for neutral gender). And now we agree that:
- A person P has gender-3 if, and only if, P has neither gender-1 nor gender-2.
This creates “inclusive-N gender”: inclusive-N gender, first of all, also provides a categorization for people who rate themselves gender-neutral. But “inclusive-N gender” also gives (some) space to people like Marcus Dib who does not want gender (see AGTRT-BF49 and AGTRT-BF37). Based on inclusive-N gender, one would assign Dib gender-3 to Marcus, and that is less “oppressive” than if Dib were assigned Gender-1 or Gender-2. “Inclusive-N gender” is thus slightly more inclusive than “inclusive gender.”
Read more about Marcus Dib’s case study:
Marcus Dib is transsexual but not transgender: what does this mean for gender theory?
While we are not advocates of co-essentialism, we can go along with the idea that co-essentialism is a relevant proposal for a definition of gender and that inclusive gender enhances that proposal. With that, inclusive gender is by no means the final solution to the design problem for a notion of gender. Inclusive-N gender we think is already a bit better (albeit we still find even that proposed definition of gender far too co-essentialist).
Nevertheless, Kirk-Gianinni’s contribution is of great interest to us. Indeed, that one brings more symmetry to research: incremental concept engineering and decremental concept engineering might one day arrive at the same concept, and that would then be a good candidate for a MotR gene theory.
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