Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
We have already devoted two blogs to recent work by Kirk-Gianinni (see AGTRT-BF49 and AGTRT-BF51). This is reasonable because here is a next step that clearly builds on earlier work by Bettcher, Jenkins, Barnes and Dembroff taking into account the criticisms of it by Byrne and Bogardus. And these are the most active authors on gender theory in recent years.
Read more about the added value of Kirk-Giannini’s article:
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini: a next step in concept engineering gender
Learn more about Kirk-Giannini’s new approach to concept engineering:
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Gianinni gives an alternative to ICE: decremental concept engineering
The recent work of these authors always directly or indirectly concerns the question “what is a woman.” At Kirk-Gianinni, this is made explicit as follows:
“A woman is an adult person of gender-1.
And the definition of gender-1 is the subject of Kirk-Gianinni’s paper, and in doing so, as discussed earlier, it takes a step of concept engineering that takes particular account of Barnes’ critique of the co-essentialist idea that gender is determined solely by gender identity, or self-identification of gender. Kirk-Gianinni makes the description of gender-1 no longer entirely dependent on self-identification, and thus less co-essentialist. This is undeniably a step forward, this regardless of the fact that we do not yet find the resulting definition of gender-1 attractive, for this definition is still too co-essentialist in our experience.
But we want to note here that in none of the papers on definition and concept engineering of gender, “neutral gender” (or, if you will, non-binary gender) plays any role. And this is curious. Thus Barnes finds that gender (or in Kirk-Gianinni’s terms gender-1, that is, defined in pure co-essentialism) is insufficiently inclusive toward cognitively “disabled” persons. Yet it is not made sufficiently clear in Barnes’ work why categorizing (part of) that group of people as gender neutral would not solve the problem Barnes raises (see also AGTRT-BF49).
We therefore believe that Kirk-Gianinni would have done better to first and explicitly introduce gender-3 (for gender neutral) and indicate who qualifies for categorization under gender-3 when. By first parroting Barnes’ critique, Kirk-Gianinni misses the opportunity to analyze the extent to which gender-3 can address those issues, and that could be relevant. Finally, making the concept of gender (via the definition of gender-1 and gender-2) dependent on the assessment of a person’s cognitive abilities is a big step. In practice, such a thing seems unworkable to us anyway, even if Barnes’ criticisms are valid.
Leave a Reply