[AGTRT-BF58] Pargender theory: a new strand of theoretical sexology

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

Structure of this blog

1. Introduction
2. Exceptions that confirm the rule
3. The rule: a mother, father and baby
4. Exceptions: gender transition
5. What to do when filling out the population register?
6. Applying ICE to pargender theory
7. Conclusion: beyond the battle between “woke” and “anti-woke”

1. Introduction

This week there was another fuss about gender in political Hague: an SGP operative found in a so-called “compilation bill” that the government intended to change the term “mother” in the population register to “parent from whom the child was born.” The purpose of the change was to make registering parenthood inclusive for people who have undergone gender transition. After all, a trans man who gives birth to a child is no longer a woman, and often will not see himself as a mother.

This led to outrage, especially among the right-wing parties: the government would have “glossed over” this change in the Collective Act in order to push “woke” ideas through parliament in this way. The caretaker government saw it differently: it expected – apparently naively – no significant opposition on this issue.

Because of all the fuss, Hugo de Jonge was forced to acknowledge on X the same day that this was an unnecessary mistake: “The word ‘mother’ is beautiful and deserves a place in our law.” He promised that the collection law would be amended, and so this confrontation ended with a hiss, but also without a clear solution to the issue of how parental registration should now be done in the case of gender transition.

This turn of events is indicative of how discussions about gender often proceed in The Hague. From the progressive camp there are all sorts of proposals for making legislation more “inclusive” that do not seem to be well thought out in terms of both content and strategy, and the conservative camp crosses it with criticisms that are often not well thought out either. The result is an ideological stalemate that leads to stagnation and yet seems to benefit no one. How could this be any different?

2. Exceptions that confirm the rule

For this particular case on the inclusive registry of parenthood, gender theory may be helpful, specifically the concept of pargender. This is short for parental gender and concerns the choices between father, mother and caretaker(mother, father, caretaker).

Pargender theory problematizes and thematizes the notions of mother, father and caregiver just as gender theory problematizes and thematizes the notions of man woman and neutral. Pargender theory should be helpful in solving concrete issues such as making legislation inclusive that involves registering parenthood.

We do suggest then that pargender theory should pay attention to rules with exceptions, and not too easily see the existence of exceptions to a rule as a reason to remove the rule. Such rules provide a foothold in the existence of many people, and that is of great importance.

One pitfall of the progressive camp on gender is to pursue inclusiveness to such an extreme degree that it becomes a taboo to name that gender diversity is mostly about exceptions, and that most people belong to a majority for whom that exception is irrelevant.

Much greater support for gender inclusion can be expected if it does not so sharply oppose norms, rules and majorities, but recognizes them in the first place. Inclusion is then only about recognizing specific exceptional cases, for whom, for example, registration must be neatly regulated in legislation. Gender-inclusive policy, then, may more often than not simply be called what it is: policy for exceptions that confirm the rule.

3. The rule: a mother, father and baby

The rule is easy to establish in the case of parenthood: it does not require a complicated pargender theory. A person develops from a child at birth and that child arises from a fetus and this fetus has a genetic mother and a genetic father. There is also a physical mother, the person who develops the fetus into a child and gives birth to the child.

For a given person, these three roles are in principle fixed, and in many cases it is also easy to identify who performs them. These three roles are directly related to reproduction and thus we classify these three roles as roles that belong in (theoretical) sexology. It is customary to read “the mother” as the physical mother.

Father and mother
With this, we arrive at these definitions that can serve as a starting point for pargender theory:

A mother is a person who has been physically a mother (this requires precision in the case of still births and other complications but the idea seems sufficiently clear to us initially).

A father is a person who has been a physical father (this also requires precision for still births and other complications).

We therefore believe: once a mother, always a mother. These rules do not preclude a person from being both father and mother, nor do they preclude a person from being both father and mother of the same child. But this concerns that are extraordinary exceptions. Surely the obvious rule in pargender theory is this:

A person is not both father and mother at the same time.

Gender and pargender
The relationship between gender and pargender is far from easy to determine, but thinking qualitatively in terms of numbers may help further:

1. Most physical mothers are physical women from birth and have remained so and still are.
2. Most genetic mothers are physically female from birth and have remained so and still are.
3. Most genetic fathers are physically male from birth and have remained so and still are.
4. Each of the three roles mentioned is a role as a parent (of a person).

4. The exceptions: gender transition

But there are exceptions to Majority Rules 1-3, and they stem in particular from the phenomenon of gender transition. And to do justice to these exceptions, one can use rules 5 and 6.

5. To avoid the ambiguity of “mother,” one can use the description “the person who gave birth to the child,” and instead of genetic mother one can say “the person who provided the egg.”
6. In the place of father, one can say “the person who provided the seed.”

The question now is how to handle exceptions. There are different views on this, and they can be summarized under the labels we also used to describe positions in the general debate on gender: essentialism and co-essentialism (see also gender-theory.org).

If we apply these labels to the debate about parenthood, we get pargender essentialism on the one hand. This is the view that the majority rules in 1-3 should be read as principles that govern how terminology, and preferably regulation, works. Exceptions might be conceivable but only as an anomaly, and of these the “normal cases” should not be inconvenienced.

The combination of gender essentialism and pargender essentialism provides a complete and conventional alignment between gender theory and pargender theory: all mothers are women, all fathers are men.

Pargender-co-essentialism is the view that there need not be any predetermined relationship between the notions of mother and wife and between the notions of father and husband.

5. What to do when filling out the population register?

When filling out the population register, one then faces these questions: are father and mother used, or rather the descriptions listed in lines 5 and 6? And if father (mother) are used, is it or is it not assumed that the person in question is also male (female) at the time of the child’s registration, or does it not matter?

As mentioned, the Hague commotion arose this week after a bill with a choice of options 5 and 6 came into view. According to the SGP, this is a big step that further undermines the concepts that are so important. The CDA was quick to speak of a mistake in this one.

It is understandable that in these times, when progressive thought can sometimes take on religious and coercive forms, these parties are suspicious of such changes. At the same time, the current situation without changes also creates problems. If one sticks to father and mother then it may be the case that the father of a child was a woman on the day of conception (and later).

All sorts of unexpected complications in terminology can then arise. Now no doubt CDA and SGP were never wholeheartedly in favor of transgender legislation. But that legislation is there, transgender people exist, and it is relevant to have clear language with respect to those people. If SGP and CDA are against renewing the law, that means they think it is reasonable to say: the father of X (as known to the civil registry) is a woman, the mother of Y (as known to the civil registry) is a man, and so on.

6. Applying ICE to pargender theory

It is at this point we believe it is necessary to go back to the reasoning for the original transgender law. This is what the method ICE prescribes (see AGTRT-BF38 and AGTRT-BF56). At the time when the first transgender legislation was introduced, the following majority versions of classic definitions of woman and man that we call AHF(a woman is an Adult Human Female) and AHM(a man is an Adult Human Male) were implicitly used:

MAHF: The majority of women are adult human females.
(In majority, women are adults with female physical gender)

MAHM: The majority of men are adult human males.
(In majority, men are adults with male physical gender)

There are also two complementary variants:

MAHFc: The majority adult human females are women.
(In majority, adults with female physical gender are women)

MAHMc: The majority adult human males are men.
(In majority, adults with male physical gender are male)

We assume that at the time the truth of MAHF, MAHM, MAHFc and MAHMc was not questioned and that transgender persons were seen as exceptions to the point that it was not a social problem to facilitate their existence properly.

The question that arises is whether a different course is now being taken in this area, so that an adjustment of terminology favorable to transgender persons can and should now be rejected because this adjustment also affects the terminology regarding “the majority.”

SGP and CDA can be critical of “woke,” but will also need to recognize that these trade-offs must be considered consistently, even if one does not wholeheartedly support existing transgender legislation itself. If these parties believe that transgender legislation should be changed in the direction of reducing opportunities for gender transition then that should be clearly stated.

7. Conclusion: beyond the battle between “woke” and “anti-woke”

The proposal to adopt gender-neutral conventions mentioned under lines 5 and 6 now came as a surprise, but it should not have been at all. These rules are an obvious and logical consequence of existing transgender legislation that, due to circumstances, has only been delayed on the table.

Existing transgender legislation led to complications from the start: a man can have a child, a person’s mother can become a man, a woman can become a man after conception but before giving birth (and then “as a man” also be a mother). These complications should have already been thought through in the current legislation, something that was done in much detail in the recent German bill in this area.

In the discussion we saw this week in The Hague around parental registration in the population registry, the dividing line between “woke” and “anti-woke” became visible once again, when in fact it is completely unnecessary. The government should not have resolved this issue through a collective bill, and the opposition should not have been surprised that existing transgender legislation now has consequences for birth registration, for example.

How can this be different from now on? In regulating legal protections for transgender people, it is at least important not to lose sight of the fact that they are a minority (as explained in Section 2). General rules that apply to most people do not necessarily need to be removed to facilitate a minority; that quickly leads to all sorts of social unrest and ever-deepening polarization between “woke” and “anti-woke,” as we see happening now.

There are several possibilities for solutions in the issue of registering parentage in the population registry that do not put such a strain on public support for transgender people. For example, the transgender legislation can be re-examined critically, but also the method of registration in the population register can be reconsidered.

First, transgender legislation: that legislation now goes very far in facilitating transgendering. Consideration could be given to curbing opportunities for transgendering, or in other words making the law less liberal now, especially at the stage of conceiving and having children.

For example, one possibility is to make giving birth to a child the consequence of being considered a woman for at least several years afterward. Then in time everyone will have a mother (with a father it is a little more difficult, but that is already the case).

Looking at it this way, pargender theory may have implications for the concept engineering of gender. There is not so much wrong with that. FGT(Formal Gender Theory, see gender-theory.org) describes the ICE mechanism for stepwise concept engineering of gender. FGT does not describe all the considerations that may come up at each stage.

Second, when filling out the population register, consideration could be given to giving parents both opportunities to name their role in the creation of the child: father or parent who provided the seed, and mother or parent who gave birth to the child. Genetics is then not systematically discussed in the population register, but it could eventually be.