[AGTRT-BF67] Kathleen Stock provides gender-critical arguments for “a woman is an adult human female”

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

Kathleen Stock is a British philosopher who resigned her professorship at the University of Sussex in 2021 due to pressure from activist transgender students calling for her resignation because of her gender-critical statements. Stock is one of the best-known victims of cancel culture in gender studies. She now works part-time at the University of Austin in Texas, United States.

In the recently published volume Sex and Gender, a contemporary reader (2023), Kathleen Stock has also written a contribution called Is Womanhood a Social Fact? (2023). In it, she lays out the arguments she sees for the now widely known gender-critical assertion by American philosopher Alex Byrne (MIT): a woman is an adult human female (AHF for short). There is no room for gender in that statement, only sex.

Read how Alex Byrne’s claim AHF is related to the concept of physical gender:
How can the concept of bodily gender be concretely applied in gender theory?

This claim (AHF) was substantiated by Byrne in his now famous publication Are women adult human females? (2020), in which he strongly criticized the careless and circular way progressive gender scholars treat the word “woman.” Stock agrees with AHF: she denies the existence of trans men and trans women, or at least finds it highly implausible, and theoretically ruled out.

Read how progressive gender science reacted to Alex Byrne’s claim AHF:
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini: another step in the concept engineering of gender

The arguments Kathleen Stock lays out are broadly similar to Byrne’s arguments but the organization of the argument is clearer. We do not share Stock’s view. Where are the holes in Stock’s argument for AHF? Stock assumes a three-way split, that is, she sees it in such a way that exactly one of the following three possibilities is valid. This three-way division is actually already in Byrne’s work as well but Stock makes it a bit more explicit.

1. A woman is an adult human female, (or in our reading an adult person with female physical gender).
2. Woman is ambiguous and has at least two meanings: the meaning under (a) and a meaning in which “woman” is a concept that is as she calls it constitutively social. She gives as an example of a constitutively social concept the Euro, the Euro is constitutively social, the moon is not.
3. Woman has a single meaning, and does not refer to “adult human female” but refers to a “social fact.”

Right here we have a criticism: woman can also be a concept that originally has a definition as “adult human female” but has undergone a certain shift under the influence of social processes. This does not make “woman” ambiguous.

We note then that the notion of woman never existed without social processes and that to speak of an “origin” of that notion is questionable. Also the body can and could only be interpreted socially. There is always a continuous shift in the definition of almost every concept under the influence of social processes. This does not immediately make such a concept ambiguous.

We saw earlier that the concept of bodily gender shifted from morphological gender to biological gender in the last century, and there are also still options and choices in how biological gender should be defined. Exactly the term “female” in AHF is undergoing a certain shift. This has not at all stripped this term of a physical or biological background, the term has just been given some other boundaries.

If 1, 2 and 3 were the only options then Byrne’s arguments that Stock repeats are convincing. But what, in our view, is missing from Stock’s list is a fourth option:

4. Woman by and large has the meaning of “adult human female” but there are exceptions, and therefore the “new meaning” of woman is also socially useful just as the old one was. Those exceptions look like this: (i) trans women are women but not AHF, (ii) trans men are not women and are AHF, (iii) some adult individuals with neutral gender (i.e., not female) do have AHF.

With this option 4 added, Stock’s (and Byrne’s) argument is no longer decisive.

For completeness, here are our definitions of man and woman (gender), starting with a definition of male and female (sex). These are terms that have no convincing translation in Dutch, a formidable complication for Dutch-language gender theory. But as we described earlier, the distinction between “woman” and “female person” as a concept is uncontroversial in English, and is thus of principle importance.

• A female (male) is an adult person with female (male) physical gender.
• A man (woman) is an adult person with female (male) formal gender.

The concept of formal gender is partly socially determined, as it emerges through ICE(incremental concept engineering, see AGTRT-BF56) in a series of design steps starting from morphological gender, or the form of bodily gender that was current in the year 1900 and earlier. The ICE method includes constraints that avoid drifting too far from “physical gender.” Thus, the social function of the concepts of man and woman remains intact despite the definition given here.

Kathleen Stock and Alex Byrne defend trans-exclusive positions, but without any reference to feminism or to theology or religion. They are neither TERF (see AGTRT-BF43) nor TEFC (see AGTRT-BF44). We call these opponents of gender transition TEGPs(transexclusionary gender philosophers). TEGP is less than TERF and TEFC an ideology. We assume that TEGP(transexclusionary gender philosophy) as a philosophical position will ultimately prove untenable, but there is no denying that refuting the arguments from the TEGP angle is an ongoing challenge for the time being.