So, you should read RS for the new post up on the incoherence of TERF philosophy and/or ideology, it’s well done. But I want to single out and emphasize one particular bit. HJ Hornbeck excerpts a Medium article credited to a number of folks1 and proceeds to challenge it on a number of points. While I don’t have more than a few quibbles with what HJ wrote, HJ acknowledges that there is much more that could be challenged than was covered in the Reprobate Spreadsheet analysis. This is a place where a bit more of that challenging will happen.
Here, I want to emphasize a point that HJ made briefly that I believe could use more attention, add a couple of points original to me, and then allow you to get more from HJ’s original analysis. Here is the section I wish to reanalyze, a smaller portion of HJ’s first excerpt2:
the view that the category of ‘woman’ is correctly defined as ‘adult human female’. Biological essentialism is a position about whether certain traits of women are biologically produced by sex category membership. Womanhood itself is not a genetic ‘trait’ and no-one on either side of the dispute thinks it is conceivably biologically produced in the way that, arguably, emotional intelligence or maternal instinct is supposed to be.
HJ already points out that
You cannot square “we are not biological essentialists” with “women, definitionally, are adult human females.”
though they do try by putting forth what I believe to be a definition of biological essentialism (hereafter BEm, because whew, that gets tiresome) that is in my view erroneous, strangely idiosyncratic, and slippery, in a manner that appears unintentionally deceptive. Look again at the excerpt. It begins to slip awry, and deceptively so, when it defines BEm wrongly. BEm is not a position that relates only to “certain traits of women”. It can, of course, relate to “certain traits of space aliens” or “certain traits of dolphins” or “certain traits of members of the genus homo“. The point here is that by defining BEm in the manner that the authors do, they put the classification of women qua women outside of the possibility of consideration. It’s likely (I’m not up on all the current feminist philosophy) even fair to restrict the definition in feminist philosophy to human beings and exclude dolphins or space aliens, even if other disciplines might be concerned with how perceptions of biological determinism affect their own areas of research. But feminist philosophy certainly concerns itself with essentialisms other than those affecting how we perceive the etiology of women’s traits, and even defining BEm as regarding “certain traits of members of homo sapiens” or “certain traits of persons” would allow us to question whether or not womanhood is assigned based on biological essentialist (hereafter, BEt) criteria.
It is odd, then, that the excerpt even attempts to defend its authors’ definitions of women and womanhood as non-BEt. But accepting that they do, bizarrely, go ahead and attempt a defense, one would like to see a coherent one that at least makes a logical case that the authors should not be seen as biological essentialists unless and until some successful rebuttal is mounted. This is not what is presented.
But one matter further before we get there. BEm, remember, is not only absent when not regarding certain traits of women, but also occurs only where those traits are ascribed by the biological essentialist to those situations where an eligible trait is:
biologically produced by sex category membership
But this, too, is incoherent. Biological mechanisms do not operate differently depending on how human knowledge categorizes them. This is particularly important because categorization can and does affect acculturation and other social learning. Unstated in their definition of biological essentialism is that BEm is an alternative to cultural determinism and cultural essentialism (another topic is whether the authors have used biological essentialism throughout when in fact it would be more accurate to speak sometimes of biological essentialism and sometimes of biological determinism).
Cultural essentialism and biological essentialism are opposing theses, and their tension is often articulated in abbreviated form as “the nature versus nurture debate”. For most of us “nature versus nurture” is no longer an interesting debate. Those qualities that can be assigned wholly to one have most likely been so assigned. For the remainder of examinable qualities or traits, then, the relevant question isn’t likely to be, “How do we pin down this trait entirely to a biological etiology or entirely to a cultural one,” but rather, “how do the biological differences between individuals (or subgroups) combine with social and cultural differences between individuals (or subgroups) to produce this trait?” To say that an individual is engaging in essentialism, then, is to assert that on the question of the etiology of a trait where an answer isn’t clearly all biological (to the limits of our investigatory resolution) or all cultural (same), the individual in question has diverged from the interactive model to argue that the trait is determined by a process where the contributions of either culture or biology are functionally insignificant. Veering away from unspecified essentialism, BEm is the position that the functionally insignificant factor is culture, and all significant etiological processes are thus biological.
Anthropologically, the data are in: womanhood is determined differently in different cultural contexts over time, but in all cases the cultural mechanisms determining membership in the category “woman” and other culturally analogous categories reference biological facts in significant part. Those biological facts have, obviously, biological origins, but since they are given different meaning in different contexts, we can confidently state that those biological facts are not the entirely of significant factors determining womanhood.
This is not in dispute. Yet the authors of this paper assert that
‘woman’ is correctly defined as ‘adult human female’.
This is clearly a deviation from the interactive model toward a model where culture is functionally insignificant. This is classic BEm. It could hardly be clearer. Despite this, the authors then (almost immediately!) assert:
Womanhood itself is not a genetic ‘trait’ and no-one on either side of the dispute thinks it is conceivably biologically produced in the way that, arguably, emotional intelligence or maternal instinct is supposed to be.
But …
BEm says nothing about genetics per se. The authors aren’t discussing genetic determinism or genetic essentialism. They chose to discuss biological essentialism, which is a larger category that includes but is not limited to genetic essentialism3. Under BEm, all biological etiological mechanisms are equally validly contained within its structures.
Having said that, the more glaringly bizarre inclusion is this:
no-one … thinks it is … biologically produced in the way that, arguably, emotional intelligence or maternal instinct is supposed to be. [emphasis mine]
Why not eye color? Why not tibia length? While “supposed to be” creates ambiguity here as to whether the authors believe it is (near) certain that emotional intelligence or maternal instinct are biologically determined – supposed by whom? is the relevant question – the authors clearly at least leave open the possibility that emotional intelligence is determined without significant contribution from cultural and social factors.
Make no mistake: even in its minimal form this is a position so divorced from reality it can only be called delusional. The definition of emotional intelligence is this:
the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
As a thought experiment, imagine a child washed up on a remote island growing to adulthood entirely alone. Are we to believe that this child would be equally skilled at expressing emotion as the child having grown up without language or anyone to whom one might express that emotion as the child would have been growing up with language in a social context? Are we to believe that the isolated child develops “the capacity … to handle interpersonal relationships” to the same degree as a biologically identical child growing up in a social setting even though the isolated child has never once had an interpersonal relationship after some arbitrary age where it is at least conceivable that such a hypothetical child could find food independently – perhaps somewhere in the 3 to 5 year range?
This assertion, that emotional intelligence is arguably produced without significant contribution from cultural and social learning, is so horrendously outside the possibilities as even non-experts might understand them with but a moment’s thought that the mere use of emotional intelligence as a supposedly-illustrative example of things that might be biologically determined shows a huge, a drastic bias towards openness to biological essentialism.
Before we continue, I want to make absolutely clear the nature of my objection: the authors earlier used “emotional intelligence” as a possible example of something biologically determined. After that use but before the quote I’m objecting to here, they add:
All of us reject this view as stated, though at least one of us acknowledges the possibility of more minimally described hard-wired sexed behaviours across a population.
My objection, then, isn’t to the authors arguing that emotional intelligence truly is biologically determined. Rather it is to what they actually said:
no-one … thinks it is … biologically produced in the way that, arguably, emotional intelligence or maternal instinct is supposed to be.
In this quotation of the identical words, I have shifted my emphasis. Here I want to bring your attention to the use of “arguably”, because it is not arguable that emotional intelligence is biologically determined. That opinion is nonsense, and flies in the face of what we know about the capacity of emotional intelligence to change with treatment for certain disorders negatively correlated with emotional intelligence, formal education on cultural norms of emotional expression and interpersonal relationships, as well as less formal learning. Though I believe that the authors have made some major errors here, don’t mistake the critique of this statement for a false assertion that the authors believe in a BEt account of EI’s etiology. It is bad enough that they mistake this outrageous position as “arguable”.
I could conclude here, but I would be remiss not to point out that by defining BEm as characteristic of positions on the etiology of women’s traits, the authors here claiming non-BEt status are asserting that no position on the origin, development, persistence, or mutability of traits associated with individuals or groups belonging to those they categorize as men could ever justify categorizing them as biological essentialists. Yet after their definition of woman, the most damaging essentialism in which they engage may not even be their essentialism in relation to women. It may very well be that second only to how they define men and women the most damaging essentialism they practice is in relation to those they categorize as men. But in their definition of BEm, examination of these positions is forbidden to have any relevance to whether or not the authors practice essentialism.
This double standard must be challenged. As much as these authors and their ideological fellow travelers may assert that trans people are only concerned with the treatment of MtF trans women and the limits of acceptable womanhood and femininity, it is trans activism’s antagonists themselves that make it plain they have no interest in the treatment of FtM trans persons and the relevant limits of acceptable manhood and masculinity. A broad or narrow definition of manhood interests them not at all, nor do the potential ramifications of such definitions.
As near as I can tell, the arguments that they make against social and/or legal self-identification of gender apply only to MtF people. The arguments are stated in such a way as to focus entirely on hypothetical examples of male persons in space they would like to see designated female-only. There are no counter-examples about the dangers of female persons accessing space that might be designated male-only. And yet the authors conclude that such social and legal policies must be prohibited in their entirety, not limited in such a way that female persons can freely use them but male persons cannot. But if the coercive power of the state is to be brought to bear against anyone, that use of power must have a justification. In this case, the authors argue that state power should be brought to bear against those who use public restrooms to which the authors believe those persons have no appropriate claim to access. Validation of the use of state power without justification is an invitation to tyranny. Why, then, do the authors feel satisfied, having made the case for using coercive state power against MtF trans women only, arguing for a policy which would bring state punishments upon those persons whose behaviors the authors have never even attempted to argue deserve such punishment?
It is in fundamental errors like these that the authors show biases that I consider far more dangerous than the world prioritizing self-determination4 that I advocate.
1: Primary authorship credit appears to go to Dr. Kathleen Stock, but the on-line publishing format is less than clear given that Stock alone is given the website byline, but when the full list of six authors is presented, it is ordered alphabetically with Stock placed last. The authorship list as given on medium.com:
Sophie Allen, Jane Clare Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, Mary Leng, Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, and Kathleen Stock
2: There is additional context which I’ve chosen to omit. The full omitted paragraph is this one:
‘Biological essentialism’ is standardly used in feminist philosophy to refer to a position which thinks that certain cognitive abilities (e.g. emotional intelligence, lack of spatial reasoning), instincts (e.g. maternal instincts, a drive for monogamy), social preferences (e.g. for domesticity, for family life) and dispositions to certain behaviours (e.g. kindness, passivity) are causally produced across a population of human females in virtue of their biological sex category membership.
This suffers from the same deficiency with respect to the phrase
in virtue of their biological sex category membership
as the quoted passage suffers from in the phrase
certain traits … are biologically produced by sex category membership
Further, the same problem exists with respect to
across a population of human females
as exists in the portion I quote that reads
whether certain traits of women
I believe it’s clear that their definition differs from standard definitions of BEm – yes, even in feminist philosophy – in specifying that BEm can only be applied to female humans. I do think it’s fair to assert that feminist philosophy focuses more frequently on BEm as applied to sex than as applied to race or some other topics. I also think it’s fair to assert that feminist philosophy focuses more on BEm as applied to women and/or human females than men and/or human males. But these are not definitional issues, these are investigatory patterns demonstrating the interests of feminist philosophers.
Moreover, I did not quote the first-occurring paragraph in the main body of this post because it seems to be, forgive me, rank bullshit. Nowhere in the Medium.com article do the authors assert that their intended audience is limited to trained feminist philosophers. Nowhere do the authors assert that they are responding only to the critiques of trained feminist philosophers. The closest they come is to say that
While there have been a number of comment pieces in national media by philosophers challenging gender-critical and radical feminism, we have yet to see in these a compelling argument against our position. Rather than respond to these pieces individually, we would like to highlight some of the common misunderstandings and fallacious arguments that we take to be problematic in these responses.
I am careful to note that they are responding to “comment pieces in national media by philosophers”, but this isn’t the same as limiting the discussion to feminist philosophers. MOREOVER, just because you’re a trained X, doesn’t mean that you will use the professional nomenclature with academic precision in a popular venue. If you’re not writing for professional philosophers, then you have to use the language that non-philosophers will understand. In law, “reasonably foreseeable” has a certain definition. But if I wrote a popular op/ed and used the phrase “reasonably foreseeable” it’s unlikely that the majority of my readers would understand me to be using the specific, technical definition found in the law of liability. Thus, even though in the majority of cases in which I use “reasonably foreseeable” I might very well intend the technical, legal definition, it does not follow that any of my writing in popular periodicals would necessarily use the term that way. In fact, despite my membership in a particular group, my audience is far more determinative of how I use a word or phrase than my training. I wish to be understood. I know something about how my audience understands a word or phrase. I know that my audience has no telepathic or other means of divining my intent apart from my words. Therefore I choose my words according to how they will be understood.
Given all this, we can be certain that the definition of a phrase used in an argument that feminist philosophers would like to critique depends on the definition of that phrase as used in the original argument, not as used in feminist philosophy journals. Unless and until the authors quote a specific user of the phrase biological essentialism and find that person to be writing in a specific context that obviously limits available interpretations to those defined by feminist philosophy, the definitions of feminist philosophy are irrelevant.
This is all particularly disconcerting since the authors have been taken to mean something other than they intend at various times. One of these authors, defining womanhood as such an author does, might use “woman” in a way that conflicts with the lived facts of social reality in any number of areas around the globe, but is entirely consistent given their idiosyncratic definition. For instance, depending on the definition of “female”, it would be perfectly consistent (and true!) to say that all women have the capacity to get pregnant from penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse, if one’s definition of “woman” is “adult female human”.
The authors experience some frustration with others interpreting their statements about women to be in contradiction of reality (or to be otherwise problematic), when using their own specific definition of woman such a contradiction (or problem) does not exist. Given this, it seems particularly egregious that they do not either state, “We intend this article to be critical only of other feminist philosophers,” or open their definition up to include what their rhetorical opponents actually use the term biological essentialism to mean. It’s for damn sure that none of those rhetorical opponents think that biological essentialism can only be applied to female humans.
So why do these authors pretend that this is somehow the relevant definition when responding to those opponents? I honestly don’t know. They should know that it is literally impossible that all their critics are using biological essentialism consistent with how they define the term in this article. It strikes me as patently dishonest, then, to assert a definition unique to feminist philosophy as the standard by which a term’s use in discussion with non-philosophers is to be understood.
There are reasons why the authors might not want to quote specific criticisms by specific critics, but so long as they wish to lump all their critics and all those criticisms together, then any rebuttal aimed at those who use the term biological essentialism in popular periodicals must address what is meant by all of them. Indeed, without specific examples, any rebuttal must address what even a single use might reasonably be interpreted to mean by its intended audience. Anything less is certainly not “[d]oing better in arguments about sex, gender, and trans rights”.
3: This could be seen as an equivocation fallacy, but I read this document as intended to be rhetorically persuasive rather than logically conclusive. If they aren’t using their equivocation in the context of a logical argument that given some premise or premises we must accept some conclusion or conclusions as true, then this isn’t a fallacy.
4: Please note that I said, “prioritizing” and not “deferring absolutely to”. Prioritizing is a relative term, and I certainly prioritize self-determination more than these authors on at least some relevant issues. Obviously it’s possible that on some issue I haven’t discussed one or more authors prioritize self-determination more than I would, and in no case does that mean that the party more highly prioritizing self-determination has taken an extreme or absurdist position that what one decides to do is always acceptable so long as one has decided it for oneself.
Are “emotional intelligence” and “maternal instinct” measurable? If not, I doubt they exist. If so, are they gender-linked? Seems to me that if there is a “maternal instinct” there might well be a “paternal instinct” and they might be the same – how does one tell them apart? Is there perhaps a “parental instinct”?
A lot of this TERF-y stuff seems to me to be firmly grounded in pop psychology. I.e.: it’s founded on vigorous assertion and pretty much nothing else. Yet another sad example of how psychology is used to justify prejudices – it’s American as apple pie and apartheid.
the authors argue that state power should be brought to bear against those who use public restrooms to which the authors believe those persons have no appropriate claim to access
Is that really it, or is that an argument thrown up as a placeholder, which will be followed by another and another as they get knocked down? Because, if it’s not a placeholder, the problem is going to resolve itself – I see more gender neutral bathrooms all the time, and the “threat” of having multiple people using the same bathroom is going to be moot. Additionally, why is nobody concerned about the hallway leading up to the bathroom? Could not a male intent on harassing a woman simply wait in the hallway outside the bathroom? I know that’s never happened before, /sarc. Or was it that creepy harasser-guy waited until the target was in an elevator? I forget. Anyhow, it seems to me like a ridiculous amount of trouble to go to for a simple tactical problem.
I’m speaking from a position of tremendous privilege but this sounds like an exclusive club that’s trying to keep its separatism in place and is pissed off that the power of the state is not leaning heavily in their favor, to keep the ruffians out.
Excellent work, I’m still a bit embarrassed at how I glossed biological essentialism. Ah well, a link to this post should shore that up.
Marcus Ranum @1:
Think of it more like the anti-choice movement’s equivocation of fetus and baby, which places emotional appeals and fearmongering as the bedrock. When they reach for a scientific fig leaf, it’s found in domestic violence statistics instead of behavior and custom.
@2:
That pretty much nails it. They are convinced they are the One True Feminists, and everybody else has fallen into a “Stalinesque, anti-philosophical, PC ban on raising ‘common sense’ questions about transgender persons.” TERFs were exclusionary decades before the term “TERF” even existed, and were exclusionary about far more than bathrooms.
In my recreational reading I’ve seen a number of studies by research psychologists on emotional intelligence where EI was operationally defined as a measurable quantity. (Mind you I’m no expert in psychology, but there was crossover with my graduate studies and I’m competent to read a good bit of the literature if not to contribute to it.) My reading on EI included a bit on gender and/or sex differences in EI, but was primarily about EI without reference to sex or gender. In particular I was interested in the way that EI can change with intervention (and it can, at least according on the measures used in some of the operational definitions). But that’s long ago, far away, and from a lay person. If you need to know how EI is measured or what measurements have become standard (if any) you’ll need a different source than me.
As for the other, I haven’t ever looked into any research on “maternal instinct” (informally, recreationally, or otherwise). Operational definitions for research purposes can be quite clever in their use of measurable proxies, so I don’t doubt that there are some. One I could think of is measuring how long someone breastfeeding an infant holds the child after breastfeeding is complete. This lag time between nipple detachment and setting the infant down could be used as an easily measurable proxy for “maternal instinct” that could then be subject to measurement after various interventions (education that stresses the need for children to be held at least X minutes a day or whatever intervention you want) or having measurements compared across group memberships (breastfeeding queer moms, breastfeeding trans parents, breastfeeding het moms; membership in an orthodox, conservative, reform, or reconstructionist jewish congregation; etc.).
If I can come up with an idea for a proxy almost instantly, it’s for darn sure that the people actually studying these topics in the field have more and better ideas than me. Some of those ideas may even have been through a process of validation and standardization already. Again, that’s a question for someone with actual expertise in the field, not me.
All uses of such proxies are subject to validity critiques, but so long as the researchers proactive consider validity critiques during design of a study and are open to validity critiques during peer review and post-publication, the mere use of measurable proxies is entirely normal and not at all seen as problematic. Of course, if you pick what others see as a bad proxy, you’ll come in for serious critique-hell. At that point, even having good arguments for your unpopular choice won’t make defending your choice of proxy easy or fun.
It’s certainly true that quite a number of assertions of trans-exclusive feminists (radical or otherwise) are unevidenced. Sometimes this is because the persons making the argument are defining something as true (“women = the set of adult female humans”) even when there is real-world evidence that many people don’t, in fact, use the word that way. Some of their contested assertions are even be true if one accepts their definition of the words woman, women, & womanhood. However if we know from linguistic semantics and pragmatics and from the anthropology of gender that the words are used in other ways by a wide variety of people, then what they intend to assert and what people understand them to be asserting might differ by a wide margin. In that case, I don’t think this reflects pop psychology/ unevidenced assertion. I think rather that it is attributable to poor communication (for which you can apportion blame as you like on the producers or receivers of the communication).
In other cases, they’re quite clear that they’re using thought experiments rather than actual evidence. There’s nothing wrong with thought experiments, but these are only useful if one is able to see past one’s own biases. I’m certainly not fit to speak to how prevalent a phenomenon that might be among researchers, writers, and thinkers philosophically or ideologically similar to the authors of Doing better. However, I can make statements about the Doing better article itself, and through critique of this article make somewhat more qualified statements about this specific set of authors.
Here there’s good reason to believe that at least one of the authors was struggling to see past that author’s own bias. The definition of biological essentialism, for instance, shows obvious problems I’ve detailed above. How is it possible that a group of thoughtful, educated people managed to assert that biological essentialism by definition pertains only to characteristics or traits of women? A moment of unclouded thought would reveal the problem there, and I don’t for a moment believe that they weren’t thinking as they were writing this piece. Therefore unless new and unanticipated evidence comes to light, the most reasonable conclusion is that the thought was at least somewhat clouded throughout, at a level at least the minimum necessary to avoid seeing this obvious flaw in the article. It’s possible that some unnamed editor, not a member of the actual writing team, changed gender agnostic language in that paragraph to language asserting that biological essentialism is inherently a characteristic of the etiological explanations of only women’s traits. But we have no evidence for that. So as of today, we must provisionally accept that there was some serious clouded thinking going on.
In this case, the authors relied on bold – and IMO wrong – assertion that biological essentialism is a concept applicable to only a single sex or gender. Given that philosophers – yes, even feminists – study biological essentialism in relation to race, in relation to men, and in relation to other categories, it’s impossible that you could find firm empirical evidence that BEm is applicable only to a single sex or gender. Thus in at least this case, these authors do indeed rely on “vigorous assertion and pretty much nothing else”.
You know, more than anything I wish that the authors had simply chosen to cite sources. Maybe someone in the literature has defined BEm as a single-gender concept. In that case, citing it would at least prove that the authors weren’t making it up. It would still be wrong, because of the aforementioned problems, but it wouldn’t seem so strangely out-of-the-blue.
Even the certainty with which they put forward their definition:
strikes me as odd.
Twenty years ago I read a sentence that I still sometimes quote:
Though I’m not a professional philosopher, this seems from the perspective of an outside reader to be just as true today. So why the unjustified confidence in the authors’ definition? It’s very hard to know.
1: Source: Barker, Victoria. “Definition and the Question of ‘Woman.’” Hypatia, vol. 12, no. 2, 1997, pp. 185–215., doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1997.tb00026.x.
Marcus @#1
I’m willing to accept that there probably exists something among some non-human animal species that we have labelled as “parental instinct.” After all, many animal species do exhibit attempts to care for their offspring. For example, my female dogs seem to exhibit parental instinct approximately two months after they exhibit the mating instinct.
It gets murkier when it comes to humans. I’m uncomfortable with labels “maternal instinct” and “paternal instinct” when it comes to humans. After all, people of various biological sex or gender seem willing to care for human children. The label “parental instinct” seems less problematic for me at least in this regard. I’m willing to believe that there might be something like this for people. I’m also willing to believe that some people have more of this thing than others (for example, I seem to have no parental instinct whatsoever, I dislike interacting with children, especially babies). That being said, I don’t believe that parental instinct can be reliably measured beyond very crude attempts (for example, I seem to have none or very little of this thing, I have seen other people who have more of this thing than I do, therefore saying “a loving parent has more parental instinct than Andreas” would be a very crude measurement and an attempt at making a comparison). Moreover, I’m also unwilling to speculate about the exact nature of the thing that we call “parental instinct.” Is it inborn or is it heavily influenced by education and socialisation? I’d rather not even try to speculate about such questions.
What pisses me off immensely are bigots claiming to know the answers, claiming that people who are female assigned at birth have a maternal instinct. And that this maternal instinct is somehow different from what people who are male assigned at birth get. And this claim then gets used to justify discriminating us.
Crip Dyke @#4
That would be just a proxy for measuring how busy some mother is. A mother with four kids and two jobs will hold the baby for a shorter amount of time than a mother with no job and one child. Never mind all the other lifestyle and educational factors that influence how long a parent will hold their kid. For example, “my preacher told me that I shouldn’t spoil my child by holding them all the time” versus “my preacher told me that the more I interact with my child, the better it is for them.”
“Instinct” is supposed to be something humans or animals are born with. What you are proposing to measure instead is the result of lifestyle, education, etc. non inborn factors. Whatever it is that you will succeed in measuring, it won’t be “instinct.”
If maternal instinct was inborn, mothers who belong to various groups (for example, different religious background) should hold their babies, on average, for the same amount of time. There is no reason why Christian mothers should have different levels of inborn maternal instinct than Jewish mothers. (Just like there is no reason why people with black skin should have, on average, different levels of inborn intelligence than white people.) The fact that you expect to see differences between various groups already indicates that you are aware than your proposed test cannot measure inborn maternal instinct, and instead it would be measuring behavior that is directly influenced by how the mother was socialized by her culture.
Yes.
No, it is problematic in situations where people are claiming that they can measure something as nebulous and intangible as “maternal instinct.”
It is even more problematic where poorly designed “scientific” research can be later misinterpreted and cited by bigots who will use it in order to justify discrimination. “A study found that queer parents have less parental instinct than straight parents,” scream the bigots and demand laws that discriminate queer families.
People have already tried to measure intelligence, another nebulous and intangible concept. That has already resulted in a century long disaster. Not only intelligence cannot be measured, poorly designed research has been used to justify a continued discrimination of people of color. I can recommend The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould as an introduction to humanity’s disgusting and racist attempts to measure intelligence. I can imagine how the exact same problems could also apply if humans attempted to measure maternal instinct (or emotional intelligence).
Marcus Ranum @1
Actually, it seems to me to be grounded in bigotry. Their “arguments” are nothing more than more or less elaborate rationalizations for their hatred. If you ever do manage to demolish what appear to be their claims, they’ll just throw up different ones. The hatred is the only solid thing in all their words, the rational-appearing arguments are just a smokescreen to make it seem like something reasonable people should agree with, and, like smoke, have no need to follow the logic that solid objects are forced to conform to. (If you were around when a certain former FtB blogger went full metal TERF, you saw this in action.)
I have a hard time forcing myself to try to understand the rationalizations that TERFs spout, anyway, because I learned long ago to look at what people do and not so much at what they say. (I grew up surrounded by people who expressed the kindest possible wishes for me as they were tormenting me to the brink of suicide.) And every time I’ve encountered transphobia, or read about other people’s encounters with it, the one solid thing and the only coherent message was that they wanted people like me eliminated and banished from their world, by violence, if necessary. Ultimately, they wanted me and people like me eradicated — i.e., dead and forgotten.
And when someone wants me dead, I don’t care all that much about the thought processes they dress their death-wishes in. I just want the threat to go away.
Crip Dyke
Thank you. I find thinking about this stuff hard, it is very helpful to have your considered analysis to frame furtther thought on my part.
Allison @#6
Personally, I felt like transphobes wanted me silenced and forced to conform to all the patriarchal stereotypes about the gender that I got assigned at birth. They wanted me to shut up, wear dresses, make babies, stay at home, get married, and obey my husband. They didn’t necessarily wanted me eradicated as in dead, they just wanted me to shut up and stay out of their sight. They wanted me to finally realize how delusional I was and how I was attempting to go against my own nature by choosing to live as a more masculine person.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden:
In my recreational reading I’ve seen a number of studies by research psychologists on emotional intelligence where EI was operationally defined as a measurable quantity.
If it’s a typical psychological epistemology, they probably define EI as “EI is what’s measured by Dr Bob’s EI test.” Therefore it’s measurable and quantifiable and we can use it as a measurement because, see, we have this test…
Sometimes this is because the persons making the argument are defining something as true (“women = the set of adult female humans”) even when there is real-world evidence that many people don’t, in fact, use the word that way. […]
That’s a good explanation. Thank you.
This all sounds remarkably like racism. You know, you’re a woman if you “pass.” But don’t you dare get in a bathroom with me if you don’t.
You know, more than anything I wish that the authors had simply chosen to cite sources.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “no, you don’t.” One problem with source-citing is that there is so much B.S. it’s pretty easy to find someone who cites someone else as a second-order supporting argument, and then you have to wade through a mountain of assertions and uncover them piecemeal. HJ seems to get some twisted pleasure from that process but it may not be how you want to spend your time.
As always, than you for helping instruct me about this stuff.
Andreas Avester@#5:
After all, many animal species do exhibit attempts to care for their offspring. For example, my female dogs seem to exhibit parental instinct approximately two months after they exhibit the mating instinct.
Exactly. But how do we know that there is a “female” version exclusive of a male version? And why would we preference one over the other by ignoring the other? Perhaps (I am making things up, here) “maternal instinct” involves using breasts and nipples to feed the young – but that explicitly embeds a notion of femininity by basing it on a ‘mere quirk’ of femaleness. If we say “parental instinct is to provide food for the young” then a male parent that hunts and brings back game, nuts and berries is fulfilling its instinct just as thoroughly as a female who eats that food and produces milk. There are other “parental instincts” such as apparently some male cats will kill another cat’s progeny while “protecting” their own. Or perhaps that’s just parenting badly. What is the benchmark for parenting? Offspring survival?
Also, as a note, having had several generations of barn cats: some female cats are really bad parents. I noticed that Miss Thing #3 (I used to get barn cats “fixed” as soon as I could catch them) dropped a litter on the stairs to the hayloft in the horses’ run-in shed. The horses were not being mean but they stomped the kittens pretty fast; they probably never saw they were there at all. Her second litter I could not catch her) was dropped in the wall, between boards, where the kittens could not get out, and neither was she able to get in and out to feed them. “Maternal instincts” appear to be trumped by learning – most cats lose a lot of their first litters unless there is a human around to help. But that’s just cats, right? 😉
I’m uncomfortable with labels “maternal instinct” and “paternal instinct” when it comes to humans. After all, people of various biological sex or gender seem willing to care for human children. The label “parental instinct” seems less problematic for me at least in this regard. I’m willing to believe that there might be something like this for people.
I am, too. But how do we measure it? We ought to say, as you do, “I am willing to believe there might be something like this” but going beyond that is complicated by lots of social factors. For example, ‘modern’ child-rearing owes itself to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who made up a bunch of stuff based on – I don’t know – fantasies he had one morning. People took it seriously and it was tremendously influential. Meanwhile, he impregnated several women and abandoned them immediately. Some parental instinct, indeed! We must look at how civilization has affected child-rearing before we talk about “parental instinct” so as to avoid things like the ancient Assyrians sacrificing babies to Moloch, or the Yanomamo killing their firstborn, etc. Wait, that’s an “instinct!”
Based on this discussion, it seems to me that much easier than measuring “maternal instinct” would be measuring bigotry, seeing as almost everyone suffering under significant bigotry can easily come up with some measurable proxies – you could then rate the proxies by how much measurements over different proxies agree, and thus seem to proxy-measure the same thing. (Though, what is the thing you measure with the proxies child births and stork population?)
@MarcusRanum:
First: fuck Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob is a quack who has gone to the dogs.
Secondly: yes, exactly. This is standard in the literature, and if you’re a professional and can keep in mind that all X means is “The result of Alex’s test”. The real problem is when these tests somehow leak out into the popular press and people who can’t separate the concepts, “What the test measures,” and “What we would like to directly measure, if we could, but we can’t”. This is part of the problem with IQ, where people insist that it’s an uncomplicated, direct measure of g, when instead it’s a measure of everything from how distracted you are that day to how close the testing dialect is to your most familiar dialect to your memory for trivia, and, yes, a bit of problem solving. It’s not that IQ doesn’t measure anything, but it was initially developed early enough that psychology hadn’t developed a healthy awareness of the difference between the proxy and the idealized concept. Thus IQ, even more than other proxies, has been confused with the idealized concept – especially, but not only, outside the ranks of professionals who specialize in studying intelligence.
So, I get you. And, yes, citation can be used to obfuscate more than clarify (this should be corrected in peer review, but isn’t often, especially in philosophy where someone will cite X’s elaboration of an idea, because they like X’s turn of phrase, but X never actually attempted to establish the truth of X, and indeed cites someone else who didn’t attempt that either, so you have to go 3-6 citations back to find someone who even attempted to establish the truth of X, and only then can you evaluate the claim itself, rather than evaluating whether or not it’s true that certain philosophers like the claim.
But in this case, when I say:
my concern is primarily that this document is a rebuttal argument. I’m not interested as much where the authors of Doing better… got their ideas. But I’m very interested in whether or not they’re representing their critics fairly. They say that they’re responding to philosophers in “national media” but which ones? Writing when? Making exactly what arguments?
It’s the sloppiness of certain things within Doing better (e.g. “Biological essentialism is a position about whether certain traits of women are biologically produced by sex category membership.”) that makes me unable to trust that their “rebuttals” actually reproduce their opponents’ real-world arguments faithfully.
A rebuttal without references to the arguments being rebutted is a very, very weird thing.
Marcus @#10
My experience with dogs is that some female dogs are good parents already with their first litter. They somehow know exactly what to do and they get it right. Other female dogs are the exact opposite—they have no clue whatsoever. This discrepancy indicates that dogs must have a parenting instinct. Without such an instinct all female dogs would be equally clueless and lose their first litters. The fact that some dogs get it right on their first try with their very first litter means that some kind of instinct exists and how well it functions varies among individual dogs. If such an instinct didn’t exist, no female dog would ever get it right on her first try and every single dog would lose her first litter.
Moreover, the very fact that dogs try to care for their puppies indicates that there is some instinct. When a puppy pops out of its mother’s body, she has multiple ways how to react: (1) care for it and feed it; (2) abandon it; (3) eat the puppy. Even trying to care for the puppies rather than abandoning or eating them is an instinctual behavior.
I might as well give specific examples. This dog, Nika, https://andreasavester.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/German-Spitz-Pomeranian-Dog-9.jpg got it right on her first try. During the delivery she just knew that she’s supposed to lick the puppy clean and bite off its umbilical cord. My mother didn’t need to assist Nika in any way, she did everything herself and did it correctly. Once the puppies were born, Nika knew to lick and feed them.
This dog, Shira, https://andreasavester.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/German-Spitz-Pomeranian-Dog-8.jpg was the exact opposite, she was totally clueless. She didn’t even understand that she’s supposed to push puppies out of her body. She made crying sounds, shivered, she ran around, ultimately she just sat there while my mother waited for a vet to visit us and get the puppies out of her. Once the vet helped Shira with the delivery, she had no clue what to do with the puppies. Shira didn’t understand that she’s supposed to lick them, she didn’t feed them, she just ignored her puppies. My mother found another female dog who adopted Shira’s puppies. As Shira observed the other dog, she tried to emulate her behavior but failed to really get what to do. For example, Shira saw the other dog lick the puppies. So she responded by starting to lick their heads while in reality a female dog must lick her puppies’ butts in order to stimulate their digestion. Only by her third litter of puppies Shira somehow figured out what to do with them.
Yep. I have read some research done by anthropologists about how isolated tribes take care of their children, and there are plenty of differences compared to what our society does. Alternatively, only a few decades ago parents believed that it’s bad to spoil a child and that corporal punishment is an essential part of child rearing. Or the fact that some societies welcome children being active and playing, while others insist that they must be made to stay calm and be silent.
I don’t think humans can possibly separate any parental instincts we might have from learned behavior. Consider the fact that many people choose to have children and seem to enjoy parenting. Do they do so, because we are biologically wired to enjoy spending time with children or is it because the society stigmatizes everybody who decides to remain childfree by choice?
Andreas Avester@#13:
I don’t think humans can possibly separate any parental instincts we might have from learned behavior.
Then we don’t have any, and it’s time to drop the idea and move on.
If ‘instincts’ are so subtle that they can’t obviously be pulled apart from learned behaviors then it stands to reason that they’re less significant than the learned behaviors, anyway. If there were “parenting instincts” they would be inevitable and would dominate how we behaved, whether we wanted them to or not. That’s not how it happens, so let’s just put a fork in “instinct” until someone is able to measure one.
[Believers in instincts are next expected to pull an evolutionary psychology move and say something like that they’re really subtle but they have profound influence because: haven’t you noticed that when someone has kids their behaviors change? Yeah, that’s because they have a kid to support. It’s not ‘instinct’ to support a child – in fact that also appears to be governed by social expectations. Ev Psych folks would say something that basically boils down to “well, having kids is an evolved behavior therefore its controlled by your DNA!” I always enjoy asking people who say things like that to remember back to their first sexual experiences and to tell me honestly whether they learned while they were at it, or had some kind of ‘instinct’ telling them what to do.]