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the current moment in history, most people are essentialists about gender,
06
but things are changing.
07
Religious doctrine is a wellspring of essentialism. Consider how the Na-
08
tional Catholic Bioethics Center talks about “Gender Identity Disorder”
09
(italics in original):
10
11
We are either male or female persons, and nothing can
12
change that . . . Persons seeking such operations are clearly un-
13
comfortable with who they really are . . .
14
A person can change what genitalia they have, but not one’s
15
sex. Receiving hormones of the opposite sex and removing gen-
16
italia are not sufficient to change one’s sex. Sexual identity is not
17
reducible to hormonal levels or genitalia but is an objective fact
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rooted in the specific nature of the person . . .
19
A person’s sex identity is not determined by one’s subjective
20
beliefs, desires or feelings. It is a function of his or her nature.
21
Just as there are geometrical givens in a geometrical proof, sex-
22
ual identity is an ontological given.
23
24
It would be hard to find a more straightforward declaration of gender
25
essentialism, asserting that a person’s gender is a function of their “nature,”
26
part of “who they really are.”
27
Religion isn’t the only source of such a stance. The notion of “Gender
28
Identity Disorder,” as a diagnosed condition of people whose gender iden-
29
tity disagrees with their biological sex, first appeared in the Diagnostic and
30
Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Long
31
before that, surgical procedures and hormone therapies were used on chil-
32
dren who didn’t look or feel the way their doctors judged that they should.
33
Only in 2013 was the official APA diagnosis changed to “gender dysphoria,”
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used to refer to psychological discontent with one’s own condition, rather
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than a mismatch with a purportedly objective judgment of what one’s sex
02
“really” is.
03
•
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Poetic naturalism sees things differently. Categories such as “male” and “fe-
06
male” are human inventions— stories we tell because it helps us make sense
07
of our world. The basic stuff of reality is a quantum wave function, or a
08
collection of particles and forces— whatever the fundamental stuff turns
09
out to be. Everything else is an overlay, a vocabulary created by us for par-
10
ticular purposes. Therefore, if a person has two X chromosomes and identi-
11
fies as male, what of it?
12
That doesn’t mean we should simply eliminate gender, either. A person
13
who is biologically male but identifies as a woman isn’t thinking to them-
14
selves, “Male and female are just arbitrary categories, I can be whatever I
15
want.” They’re thinking, “I’m a woman.” Just because a concept is invented
16
by human beings, it doesn’t imply that it’s an illusion. Saying, “I am a
17
woman,” or just knowing it, is absolutely useful and meaningful.
18
This can sound reminiscent of the old postmodern slogan that “reality
19
is socially constructed.” There’s a sense in which that’s true. What’s socially
20
constructed are the ways we talk about the world, and if a particular way of
21
talking involves concepts that are useful and fit the world quite accurately,
22
it’s fair to refer to those concepts as “real.” But we can’t forget that there is
23
a single world underlying it all, and there’s no sense in which the underlying
24
world is socially constructed. It simply is, and we take on the task of discov-25
ering it and inventing vocabularies with which to describe it.
26
People who think that transgenderism is a violation of the natural order
27
sometimes like to use a slippery- slope argument: If gender and sexuality are
28
up for grabs, what about our basic identity as human beings? Is our species
29
socially constructed?
30
There is, indeed, a condition known as “species dysphoria.” It is analo-
31
gous to gender dysphoria but is characterized by a conviction that the sub-
32
ject belongs to a different species. Someone might think that, despite their
33
nominal human form, they are actually a cat, or a horse. Others go further,
34
identifying with species that don’t actually exist, like dragons or elves.
35S
Even for the relatively open- minded, a certain grumpiness tends to kick
36N
in when confronted with species dysphoria: “If poetic naturalism means
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that I have to pretend to go along with my crazy teenage nephew who
01
thinks he’s a unicorn, I’m going back to my comfortable species essential-
02
ism, thank you very much.”
03
The question, however, is whether a particular way of talking about the
04
world is useful. And usefulness is always relative to some purpose. If we’re
05
being scientists, our goal is to describe and understand what happens in the
06
world, and “useful” means “providing an accurate model of some aspect of
07
reality.” If we’re interested in a person’s health, “useful” might mean “help-
08
ing us see how to make a person more healthy.” If we’re discussing ethics
09
and morality, “useful” is closer to “offering a consistent systematization of
10
our impulses about right and wrong.”
11
So poetic naturalism doesn’t automatically endorse or condemn some-
12
one who thinks they are a dragon, or for that matter someone who thinks
13
they are male or female. Rather, it helps us understand what questions we
14
should ask: What vocabulary gives us the most insight into how this person
15
is thinking and feeling? What helps us understand how they can be
happy
16
and healthy? What is the most useful way of conceptualizing this situation?
17
We can certainly imagine thinking through these questions in good faith,
18
and at the end concluding with “Sorry, Kevin. You’re not a unicorn.”
19
The real lives of people whose self- conceptions do not match those that
20
society would like them to have can be extremely challenging, and their
21
obstacles are highly personal. No amount of academic theorizing is going
22
to solve those problems with a simple gesture. But if we insist on talking
23
about such situations on the basis of outdated ontologies, chances are high
24
that we’ll end up doing more harm than good.
25
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Abducting God
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09
10
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16
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Everyone knows Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead.
It’s one of the few sentences in the history of philosophy that you
can buy on T-shirts and bumper stickers. Or if snappy comebacks
are more your style, you can also find nietzsche is dead— god.
18
But many people assume that Nietzsche was celebrating God’s supposed
19
demise, which isn’t really accurate. Although he wasn’t denying it, he was
20
certainly worried about the consequences. The famous quip appears in a
21
short parable entitled “The Madman,” where Nietzsche’s title character
22
runs crying through a marketplace filled with unbelievers.
23
24
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them
25
with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We
26
have killed him— you and I . . .
27
“Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not be-
28
come colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we
29
not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing
30
as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do
31
we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too,
32
decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
33
killed him.”
34
35S
Neither Nietzsche nor his fictional madman are happy about the death
36N
of God; if anything, they’re trying to wake people up to what it really means.
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Starting in the nineteenth century, it began to sink in to a growing
01
number of people that the comforting certainties of the old order were be-
02
ginning to crumble away. As science developed a unified view of nature that
03
exists and evolves without any outside support, many cheered the triumphs
04
of human knowledge. Others saw a dark side to the new era.
05
Science can help us live longer, or journey to the moon. But can it tell us
06
what kind of life to live, or account for the feeling of awe that overcomes us
07
when we contemplate the heavens? What becomes of meaning and purpose
08
when we can’t rely on gods to provide them?
09
Thinking about God in a rigorous way is not an easy task. He seems to
10
be reluctant to reveal himself very explicitly in the operation of the world.
11
We can debate about the legitimacy of reported miracles, but most of us
12
will grant that they are rare at best. People may feel that they have an inner,
13
personal experience of the divine— but that’s not the kind of evidence that
14
is convincing to people other than the experiencer.
15
For another thing, people don’t agree about God. He’s a notoriously
16
slippery notion. To some people, God is very much a person— an omni-
17
scient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being who created the universe
18
and cares deeply about the fate of human beings, individually and collec-
19
tively. Others prefer to think of a more abstract notion of God, as some-
20
thing closer to an explanatory idea that plays a crucial role in accounting
21
for our world.
22
What all theists— people who believe in God— tend to agree on is that
23
God is absolutely important. One of the most significant features of some-
24
one’s ontology is whether or not it includes God. It’s the biggest part of the
25
big picture. So, slippery notion or not, deciding how to think about God is
26
something we simply have to do.
27
28
•
29
Remember that there are two parts to Bayesian reasoning: coming up with
30
prior credences before any evidence is in, and then figuring out the likeli-
31
hood of obtaining various kinds of information under the competing ideas.
32
When it comes to God, both of these steps are enormously problematic. But
33
we don’t have any choice.
34
For the sake of keeping things simple, let’s divide all of the possible ways
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of thinking about God into just two categories: theism (God exists) and
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atheism (no, he doesn’t). These are catchall terms for a variety of possible
02
beliefs, but we’re illustrating general principles here. For the sake of being
03
definite, let’s imagine we’re talking about God as a person, as some kind of
04
enormously powerful being who is interested in the lives of humans.
05
What should our priors be for theism and atheism? We could argue that
06
atheism is simpler: it has one fewer conceptual category than theism does.
07
Simple theories are good, so that suggests our prior for atheism should be
08
higher. (If atheism doesn’t actually account for the universe we see, that
09
prior will become irrelevant, as the corresponding likelihoods will be very
10
small.) On the other hand, even though God is a separate category from the
11
physical world, we might hope to explain features of the world using that
12
hypothesis. Explanatory power is a good thing, so that might argue in favor
13
of a greater prior for theism.
14
Let’s call it a wash. You are entitled to your own priors, but for purposes
15
of this discussion let’s imagine that the prior credences for theism and athe-
16
ism are about equal. Then all of the heavy lifting will be done by the
17
likelihoods— how well the two ideas do in accounting for the world we
18
actually see.
19
•
20
21
Here is where things get interesting. What we’re supposed to do is to imag-
22
ine, as fairly as possible, what the world would probably look like according
23
to either of our two possibilities, and then compare it to what it actually is
24
like. That’s really hard. Neither “theism” nor “atheism,” by itself, is an ex-
25
tremely predictive or specific framework. We can imagine many possible
26
universes that would be compatible with either idea. And our consider-
27
ations are contaminated by the fact that we actually do know quite a bit
28
about the world. That’s a considerable bias to try to overcome.
29
Take the problem of evil. Why would a powerful and benevolent God,
30
who presumably could simply stop humans from being evil, nevertheless
31
allow it in the world? There are many possible responses to this question. A
32
common one relies on free will: perhaps to God, it is more important that
33
humans be free to choose according to their own volition— even if they end
34
up choosing evil— than to coerce them into being uniformly good.
35S
Our job, however, isn’t simply to reconcile the data (the existence of evil)
36N
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with the theory (theism). It’s to ask how the data changes our credences for
01
each of the two competing theories (theism and atheism).
02
So imagine a world that is very much like ours, except that evil does not
03
exist. People in this world are much like us, and seem able to make their
04
own choices, but they always end up choosing to do good rather than evil.
05
In that world, the relevant data is the absence of evil. How would that be
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