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