After some preliminaries (described here and here), Bogardus reviews some claims by well-known feminist philosophers about the concept of a woman as a gender concept. They hold in common that whether or not one is a woman is not a matter of one’s sex. But what do they think it is to be a woman? The answers vary. In Bogardus’s summaries,

• Butler (1988, 1999) – “to be a woman is to repeatedly perform as a woman, i.e. to regularly and for the most part behave in line with feminine gender norms.”
• Burkett (2015) – “to be a woman is to have accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities, and relished certain courtesies.”
• Rubin (1975) – “to be a woman is to be systematically subordinated along several dimensions (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) and ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by being regularly and for the most part, observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.”
• Jenkins (2016) – “to be a woman is to take (enough) norms of femininity to be relevant to oneself.”
• Bettcher (2017) – “being a woman is entirely a matter of self-identification.”

You can probably think of obvious counterexamples that would show the falsity of each claim; you probably know or know about real life women whoses existence show each definition above to be false.

Also notice that the proponents of “gender” agree on what it is not, but not on what it is. It is something psychological (Burkett, Jenkins, Bettcher) or is it rather something social (Butler, Rubin)? (They can’t both be correct.) What these definitions have in common, Bogardus observes, is their assumption that “womanhood and manhood are not now and have never been truly defined in part by biological sex . . . the traditional definitions of manhood and womanhood are false.”

OK, but since its proponents can’t agree on what a woman is (if woman is a gender concept), we should step back and ask why we should think woman and man are gender and not sex concepts at all. After all, such authors as these seem to be assuming that claim, not arguing for it.

Bogardus says that “My interest in this paper is to show that . . . the distinction [between sex and gender] is held in high esteem, but the arguments supporting it have surprising flaws.”

Next time we’ll look at Bogardus’s analysis and evaluation of the first sort of argument, which is based on pushing back against “biological determinism.”