With this post our series on Tomas Bogardus’s “Evaluating Arguments for the Sex/Gender Distinction” ends. (You can get a free copy of the paper here.) (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.)

At the end of the piece he gets into some more technical, tricky arguments which need not detain us.

The overall point is that many assume that being a man or a woman is a matter of one’s gender, which is not even partly a matter of one’s physical, bodily sex, and worse, many educated people now assume that this is something all (non-bigoted) educated people know.

But it’s not. There is nothing remotely obvious about that claim; it is the sort of claim which needs to be supported by one or more arguments. And as we’ve seen, when we go looking for such arguments, they are surprisingly poor! Dr. Bogardus ends his piece with these words:

It’s widely believed in contemporary feminist philosophy that there is a sex/gender distinction, that manhood and womanhood are social constructs, that, for example, to be a woman is not to be an adult human female. The view is more often assumed and asserted than argued for. And what we’ve seen in this paper is that the enthusiasm with which this doctrine is asserted is all out of proportion to the strength of the arguments in its favor. So, there remains much work for philosophy to do, either to develop stronger arguments against the traditional definitions of [the concepts] woman and man, or to develop a variety of feminism on the foundation of this traditional, biological understanding of manhood and womanhood.

Section 2

As I explained last time, I think the traditional understandings are physical and biological, but perhaps not exactly scientific.

Still, Bogardus has effectively pointed out the rickety, threadbare, unimpressive quality of about four common kinds of arguments that being a man or a woman is matter of “gender,” where that doesn’t have to do with one’s bodily sex. It’s a negative point, but an important one!