The Apples who Paint Themselves Orange

"Man" and "Woman" are not mere sociolinguistic concepts, and it does harm to gender-dysphoric people to claim that they are.

UPDATE: You can listen to me read this article while you do your business, by clicking here.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: linguists, like philosophers, sometimes get tangled in their own intellectual webs and lose sight of the big picture. All that book learnin’ and sometimes they come out dumber for it.

So it seems with a linguist named Vyvyan Evans, who penned an embarrassingly messy piece for Psychology Today in defence of “gender identity.” He commits many of the usual sins of illogic that this topic routinely elicits in the intellectually confused, including mansplaining feminism to women, not actually backing up his central argument with… well, any argument at all, and — my personal unfavourite — he assumes that the convoluted Western, social media-pickled “gender identity” movement has precedents in other cultures and times. (It doesn’t, really. Gender roles vary from culture to culture — as in the social roles and titles and customs and such that are available to men and women — but no other culture has ever attempted to make it taboo or illegal to distinguish between males and females, which is the key component that makes 21st-century gender ideology so nutty, and it’s the part that the gender-critical movement objects to.)

But here I want to address another mistaken idea of Evans’s. It’s the one that relates directly to his field of expertise, linguistics. He says:

Whatever one’s views on the immutability or otherwise of biological sex, gender is itself a sociolinguistic construct. While it certainly has a basis in biology, it is confected in a cultural context.

Are “man” and “woman” word games?

That’s an argument I hear in various forms all the time — that male and female may be biologically “real things,” but man and woman are basically word games. I’ve wanted to address this line of thinking for a long time.

A commenter named What a Maroon, who has far more knowledge of linguistics than I, has written a great rebuttal:

But anyway, yes, “gender” is a sociolinguistic construct. …But that doesn’t mean that [the concepts of man and woman] are arbitrary, with no basis in reality. We wouldn’t survive long if our mental representation of the world (however incomplete and distorted it may be) had no relation to the real world. You have to be able to distinguish between an apple and a rattlesnake, and know that one is good for eating and the other is something to avoid, even if your language doesn’t distinguish between apples and pears, or red and orange. And knowing that there are two sexes that are immutable, and being able to distinguish between them, is pretty key to the propagation of our species—we wouldn’t be around to argue about gender if Og and Mog hadn’t known which was which.

But that is not gender essentialism. …Gender essentialism is saying that if you like to play with dolls and dress up in frilly clothes, you must be a girl regardless of your anatomy. Or that you have an inner sense of your gender that overrides your anatomy.

Hear, hear.

Let me add to that point.

One not only has to ask why there’s need for a meaningful distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, one must also ask why some people want to erase or modify the distinction between an apple and a rattlesnake, or an apple and an orange, or — obviously, because this is what we’re really talking about — between a man and a woman.

Are we trying to correct a logical error here? Is something broken? Is the current means by which we categorize men and women not working? I daresay it’s not broken, because when we investigate the motives behind those who claim to have been miscategorized, we see that they themselves still rely on the common, material, sex-based definitions of men and women for everyone else; they just don’t like how the categorization system maps onto themselves.

(For example, I’ve heard countless stories of trans-identifying males, seeking sex with women, being outraged at the idea that they should have sex with other transwomen. Given that they preach that transwomen are women, you’d think they’d put it to practice by having sex with fellow transwomen, who are women after all, they insist. But no. When it comes to everyone else, they know full well that transwomen are actually men; they just don’t want that rule to apply to themselves.)

Indeed, trans-identifying people must rely on the material, sex-based definitions of man and woman in order to know how to fashion the opposite-sex guises they maintain. Men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men (or who claim to be neither men nor women; i.e., “non-binaries”) are in fact more conscious of gender and sex stereotypes than other people are, and the argument that gender identity should supersede sex paradoxically relies further on sex distinctions than the material sex-based categories it seeks to overthrow.

(Many trans activists even go so far as to advocate for reinforcing sex-based dress codes: they’re bitterly hostile to drag queens, for example, on the argument that allowing men to wear dresses while acknowledging that they’re still men threatens to destroy the argument that males who wear dresses are by definition “women.”)

In the current definition — that is to say, in the real world outside the influence of the social media-fuelled gender identity fad — men and women are simply males and females, and while there are stereotypical differences in appearance and behaviour between the two, deviations from the norms don’t invalidate the categories. Feminine-dressed males are still men, and masculine-dressed females are still women, because there is a vast array of different properties that distinguish men and women beyond their superficial presentation. We use the words “men” and “women” in countless contexts to distinguish males from females, even though we know that sometimes, superficially at least, the men might look more like women and vice-versa. By contrast, gender identity activists seek to reinforce the categories man and woman on such strictly superficial terms that deviations from stereotypical presentation necessitate that they be completely recategorized.

Orange paint does not an orange make

It’s as if they’re trying to replace the distinction between apples and oranges — different fruits which have a vast array of different properties — with the claim that all apples are red and all oranges are orange, and then to claim that if you dip an apple in a can of orange paint and toss it into a basket of oranges, that everyone is obligated to act as if they can’t tell it’s an impostor.

Upon seeing an orange-painted apple in a basket of oranges, the reasonable reaction should be to ask, “why has someone gone to such trouble to pass that apple off as an orange,” not “I’m so much cleverer than everyone else, only I can tell that this orange-painted apple represents how complex the sociolinguistic concepts of apple and orange are.”

(And the conclusions one might draw after recognizing that someone is trying to pass an apple off as an orange — a man trying to pass as a woman or vice-versa — can vary from case to case: some cases might elicit a lot of sympathy and others might elicit much distrust and suspicion. A system that recognizes when apples are trying to pass as oranges and then inquires about the circumstances is far better reinforced against exploitation than a system that shuts down the question and gaslights everyone into never asking questions again. The latter system, which gender activists espouse, seems like it was designed by exploiters who are trying to conceal their motives. Gaslighting, indeed.)

For all Evans’s talk of how apples and oranges — or men and women — are mere sociolinguistic concepts, the real world puts the lie to it. Many transgender advocates don’t even argue that gender identity is a concept separate from the material reality of their sex — rather, they argue that their sex was incorrectly “assigned” at birth. It’s not that some females can be men, you see; it’s that I was never a female; there was a terrible mixup back at the hospital when I was born, and I’ve really been male all along!

Which is to say, even if you do grant that “man” and “woman” are mere sociolinguistic concepts uncoupled from the material facts of sex, the activists are so acutely aware of how untrue this is in practice in the real world, they almost inevitably up the ante and take aim at material reality anyway — they still attack biological sex itself even if you concede to them the labels “man” or “woman.”

If I’m being honest, in the practical day-to-day world, I don’t particularly care who calls him or herself a “man” or a “woman,” as long as it’s clearly understood that it’s a little falsehood, a linguistic shorthand for a more complicated situation that we all agree about in principle — that transwomen are male and that transmen are female, and that people who are struggling with gender dysphoria (or claiming to be) ultimately only have grounds to ask for language concessions from others, rather than to forcefully impose language restrictions on others.

And that’s the danger of this game, of trying to shift “man” and “woman” into malleable concepts instead of material facts: the people strugging with confusion about sex and gender identity — the apples who paint themselves orange — don’t always settle nicely into the basket with the oranges. They struggle to fit in, and they often suffer, sometimes terribly — sometimes to the point of suicide. Eventually it becomes crystal clear that orange paint does not an orange make, because their shape is a little off, their skin texture is wrong, their body has a different firmness, they don’t smell the same… and most importantly, they don’t work the same in the kitchen, if you catch my drift. You simply cannot make orange juice with an apple.

Look at the motives behind the painted apples and it becomes clear that for all the linguists’ babbling about sociolinguistic concepts, it means next to nothing in the real world, and at the end of the day all this academic jibber-jabber about “man” and “woman” is confusing the vulnerable among us, and emboldening the misanthropic among us. It’s doing vastly more harm than good, especially to the very people these foolish word games are ostensibly intended to help.

It’s better to say upfront that apples can’t really be oranges than to get everyone caught up in the harmful lie that they can.

UPDATE: You can listen to me read this article while you do your business, by clicking here.

(This post was adapted and expanded from a comment of mine at Butterflies and Wheels.)