What Is a Woman? A Woman Is an Adult Human Female; Two Fallacies Employed by Non-Gender Critical Persons and Institutions

 

The documentary What is a Woman (The Daily Wire, 2022) has become popular this year with a problem that exposes a severe academic problem as far back as 2018. Back then and even today, the academic, scholarly, and I would argue, sensus communis position of Gender Critical (GC) philosophy has resulted in censorship in K-12 schools, for-cause firings in academia, and censorship in scholarly journals with brute force tactics of activists and weak-kneed administrations of educational institutions to advance the idea of gender.

Kathleen Stock and others, (Medium page is here, her Substack subscription page is here) have been pushing back against the academy and others who claim a woman is something other than an adult human female for years. Many people know that is true, but struggle to find the words, so documentaries like What is a Woman are popular since the traditional methodology of knowledge and linguistics is broken on this topic. So, if you have wondered if there is a philosophical position that defines a woman as an adult human female, that position is called Gender Critical.

Weak educational (primary, secondary through the university level) administrations, as well as some psychologists and therapists regularly engage in a number of fallacies to either cave to a relative reality of activists and their brute-force methods, or further a very dubious health philosophy of affirmation of the patient at all costs for treatment and castration drugs to children. Below are the common fallacies which can be found in living color in the documentary "What is a Woman," with a more scholarly approach in this post by Kathleen Stock.  

 

"Gender" Fallacy #1: The Gender Critical position is a far-right, conservative position and is thus wrong / fails. 

This is what is known as Ad Hominem, or attacking a person instead of an argument. For example, in a problem of the big, bad wolf attacking chickens, the people using ad hominem would rather attack another person instead of the actual problem. It is avoidance of an argument and many weak educational administrators, therapists, and psychologists love to employ this type of attack. It is as unprofessional as it is unproductive. The fact that a philosophical position in Radical Feminism is similar to one in conservative thought is irrelevant as far as the conclusion is concerned, and I would add strengthens the validity of the conclusion as it is an intersection of two different lines of reasoning. 

Gender Critical Response #1: This is a dishonest tactic, and has no place in responsible argument whether the person that utters it is a university professor / teacher, an educational administrator, a therapist, or a psychologist, no matter their credentials.  

"Gender" Fallacy #2: You (those with Gender Critical beliefs) are _____ essentialists. 

 Interestingly the Women's Studies professor, Dr. Patrick Grzanka, in What is a Woman makes this claim of the person that asks for a definition of a woman. First the professor makes a circular reference that a woman is someone that identifies as a woman, then the professor (after the professor makes several attempts to derail or stop the conversation by insinuating the person asking the question is misbehaving, being rude, doing something wrong, etc), does not provide a definition but rather "accuses" the person and "people in his field" that those people seeking a definition of a woman as "seeking an essentialist definition."

The professor then goes on claiming those who ask "What is a Woman" aren't actually asking what a woman is, but rather "are looking for a set of physical or cultural traits for one gender or the other." 

I will quote Dr. Kathleen Stock et al response, as she notes this is a fallacy in relation to the definition of a woman, "Biological essentialism’ is standardly used in feminist philosophy to refer to a position which thinks that certain cognitive abilities (e.g. emotional intelligence, lack of spatial reasoning), instincts (e.g. maternal instincts, a drive for monogamy), social preferences (e.g. for domesticity, for family life) and dispositions to certain behaviours (e.g. kindness, passivity) are causally produced across a population of human females in virtue of their biological sex category membership."

So you can see the professor in What is a Woman attempted to bypass a definition, (the only one, many would agree), then add things to establish and underwrite the meaning of gender. Having a position of Gender Critical, as the name implies, rejects the notion of gender completely. 

I and I think many people agree with the Gender Critical position, and I again will use Dr. Stock's response: 

Gender Critical Response #2:  To call the view that some of us hold ‘biological essentialism’ is a misnomer. Moreover, it is a misnomer apparently rhetorically designed to draw some of the harsh criticism which appears in progressive circles about biological essentialism, in the true sense, onto the view that women, definitionally, are adult human females.

So if an academic, or anyone accuses you of being an essentialist, it's a rhetorical trick and has no informational value. 

I will end with a question posed by Dr. Stock:

What, metaphysically speaking, is gender identity? What ensures that when Person 1 identifies as X and Person 2 identifies as X they are identifying as the same thing?