by Spencer Greenberg
Gender is a central part of many people’s identities, and yet a very basic and politically contentious question is still being debated: What IS gender? And what defines whether someone is a “man,” a “woman,” or neither?
This question is especially topical and important now in light of the January 20, 2025, Executive Order from Donald Trump attempting to define what it means to be a man or a woman:
After carefully investigating people’s usage of “man” and “woman,” I was surprised to uncover that there are at least 13 meaningfully different definitions of gender in use, depending on who you talk to. Upon hearing this, some people’s reactions will be: “Come on, this is a straightforward question with a straightforward answer.” As we’ll soon explore in this essay, however, attempts to give “straightforward” answers bump up against logical and philosophical challenges quite quickly. In fact, there are important empirical or philosophical challenges to almost every one of these potential definitions.
Of course, there are many obvious cases where everyone agrees who is a man and who is a woman – it’s precisely non-obvious where the different definitions matter because, depending on which definition you choose, you’ll end up classifying people differently. And every single one of these 13 definitions contradicts each other in at least some cases.
Many people, though they typically don’t realize it, don’t precisely know what they mean by the words “man” and “woman.” Matt Walsh made use of this fact by creating a documentary where he asked people, “What is a woman?” making fun of progressives who couldn’t quickly give a definition. Later on in this essay, we’ll see some of the precise definitions of “woman” that are popular among progressives that participants in the documentary could have potentially given to provide a precise answer to his question.
From “What Is a Woman?” (2022)
In this deep dive into gender, we explore the meaning of “man” and “woman” in two ways:
- Philosophically, by looking at the hidden consequences and assumptions of various views about gender, including discussing major critiques of each definition (both conservative and progressive)
- Empirically, by exploring the many different definitions of gender, examining how common each of them is in the United States, and analyzing how their usage differs based on political ideology and identity groups.
My aim here is to explore the implications and critiques of both conservative and progressive ideas about gender, with the hope that you’ll come away at the end of this essay with a clearer sense of what your own perspective is and better understand any hidden assumptions you may be making. Since this topic is distressing and fraught for some, you may want to skip this essay if you’re not up for hearing the perspectives of people from across the political spectrum whose beliefs I report on, some of whom may hold views diametrically opposed to your own.
Part 1: Tables with fur?
The project of defining gender is highly contentious and political. This makes it very hard to focus on the underlying philosophical questions. Let’s, therefore, start with a trivial and absurd example designed to highlight a critical conceptual challenge that we’ll later encounter during attempts to define gender.
Consider this question: what makes something a “table”?
Most of the time, it’s obvious: it has four legs, a flat surface on top, and it’s used for sitting around and placing items on.
But imagine a culture that raises a furry, four-legged creature with a broad, flat back. People sit around this beast and set their plates on its back. It often stays still but can move around.
Is this a “table”? In some sense, yes, it has legs and a flat surface for placing things. But in other ways, it isn’t: it’s alive, it moves, and it’s definitely not a static piece of furniture.
Different people’s notions of a word – like “table” – usually overlap enough for everyday use. That’s what enables human communication. But on the edge cases, disagreements and confusion emerge.
Perhaps you think a table must be an inanimate object (so the creature’s back cannot qualify), while someone else sees any flat, leg-supported surface as a table. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, you’d both agree. But this borderline scenario exposes a fundamental difference in your definitions. And, to make matters worse, it’s unlikely we even have a precise definition of “table” in mind – for edge cases, we mainly end up following our intuitions for what the word “really” means.
Unfortunately, there’s no single “correct” definition, even for something trivial like a table.
Debating whether such a creature really is a table is very likely to go in pointless circles. One person might argue, “They’re just using the beast as a table; it’s not truly a table!” while another responds, “But it is really a table because it has legs and a flat surface for plates!” There’s no progress to be made.
Even dictionaries won’t help either because they offer different takes:
- Table: a flat surface, usually supported by four legs, used for putting things on (Cambridge Dictionary)
- Table: a piece of furniture consisting of a raised flat top of wood, stone, or other solid material, supported on one or more legs, and providing a level surface for working at or on which to place things for various purposes (Oxford English Dictionary)
By Cambridge’s definition, these beasts are clearly tables – but it’s not clear that they meet Oxford’s definition because they may not qualify as “furniture” or “solid material.” We can’t refer to authorities to settle this dispute – this is fundamentally a philosophical problem, not one of consulting the right authority.
And, of course, this has nothing to do with tables. It’s a fact about word meanings, and it applies whenever we encounter edge cases.
There are some ways that a definition can be lousy, such as definitions that cause miscommunication, are inefficient to use, group unlike things together, are irrelevant to the topic at hand, or are especially ambiguous. However, in the case of both tables and gender, these criteria aren’t sufficiently constraining to allow us to choose a single “correct” definition.
With that in mind, we’ll now leave the realm of the absurd and trivial to talk about definitions that greatly impact people’s lives.
Part 2: When our definitions matter
Most people never need a precise definition of “table.” The definition would only become important if we were to encounter a high-stakes situation involving ambiguous cases.
We also don’t need a precise definition of “man” and “woman” in most situations because most people unambiguously fall into one category or the other. When the way a person looks matches how they identify, which also matches their anatomy, their chromosomes, their gametes, and so on, nobody disagrees whether the person is a man or a woman. Definitions become important and controversial when some of these features (and hence, our conclusions based on different definitions) diverge.
Unlike tables, the way we use words like “man” and “woman” has a serious impact on people’s lives. Because of that, the fact that we use words differently from each other and that our definitions aren’t precise becomes important. It’s, therefore, worthwhile to reflect on what our options are for how to define these words and what the implications and implicit assumptions of each of these definitions are. My hope is that having a better understanding of the assumptions and tradeoffs presented by these definitions will help you choose more wisely between them.
In this essay, I’ll explore eight different definitions for what determines a person’s gender (or whether they’re a “man,” a “woman,” or neither). While I’ve identified a total of 13 definitions in use, we’ll focus on just those that are most commonly used and those that raise interesting questions. These are:
1) chromosomes
2) anatomy at birth
3) gametes
4) a gendered soul
5) an internal feeling
6) self-naming
7) a gendered brain
8) social construction
Throughout this article, I’ll be using the gender terms “man” and “woman,” not biological sex terms like “male” and “female.” As we’ll see, some people argue that there is no difference between the two, but many other people disagree.
In this essay, we will be exploring logical, philosophical, and practical issues with both conservative and progressive definitions of gender, with the goal of helping you understand this question as clearly as possible.
We’ll begin by considering definitions for gender that are more commonly used by conservatives, then move to those more common among progressives, and end with a discussion of how I think these disagreements are best resolved. Of course, neither conservatives nor progressives are a monolith: any individual person may disagree with the perspectives that are more common in their group or reject all of the approaches to gender that I outline here.
Part 3: Conservative definitions of gender
Conservatives are more likely than progressives to take the view that gender is defined by one of these:
Definition 1: Chromosomes (a woman is a person with XX chromosomes, a man is a person with XY chromosomes)
Definition 2: Anatomy at birth (a man is someone born with a penis, a woman is someone born with a vagina)
Definition 3: Gametes (a man can produce sperm, a woman has ova; gametes are used to define both sex and gender in Trump’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order, though he refers to them as “small reproductive cell” and “large reproductive cell” respectively)
Many conservatives (as well as some gender-critical progressives) believe that gender is determined by biology (and hence, that there is no distinction between gender and biological sex). They say that a man has XY chromosomes, a penis, and can produce sperm, while a woman has XX chromosomes, a vagina, a uterus and can produce eggs. However, while chromosomes, anatomy at birth, and gametes are highly correlated, they don’t always overlap.
You might think it doesn’t matter which of the three definitions above a person were to choose, but there are cases where the definitions contradict each other.
For example, people with Swyer syndrome are usually born with both XY chromosomes and female anatomy – meaning that they are men according to definition 1 and women according to definition 2. Here is a table of examples where the above definitions can contradict each other (note that the table reflects common manifestations of these conditions, but there can be individual variation):
As the table above illustrates, in order to be aligned with reality, a definition cannot make the false assumption that chromosomes, anatomy, and gametes are always all male-like or all female-like.
Since the three popular conservative definitions of gender sometimes disagree with each other, that raises the question of how, from a conservative perspective, a person’s gender can be unambiguously determined. Sometimes conservatives will attempt to define a “woman” as “an adult human female,” but that actually doesn’t resolve the ambiguity because it leaves open whether a “female” is to be defined by chromosomes, anatomy at birth, gametes, or some other criterion.
Some try to solve this by picking just one of the three definitions (chromosomes, anatomy at birth, or gametes) and declaring that to be the true determinant of gender. But then, which of the three options is to be used? The choice seems arbitrary, yet depending on the choice made, some people will end up in different categories.
An additional challenge is that, whichever of these three definitions is selected, some people will end up uncategorizable. For instance, suppose you decide that someone’s gender should be determined by whether that person’s body produces eggs or sperm. How are you to classify people who are woman-like in every way but born without any egg production capability (e.g., due to “ovarian agenesis”)?
Some conservatives, such as Candace Owens, ignore these problems and declare only two genders exist, such as in this Tweet:
From this perspective, trans and non-binary identities are seen as a form of confusion, social contagion, or mental illness. It’s unclear how intersex people can fit into this framework at all, because some of them will have no category.
A somewhat different approach that some conservatives take to avoid leaving some people uncategorizable is to use a third category for people whose chromosomes, anatomy at birth, and/or gametes don’t align in a typical way – a catch-all “intersex” category. For instance, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro appears to take this approach.
Depending on the particular choice of study investigating this question and the definition of “intersex” used, somewhere between 1 in 2000 and 1 in 50 people will fall into this intersex category.
This avoids leaving people without a category but also ends up grouping together people who are extremely different from each other in the intersex category – for instance, someone who is “female-typical” in every way except for their chromosomes has little in common with someone who is “male-typical” in every way except for their lack of a penis at birth.
An additional challenge to this viewpoint is that many people have a strong intuition that someone who is “man-typical” in every way except for one (e.g., they look like a man, identify as a man, have a penis, etc. but, for example, were born without the anatomy to produce sperm) should be considered a man, but this approach may define them as intersex instead.
Even if we put aside the logical and philosophical challenges to these definitions of gender, an additional critique is that all three conservative options leave some people extremely unhappy with their categorization, including many trans and non-binary people.
There’s a perception among some conservatives that one or more of these three definitions are “scientific,” whereas other definitions of gender are anti-scientific – sometimes encapsulated with phrases like “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Facts matter tremendously, and science is very important in making sense of the topic. What this critique misses, however, is that science is only capable of answering empirical questions. For instance, science can tell us things like the correlation between specific traits in the population. While it is critical that science inform our understanding of gender, unfortunately, science is unable to answer questions of the type we are considering here, in particular:
- What “should” we use a word to mean?
- Which of these potential common definitions (such as which of the three definitions discussed above or the definitions discussed below) is the “better” one?
Word choice must be informed by science, but it isn’t determined by science. It also depends on philosophical and value-based considerations, which can be applied independently of science.
Another perspective sometimes expressed by conservatives is that it’s silly to discuss gender at all – why not simply talk about biological sex (or define gender and biological sex to be identical) and leave it at that? Why bother ever discussing gender in the first place? The main objections to this point of view are:
- Whether a person is considered a “man” or a “woman” or neither has many real-world implications – both in terms of how others view them and treat them and, in some cases, how they are impacted by rules and laws – so definitions of gender matter.
- Many people do not see gender and biological sex as being the same thing, and some people have a very strong preference not to have their gender viewed as the same as their biological sex – so solid reasons would need to be provided to explain why these people are wrong, or their strong preferences should be ignored.
If everyone felt their biological sex and gender were identical, and if there were no real-world consequences for which gender a person is identified as, then indeed, we could simply put this topic to rest by declaring sex and gender the same – but that’s not the world we live in.
Before moving onto progressive definitions of gender, we’ll next briefly discuss a definition of gender that not many people in the U.S. hold but which is interesting from a philosophical point of view. It may also have particular appeal to some religious and spiritual people.
Definition 4: Gendered soul
Some spiritual people argue that everyone has an immutable soul that’s gendered. According to the more conservative version of this definition, God made everyone either a man or a woman from birth, and that’s the true determinant of their gender. Progressives who believe in gendered souls may be more likely to additionally believe that sometimes people’s bodies don’t “match” their soul’s gender. Gender dysphoria may then be the result of being a soul “trapped in the wrong body.”
Of course, these perspectives are religious or spiritual in nature, and people don’t claim that they are derived from science. As we’ll see later, there exist secular alternatives to the gendered soul view that non-spiritual people are likely to find more palatable.
We can find an example discussion of gendered souls on the website Thoughts Theological:
A “gendered soul” approach, of course, assumes certain philosophical commitments: belief in God and/or belief in a soul. It also raises a tricky question for conservatives: since the soul is invisible and unmeasurable, how is a person supposed to know what gender they are if their chromosomes, anatomy at birth, or gametes don’t align in the typical way — i.e., which “soul” (a man’s soul or a woman’s soul) does the person have? And even if their biological features align in the most typical way, what if they have a strong feeling that their gender is different than these biological features usually suggest — is that an indication that God made their soul a different gender than is typical of their body?
We’ll now move on to more progressive approaches to defining gender.
Part 4: Progressive definitions of gender
Definition 5: Internal feeling (a gendered “quale“)
Some think that everyone has a distinct feeling inside them (a “quale” – the singular form of “qualia”) that reflects and determines each person’s true gender.
It feels like something to taste an avocado, and it feels like something different to taste a pineapple. There’s an internal experience that you’re aware of when you look at something red, which differs from your experience in your mind when seeing blue. Similarly, this “internal feeling” approach proposes that there is an internal feeling of being a woman, which differs from the internal feeling of being a man.
From this perspective, gender dysphoria—a feeling of intense distress reported by many trans people— could be a consequence of this internal gendered feeling not matching a person’s body or not matching the way others view them. An example of defining gender in this way comes from the Kids Help Phone website:
Before we consider using this definition, it’s worth considering whether an internal feeling of gender actually exists – because if it doesn’t, this definition would be off the table. We know that eating an avocado doesn’t produce the same feeling/experience as eating a pineapple. Does gender work like this, too: does being a man feel different from being a woman?
To make this concrete via a thought experiment: if you could share the internal experiences of a random person on earth for one minute—a person who is sitting alone in a room with their eyes closed, not moving at all—would it be possible for you to tell their gender just from this glimpse of what it feels like internally to be them?
Assuming a quale of gender exists, most of us only ever experience one such quale. So if that’s all we ever know, how do we know what that feeling signifies? For instance, imagine that since birth, you always had the taste of pineapple in your mouth – would you even be able to know that it was a taste of something, or would you just assume the taste of pineapple is just part of the way it feels like to exist? Do we just intuitively know that this gendered feeling we experience is linked to our gender, even if we have never experienced something different than it?
Some people say they have an internal feeling of their own gender, whereas other people say they lack this feeling. While Twitter/X polls should, of course, not be considered scientific studies, they can provide an indication of how some people commonly feel. To that end, I ran a poll on Twitter/X and found that about 24% of people reported having an internal feeling regarding their own gender (wording such a poll is very tricky, and its results should be taken with a grain of salt):
The audience for this poll included highly educated people, mostly 25 to 50 years of age, 80% of whom were men, 40% of whom were from the U.S., and most of them were “not conservative.”
If we can take poll results like this at face value, it presents a challenge for the internal feeling view. Do the substantial fraction of people who don’t have an internal feeling of gender really lack a gender entirely, despite them believing that they have a gender? It seems unlikely that even the proponents of the “internal feeling” viewpoint would accept this strange implication – but if it is that feeling that literally determines your gender, then what should we make of many people saying they don’t have such a feeling at all? Perhaps those who believe in this view could suggest that such people have no gender. In another Twitter poll I conducted, 17% of participants reported being neutral or indifferent to their biological sex suddenly changing:
Most people report that if that happened, they would not be willing to undergo surgery to try to transform their body back:
These poll results relate to the concept of “cis by default” from Thing of Things:
Here’s a specific example of someone who does not perceive themselves as having a feeling of their own gender:
Of course, just because quite a number of people report that they don’t experience this feeling doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Perhaps some people experience it, and some people don’t – in which case the “gendered feeling” point of view would suggest that those people lack a true gender. Another possibility is that those who say they don’t have such a feeling are simply mistaken – for instance, they might discover that they do have a sense of their gender after all on deeper reflection, or they may be misidentifying gendered-related feelings as something else.
An interesting implication of the “internal feeling” view is that if gender is determined by a feeling, it can change over one’s lifetime and potentially can change rapidly. This suggests the possibility of gender changing on a daily basis or even a minute-to-minute basis, such as is described by this person:
Definition 6: Self-naming
According to this perspective, your gender is much like your name—you’re assigned a gender at birth, and while most people stick with it, you can change it if you don’t like it, and your gender is whatever you say it is.
An example of this used as educational material for teenagers online comes from the “Teen Health Source”:
This self-naming approach has some interesting philosophical implications:
i) Someone can never be wrong about their gender, much like they can’t be wrong about their name when it comes to social (rather than legal) usage. If someone decides they want to be called “Bob” and tells people that, then their name is, in fact, now “Bob” in a meaningful sense.
ii) Someone’s gender can be anything they want
For instance, if someone identifies their gender as the sea (sea/sear/sea-self) or as a bear (bear/bears/bear-self), that’s not problematic from the “self-naming” point of view—like a name, people can choose to identify how they like. If you’re not familiar with neopronouns like these, here’s how the Human Rights Campaign explains them:
Viewpoints on neo-pronouns are diverse. Some people see them as a way to further break down unhelpful binaries and a way for people to helpfully express their identity, while others see them as absurd or making a mockery of the concept of gender.
Sometimes, the self-naming view is criticized on the grounds that it is “circular,” such as in the graphic below:
However, it is not circular if we take gender to be something that is defined via self-identification – in other words, if your gender is, by definition, a label that you assign yourself (which happens to be laden with associations and social implications).
Some progressives reject the self-naming view because it feels too far from the original concept of gender—it’s not clear that it’s even a classification of gender anymore if someone can identify as anything that they like. For instance, some argue that gender relates to biological sex, even though it is not the same thing as biological sex, and so it consists of more than identification.
Progressives may also reject the self-naming perspective because it seems to invalidate the experiences of people who say they were previously mistaken about their gender. For instance, people sometimes say things like, “I used to believe I was a woman, but now I realize that all along, I was a man.” From the self-naming perspective, a statement like this can’t be correct—it would be like someone saying, “I used to believe that my name was Bill (and I asked people to call me that), but now I realize my name was Ted all along.”
Furthermore, some people see the self-naming view as trivializing intense feelings that some people have about their gender – it seems far more important to them than a mere arbitrary label that they choose to assign.
Finally, some people reject a self-naming perspective simply because they feel that neopronouns like sea/sear/sea are absurd. However, rejecting something because it seems “absurd” is generally considered a weak form of argument. Different people find different things absurd, and some things that were considered absurd in the past are now considered normal.
Another option that a minority of progressives like is:
Definition 7: Gendered brain
From this point of view, men and women have subtly different brains, and the structure/nature of a person’s brain determines their “true” gender.
If we use the brain’s structure to define gender, this allows for the possibility that someone is truly a woman even if, for instance, they have XY chromosomes and were born with a penis.
Some articles suggest this viewpoint (even if they don’t define gender explicitly based on the brain), such as in this example from ScienceDaily:
We see a similar viewpoint reflected in this quote from trans musician Chaz Bono:
The “gendered brain” definition has other interesting consequences. First, it assumes that men’s and women’s brains are actually reliably different.
Is this true? It’s a hotly debated topic. Books like The Gendered Brain deny that there are significant differences between men’s and women’s brains.
On the other hand, some papers claim that fMRIs can pretty reliably differentiate between the brains of women and men (e.g., 94% accuracy in this paper and 88% in this one). Other research has suggested that transgender people’s brains may match what’s typical for their gender identity, not their sex at birth (Katie Couric’s documentary Gender Revolution discusses some of this research). If these methods hold up to scrutiny and the findings can be replicated, that means that devices could exist to determine one’s gender.
An implication some people feel uncomfortable with regarding this definition is that it implies that, one day, there may exist tests that can objectively determine a person’s gender (or show that someone is wrong about their own gender) via a brain scan. Someone born with a male body who identifies as a man and loves being a man might one day get a brain scan telling them that they are “wrong.” Progressives might also object to the fact that a gendered brain approach could be used to “prove” that transgender people aren’t really transgender if their brain scans match what’s typical for their assigned sex at birth rather than the sex they identify as.
This view also comes with its own potential explanation for gender dysphoria: that it’s caused by a mismatch between one’s brain and one’s body.
An additional note is that, by some interpretations, the “internal feeling” view (which we discussed earlier) is merely a much more specific and narrow version of this gendered brain viewpoint since where would this internal feeling originate from, if not the brain? So if what determines gender is this internal feeling, and our internal feelings originate in the brain, then ultimately, what determines gender is also determined by the brain. This means that critiques of the gendered brain perspective also apply to the internal feeling perspective unless you’re willing to say that we have feelings that don’t originate in the brain or aren’t a necessary consequence of the state of our brains.
Both the internal feeling view and the gendered brain view provide natural explanations for cases like the following, where people report always having felt like their gender didn’t match their biological sex:
Let’s move on to the final option that some progressives find appealing:
Definition 8: Social construction
According to this view, gender is a cultural concept, and a person’s gender is determined by the social roles they decide to opt into. This definition also implies that people can opt out of male and female social roles altogether: they can be “agender” or choose a gender that lies in between the categories “man” and “woman” by adopting an intermediate role. For example, we can find this definition of gender on the WHO website:
The social construction approach gives people a lot of choices—they can identify as a woman if they prefer social roles culturally associated with being a woman, but also change their mind later to opt into different norms.
It’s also worth noting that some societies have traditional social roles outside of “man” and “woman” – some (but not all) of which may map onto terms like “transgender” or “non-binary” in modern language. An example is provided by the hijras in India. As described by Harvard Divinity School:
“While the third gender includes a few different groups in South Asia, the most common are the hijras. Hijras are often born male but look and dress in traditionally feminine ways. Many, but not all, choose to undergo a castration ceremony, removing their male genitalia as an offering to Hindu goddess Bahuchara Mata. Other hijras are born intersex. Often called transgender by outsiders, Indian society and most hijras consider themselves to be third gender—neither male nor female, not transitioning. They are a different gender altogether. However, hijra identity is complex, and recently, some have identified as transgender and sought gender reassignment procedures.”
On the other hand, some people reject this social construction-based definition because they feel that it denies an important reality: that gender is not merely social. For instance, the vast majority of women have (or have had) a body that is able to carry a baby to term (during their fertile years).
Another potential counterargument to the social construction point of view goes as follows: imagine a culture where anyone with blonde hair is considered a man, regardless of their chromosomes or reproductive anatomy. The social construction view says that in this culture, all blonde people are, therefore, men. But some people would object to this, saying that this culture is simply mistaken or not “carving reality at the joints”—that through this arbitrary division of gender based on hair color, it is missing an important aspect of what gender actually means.
Part 6: What do people in the U.S. believe about what determines who is a man and who is a woman?
The 8 definitions above all rest on the idea that there are differences between men and women: biological, psychological, metaphysical, or in terms of preferences. However, note that there are other traits that (on average) men and women differ on but that pretty much nobody wants to use to construct a definition of gender, including:
- Height—while men are, on average, taller than women, most people would consider it absurd to define tall people as men and short people as women
- Hormone levels—nobody thinks that if someone who is a woman by every definition accidentally starts taking testosterone (e.g., let’s assume their pharmacy gave them the wrong medication), this is going to make them into a man
- Personality—while there are some small-to-moderate average differences in how men and women describe their own personalities, pretty much nobody thinks that personality traits determine what gender you are. If you’re interested in this topic, see our interactive tool that empirically explores gender differences in personality and will attempt (if you opt-in) to predict your gender from your personality.
The eight definitions for defining gender presented in this article were not chosen merely because they reflect average differences between men and women; rather, they reflect real definitions of gender that real people actually use (though they rely on these definitions implicitly rather than explicitly).
How popular are each of these definitions? And are they truly divided along political lines?
We ran a survey to explore this. We first created 13 meaningfully different detailed definitions of “man” and “woman”; these include the eight definitions discussed above, as well as five others that it turned out were not popular.
We then recruited 594 study participants in the U.S. using our participant recruitment platform Positly, asking them to read each of the 13 definitions and rate, for each, how much they agree that “Whether someone is a ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ or neither is determined by” that definition. At the end of the study, they were then shown all 13 definitions one more time and asked, “Which [one] of these defines whether or not someone is a ‘man,’ a ‘woman,’ or neither?”
As you can see in the chart below, conservatives and progressives are near polar opposites in terms of which definitions they prefer:
For those who would be tempted to define the words “man” and “woman” based on the real-world usage of those words, the chart above shows why this plan is doomed. Progressives and conservatives use these words very differently, and there is a lot of disagreement on definitions, even within each political group.
As suspected, conservatives were most likely to choose the following definitions, with anatomy at birth being the most popular:
- Anatomy at birth: if you are born with a penis, you are a man; if you are born with a vagina, you are a woman
- Chromosomes: if someone has XY chromosomes, they are a man; if they have XX chromosomes, they are a woman)
- Gametes: if you have the anatomy to create sperm, you are a man; if you have the anatomy to create eggs, you are a woman)
Definitions that were fairly unpopular among both conservatives and progressives were:
- Hormone levels: men and women have different levels of hormones, e.g., testosterone and estrogen. If you have the typical hormone levels of a man, then you are a man; if you have the typical hormone levels of a woman, then you are a woman.
- Personality: men and women have different personalities, and whichever of those personalities you have determines your gender — if you have a typical man’s personality, then you are a man; if you have a typical woman’s personality, then you are a woman.
- Interests: men and women are interested in different things — e.g., if you enjoy taking care of babies and prefer to wear dresses, then you’re a woman; if you enjoy combat sports and prefer to wear suits rather than dresses, then you’re a man.
- Soul: you are born with a non-material soul, and your soul has a specific gender that can never change.
- How you look: if almost everyone who sees you would assume you are a man based on the way you look, then you are a man; if almost everyone would assume you are a woman based on the way you look, then you are a woman.
- Culture: your gender is determined by whatever social role is assigned to you in your particular culture. If, according to your culture’s customs, you are a man, then you are a man, and if, according to your culture, you are a woman, then you are a woman.
- Brain: men and women have different brains — if we had good enough technology, we could completely determine a person’s gender from their brain scans. If you have a man-typical brain, then you are a man; if you have a woman-typical brain, you are a woman.
And the definitions that progressives prefer were:
- Self-naming: gender is like a name. You have whatever gender you say you have, just like you have the name that you say you have, and your gender can be whatever you decide, just like your name can be whatever you decide. You can’t be wrong about your gender, just like you can’t be wrong about your name)
- No “right” definition, whatever’s agreed on: there is no “right” definition for who is a man and who is a woman since words are fundamentally ambiguous, much the same way that there is no right definition for what is a “table.” We can choose whatever definitions we want, and while some definitions are more helpful than others, who is a “man” or “woman” or neither is just determined by what definition we choose to adopt.
- Internal feeling: there is an internal feeling when you taste avocado that differs from the internal feeling you experience when you taste pineapple, and analogously, it feels different internally when you’re a man rather than a woman — whichever gendered internal feeling you experience determines your gender
Going beyond the left/right political divide, here are definitions that were most strongly agreed to by study participants from different identity groups:
Here, we can see that identity groups split into three camps. People who were affiliated with the progressive identities (such as “Liberal,” “Left Wing,” and “Social Justice Advocate”) agreed most with the “Internal Feeling” and “No ‘right’ definition, whatever’s agreed on” definitions.
Two identity groups (“Center-Left” and “Rationalist”) fell in the middle, agreeing most with “No ‘right’ definition, whatever’s agreed on, “Gametes” and “Chromosomes.”
Finally, the more conservative identity groups (such as “Center Right,” “Libertarian,” and “Right Wing”) agreed most with “Gametes,” “Chromosomes,” and “Anatomy.”
Part 7: Gender and politics
Note that in this section, I discuss some common political debates related to transgender identities and trans people’s access to medical care and gendered spaces – if you’re likely to find such a discussion upsetting, you may want to skip this section.
Discussions of whether an imaginary table-animal is “really” a table are purely metaphysical and abstract. Discussions about the definition of gender, however, are often political and impact people’s lives, and they are more than debates about the use of language. As we have seen, conservatives and progressives have very different opinions about the right definitions to use. These differing definitions can lead to conflicts as well as to people talking past each other.
Conservatives sometimes make statements on social media that “trans women aren’t women.” Keeping in mind that to conservatives, the word “women” is typically used based on a definition involving chromosomes, anatomy at birth, or gametes – the literal meaning of “trans women aren’t women” is that trans women don’t have the same chromosomes, anatomy at birth, and/or gametes as cis women. Of course, progressives agree with this: for instance, nobody (whether progressive or otherwise) claims that trans women and cis women typically have the same chromosomes.
On the other hand, when progressives say “trans women are women,” since they are usually using a different definition of “woman” if taken literally, they are saying that trans women satisfy the “self-naming” or “internal feeling” definitions.
If we read these statements literally, conservatives’ and progressives’ words may appear to have completely contradictory meanings. However, in actual practice, it seems more common that they’re interpreting the word “women” so differently as to be making completely unrelated claims. In fact, the two claims can even be true simultaneously because claiming that trans women don’t meet criteria (1), (2), and (3) doesn’t exclude them from meeting criteria (11), (12) and (13). So, what seems like a direct contradiction in claims is not literally a contradiction at all.
Of course, viewing this debate on only a literal level misses a lot of what is actually going on. These statements are often implicitly claims about which set of definitions is the “right” one. Given the complexity of this topic and the fact that our words don’t have fully precise meanings, it’s likely that many people who make statements like these have not considered precisely what definition they mean to imply for “women” – so it’s more likely pointing to a cluster of (either conservative or progressive) definitions and saying “one of those is the right ones.”
Posts of this nature also signal to others a lot about what political group a person views as their own and their most probable answer on questions like whether they think trans youth would benefit or be harmed by having fast and easy access to puberty blockers, whether they believe that the trans rights movement has worked against the interests of cis women, how they feel about trans women accessing women’s locker rooms, how they feel about trans women competing in women’s sports, and many other hotly-debated questions.
So that means that such posts have at least four interpretations:
- a literal claim about trans and gender-diverse people (e.g., what chromosomes trans people have),
- an implicit claim about the “best” definition to use for gender
- signaling political in-group and affiliation
- a perspective on the best resolution to controversial societal questions
Part 8: Where does this leave us?
Unfortunately, when we use words, we don’t use them with perfectly clear, unambiguous definitions. And we all use words a bit differently (on pretty much every topic). “Gender,” being a word, also lacks a precise definition. We’ve considered three common conservative definitions of gender:
- Chromosomes
- Anatomy at birth
- Gametes
We’ve also considered common progressive definitions of gender:
- Internal feeling
- Self-naming
Each of these definitions has complicated implications (some philosophical, some empirical, some practical).
The three more commonly conservative definitions struggle to handle cases that fall outside the binary (such as people with XXY chromosomes), lump together people who don’t have much in common, and force some people into boxes that they hate being forced into. Additionally, in some cases, people use these definitions in such a way that they are factually invalid – such as when they assume that all people are born with either male-typical or female-typical anatomy.
The progressive options, unlike the conservative options, give people a lot more freedom to self-identify.
The “internal feeling” definition hinges on an internal feeling of gender actually existing (which some dispute) and doesn’t provide a way to talk about the gender of people who say they lack this feeling, which is a substantial fraction of people.
The “self-naming” approach allows for identities that some argue are completely unrelated from gender – such as preferring animal-related pronouns – and while some see this as a good thing, others view this as either absurd or having strayed too far from what we are attempting to discuss in the first place. The self-naming approach also doesn’t fit with the fact that many people feel like their gender isn’t a choice or that they have previously been mistaken about their ‘true’ gender.
Part 9: My opinion
You may not care about my opinion on this topic, but I’ll provide it in case you’re interested.
If we defined “man” to be “a person with an odd number of hairs on their head,” then that would be a very unhelpful definition because it would be pointing to something that is very different from what everyone else means by “man.” Such a definition fails to get the easy cases right – that is, the cases that everyone agrees on. We can eliminate bad definitions like that on the grounds that they don’t refer to what we are trying to discuss. But this approach doesn’t allow us to choose between the popular definitions of gender in use today because they almost always already agree on the easy cases.
So, what is the right definition? My perspective on the “right” answer for how to define gender-related words is that there is no objectively right answer, just like there is no objectively right answer to what, precisely, a “table” is. If you claim that there must be one unique correct definition that determines who is a “man,” who is a “woman,” and who is neither, then I challenge you to come up with a definition for a “table” that is objectively better than all the other definitions that agree on the easy cases (i.e., the cases where everyone will agree it’s a table). The problem is that there are no objective criteria by which to resolve difficult cases.
Does that mean it doesn’t matter what definition we use for gender-related terms? No, it does matter.
With that in mind, I’ll leave you with my preferred option for thinking about gendered terms.
Option 9: Increase Flourishing
I think that we should define gender-related words in whatever way causes maximal human flourishing. Not because that’s the objectively “right” way to define those words, but because there is no right way, so we might as well choose the approach that makes the world better.
Our use of words has real consequences on people’s lives. They can impact how people are treated, how people feel (e.g., whether they feel accepted or rejected by society), and even, in some cases, how the law is enforced.
While people certainly will disagree about which word usage best helps increase human flourishing, my proposed approach has some advantages:
(i) At least it leaves us with a clear and beneficial goal in mind to guide our choice of words: hopefully, we can agree that we all want to make people’s lives better and improve society.
(ii) It avoids what I think are ultimately unresolvable semantic debates. If there is no “right” answer for how to define these words, then debates about the “right” definition cannot go anywhere.
This does not mean we need a single definition for all purposes. For instance, the determination of who is eligible to compete in women’s professional sports doesn’t have to be the same definition that we use in colloquial conversation and social introductions and doesn’t have to be the same definition that is used to decide what is written on a person’s driver’s license. In order to maximize flourishing, it may be necessary to have multiple definitions because different contexts may invite different considerations.
Unfortunately, my proposed approach leaves us with an additional (mostly) empirical question that is beyond the scope of this essay: what choice of definitions will create the most human flourishing?
For now, I’ll leave that question for your consideration.
Thanks go to Cei Lambert for insightful feedback on this essay. Thanks also goes to the 36 other anonymous people (representing an extremely wide range of viewpoints) who also provided their suggestions and critiques, which I used to improve this essay.
Images in this article were made by Spencer using Midjourney A.I., except for charts, which were created from study data, and screenshots, which are sourced to where they originated.
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