The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees

The gender binary is a collective effort to divide human beings into exclusive and exhaustive groups of men and women based on their reproductive capacities, and to impose different social expectations on each group. The gender binary is ethically suspect, both because it limits the lives and dreams of men and women, and because it relies on the oppression of those who don’t fit neatly into either category. It’s also metaphysically suspect, because it appears to lack adequate basis in objective reality. Yet, many people continue act in ways that uphold it, both in ordinary life and in their capacity as philosophers.

Kevin Richardson’s book offers a sharp critique of the gender binary, as well as the related sexual orientation binary that divides people into exclusive groups of heterosexuals, homosexuals and (marginally) bisexuals. It documents the way so-called “gender critical” philosophers uphold binaries while claiming to reject them. But most importantly, it develops a positive alternative to binary thinking—the spatial theory.

Geographic location furnishes a handy metaphor for the spatial theory’s central insight: just as your position in physical space ultimately determines the answer to the question “where are you?”, your position in a structured space of properties ultimately determines the answer to the question “what is your gender?” There are many ways of naming locations: a single geographic location might be accurately described with “Boston”, “Somerville”, “Massachusetts”, a street address, or precise latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, while a single gender might be accurately described with “man”, “trans man”, “masc-of-center nonbinary”, “elder twink”, or “genderqueer demiboy”. Which description we pick is partly a matter of how our culture divides up the terrain, and partly a matter of our communicative interests, but the underlying reality is a location that can be described in many equally accurate ways.

In Part I, Richardson characterizes the gender binary as a system of social norms that encodes three assumptions:

1. there are two genders, woman and man, and everybody belongs to exactly one,
2. people’s status as women or men is determined by their sex, which is either female or male (with familiar phenotypic stereotypes), and
3. everyone must perform a complex set of social roles based on their gender.

He goes on to observe the high stakes of the gender binary: in the US, its advocates want to ban books about queer people from public libraries and queer people themselves from public life. Richardson covers only legislative threats that target queer and trans people—one could expand the list of tactics to include stochastic terrorism, discrimination, social stigma, and conversion “therapy”, and one could expand the list of victims to the many intersex people, cis women, and cis men harmed by gendered violence—but he gives more than enough evidence to establish the political significance of his project. Part I also includes a chapter examining how “gender-critical” philosophers uphold the gender binary—unsurprising, but worth documenting.

By the end of Part I, Richardson has offered compelling evidence that the gender binary is morally bad, but this leaves open the question of whether it’s metaphysically wrong. Part II gathers recalcitrant evidence that the gender binary cannot explain. The chapter begins with a survey of attempts to define gender in terms of biology, social role, and self-identity. Richardson argues that these attempts don’t partition human beings into two exclusive and exhaustive categories, don’t align with each other, and don’t match most people’s intuitive judgments. Instead of a single, unambiguous definition, our gender categories admit of multiple non-equivalent definitions, and when forced to choose among them, we typically pick based on context and pragmatic factors.

He goes on to argue that gender is nonbinary in multiple ways. First, there are non-normative genders—various ways of being genderqueer, fluid, intersex, and so on—that we should see as real in themselves, not as afterthoughts to binary categories. Second, gender is fuzzy—there may be no fact of the matter as to a particular person’s gender (e.g., whether they’re a trans man, a butch lesbian, or nonbinary). This fuzziness includes both vagueness (which Richardson understands as the idea that category membership is a matter of degree) and open texture (where we are confronted with new examples that our categories were never designed to handle). And third, as the survey of definitions illustrates, there’s no good, context-independent way of defining genders using necessary and sufficient conditions.

Part III develops the spatial theory, beginning with the idea of gender prototypes. Richardson draws on the prototype theory of Eleanor Rosch (1988), which models how we grasp concepts without relying on necessary and sufficient conditions. A prototype of an F is an ideal F—not a real individual that happens to be exemplary, but a collection of properties that would be possessed by an exemplary F. The prototypical bird is small, has feathers, flies, and sings; it is more like a robin or a sparrow than a cassowary or a cockatoo with beak-and-feather. Similarly, there are prototypical women and men, though Richardson is circumspect in naming their features. (He points to a lack of empirical psychological data; there’s also a danger of covertly pushing pernicious norms.) Someone counts as belonging to a gender category like woman or man insofar as they are sufficiently similar to its prototype.

Prototype theory raises three questions. First, why assume each category has only one prototype? Richardson’s answer is that we shouldn’t: there can be multiple competing prototypes, or different ones for different contexts. This multiplicity of prototypes explains why gender categories are fuzzy: someone may be sufficiently similar to some prototypes of manhood, but insufficiently similar to others. It also explains why our definitions might shift with context: different practical interests call for different prototypes.

Second, what does it mean to be similar to a prototype? Richardson answers by pointing to an underlying space of gender-making properties. Whether someone is a woman depends in a complex way on many fine-grained features: how often they are marked out for treatment as a woman, how often they are systematically subordinated as a woman, their hormone levels, etc. These features come in degrees: someone can be singled out for a treatment more or less often, and have higher or lower estrogen levels. We can think of the features as axes in a multi-dimensional space, and prototypes as points in that space exemplifying the “ideal” combination of features for each gender. To be similar to a protype is to be near it in this multi-dimensional space.

Third, what counts as sufficient similarity to a prototype? This question presupposes some way of measuring similarity, even when the underlying dimensions differ wildly from each other. How does one trade off sex chromosomes—which seem best represented by a discrete variable with a few values and no natural ordering—against frequency of being singled out for treatment as a woman, which seems best represented by a continuous variable whose values are linearly ordered? Richardson posits numerical degrees of womanhood, manhood, and so on to substantiate judgments like “Demario is much more of a man than Nolan”, but doesn’t offer us concrete ways of measuring these degrees, which (he says) represent how the world is, not what we know or how we should talk.

Part IV applies the spatial theory to sexual orientations by keeping the gendered dimensions for the agent of sexual desire, and adding gendered dimensions for the patient (i.e., the type of person desired). Richardson posits separate dimensions for disposition to feel desire, disposition to engage in sexual activity, and identifying with an orientation label. For example, the prototypical lesbian is a woman (along various dimensions) who is disposed both to desire and to have sex with people who qualify as women (along various dimensions), while not desiring or having sex with people who qualify as men, and who identifies as a lesbian. Other people count as lesbians as long as they are sufficiently similar to this prototype (but they might be nonbinary, or occasionally sexually attracted to men, or celibate.)

Naming new sexual orientations doesn’t change the underlying space, but it introduces new prototypes, thereby creating new sexual orientation categories. The prototypical asexual doesn’t feel sexual desire for anyone, regardless of gender. The prototypical heteroflexible person mostly desires and has sex with people of the “opposite” gender, but is disposed to occasionally desire or have sex with same-gender partners. And so on. As with gender, the property space is the fundamental reality underlying both the prototypes and the categories based on them.

Part V consists of a final chapter theorizing about binary abolition. While it’s okay to keep talking in terms of categories, Richardson argues, we should hold our labels more loosely, remembering that they don’t reflect fundamental divisions in reality, and adapting them to our needs rather than taking them as given.

There’s a lot to like in Richardson’s theory. It’s refreshing to see a philosopher take the messy realities of queer life seriously as data, rather than trying to shove them into a binary mold that tacitly treats heterosexuality as the most natural way of being. It’s particularly nice to see a theory that takes bisexual and trans experiences as central examples rather than embarrassing anomalies. Richardson writes with the sensibilities of a public philosopher, which is to say that he often steps back from the persona of the objective, impersonal reasoner to evince a personality and a sense of humor. Nerds like me (and much of NDPR’s readership, I expect) can enjoy nitpicking his treatment of vagueness and concept possession.

One of my nitpicks is that he commits to specific claims about vagueness and indeterminacy that don’t seem crucial to the project’s goals. I am tempted by bivalent theories of vagueness that don’t posit “joints in nature” (e.g., Raffman, 2005; Fara, 2000), but these theories are at odds with Richardson’s degreed treatment of vagueness. Adopting a sophisticated classical theory like Raffman’s or Fara’s shouldn’t saddle a metaphysician with commitment to the gender binary, and Richardson’s theory should ideally translate across these abstract disagreements. In fairness to Richardson, vagueness is notoriously hard to describe, and even one viable description of gender fuzziness is better than none. I hope that future logicians translate his ideas into other idioms.

Here's another nitpick in the form of a question: What fixes the underlying dimensions’ gender spaces? Estrogen level is arguably one such dimension, but endocrinologists only succeeded in isolating estrogen in the 1920s (Santen and Simpson, 2019), when the concept of womanhood was well established. This suggests that the space itself is constantly reconfigured in response to changing social pressures. The nature of particular dimensions is also in flux. Consider frequency of being singled out for treatment as a woman; what counts as treatment as a woman depends on shifting social practice. And the binary concept woman is embedded in treatment as a woman, raising doubts about Richardson’s claim that gender space is more fundamental than binary concepts.

Characterizing underlying dimensions seems especially puzzling when it comes to sexual orientation, and Richardson’s choice to characterize it in terms of gender. Some people are mainly excited by sadomasochism, or by feet, or by fictional monsters; why shouldn’t these count as full-fledged sexual orientations? Even among the orientation labels that Richardson discusses, “asexual”, “graysexual”, “demi-sexual”, and “reciprosexual” are fully agnostic about the genders of all parties.

Regardless of the ultimate metaphysical status of gender spaces, they’re invaluable for theorizing gender and sexual orientation. The End of Binaries draws our attention to the fluidity and fuzziness of gender, and makes important headway on systematically theorizing its complexity. We still have a lot to learn, but Richardson helps advance our collective understanding a little farther.

REFERENCES

Allen, Amy (2013) “Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too: Habermas’s Genealogy of Postsecular Reason.” In Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds), Habermas and Religion, 132-153. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Fara, Delia Graff (2000) “Shifting sands: An interest relative theory of vagueness.” Philosophical Topics 28 (1):45-81.

Raffman, Diana (2005) “Borderline cases and bivalence.” Philosophical Review 114 (1):1-31.

Rosch, Eleanor (1988) “Principles of Categorization.” In Readings in Cognitive Science, 312–322.

Santen, Richard J. and Evan Simpson (2019) “History of Estrogen: Its Purification, Structure, Synthesis, Biologic Actions, and Clinical Implications.” Endocrinology, 160 (3):605-625.

Like Richardson, I will play loosely with my logical types. I’m unsure whether prototypes are non-actual individuals, complex properties, or collections of simple properties, but I don’t think it matters much.