Jenkins' ‘inclusion’ is confused, misleading, and impossible

Quotes

“attempts to define woman risk excluding or marginalizing some women”
– part 1, p1/394 para 1

“According to Haslanger, an ameliorative inquiry into a concept F is the project of arriving at the concept of F-ness that a particular group should aim to get people to use, given a particular set of goals that the group holds.”
– part 1, p2/395 para 2

“Ameliorative inquiries thus make use of normative inputs. The concept of F-ness that is generated by an ameliorative inquiry is the target concept of F. Ameliorative analysis is not bound to comply with our ordinary understanding or use of a concept: the target concept may be revisionary, provided that it furthers the goals guiding the analysis.”
– part 1, p2/395 para 2

Illustration

‘Ameliorative inquiry’ with its ‘target concept’ can be grasped in a vivid way: it is a kind of bait-and-switch. In choosing a thing, and declaring it ‘redefined’, it summons your familiar expectations, then sneaks in a substitute.

Imagine that someone tries to sell you an iPhone: they have the latest one, and at a moderate price. But you quickly see it is not an iPhone but a Nokia. They are insistent though, and their retort is: “no, you don't know the proper definition of ‘iPhone’”. You might pause, and wonder that there is some funny business going on. You have to know what an iPhone is to be attracted, and yet at the same time not know so that you could not disprove it. Their offer is only attractive if you know what an iPhone is, but then they tell you that you do not know what it is. Do you, or not? If it is not an iPhone, then it does not command an iPhone price. Is it an iPhone or not?

Think of it in terms of a set of features you want. You want an iPhone because they have, eg, good cameras. But the seller, since they are describing a different definition, is telling you that iPhones do not have those cameras. Well, that means you do not want one after all: you want a good camera, but the seller is not offering something including that – and similarly for any other features you wanted. They are saying they do not have what you want, yet pretending that they do.

You can clarify the structure like the following. Your question is: ‘(I am thinking of an A) Do you have an A?’. Their answer is: ‘I have an A (that is, I have what you think an A is).’. Now when you check and find they do not have an A, you have found them wrong in their claim. With this clarified interaction, they cannot reply with: ‘no, you do not know what an A is’ – knowing what an A is was part of the question. How else is one to communicate about a particular thing except by a common/shared name? The meaning and function of this communicative interaction rests on there being only one idea of ‘A’

Exemption not redefinition

The ‘ameliorative enquiry’ purports to make a new definition of ‘woman’, so what new definitions are possible? Could we have as a new definition body mass? – Above/below a certain level is woman/man? Or perhaps odd/even birth months as man/woman? … Why not? But those do not fit the hidden assumption: we feel that the definition must be about women. But was that not what we were supposed to redefine? There is a puzzle. The problem posed asks for a new definition, yet wants the answer to fit the old one; any new definition requires the old one to be retained. What is going on?

The explanation is that this is not about redefinition after all. Notice that no new features, no new criteria, were being asked for, or were ever suggested. The structure all stays the same. Instead, this is about exemption: granting an exemption from the definition/criteria, to certain people based only on their request/want. Keeping the definition the same, yet admitting such new members is not a change to the definition, it is better described as making exemptions to that definition.

Redefinition is circular

Is it true that there are no new definitions offered (hence ‘exemption not redefinition’)? Yes: first, because there is a logical obstruction: it is impossible to make a structure that meets the requirements.

Proposed definitions/concepts are all versions of: ‘Transwomen are people who adopt conventions of / feel like women, therefore transwomen are women.’. That adopting/feeling is often gathered under the more ambiguous but somehow more immediately persuasive term ‘identifying’. But the deep flaw is that this is circular, more clearly so when rearranged: ‘Transwomen are women, because women are people who identify as women.’ – T is W, and W is defined in terms of W.

One could see two problems in breaking the circularity (or you could see the circularity as being made of two things): (1) finding some new second ‘woman’ concept, to fill-in the gap in the definition; (2) there would be two separate things: women, and some ‘modification’ of women.

First: what can be put in the second ‘women’ slot? It must be a reference (maybe indirect) to the basic biological fact of female/male-ness. What else can supply the attachment to male/female-ness, and hence the meaning of gender? For without bodily female/male there is nothing relevant. But by male/female-ness transwomen are men. Because female/male-ness must have a meaning independent of and prior to trans-ness, otherwise it will be circular again.

Second: if there are two separate concepts, the secondary dependent one is not the same as the first. That is why you are making a secondary term: to get something different, otherwise the circularity would not be broken. You cannot say T are simply W (the independent one), because they do not qualify by that. That is why you make this secondary ‘modification’ on W: to get T to qualify by that modification. You cannot afterwards assert that they are the same, because you would be back in circularity.

You are stuck. Whatever new definition you conjure up, you will have to reference woman-ness, otherwise you are talking about something else. But then, if you want to call your resultant definition ‘woman’, you will be trapped into circularity. In practice this logically impossible circularity becomes the redefinition bait-and-switch of ‘ameliorative enquiry’: take the label from the original product, and misleadingly put it onto something else.

There is no new fact

Is it true that there are no new definitions offered (hence ‘exemption not redefinition’)? Yes: second, because there is a lack of substantial fact: and with nothing to rest on, the fake redefinitions proffered end up in the circularity problem.

You must pick some fact, else there is no criteria, and no categorisation. It cannot be the female/male body dimorphism, because that is what disqualifies trans people – which was the original problem to solve. But what new fact is there?

We hear confusioneering about ‘sex is a spectrum’, but such an argument would not help any claim to a position in the binary classification of male/female. If you are claiming to have blonde hair, what does it matter that colour is a spectrum? Because other colours shade into blonde? But you have specified something particular: blonde – your claim presumes you have clarified the bound, and so resolved any question of unboundedness in the spectrum.

And even if you found some new fact – say (probably best possibility) psychological profile – it would not address the problem: someone can be intro/extro-vert, or neurotic/stable, and so on, and still be either female or male – the two categorisations do not affect/imply each other. This problem faces all possibilities: if you talk about something else, you are indeed talking about something else. If the new categorisation is a different dimension, and uncorrelated with female/male, then it has no implications for female/male. If correlated, then having the thing correlated with female yet not being female, is an example of where the correlation fails: it shows the lack of implication. Even assuming the strongest argument: psychology as clearly divided male/female, then what? Trans people are precisely where that association fails – having one feature did not imply the other. How can a model be claimed apt by appeal to the cases where it breaks? Not talking about A, is not talking about A; not being A can never be grounds for claiming to be A.

And if this psychological difference were truly substantial, would not transwomen already be thought of as women, on that feature alone? Yet one wonders if we would even notice much. And if we did, that feature would still not prevail: we would say: this is a man with an unusually female demeanor – we would not say: this is a woman with an unusual body. This shows the basic precedence problem here: bodily dimorphism is primary and sets the meaning and decides status, and psychological profile would be only secondary.

Surely the contention must have trans people to be talking sense, that they are telling the truth about something. What they say must line up with some fact. So what are they telling the truth about? There seems to be no substantial objective fact. The only thing is their mere gesture of claiming itself: the fact that groups them together is only their declaration of membership. That is both materially insubstantial and does not group them into female/male classes.

‘Identifying-as’ is referencing not being

The reason why ‘identifying-as’ (and adopting convention / feeling like) seems meaningful is not because of any substantial fact, but by referring to something else. ‘Identifying-as’ takes there to be a group, and by a kind of proximity claims to be a member of the group, but without actually meeting the criteria.

What if you are film extra, and though male, you always dress as female. Are you then ‘cinematographically’ a woman? This seems like being ‘socially’ a woman, but just within a limited domain/context. We still have the same structure: a type, and the signs of it. You look like a thing, but you are not that thing. You have the signs, but not the actuals. But in that context are not the signs the actuals? Are they not all that is needed? Just purely the form of the clothes, and none of the signification? If that is true, then yes; but then also, you are no longer being a woman, since it is only about the form of the clothes – there is nothing in the clothes that is female. You are cinematographically a ‘certain-kind-of-clothes wearer’.

‘Identifying-as’ – adopting conventions, feeling like – these work by referring to something else than themselves. You can understand this simply as correlation. One appearance, being usually found with some thing, serves as an indicator of it. But having the indicator is not having its correlate, it is merely likely so.

‘Identifying-as’ arrogates all the authority, the entire force of its claim in itself. There can be no other features to be taken into account, to be assessed and count as well. But that is exactly to say that the statement of ‘identifying-as’ has no other meaning: it cannot be valuable for indicating something else, because were that referenced/associated thing to be absent, that value would be absent too, and the statement of ‘identifying-as’ could be disproved. But the character of ‘identifying-as’ here is that it cannot ever be disproved. It must act so, because the thing it is used to claim is to be male when the claimant is female (or vice-versa) (and that must be the particular claim because there is no other of substance and relevance in this whole matter). Yet, if it cannot be disproved, then it must have – as just shown – no other meaning than its literal statement, the sound of the words, the shapes of the letters.

So there is a dilemma: ‘identifying-as’ cannot have both authority and substance. Either it has infallible authority, but only for the existence of the declaration itself; or it stands for something else, but can be (and in this case is) false.