On Ideal Forms and Gender

I was at chess club, and a young man told me that I look like an anti-trans commentator. He told me that this commentator had produced a documentary, and had asked people to define a woman, and that a lot of people in the film struggled. I explained that people might struggle to define what a woman is, just as people struggle to define justice, or family, or being. For example, most families have a mother and father and biological children, but some families have only one parent, due to death or divorce, while other families have adopted, foster, or step children. Sometimes defining nouns is difficult. I added that just because some people are unable to define what a woman is, that does not mean that this man's definition of a woman is correct. If people can’t answer a math question correctly, that doesn’t mean that the person who asked the question is correct.

Socrates struggled with defining what a chair is. Socrates described the form of ideals, where reality is a physical manifestation of ideal forms. A circle is a line that is equidistant from a point, but there has never been a perfect circle represented in the world.

In the abstract, ideal form, there is a woman. This ideal woman could have some physical characteristics, education, or income. But there has probably never been a physical manifestation of this ideal woman. Women can vary along a great number of characteristics, and none of them will perfectly align with the ideal form of a woman. (And by the ideal form of a woman, I am implicitly referring to the man’s ideal form of a woman. Maybe women have a different ideal form of women! I should also add I am also referring to women in Western culture, maybe women from different cultures have different ideal forms.) And maybe women cannot only have different characteristics, but also different reproductive systems. A woman who has had a hysterectomy, lumpectomy, or mastectomy is still a woman. Just as a man who has had an orchidectomy is still a man. We cannot reduce the category of women or men to their reproductive systems. And so, maybe in addition to the other characteristics that women and men can vary along, maybe they can also be born with different reproductive systems. Just because people do not match the ideal form of their gender, that does not mean that they don’t belong in that category.

I was thinking about transphobia and homophobia. I read a letter in which someone talked about fear of transwomen in the women’s changing rooms or bathrooms. They said, in effect, that some straight man will lie about being trans and will take advantage of a woman. Consider some straight men’s fear of gay men. This is implicitly the fear that some gay men will take advantage of straight men, the way that some straight men take advantage of women. If you look at these two situations, transphobia and homophobia are not rooted in the fear of trans or gay people, it is rooted in the fear of aggressive straight men.

I’ve talked a lot about women, but I’m a man, so I feel out of equality, that I should also talk about the ideal form of a man, with which I probably have more experience. Maybe the ideal form of a man has certain physical characteristics, education, and income levels. But there are men who don't have those physical characteristics, education, and income levels and are still men.

Our understanding of gender categories and other characteristics of humanity has changed based on the power of reason, through philosophy and science, and that’s progress.

 

Edit: Updated for clarity.