105. Ray Briggs | What Even Is Gender?

What if the biggest mistakes in debates about gender come from treating “gender identity” as one unified thing, instead of a cluster of different feelings, traits, and social norms that can come apart?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestRay Briggs is professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and their work has focused on a range of topics, including chance and decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and gender. This interview was recorded with audio only.Check out their book with B. R. George, "What Even is Gender?"!https://www.routledge.com/p/book/97803675132142. Book SummaryIn What Even Is Gender?, Ray Briggs and B. R. George argue that the familiar question “what is gender?” invites confusion, because there isn’t one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or “gender identity”). Instead, mainstream discourse (including lots of well-meaning “trans 101” framings) tends to conflate a cluster of distinct social, material, and psychological phenomena—conflations that can make trans and gender-nonconforming lives unintelligible and can smuggle in hidden assumptions about what trans legitimacy is supposed to require. The book’s project is therefore largely conceptual: to diagnose where our ordinary talk goes wrong and to engineer a clearer alternative framework that can better represent the variety of lived experience and the political demands of trans liberation.Chapters 2 and 3 build the book’s core “map” of what the authors call the ‘sex/gender system’. Chapter 2 replaces the overly unified notion of ‘gender identity’ with a more fine-grained account in terms of ‘gender feels’: self-situating attitudes toward different gendered traits, organized (for their purposes) into sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories. This helps explain why different subjective “feels” can come apart (and why lumping them together causes practical and political misunderstandings). Chapter 3 then shifts from subjective attitudes to public structure, distinguishing different kinds of social norms that link categories, biology, and behavior; it treats many of these norms as obvious targets of feminist and queer critique, while warning that some “abolitionist” rhetoric slides illicitly from opposing oppressive norms to condemning the categories or behaviors the norms are about.Chapters 4 and 5 turn from diagnosis to guidance: Chapter 4 argues that we should treat people’s self-reports of ‘gender feels’ as deserving default trust—presuming sincerity, competence, coherence, and moral respect—unless we have specific reasons to depart from those defaults, and it critiques common patterns of dismissing trans subjectivity. Chapter 5 defends a political principle of ‘gender self-determination’: in general, we should categorize people according to their sincerely expressed wishes rather than outsiders’ projections, and this requires treating gender categories as irreducible (not settled by biology, behavior, or the norms society imposes), without that irreducibility collapsing into circularity or mysticism. The conclusion frames many recurring confusions as a kind of “essentialism” that mistakes contingent links (between traits, norms, and feels) for constitutive necessities; the authors urge “less essentialism, more imagination,” emphasizing both the real variety already present in human lives and our collective power to change gender norms and the rules by which category membership gets socially administered.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:44 - Target audience02:23 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive06:23 - History and cross-cultural comparison12:48 - Idealizing gender15:00 - Gender as a single thing?19:07 - Gender traits and feels26:30 - Gender identity31:34 - Vagueness of gender language33:17 - Developing categories35:55 - Second-order gender feels38:26 - Gender norms41:24 - Feels and norms43:14 - Abolitionism53:53 - Semantic trade-offs56:15 - Another case for abolitionism59:45 - Too many categories?1:03:39 - Self-determination1:05:14 - Circular?1:10:22 - Reductive definitions1:11:35 - Uninformative account?1:16:11 - My general descriptive view1:24:38 - Term haggling1:26:02 - How this might help trans people1:27:24 - Value of philosophy1:29:44 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe