143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestKevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality.Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"!https://academic.oup.com/book/61709https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf2. Book SummaryKevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose.The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape.Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:42 - Overview of book05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive14:50 - Gender binaries20:47 - Biological binaries25:07 - Gender norms32:47 - Linguistic constraints37:15 - Social accounts47:07 - Haggling usage53:07 - Spatial theory of gender59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness1:07:12 - Gender kinds1:12:53 - Vagueness1:23:14 - Abolitionism1:27:15 - Social issues1:34:47 - Making progress1:41:01 - Value of philosophy1:44:50 - 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