Episode post here. Thanks to Caroline Wall for another brilliantly executed transcript. I hope you enjoy the written version!
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman.
Henry Curtis:
And I’m Henry Curtis.
Matt Teichman:
With us today is Stephanie Kapusta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University, and she’s here to discuss misgendering. Stephanie Kapusta, welcome.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Hello. Thank you for inviting me.
Matt Teichman:
I think probably our listeners are familiar with this terminology, but just in case people aren’t up to date, what do terms like “trans” and “cis” mean, or transgender versus cisgender?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Well, I think what I mean by “trans,” when I talk about transgender, or trans—it’s an umbrella term, particularly “trans.” It means, from my point of view, all those people who in some way reject, resist, or do not feel comfortable with the gender labels they were assigned at birth. And so by way of contrast, “cis” people, or cisgender people, would be those persons who, do in some way—to a lesser or greater degree, of course—accept those gender labels that they were assigned at birth.
Matt Teichman:
So this is actually something I wonder about a lot. So does cisgender mean that you’re comfortable with the labels you’ve been assigned at birth? Or does it mean you’re not that uncomfortable, as it were?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Well, yeah, that’s an interesting question. I would say that there has to be at least quite a few contexts in which you would say, “I am a man,” or, “I am a woman,” where those labels were assigned to you at birth. So you may not be psychologically comfortable, to a greater or lesser degree, with those labels. But there has to be a range of contexts if you are willing in some sense, even begrudgingly, to say, yes, I am a man, I am a woman—in some sense.
Henry Curtis:
Would you say that in order for someone, in your view, to be trans, they would have to take the discomfort that they feel with the gender they were assigned at birth, and identify as a gender different than that? Or could a certain degree of uncomfortability itself qualify someone as being trans?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes. This is quite a complex question, actually, because there are some trans people who, as we say in some trans communities, “live stealth,” who self-identify as the gender opposite—if we want to use those “opposites”—to the gender they were assigned at birth, but for various reasons cannot publicly declare themselves to be of that gender. So from a philosophical point of view, I think those are very difficult cases. I think there has to be some sort of at least psychological rejection—or existential rejection, if you prefer that kind of terminology—of the gender label that you were assigned at birth, although it may not be publicly expressed.
Matt Teichman:
I found that my students are often surprised to hear that there are many different ways via language that we acknowledge each other’s genders. So what are some examples of that?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Well, the way we acknowledge people’s genders probably is through pronouns—through pronoun use—very often through first names and appellations of various sorts, where those appellations are gendered according to commonly accepted social conventions. There are far more, if you want, pragmatic ways in which gender is self-declared or asserted. So this might be something like using a particular washroom instead of another washroom, applying for a driver’s license, perhaps where you have to put your gender in. So in a broad sense, I think you can be gendered—either self-gendered in various ways or gendered by others—not just through utterances or speech acts, but also in various practical things that you do, through certain processes or behaviors that you undertake or don’t undertake in a given context.
Matt Teichman:
That’s interesting. So whenever there’s any kind of social practice where the assumption is: this is a practice primarily that people of gender X are entitled to do—by doing that, you implicitly convey the message to the outside world that you are of the relevant gender.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes. But then again, it’s alluding to what we said earlier—it’s not always the case that in public, what I declare really corresponds to my subjective sense of the gender I am, because of these complications of why people might think it’s safer not to declare their own psychological, personal sense of who they are.
Matt Teichman:
Isn’t one big reason for that that sometimes, it’s just not physically safe—like the person could be under threat of some sort of violence from their community?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think in a lot of contexts, and in various countries, as we know, if we look at the degree of violence, particularly against trans women—particularly against trans women of color—it can be extremely unsafe to declare your gender in various open ways, as understood as really declaring, “this is who I am.” That can be a very unsafe thing to do.
Henry Curtis:
So recently, you published a paper, “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability,” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Could you maybe just start us off by discussing what you take misgendering to be?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes. So misgendering, I think, has this broad sense in which it would be any kind of practice, be it linguistic or other, by which you are explicitly or implicitly labeled as a particular gender with which you do not identify. So, for example, this could be use of the incorrect pronoun. For example, in the case of a trans woman, it could be terms that connote maleness or masculine when applied to that person. Obviously, a lot might depend on particular conventions—linguistic conventions, other conventions—but the practical implication would be that this person is not of the gender that they self-identify with.
And then in a more, I guess, technical sense, the sense that I consider in the article you mentioned, I wanted the term “misgendering” to encompass all those deployments of gender terms and gender concepts that, in particular in reference to trans women, either exclude those women from the category or the social kind “women,” or, within that category and social kind, marginalize them in some way, or make them non-central cases, or hard cases, or problematic cases, according to the theory that you’re discussing.
Matt Teichman:
What would be an everyday example of misgendering?
Stephanie Kapusta:
So one happened to me today. I was at—
Matt Teichman:
I’m sorry to hear that.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes, it happens to me, occasionally. So I was in a coffee shop, and I ordered a coffee and a sweet, and the sweet wasn’t available. And the server said something to a colleague—“Could you get this sweet for him?” I was standing there at the counter, obviously. So that would be an everyday example of misgendering.
Matt Teichman:
Would that also be an example of the second thing you mentioned, whereby a person is made to feel like they’re being excluded from full membership in the gender category that they identify with?
Stephanie Kapusta:
So this second idea—certainly, I think it is implied in every individual act of everyday misgendering. But this second concept of misgendering that I developed in my thinking that appears partly in that article is the idea that there can be theoretical accounts, philosophical accounts, of what gender is that explicitly or implicitly exclude, for example, transgender women from the category “woman” or from the social kind “woman.”
Some accounts, for example, of gender are cluster accounts. So I refer to cluster accounts as accounts of a general kind where there is a series of membership conditions. They may describe some properties that an individual satisfies in order to belong to the social kind “woman.”
Now, cluster accounts have this often desirable property that you don’t need to exhibit all of the properties. You don’t need to satisfy all of the conditions to belong to the kind, or the category, but just enough of them. But the way, very often, that these accounts are formulated is in terms of properties or conditions that non-passable or non-passing transgender women—and I can come back to that in a minute—will fail to satisfy, or will satisfy very few of them.
Okay. So in a sense, if you’re talking about a kind, membership of which is guaranteed by satisfying enough of a certain number of criteria, then if you satisfy fewer of those, or if you get to a position where you become a borderline case, I regard that as a situation of what I call “marginalization,” where it is possibly a vague matter whether you are a member or not a member, or you are a borderline case because you don’t satisfy very many of those properties.
And since I began talking about passing privilege, I think that is a privilege to be perceived within society as a cisgender woman. It is a kind of a privilege. I do acknowledge that passing transgender women do have some problems of their own that are specific to them. But on the whole, I would say that passing as cisgender within society is a kind of privilege. But the problem within these cluster accounts, be they family resemblance accounts, whatever kinds of accounts they are—it is the non-passing transgender women who will tend to be marginalized.
So I like to talk about a specific example. I ask readers to imagine Laura, a late transitioner—perhaps around 50, 55 years old—who’s been struggling with her gender identity perhaps for many years, did not come out as a child or as a young person because decades ago, this was a very difficult process, a completely different process than what it is today. In many societies, there was no internet. There was no general information. And people of that generation very often went through life—they would get married, they would have children, and then coming out as trans became even more difficult because of the extra burdens involved.
So I treat that kind of person and I say, well, as I know is the case with many transgender people I know, say because of health problems or various other reasons that a trans woman cannot have gender-conforming surgery—perhaps may not even be able to have hormonal treatment of any kind—because it is risky for their health. Now, such a person very often will not be visibly feminized, may still have a very deep voice, may still have big hands, big feet, might even have a five o’clock shadow, will not generally have typically female body parts either, and yet self-identifies as a woman.
With cluster accounts, it is very difficult to see how such a person could satisfy enough of the properties, because the properties usually include some sort of biological element in them—norms of appearance, satisfying certain norms of paradigmatically feminine appearance, for example—and none of this is there. Sometimes it seems to be purely self-declaration, really, that’s the deciding factor. And cluster accounts don’t seem to be able to take this into account. And so I like looking from the perspective of Laura at the issue of misgendering within philosophy, because I think it undermines a lot of the accounts—not just the cluster accounts, but a lot of other accounts that are based on, or allude, in some way, to biological characteristics.
Matt Teichman:
So tell me if this is right. I guess the idea behind a cluster definition of what a woman is would be something like: in order to be a woman, you have to have properties X, Y, and Z. I don’t know what—you wear earrings, you wear makeup, you have certain biological characteristics. We have a list. And it’s probably not going to work as a definition to say, in order to be a woman, you have to satisfy every property on the list—because, look, this woman over here doesn’t wear makeup. This one over here doesn’t wear earrings. But we have some sense that if you satisfy enough of them—like half of them, 60% of them, or whatever—you pass some threshold that’s enough to count as a man, or a woman, or whathaveyou.
And then, it seems like maybe the problem that Laura poses for even this attempt to salvage a definition in terms of having this list of properties is that Laura identifies as a woman despite meeting only a very low percentage of these properties, if any.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes, that’s correct. And in addition, if you have, then, a corresponding cluster account of what it means to be a man, Laura may actually satisfy quite a few of the properties that count towards belonging to the gender “man,” which would lead to the rather unfortunate and undesirable (from a trans perspective) conclusion that you could call Laura a man because, for example, I don’t know, she dresses in a certain way, or she has a low voice, or she has a penis, or whatever is within your cluster account.
Henry Curtis:
So in the place of the cluster account, you discussed earlier that we may want to actually put self-avowal in the place of the cluster count as the relevant factor with respect to statements about the genders of particular people. Is this right? Could you maybe talk a little bit more about this?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Oh, yes. I think this is an ongoing philosophical project that I, myself, am interested in. So I do work on social ontology, and I do want to develop a theory within social ontology within which one can definitively say trans women are women. Trans men are men. From my own research, I don’t think that such an account exists at the moment, unfortunately. I think there are various moves—helpful moves, very interesting moves—within social and political philosophy, broadly construed, to make sure that gender self-identifications have a certain priority and are respected. And I think that’s good. But I find I’m still dissatisfied, particularly in social ontology, as I said, with the extant theories, because it’s difficult to see how we can say transgender women simply are women.
Because it’s one thing to say that someone is a woman, and another thing to say we should respect her gender self-identification. I think these are two different claims. And I see, at the moment, a little bit of a gap. And social ontology is not easy, as people have pointed out to me. It’s very difficult to specify what it means to be a cisgender woman, in many contexts—and I think that’s quite right. But I think it’s important for transgender men and women, from a philosophical point of view, to be able to say, look, here’s a theory according to which you are men, you are women—period.
Henry Curtis:
You also regard that type of philosophical move—the sort where someone might say, well, according to our theory, we’re going to say that for ethical reasons, we should use a certain pronoun but not really consider the person to be the gender associated with that pronoun—that’s one of the sorts of acts of philosophical misgendering that you discuss, right?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Right, yes. So because philosophical misgendering has this more specific meaning, it can mean any theoretical account of how to apply gender terms, or gender concepts, or criteria for defining or characterizing who is a woman. Any such account that excludes people causes them psychological harms, quite possibly, and will diminish the credibility of the accounts of who they are. So it’s a kind of what we call an epistemic injustice, in that we misgender someone, and therefore don’t take their statement of who they are at face value.
And as you were saying, one way of doing that is, implicitly or explicitly in your philosophical account, to say, as some philosophers have done, look, we have this account of who is a woman—for example, with transgender women or cisgender women, in general—doesn’t quite fit perhaps all transgender women. It doesn’t fit Laura, for example. But there are good ethical and political reasons to call her a woman. I find that very unsatisfactory, because you’re not really validating their claims to the full. You’re saying, well, hey, you might claim you’re a woman. We really know that you’re not, according to our theory, but we respect your appellation, or your self-declaration. And that’s in itself kind of questionable, from a trans point of view.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. It almost feels like if we stopped there, we’d just be saying, oh, we’ll humor you. But we don’t actually believe that you have membership in the category.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes. And I think that’s correct. And so I think any move that goes that way is kind of, I don’t know, dissatisfying and possibly misgendering. Of course, it depends on the details of how the philosophical account is formulated in detail. So I’m not making some sort of general accusation here. It’s just that I have come across theories of that nature, and I list some in my article.
Henry Curtis:
So one way I think in your paper that you very interestingly relate theoretical philosophy with practice is by what you call the criterion for unacceptability that you express counterfactually. So you say we have these philosophical theories of gender, including the sort that we were discussing earlier that might say, well, we don’t necessarily think people are in this category, but for ethical or political reasons, we’ll say that they are. And you say these are only acceptable if it is the case that if they were to be applied in broader society, they would not cause harm or offense to trans people, and they’re unacceptable if they would cause that harm. Can you speak a little bit more about that criterion?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yeah. I quite like this criterion. I think it forces philosophers to stay grounded. So if X is a philosophical deployment of the gender term “woman,” that means it is just its extension, or the theory that explains what “woman” means. Okay. So a description of what a woman is, for example, would be the gender term deployment of “woman,” or one example of such. Then, I asked myself, how can misgendering happen in philosophy? I mean, Laura certainly is not necessarily a philosopher. So she’s never heard these philosophical theories. She doesn’t come in contact with them. But there is something still questionable that I want to point out.
And so I established this criterion, which, I don’t know, has some allusions to various similar other criteria—like in Kantian ethics, universalizability. There are certain Rawlsian ideas, as well, in political philosophy—a publicity criterion, for example. What you do is, to find out whether your gender term deployment is acceptable, you imagine this kind of counterfactual. And you say, that deployment is unacceptable from a transgender standpoint if the deployment would be oppressive or harmful with respect to some group of transgender women, particularly when implemented or broadly applied within society.
So what you do is you imagine, well, let’s take this account of what a woman is, and let’s say it became law, or it became government policy, or it became the general criteria on the street according to which we would label people. And we ask, what would that do to people like Laura? Would she, for example, suffer microaggressions? Would she experience a diminishment of her self-respect? Would she experience epistemic injustice? Would her credibility diminish? And we ask these questions about these harms. And if we could fairly reasonably say, yes, she would experience one or more of these harms, then I say that this gender term deployment is unacceptable.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, right. So it’s something like, if we’re going to try to figure out what gender is—what being a man is, what being a woman is—I’m going to try to get to the bottom of what it means to be these things and have an account. There are lots of different things you have to take into consideration regarding whether or not the account is correct. And what you’re doing here is you’re highlighting one thing that’s on that list—namely, if we’re choosing between several possible definitions of what counts as man, what counts as a woman, and one of them has the unacceptable consequences—namely, if it were to be adopted by everybody, someone like Laura wouldn’t count as a woman—it doesn’t look so great for that definition. We might want to pass it up and consider another one.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes, that’s correct. So I should emphasize that really, I’m talking about gender term deployments. I’m not making great ontological claims or metaphysical claims at the moment, because I’m still thinking about the metaphysics of gender, and I don’t really have a set opinion. But the question is really gender term deployment. So really, it’s an argument about language, and the harms that language can inflict. And the acceptibility or unacceptability criteria are with regard to the deployments of terms such as “man” and “woman.” So a gender term deployment is either intensional or it’s extensional. Okay? So it’s intensional if I give a description of what “woman” means, okay? I give a series of conditions for the application of that term.
Matt Teichman:
And that’s “intensional” with an S.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes.
Matt Teichman:
S-I-O-N.
Stephanie Kapusta:
That’s correct. Intensional with an S. It’s extensional if I ask, well, who do the competent language users point to or indicate when they use the word “woman”? Okay? But those are both—both the intensional and the extensional, or the connotational and denotational—are gender term deployments. But it’s really still talking about language. Okay? So I give, also, an example in my work of a doctor who’s meeting Laura in his office. And the question is, for example, whether Laura has prostate cancer. The doctor may use the term “man” intensionally to mean someone who has a prostate. So that would be an intensional deployment. There is a description that someone satisfies in order to be labeled as a “man,” in quotation marks.
And my argument is, if that is microaggressive towards Laura—if it is disrespectful, if it is marginalizing towards Laura, if also, for example, it’s triggering for Laura, if it triggers various reliving memories of certain past experiences for Laura—then the solution is not to say, well, the doctor is the expert in the use of that term. That is not the solution. The solution is, Mr. Doctor, please use different terms. Use different language. Refer to “people with prostates,” or talk in some other way in which these harms are not being inflicted on Laura.
Matt Teichman:
Right. Okay. So when we talk about our deployment of these terms, we’re talking about which group of people we’re singling out as having these terms apply to them, or something like that, through the way we use them. So it’s a matter of singling people out through our language use.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes. So I guess I’m looking for a way to say that irrespective of expertise or social authority, there are certain uses of language, of gendered language in particular, which are what I call morally contestable, irrespective of who’s doing it. And misgendering is a very good example, I think, of this morally contestable term deployment or language deployment.
Henry Curtis:
So in the case with Laura and the doctor, you bring up an interesting objection to the intensional deployment of the term “woman.” I also think one of the very constructive things in your paper is a critique that you have of the extensional use and deployment of the term “woman,” specifically with regards to “woman” being taken as a natural kind term. You say—and I like this quite a bit—there’s an issue, because typically, with natural kind terms, we want to say that the extension is determined by the way the term is used in a linguistic community. But you raise the issue, which linguistic community are we going to be discussing? Should it be a simple majoritarian account, or should it be weighted in some other way? Could you maybe talk a little bit more about that?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yeah. So the natural kind issue is distinct, I think, from the extensional account. So the natural kind issue—someone might say, well, what is the fuss about? I am going to use “man” with respect to Laura as meaning someone with a penis. Okay? It’s a biological criterion. It’s just there. It’s, say, people with penises belong to a biological kind, and we’re going to call it “man.” I think that is incorrect for the same reason that the doctor is incorrect in calling Laura a man. But the point you mentioned about, then, the extensional deployments of gender terms—that does relate to the community of competent language users. And I simply point out that if you say, well, let’s look at the way competent language users use the term “man,” or use the term “woman,” and stick with that as the extension of these terms, you have to ask, well, which community of competent language users?
Because you can end up with a linguistic tyranny of the majority. And the question is, I think, an important one, because you have to realize that trans people are not incompetent language users. In fact, contestations or countercurrent uses of gender terms presuppose language competence. So resistant deployments or contestatory deployments of gender terms rely on the fact that, for example, gender nonconforming or transgender people, or trans people, know how the term is standardly employed within society.
And then, the question then becomes, well, whose deployments? If, say, there is a community of trans people, and there’s another community—a majoritarian, say, community—whose deployment are we going to take as the standard or the linguistically normative deployment? And of course, saying, well, obviously the standard cisgender use of “man” or “woman” should be the deployment we accept, and we use, and we regard as normative, is not going to avoid, and in fact will exacerbate, the moral and political harms that we’re trying to avoid.
Matt Teichman:
So one thing I’m fascinated by in this topic is why we put so much stock in being correctly gendered. I mean, if you compare it to another property—if somebody accidentally said, “Hey, you in the gray shirt,” when in fact I was wearing a green shirt—I wouldn’t really care. I’d be like, oh, you know, it’s a green shirt, but whatever. I can tell you’re talking to me. Getting my shirt right I don’t take to be a really important matter. It’s not like it’s going to injure me in some way if somebody gets the color of my shirt wrong. But gender seems like it’s not like that. We want people to get our genders right. But why is that? It’s not immediately obvious. It seems like maybe there’s some work to be done there in explaining: what’s the nature of the harm if somebody gets my gender wrong?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yeah, that’s quite a big question, I think. And I can only signal certain points here. For one, I don’t claim that everybody is particularly concerned about whether they are misgendered or not. I have encountered some people who really don’t seem to care whether someone misgenders them or not. I think those people exist. I don’t deny their existence, and certainly, perhaps a lot of my ideas may not apply to those people.
It is true, on the other hand, that as you point out, many people—probably most people—do care quite significantly and quite deeply about whether they are misgendered or not, particularly if they perceive a certain pattern of persistent misgendering. So, for example, you may occasionally be misgendered by mistake. Someone sees you from the back, uses the wrong pronoun, and misgenders you in some way accidentally.
Matt Teichman:
Happens to me a lot with waitstaff.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes, exactly. So that is a kind of an accidental or an incidental misgendering, in the broad sense. I’m really concerned with this harmful, very often persistent kind of misgendering that goes on—and also the misgendering that is, if you want, inflected by the identity and the experiences of the person who is misgendered. I think the situation is different when someone has not struggled to assert their gender identity, has not lived in a marginalized social position on account of their gender identity.
The people who have been harmed by gender identity are those who are—and I mention three things here—those for whom misgendering is a microaggression, by which I understand a kind of utterance that is a slight, that is offensive, that is insulting, that may seem relatively minor on one occasion, but its persistent nature, its iterative nature, its repeated nature, as psychological research on microaggressions has shown, can have really rather deep and nasty psychological effects, like hypersensitivity, lack of sleep, anxiety issues, and so on. So certainly, I think many, many trans people have struggled with asserting their gender identity and have been subject to these kinds of microaggressions.
The second harm is the lack of self-respect that people can experience, particularly if they’re persistently misgendered. So in as much as for many trans people, growing into their gender identity, beginning to assert it with confidence has been a struggle, is one of their major life projects, then denying the reasonableness or the rationality of that life project—the doability, if you want, of that life project—is, as people have pointed out, very destructive of self-respect, of really knowing that my life project is worth doing, that my life project is worth living. And I think misgendering in all its forms can lead to that kind of moral, political harm.
And thirdly, there is the problem of credibility. Someone who can shape contemporary discourses about gender—so it’s a kind of what we call “hermeneutical injustice” in the sense that my say of what my gender is, and perhaps of what gender is in general, is not contributing to discourses about gender. I am marginalized as a knower, as someone who can have valuable input here. And also, my credibility as a gender witness—if you are a witness of what gender is—I suffer a credibility deficit, basically. So all those harms are really what I’m focusing on. So it’s, as you see, quite different from the case of, “Hey, you in the green shirt.”
Matt Teichman:
Do you think it’s analogous to other kinds of life projects that you might take to be really important or central? I’m thinking about, I don’t know—suppose I decided to set aside my life to study improvisational piano. And then, I went up on stage, and I start performing, and it was like people in the audience couldn’t even tell that I was playing music, or couldn’t even tell that I was acting like I wasn’t even doing the thing that I feel like I’m devoting my life to doing. Do you think that’s a possible analogy? Or is there something different there?
Stephanie Kapusta:
That’s a good question. I think there is something different, because with gender, it’s a question of a social position, whereas with concert pianists, it’s more profession or something else. It’s not like social kinds, race, gender, very often ethnicity, that socially position us in that kind of way. So I would say there is that quite considerable difference. Which doesn’t mean to deny that someone can genuinely be harmed in their ambition and their life project of being a concert pianist—particularly if they have the competence, and if they have the ambition and the hard work, and yet, for some morally irrelevant reason, those life projects are frustrated.
Henry Curtis:
So this may be a bit of a broad question, but do you think, in recent years, the characterizations of the term “woman,” and its reference, and the appropriate situations for its deployment that are provided in feminist philosophy—do you think that there has been some progress that’s been made, in terms of avoiding the kind of misgendering that you discuss in the paper? Or do you not see that kind of progress?
Stephanie Kapusta:
Yes, I do see that progress. I would say that there is progress. And there is certainly a keenness by several authors—and also, I know, from personal conversations—certainly to affirm trans self-identifications. And I see that as very positive. Where I think there is still some work to do is, as I mentioned before, this kind of theoretical gap that I’m sensing between the political and ethical postulate or desideratum to respect gender self-identifications, and the kind of metaphysical theories of what gender is. I still think there’s this gap there that needs to be filled. And that’s a project for the future.
Matt Teichman:
Stephanie Kapusta, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephanie Kapusta:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
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