The ‘What is a woman?’ debate: Essentialism, Family Resemblance and The Deferral of Meaning
In the debates about transgender issues, it has been commonly assumed that we are often arguing about the definition of essence of “man” or “woman” and not of being itself. For example, in the popular and controversial documentary “What is a woman?” by Matt Walsh, the focus has been on the word “woman” and not the word “is”. We have acted as if we all commonly agree on what the word “is” means and we just disagree on what the word “woman” means. But what if it’s the other way around? What if we all commonly agree on what “woman” means but we just disagree on what “is” means? Let’s explore this possibility.
In metaphysics, Aristotle made a distinction between essential and accidental properties of an object. Essential properties are the properties that define what an object is. They are necessary for the object to belong to its category or species. If an essential property is removed, the object ceases to be what it is. Accidental properties, on the other hand, are the properties that an object happens to have but are not necessary for it to be what it is. Accidental properties can change without affecting the object’s essence or identity. For example, if we draw a red triangle, its property of “having three sides” is an essential property since if it stopped having three sides, it would stop being a triangle. However, its property of “being red” is an accidental property, since if it stopped being red, it would still be a triangle.
This distinction between essential and accidental properties assumes an essentialist understanding of reality. Essentialism is the view, in this context, that all objects contain essential qualities. In other words, all apples have something in common without which they wouldn’t be apples, all cars have something in common without which they wouldn’t be cars, all women have something in common without which they wouldn’t be women. However, this view is not universally held among philosophers. There are many who argue that only mathematical objects have essential qualities, but not everyday objects.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was one philosopher who argued against essentialism by introducing his concept of family resemblance. Family resemblance refers to the idea that certain categories or concepts do not have a single defining essence or necessary set of shared properties but instead exhibit overlapping similarities among their members. Using Wittgenstein’s concept, we can now define, for the purposes of this essay, a third type of property: an intrinsic property. An intrinsic property is a property that is neither essential nor strictly accidental, in the Aristotelian sense of the word. An intrinsic property is not essential since an object can continue to preserve in its being in the absence of that property. But it’s not purely accidental either, since the property is part of that object’s nature. For example, “being able to fly” is an intrinsic property of birds, since it is strictly related to a bird’s nature. It is not an essential property, since a bird can continue to be a bird if it is not able to fly (for example, a bird with broken wings, or a penguin). But it is not an accidental property either, in the same way that “being white” is an accidental property of being a bird, since being able to fly is still intrinsically related to the nature of being a bird, it’s connected to our intuitive understanding of “birdness”.
I want to argue that, with the exception of mathematical objects, essential properties do not exist. Instead, there are only intrinsic properties and accidental properties. For example, “having a penis” is an intrinsic property of “being male”. It is not an accidental property in the same way that “having blue eyes” is an accidental property of being male, since having a penis is intrinsically related to the nature of being male. However, it’s not an essential property either, since if a man loses his penis in a car accident, we would still call him male. Similarly enough, “being able to give birth” is an intrinsic property of being female, it is neither an essential nor an accidental property. It’s not an accidental property of being female, since we associate “femaleness” with being able to give birth. But it’s not an essential property either, since an infertile woman is still a woman.
This view of identities being made up not of essential properties, but of intrinsic properties, is not completely alien to our understanding of reality. It is commonly used in psychiatry for example, in the definition of mental disorders. In the DSM-5 for instance, depression is defined as having at least 5 of the following 9 symptoms:
1. Chronic feelings of sadness
2. Anhedonia
3. Changes in appetite
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia
5. Psychomotor agitation or retardation
6. Fatigue or loss of energy
7. Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
8. Lack of ability to concentrate
9. Suicidal thoughts
In order to have depression, according to the DSM-5 definition, a person needs to have at least 5 of the stated 9 symptoms. This implies that it is mathematically possible for three people to all have depression without sharing a single symptom in common. What this means is that there is no such thing as an essential property of depression: there is no property that all depressed people have in common without which they wouldn’t be depressed. However, neither of the former 9 symptoms of depression are “accidental properties” in the Aristotelian sense of the word either. Having chronic feelings of sadness is not an accidental property of a depressed person in the same way that “having blonde hair” is an accidental property of a possible depressed person. Having chronic feelings of sadness is an intrinsic, but non-essential property of being depressed, since chronic feelings of sadness are related to the nature of depression more than having blonde hair is related to the nature of depression. It is not an essential property either because it is possible to meet the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression without having that specific symptom, by having another set of 5 symptoms out of those 9 that do not include the first symptom.
Similar to Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family-resemblance’, mental disorders are defined as a family of properties where none of those properties are essential but not purely accidental either. Why don’t we extend this logic to all universal categories, including the categories of male and female? In this view, “woman” is not about a single defining feature but about a set of overlapping properties, some biological, some social, some psychological. Importantly, none of these properties are individually necessary or sufficient to determine “is.” Instead, they function like Wittgenstein’s family resemblance: a category defined by a network of similarities rather than a fixed essence.
This view has profound implications for our understanding of definitions. Under the conservative-Aristotelian logic, the answer to their question “What is a woman?” should be a set of necessary and sufficient qualities of femalehood, an essence, a property or set of properties that all woman have in common without which they wouldn’t be women. But we recognize that not even scientific and rigorously-defined categories such as mental disorders in the DSM have essential properties, but only intrinsic properties. No definition is perfect, outside of mathematical objects. Any definition you give will have exceptions and imperfections. Millenia ago, the ancient Greeks were arguing about what a man is. Plato replied that a man is a “featherless biped”, so Diogenes brought in the room a skinned chicken and said “Behold, a man!”.
Haven’t we learned our lesson from Diogenes? Definitions are not fixed and static, they are not a final destination. Conservatives nowadays argue that you cannot define “woman” as “a person who identifies as a woman”, because this definition is circular and includes in it the word that is trying to be defined. This is correct, but at the same time, all definitions are circular. Any definition of a word is made up of other words. The definitions of those words are also made up of other words, and if you keep this up and look up in the dictionary the definition of each word you encounter, you will inevitably end up in a loop. Thus, all definitions are somehow circular.
This phenomenon has been of great debate in 70th century French philosophy. Lacan would’ve argued that each signifier is the subject for another signifier, and thus the whole signifying chain rests up on the intuitive knowledge of one signifier whose definition includes itself, what he named ‘the master signifier’, denoted as “S1”. Lacan showed that it is not possible to define a language based only on a dictionary without circularity, unless you intuitively know the meaning of at least two words in that language, named “S1” and “S2”. If you were to try to train an AI to learn a language by only feeding it a dictionary, it would not be able to learn that language since the definition of each word would be made up of other words whose meaning the AI also doesn’t know, and the AI will keep looking up definitions and end up in a loop, in circularity. If the AI were to magically know the meaning of only one word in that language, it also wouldn’t be able to produce anything else other than synonyms. The AI must know the meaning of at least two words without requiring a definition for them. In this way, the third word’s definition will simply be the first two words put next to each other, the fourth word’s definition will be made up of the previous three, and so on. If you know the meaning of two words, you can theoretically create a language with a dictionary out of them. This is why Lacan only talks about “S1” and “S2” but never S3.
Lacan was part of the structuralist tradition, where meaning is generated by underlying structures in society, such as language or the unconscious. For structuralism, a whole (such as society, or language) is not the sum of its parts, but the sum of the relations or differences between its parts. For example, if you take a picture of an object and you apply a negative filter on top of it, you will still recognize the object in the picture, even though the color of each individual part (pixel) of that picture has changed: all white pixels turned black, all black pixels turned white, etc. Even though all the parts of the whole have changed, the whole has kept its structure. This is how structuralists (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Levi-Strauss) view language: meaning is created not in isolation, but in the relationships between words. This should challenge the critique of circularity made by conservatives like Matt Walsh: the meaning of a word like “woman” is not created in isolation, but through context, in the relationship with other words. We never reach the meaning of one single part (word) of the whole that is language, instead the meaning of a larger structure is created through the deferral of meaning between signifiers.
The deferral of meaning was not the topic of structuralists alone. Post-structuralism took the conclusions structuralism and “radicalized” them, followed them to the very end. Derrida, Deleuze or Foucault would’ve questioned the very stability of such interpretative structures. For Derrida, language is iterative. Derrida argued that the meaning of an utterance can always be quoted from a “meta” perspective: the meaning of a statement itself has a meaning, the meaning of that meaning itself has a meaning and so on to infinity. This infinite regress challenges our conception of the meaning in language as a stable and knowable essence.
Gilles Deleuze argued a very similar thing to Derrida in chapter 5 of “The Logic of Sense”. For Deleuze, the sense of a proposition is not something that exists, but an event that happens, a quality that ‘insists or inheres’ in a proposition only the moment it is expressed. For Deleuze, you can never directly state the sense of what you say. Instead, the sense of a proposition can only be denoted by a second proposition, and the sense of the second proposition can only be denoted by a third proposition and so on. This means that the meaning of a statement is never a final destination, but more like a journey, and in the spirit of process philosophy, language is not made up of meanings that ‘exist’ but of processes of meaning that happen, an evolving, continuously changing flux.
Gilles Deleuze further argued that sense is a surface effect. The sense of a proposition is not found in the Aristotelian ‘depths’ or in the Platonic ‘heights’, according to Deleuze. This is why, when a transgender person says “I am a man” or “I am a woman” or “I am neither a man or a woman”, the question “What the hell does this even mean?” is misguided if we expect to find a fixed, simple answer. The content of the meaning is inside the form itself, in the surface interaction between the signifiers and their environment. For example, a grunt or a moan during sex can be thought of as signifiers (they can signify sexual pleasure, that you’re doing something right in bed, etc.). But at the same time, you wouldn’t interrupt the moment to ask your partner “What do you mean by this moan?”, that would be absurd. The meaning of the moan is on the surface, its purpose is not to rationally and efficiently communicate a logical statement, but to express an emotion, a vibe. Similarly, the statement “I am a woman” is like a moan. It’s a surface effect, its meaning is not found ‘in the depths’, but on the surface. It just feels right. It’s a vibe.
This view of sense as a surface effect helps us in understanding how meaning can be conveyed in the absence of rigorous definitions. Humans do not require, like computers, a strict definition of a signifier in order to process its meaning. For example, we all have a vague understanding of what math is, but no one can define what math is. We all know what philosophy is, but it’s extremely hard to define what philosophy is. So then, why define “woman”? Do conservatives really want to engage in a complex and nuanced debate about what it means to define a word, or do they want to enjoy the feeling that they trapped others in a “gotcha” moment? After watching the “What is a woman?” documentary, I get the feeling it’s the latter, considering how the gender studies professor’s long and complex answer was simply cut from the documentary and completely ignored.
