Making Sense of Embodiment Part Four - Closing Rermarks
If we understand gender identity as a way of relating to one's own embodied existence, which has always already been interpreted, then this has a number of implications, two of which I would like to emphasize here.
One is that in the individual psychological dimension, one's own identification with a possible gender identity does not take place in a radically free act in which a person applies a certain term to themselves without this being in any way related to their uninterpreted embodiment. The phrase "identifying as male/female/non-binary" can be understood to mean that on the one hand there is pure biological being and on the other hand there is identification with this being, or the rejection of this being. This understanding is expressed in particular in the parody "I identify as a combat helicopter", which is popular with internet trolls. The idea here seems to be that matter cannot, in a sense, dictate to the mind how the mind should relate to matter. However, this premise, whether it is actually held or taken for a straw-puppet argument, ignores the very fact that there is no uninterpreted experience of one's own embodied existence. "Being" means nothing other than "identifying oneself as", so that this supposed contradiction is not even posed.
The contrast is not between spirit and matter, but between the hermeneutics of the body that is lived and the hermeneutics that is assumed for oneself. One's own embodied existence is always already presented as interpreted, and this way of interpreting is initially adopted, and even the rejection of this way of interpreting must in turn fall back on resources of meaning which are provided by a shared form of life. Therefore, "identifying as" does not take place in a radically free act in which the spirit imposes an arbitrary interpretation on matter but rather a reference to a shared practice of interpreting meaning, which continues it.
Because the category of "biological sex" is also not a purely empirical one, but a scientific interpretation of empirical facts, it is still questionable how meaningful the distinction between "sex" and "gender" is. At the very least, it should be asked how exactly it is to be understood. Because at least in the amateurish debate on social networks, which I am taking as an opportunity to write this text, this distinction also seems to be understood as being about the distinction between the facts as such on the one hand and what people make of them on the other. But here, too, we have to admit that this contrast does not exist, if scientific categorization, too, is already a form of interpretation. It then turns out that "sex" should be understood as a subset of "gender" insofar as it is a matter of interpreting certain aspects of embodied existence, which is aimed at very specific purposes and epistemic interests.
From a phenomenological perspective, it must then be emphasized that the constitutional relationship does not run from "sex" (understood as the uninterpreted given embodiment) to "gender" (understood as the contingent social and individual psychological practice of interpretation that is established around embodiment), but vice versa. What comes first is the lived interpretation of embodied existence, which results from a shared way of life and is expressed in diverse social practices. The embodied existence here, is to be understood holistically, in the sense that the life-worldly concept of gender encompasses bodily, individual psychological, and social aspects which cannot be separated.
Phenomenology emphasizes the primacy of the lifeworld and understands the scientific world as a privation of it. Certain aspects of the rich lifeworld, in which things have meaning and value, are abstracted from it in order to be able to answer very specific questions. But scientific knowledge also remains a way of making sense of the world in which we always find ourselves. This means that scientific practice and its results provide us with a very specific way of interpreting it, which always raises the question of what significance it should have in our lives.