October 7, 2023

Making Sense of Embodiment Part One – Introduction

My engagement with philosophy of gender and sex is embarrassingly superficial. I have not read any of the canonical texts on the matter, and I have only read a handful of texts on it at all. So, readers who are more familiar with the subject than I am will most likely find that I am re-inventing the wheel here. However, this is alright for me, because the text is personal in two regards. It is personal in the sense that I wanted to get a clearer picture of my own view on sex, gender, and the relation between the two. And it is personal in the sense that the attempt to get a clearer picture on my own view was prompted by my struggle with my own gender identity. So, for the following series of texts, I am going to adopt the - no doubt somewhat condescending - attitude that Wittgenstein expresses in his preface to the Tractatus and not care whether anything I am saying has been said before.

This text is an attempt to explore the relationship between bodily existence and personal identity, especially gender identity against the background of some phenomenological and hermeneutic ideas. My impression of debates that keep occuring on Social Media is that a demarcation between biological gender and social and individual psychological gender identity (the relationship between these of these two terms is yet to be clarified) is widely accepted. On the one hand, a primacy of the biological and the existence of possibly deviating social and individual individual psychological identities is flatly denied or pathologized. Less extreme positions on this side concede a certain legitimacy to genderqueer identities, but insist that the “actual” or “real” identity is the biological one. On the other side, we often find the concession that there are in fact two biological genders, but the social and individual psychological level is given precedence. Yes, there are two distinct and mutually exclusive biological sexes, but what is decisive is how the individual identifies and that is largely independent of the biological constitution.

In the following, I would like to take a closer look at what is actually being demarcated here from what and how far these demarcations carry. As already indicated, it looks at first as if we are dealing here with the contrast between “matter” and “mind” and the question of what dominates over what. On closer inspection, the situation turns out to be far more complicated, because at least two dimensions can be subsumed under “mind”, which are conceptually separated from each other and in concrete cases overlap or diverge in terms of content, namely the social and the individual-psychological. This results in (at least) three dimensions of gender identity, each of which can stand in different relationships to the other. My initial thesis is that the separation between “matter” and “mind” and thus between “sex” and “gender” is under-complex and also only applicable in a limited number of situations (if at all). The reason for this is that in all of them we are dealing with practices of interpretation or meaning-making.

My approach is informed by phenomenology and hermeneutic, broadly construed. I am operating on the assumption that all human experience, including experience of oneself, is interpreted. Humans are, as David McPherson says, meaning-seeking animals.1 In order to lead the kind of life we are living, we need to make sense of the things we encounter, so that we can adequately place them in the larger context of our life.

This, I think, holds especially for aspects of our existence that shape our life more than others. And clearly, the fact that we are embodied - and that we are embodied in the specific way that we are, rather than another - is a key aspect of our existence. We are born and we are raised. We are susceptible to illness and afflictions. We need nurture and sensory experience. We age and die. All these phenomena give our life a specific shape and force us to relate to them in one way or another. So, the way in which we make sense of ours specific em bodied existence is of special importance.

Furthermore, we do not come to make sense of our existence in this way rather than another all by ourselves. We are born and raised into a community which already has established ways of sense-making and passes them onto us. Of course, we can reject these established ways and find our own, but even then we adopt them at first - in fact we could not reject them if we hadn’t adopted them.

So, in the following series, I will be taking a look at sex and gender as manifestations of established ways of making sense of human embodied existence.