Sally Haslanger has recently attempted to clarify the issues of debate over the metaphysics of

gender, or sexed, identity, and has raised the specter of objectivism in relation to sexual categories,
though her defense of objectivism is given abstractly, that is, without specifying what precisely is
objective about sexual difference. Haslanger is a rare bridge figure, capable of drawing out the full
implications of contemporary analytic approaches and relating these to current feminist and anti-
racist discussions occurring at the margins of philosophy. In her essay “Feminism and Metaphysics:
Negotiating the Natural,” Haslanger begins with a consideration of the tension between feminism
and metaphysics, given that most feminists reject metaphysics and most metaphysicians ignore
feminist philosophy. She is critical of both. She argues that feminists who reject metaphysics are
operating with an outdated notion of the field, in which metaphysics is still trying to access an
unmediated Real and produce irrefutable truths. This characterization is not true of contemporary
post-Quinean metaphysics, she holds, which understands itself as operating within a theory-laden
field and with a pre-existing set of doxastic commitments that are organized as more of a web than
a foundationalist pyramid. But she also argues that post-Quinean metaphysics has been inattentive
to the political influences affecting its priorities, its framing questions, and, consequently, its
determination of what is central versus peripheral in the organization of the web. Thus, she tries to
develop a metaphysical approach to feminist questions that will include a political reflexivity.

Haslanger’s main thesis is to argue that the feminist tendency toward skeptical and nominalist views
about the objective basis of gender distinctions is unwarranted both philosophically and politically.
That is, feminists have not made sufficient arguments to show that there is no objective basis for
gender distinctions, and they have incorrectly assumed that if there were such an objective basis,
this could only provide support for patriarchy. Thus, her main argument is in the form of a negative:
that the anti-realism about gender is unwarranted. I find most of her reasoning compelling, but in
one crucial part of her critique of the skeptical and nominalist position she ignores an important
argument. Thus, my concern here will be to see what difference this makes to her realist
conclusions.

Haslanger begins by reviewing the feminist critique of metaphysics as androcentric on the grounds
that it tends “to draw uncritically on experiences and patterns of thought that are characteristically
male or masculine...” Such arguments, and demonstrations of androcentrism, have been made by
Iris Young and Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka, among others. But this raises the immediate question of
what a better alternative to androcentrism might be, and it turns out that this is not so apparent.
Obviously, to theorize from a gynocentric perspective is no improvement over androcentrism if one
is trying to make general claims. But the even more difficult issue is to decide what would count as
a gynocentric point of view. The basis for most claims about gender has been empirical research on
sex differences, research which is now widely recognized as notoriously biased (see Fausto-
Sterling). Nor can we simply wait for better research to answer our questions about gender,
because, as the critics of sex difference research have pointed out, the problem with the research is
in the questions it poses as well as in the answers it gives. Why focus on measuring the variations
between genders when the variations within each gender is often far larger, and other differentials,
such as culture or age, are more relevant? Moreover, in defining gender through the measurement
of gender differences we may in fact be setting up a new regulatory norm or stereotype for “how
women (and men) should be” that will exclude or marginalize some or many or even most women.
Thus, how can a concept of gynocentrism address the heterogeneity among women and avoid
exaggerating the differences with men?

Haslanger argues that this set of problems does not mean, however, that gynocentric approaches
are irretrievable. What one must do is retreat from either temporal or spatial universalizations about
gender difference and instead make context-based claims. Thus we can make reasonable
characterizations of gynocentric experiences within given contexts, as long as we acknowledge that
there will still be variety even within a delimited context. This strikes me as an entirely reasonable
conclusion. And because the claims are contextual, there is no claim being made about the absolute
nature of a gynocentric point of view, and thus no regulatory norm exerting a command into the
unending future.

Haslanger points out that even such a modified approach — one that would presume nothing more
than the ability to make contextually limited generalizations about women — is still problematic for
many feminist theorists, despite the fact that many feminist social scientists pursue just such
generalizations. But for many theorists the contextual approach is not really telling us anything
about gender, even in context, but only about the discourse of gender in that context.

It is on this point that Haslanger begins her real case against the critics of metaphysics, and to
develop her case she first provides an updated characterization of post-Quinean metaphysics. Quine
portrayed the empirical claims of the sciences as having a web-like structure rather than a
foundationalist pyramidal structure, and argued that any part of the web—even basic empirical
observation reports — will be revisable if we are prepared to alter the other parts of the web that
are structurally dependent on the part we want to eliminate. And we may well be willing to make
those structural adjustments given a particular anomaly we wish to resolve or a particular
theoretical project we wish to complete, but these motivations are entirely contingent and variable.
Thus, Quine’s approach assumes neither absolute starting points nor access to an unmediated Real,
but is non-foundationalist, with a holistic approach to justification, and adopts a fallibilist view of its
best claims. Theorizing aims not at purity but at increasing the consistency of our beliefs. Haslanger
calls this approach an “aporematic” metaphysics, and explains that it might reasonably be
considered immanent metaphysics: the questions, the puzzles, and the proposed answers arise
within our thinking in response to current theoretical and practical demands. (Haslanger 2000, 114)

Again, Haslanger is still critical of much of the work in metaphysics that uses this approach for its
lack of reflexivity about its priorities and assumptions, but the point is that its anti-foundationalism
provides a greater potential openness to seeing the ways in which political realities can affect the
discursive context in which questions are formulated and posed as well as the ways in which
possible answers are developed and compared.10

According to Haslanger, then, the metaphysical question of gender is whether gender is a natural
kind, which is a group that shares a common essence, or whether it is an objective type, which is a
unity without an underlying essence, or whether it is neither of these. (I think Haslanger means to
be referring to sexed identity here, not to gender in Rubin’s sense, but I will use Haslanger’s
terminology while discussing her argument). One could hold a realist view about gender being either
a kind or a type, or one could be a skeptic, holding that we simply cannot know, or a nominalist,
holding that the basis of either kinds or types is entirely non-objective.

To say that a type is objective is to say that there is some non-random or non-arbitrary basis for its
unity. The basis for some unities is weak, such as the unity of things on my desk which at the
moment include paper, pens, matches, stones, garbage, tiles, plants, pictures, tissues, keys, candy,
cough drops, chewing gum, buttons, and a cat. There is no way to incorporate this debris into one
category except in so far as all these things share a temporary location. But some unities clearly
have a stronger basis than this, such as the unity of red things, or mammals, or of things which are
carbon based. What makes a type objective is that what brings the things in it together into a unity
is independent of us. I will address the issue of what “independence” can mean more thoroughly
later on, but Haslanger is not putting forward a chimerical language of pure access to the noumena
in claiming that the basis of some unities are independent of human practices. She is making a
comparative judgement between what are obviously all linguistically conceptualized entities. One
needn’t be a positivist, who believes in pure uninterpreted bits of data, to be committed to a theory
which holds that the basis for some categories are independent of human beings, such as whether
something is carbon based, while other categories are not independent of human beings, such as
social structures or literary conventions or even the degree of gender dimorphism in a given time
and place.
Gender is, of course, very much a social kind of unity. It has been imbued with cultural values and
meanings and it is usually presented as a category of two after which exceptions are forcibly, even
surgically, altered to fit. But Haslanger does not think these obvious facts are sufficient to dismiss
the possibility that gender is an objective type. What I assume she is thinking here is that the
objective type which is gender might be mistakenly characterized, made overly inclusive, and have
longstanding crazy cultural associations, and yet the basis of the unity itself might be objective.

To show that this hypothesis—that gender is an objective type—should not be ruled out, Haslanger
considers some of the arguments against the objectivity of gender from Wittig and Butler. She
discusses their argument that the fundamental importance attached to whether one has a penis or
vagina comes after, not before, social conventions, in this case, compulsory heterosexuality.
Butler’s variant of this argument relies heavily, and Haslanger thinks too heavily, on the idea that all
of our access to reality is mediated. From the latter claim Haslanger argues that Butler fallaciously
comes to the conclusion that gender is not objective. Here is how the argument goes.

Butler argues that when we refer to something in the world we are operating on the basis of
discursive boundaries that delimit objects. Thus there is no possibility of reference without relying
on discursively constituted boundaries, and thus no possibility of attributing objective status to any
entity or type. Haslanger is prepared to agree with Butler’s claim that it is our discourse, rather than
the world, that constitutes objects and types, if this is understood to be a claim about our language
and about our knowledge, but she thinks Butler believes it is also a metaphysical claim about the
absence of an independent basis for categories used in language.

To say that it is a claim about language and knowledge is to say that it is a claim about
things qua things we refer to. But to say that it is a metaphysical claim is to say that it is a claim
about things. Here’s another way to put the distinction: in the first case, Butler is arguing
that gender as a concept is discursively constructed, and in the second case she is arguing that
gender is discursively constructed. Haslanger thinks Butler has no grounds for the latter claim
simply on the basis of the idea that all of our relations with the world are discursively mediated. The
ubiquity of mediation itself does not entail thatnothing is independent of human beings, nor that our
knowledge is blocked by mediation, and here she uses the example of the phone system—an
intermediary which improves rather than blocks access to things beyond our reach. Of course, what
the phone brings us into contact with is not, under anycircumstances, beyond our reach; we could
conceivably travel to the person we are trying to communicate with and then communicate directly.
So one might argue that, for this reason, the phone system is not analogous to discourse. But all
Haslanger is trying to show here is that mediation in and of itself is not sufficient to justify
skepticism. Even if we were not able to travel to the person we are speaking to, we might yet be
able to communicate very effectively with them using the phone. In this case, mediation does not
block knowledge, but in fact aids it.

Moreover, the dismissal of the possibility of knowledge about the world on the grounds that we are
bounded by language presupposes very modernist pre-Hegelian bifurcations between phenomenal
knowing and a noumenal world. According to Haslanger’s portrayal of much contemporary analytic
metaphysics, a pure transparency between belief and world is no longer considered necessary to
claim knowledge: we can settle with oblique relations of veridicality, but why deny our ability to
reliably claim that the set of things on my desk has a weaker unity than the set of mammals, and
that this is a fact independent of human categorical systems? Haslanger says,

There is a temptation to think that if we cannot “get outside” of ourselves to test our beliefs against
reality, then there’s nothing further we can do epistemically to regulate belief; we’re left with only
political negotiation. But there are other epistemic considerations that can be brought to bear on
belief, and provide grounds for claims to truth, e.g., coherence, evidential support, fruitfulness, etc.
Oddly, many feminists feel pressed to skepticism about an independent reality because they
implicitly endorse a traditional conception that requires certainty or direct access to reality in order
to have knowledge of it, while at the same time they often find the traditional conception of
knowledge problematic. (Haslanger 2000, 122)
This mistake about the limits of knowledge is related to the mistake some feminists make about
analytic metaphysics: assuming that the failure of positivism leads to epistemological skepticism.

Haslanger’s arguments in regard to the implications that follow from the ubiquity of mediation seem
to me to be right. This is an important point which, although it has been repeatedly made over the
past ten or more years, seems not to have been absorbed into poststructuralist feminist philosophy.
Yes, we use concepts to know the world; no, that does not mean that we cannot say anything about
the world but only about other concepts.

But where I differ with Haslanger is as follows. She assumes that once she has shown the problem
with the argument about mediation, she can then show that categories of gender are not just about
the discourse of gender but about gender itself. However, the ubiquity of mediation is not the sole
reason Butler gives for the discursive constitution of sex. Butler’s argument also invokes the
Foucauldian idea that discourses have identity-altering, materialistic effects. That is, discourses do
not merely categorize and rearrange what is in the world but, in some cases at least, create things
that didn’t exist previously. I am sure Haslanger would agree that discourse does create some
things, like, for example, heterosexuality as a social identity, but the question is whether gender is
also one of these things. From Butler’s point of view, gender is performatively enacted on the basis
of discursively constituted regulatory norms, but this means that it literally comes into existence as
a lived experience and visible phenomena through discourse. That is, gender identity comes into
existence, which is not reducible to the possession of a type of genitals. As Pascal said, one kneels
and prays and belief comes after. For Butler there is no objective basis of gender, then, in the sense
of a basis that is completely independent of human practices.

Are Butler and Haslanger perhaps talking about different things here? One might think that Butler is
talking about a much more robust sense of gender whereas Haslanger is talking about a much more
minimal sense. And Haslanger allows that the importance of the objective basis of gender is
contestable: we can allow that there are prediscursive, objective bases for some of the properties
used to demarcate gender, even while contesting whether it is these properties which are truly
fundamental to gender in the robust sense, and whether it is political rather than metaphysical
criteria in operation here. She says,

The realist can agree with the non-realist that our classification schemes are often motivated by
interest-laden concerns, and that we need to look beyond questions of what’s ontologically
fundamental to determine how to structure our political lives; these issues are not ones that divide
the two sides of the debate. The realists begin to diverge from the non-realists, however, when they
claim that in some cases it is important to know what sets are fundamental, e.g., what properties
are causally significant, in order to effectively interact with or understand the world. (Haslanger
2000, 123)

I agree with Haslanger on this point, which causes me to part company with Butler who cannot
allow such an “objective” criteria of significance in regard to any category. But what Haslanger does
not consider, at least in this essay, is the possibility that genuinely causally significant properties
can be discursively produced: that things, and not just things qua things referred to, can be
discursively produced. Discourse is not simply about the way in which we interpret and organize the
world: it can also produce new things in the world, and not just things like “football” or “money” but
things with more of a material presence such as inner subjective experiences of inferiority or a
significant gender dimorphism or racial purity or the existence of two and only two sexes. Here I
agree with Butler that, as Foucault taught us, we need to develop a hermeneutics of suspicion in
regard to what looks natural.

If my argument is right, then Haslanger is wrong to say that Butler reaches her conclusions solely
through the ubiquity of mediation argument. If one wants to hold onto the idea that gender is an
objective type, then, one needs more than a negative argument against the ubiquity of mediation
thesis—one needs to address the claim that discourse creates gender which creates sex, and
address the issues of practices and not just the issue of naming. One needs to show what objective,
fundamental, human independent basis there is for the category of gender or sex, and to show that
this basis is not the product of discursive effect. This requires arguments that will go beyond
Haslanger. I think we have a good candidate for such a fundamental, human independent basis in
the division of labor in biological reproduction.