The Tragedy Of Richard Dawkins On What Is A Woman

Richard Dawkins has recently written an article in The New Statesman defending the position that “woman” means adult human female.

Dawkins bases his position on the thesis that biological sex is a binary consisting of male and female. Although I agree with Dawkins’ thesis I do not subscribe to the gamete-size account of sex he offers, arguing instead in “Sex Is Not A Social Construct” (from 2015 I might add) that sex is a functional category. But this aside, the problem with Dawkins’ article is not his stance on biology, it is that he thinks the debate is biological at all. Dawkins naively thinks the debate is over a matter of fact, and can be resolved by a scientific explication of the nature of sexual reproduction, gametes, chromosomes, and the like, and that his adversary will have to concede based on these facts. Ironically, Dawkins here reminds me of conservatives who, during the gay marriage debate, would say “But marriage is defined as a union of a man and a woman, so victory is ours!” (See my article (from 2014, before the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage) “A Darwinian Look at Marriage” which does for marriage what Dawkins’ article attempts to do for “woman.”) He can be correct on every point of fact, and all his conclusions follow logically from his premises, and still lose because the leftist activists care nothing for definitions, no matter how factually true, and will just force the definitions to change as they see fit.

Words usually attain their referents through the establishment of a convention, and then by weight of precedence. I think it is safe to say that everyone understands that there is nothing superior about the letters and spoken phonemes we associate with “woman” that makes it inherently superior at referring to adult human females. If things had been different in the past the sounds and letters we associate with “banana” could have served equally well for communicating about adult human females. But the convention was established at some point and for whatever reason (studied by etymologists) it spread by weight of precedent. By adopting the convention speakers would benefit by being able to communicate to listeners their thoughts concerning adult human females, and listeners could benefit by acquiring knowledge concerning them. Philosopher Ruth Millikan writes “Consider, for example, a speaker whose purpose in using the word ‘dog’ will be achieved only through calling attention to dogs or to facts that concern dogs or through changing hearers’ behaviors toward dogs. Such a speaker will eventually stop trying to use the word ‘dog’ for these purposes if they are never achieved. Also, a hearer whose language-understanding faculties turn his mind to dogs whenever speakers use the word ‘dog’ will soon unlearn this response if speakers never use the word ‘dog’ such that it carries information or expresses intentions that concern dogs.” (Language: A Biological Model, p. 58 – 59.) Read this passage again but substitute “woman” whenever the word ‘dog’ is used, and substitute “adult human female” whenever dogs are referred to. This mutually reinforcing behavior between speakers and hearers is what Millikan calls the stabilizing function of a language item; it is the force that stabilizes and standardizes the convention of using a word to refer to the individuals, kinds, properties, and relations of the world.

She goes on: “A language consists in a tangled jungle of overlapping, crisscrossing traditional patterns, reproducing themselves whole or in part for a variety of reasons, and not uncommonly getting in each other’s way… There cannot be, for example, such things as absolute semantic markers in a language; that is, forms reserved merely by convention to serve always the same function” (18). Dawkins is acting as if “woman” is such an absolute, as if there is an adamantine bond between “woman” and “adult human female.” There isn’t, and the leftist activists know it.

Dawkins writes: “Their militantly vocal supporters do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim. And you absolutely have no right to bully and intimidate those who follow common usage and biological reality in their usage of “woman” as honoured descriptor for half the population.” Oh yes they do, yes they are, and yes they do. It is interesting to see how Dawkins here has switched from making a point about biology to discussing something like morality and/or power politics. And the phrase “honoured descriptor” is hilarious.

How telling that Dawkins did not go to battle to defend the honour of the honoured descriptor “marriage” from being wrenched from its historical mooring. This can only be interpreted as being because in the case of marriage he viewed the change as a weapon to be wielded and a wound to be inflicted in his hatred of Christianity. Dawkins is just as capable of ignoring time-honoured tradition and playing help your friends, harm your enemies as anyone when it serves his purposes.

There is another process besides convention and precedent whereby words come to attach to their referents, one not discussed by Millikan*, and that is the application of raw elite institutional power to rip a term by force from its historical denotation and through sheer political will apply it to some new desired referent. Get your people on the board of the Oxford English Dictionary or pressure the board to add a new definition. Get elite institutions such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies to change the paperwork and apply sanctions to violators of the new usage (for “misgendering”). NPR listeners will be the first to fall in line. They tune in every day to find out what they need to believe in order to continue in their self-conception as one of the elite, and are dying for new ways to distinguish themselves from the proles. If you have the same values, tastes, morals, etc., as the proles you thereby are a prole, and not elite. Thus there is a kind of Darwinian process of its own whereby elites over time become more and more extreme and detached from the common people and from reality.

Eventually the proles will cave and adopt the values of the elites. They always do as the rapid change in public opinions on gay marriage attest. And, voila!, “women” now has a new meaning and weight of precedent. (The meaning usually offered is “one who identifies as an adult human female.” What an absolutely amazing quirk of history that for centuries the English language had a word for those who identify as an adult human female, but not a word for the omnipresent kind “adult human female.” You’d think this would be something they would have come up with a word for.) As far as Dawkins goes, protest a few of his speaking engagements and soon his hosts will begin to cite security concerns and cancel his appearances. Dawkins loves the limelight and being respectable too much to hold out for long. Soon he will issue statements such as “I did not mean for my statements to cause harm” and “of course words can come to have multiple meanings” and “thank you for educating me on how these opinions can cause so much hurt to already suffering populations” and “it will not cause any harm and could prevent much by applying the word in new ways.”

Or maybe not. There is reason to believe that the leftist activists made some rare tactical mistakes that might doom this effort. Flush with victory from their incredible ability to seemingly transform American values at will through hegemonic media control, leftist activists rushed their push for transsexual normativity. For one they did not lay the groundwork with a decade of non-threatening wacky transsexual neighbors on sitcoms before moving on the for final push. Second, footage of their substitutions, “drag queen story hour” and “family friendly drag shows” got out and horrified instead of placating people. Third, they pushed for trans-women in women’s sports before victory was achieved. The reality of trans-women dominating women sports has made a mockery of the “trans-women are woman” mantra. Never allow the consequences of your revolution be felt before the revolution. Speaking of consequences, let’s check in on marriage since 2015. Conservatives had claimed, and were ruthlessly mocked for claiming, that changing the essentially procreative nature of marriage would eliminate a dominant motive in getting married in the first place. Here is the marriage rate in recent years.

https://hernorm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/marriage-rate-1990-2020.webp

Marriage had been on the ropes due to decades of reform, but the Supreme Court pushed it right over the cliff. I guess it is time to change the rhetoric from “changing the meaning of marriage won’t remove a reason to get married” to “evil reactionaries want to return us to the dark ages.”

You may be lead to believe that all this proves post-modernism is correct; reality really is structured by power relations whereby the powerful create reality to serve their interests. Not quite since post-modernism requires that there be no actual reality other than the socially constructed one. On the contrary, the natural kind “adult human female” is still out there in need of a name, just as the institution of marriage is still out there like an exiled king stripped of his titles, usurped by a clown imposter, waiting for the people to realize their mistake and call for his return.

I had hoped that some conservative state would declare it the legislature’s, not the judiciary’s, prerogative to create institutions and state their purpose, and then create a “new” institution with the purpose to prevent the problems that result from the production of children. This institution would totally not be marriage since, as the Supreme Court has declared, marriage is simply an agreement to pool wealth and then divide it equally upon separation in exchange for acquiring certain rights to hospital visitation and the like. The “creation” of an institution whereby male/female pairs take on obligations to one another so as to prevent the problems that result from the production of children would, since we live in bizarro world, be called something other than marriage. I think the courts would have to concede that the legislature does have this power.

The leftist activists want the word “woman” for the same reason they wanted marriage–for the the status and norms it bestows. They weren’t mislead by some misunderstanding of the facts of biology. Just as Dawkins thinks the connection between the term and its real-world referent is sacred, the left thinks, like a cargo cult, that the connection between words and their status and norms is unbreakable; that changing janitors into maintenance engineers will increase the status of janitors, that changing the meaning of marriage will increase the status of homosexuals, or that changing the meaning of woman will increase the status of transsexuals. Usually what happens is that people no longer wish to be associated with the word and create a new one. Renaming janitors to maintenance engineers did not increase the status of janitors, but it tarnished the word “engineer.” I remember (and wish I could find) an article about how young people no longer wanted to seek a career as an engineer since it was now considered low-status. Fields were renaming the professions formally called engineers to something else since the status of “engineer” had been tarnished, just as making marriage just about uniting and dividing property removed its luster. And so activists have suggested terms like “birthing person,” “uterus-haver”, “front hole” and the like to make sure that the new term that denotes adult human females be as unwieldy, clinical, and unattractive as possible to keep people from just adopting a new term and letting “woman” wither.

*On page 38 of Beyond Concepts Millikan lists “shifts in dominant interests” as a reason for changes in word referents so she must have thought about it but doesn’t discuss it in detail.