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The following is a tutorial essay for Knowledge and Reality with Daniel Kodsi. In effect, it is a quick agenda for an hour-long discussion on a guiding question, which for this week was ‘Are there female men?’. Some free-standing and much more readable related work is on my Substack.

I don’t say it explicitly, but the structure is effectively: ‘Our notion of sex should be the one most useful for evolutionary biology. Our notion of gender should be the one most useful for feminism. Surprisingly, they coincide.’ (Although Daniel remarks that there tends to be a unity between the true and the good, so perhaps this isn’t so surprising.)

§I argues that we should take findings from evolutionary biology as our primary guide to what it is to be male and female, and that these findings suggest that male and female organisms are in some way related, respectively, to producing small gametes (optimized for quality) and large gametes (optimized for quantity). This motivates the biologically based accounts of females and males, as well as women and men, that I defend.

§II argues that an organism is female if and only if its reproductive function is to contribute large gametes to offspring, or male if and only if its reproductive function is to contribute small gametes to offspring. Unlike many competing accounts, this delivers the verdict that a human (by contrast with, say, some plants and fish) cannot be both male and female.

§III argues that to be a man is to be a (reproductively) mature male human. This account is not only a natural and empirically adequate extension of the account of sex, but it also (surprisingly) best fulfills the legitimate aims of revisionary accounts of men and women. Together with the verdict from §II, this entails that there are no female men: all men must be human males, and so no man can be female.

I. Evolutionary biology

Evolutionary biology is crucial to understanding sex. For one, it is a relatively mature and successful science, and so should be more reliable than less mature and successful competitors that might disagree (for instance, psychology, sociology, or philosophy). Further, notably more than other sciences, it takes sex as an explanans: evolutionary biology appeals to sex to explain various phenomena of interest, and so it aims to tell us a lot about what sex does. This also gives evolutionary biologists expertise in operationalizing sex for various purposes, and so some working knowledge of what the core features of sex are. Finally, and most importantly: unlike any other science, evolutionary biology takes sex as an explanandum: evolutionary biology directly treats sex as a phenomenon of interest, and so it tells us a lot about what sex is. Perhaps medicine or developmental biology are exceptions; but, as far as I can tell, there aren’t really conflicts between these, and these are also more focused on much narrower (proximal) aspects of sex, rather than more general (distal) aspects of sex. The latter are more relevant for now.

To substantiate these claims, and say what exactly evolutionary biology tells us about what sex is, I (very roughly) sketch some findings from evolutionary biology. Some organisms reproduce asexually (roughly, they can just clone or duplicate themselves), while others produce sexually (roughly, an organism is the offspring of more than one parent). Sexual reproduction has certain costs: individuals can’t reproduce on their own, and pass a smaller proportion of genetic material onto their offspring. But it also makes beneficial mutations easier to combine and spread (roughly, adaptations can be developed in parallel and then combined, rather than needing to be developed in series). As adaptations can spread faster, this makes sexual reproduction overall more fit. Now, given sexual reproduction, it’s beneficial for a species to develop exclusive mating types: two gametes of the same type cannot reproduce, but two gametes of complementary types can. Mating types, and in particular mating types which cannot reproduce with their own type, force greater diversity and so faster combining of beneficial mutations developed in parallel. Roughly, if any gamete could reproduce with any other, they would end up just reproducing with the ones closest to them; when the mating pool is less dense, each individual must mingle a bit in order to find a compatible mate. (See Czárán & Hoekstra 2004.)

With or without mating types, there are two competing pressures towards what kinds of gametes to produce: considerations of quantity favor producing smaller (male) gametes, while considerations of quality favor producing larger (female) gametes. Under a broad range of assumptions, it’s optimal for both small high-quantity gametes and large high-quality gametes to be produced, rather than all gametes being the same size and middling in both quantity and quality. It’s natural for complementary mating types to develop into differing sizes, or for each size to develop into a mating type. Thus, two male gametes cannot reproduce, and two female gametes cannot reproduce. (See Lehtonen 2021.)

At the organism level, it’s often optimal for individuals to specialize in producing either male or female gametes at a time, rather than producing both simultaneously. (Roughly the same pressures that made mating types at the gamete level optimal in the first place.) One way to do this is sequential hermaphroditism: for instance, each organism might start off producing male gametes, and later switch to producing female gametes, or vice versa. One obvious cost of this strategy, though, is the physical burden of changing which gametes one produces. For this and other reasons, different individuals might specialize into only ever producing male or female gametes. Those which specialize in producing large high-quality gametes may develop different features from those which specialize in producing small high-quantity gametes, largely because the fewer high-quality gametes will be the limiting factor on reproduction. (See Kazancıoğlu & Alonzo 2009.)

As one would expect, our folk understanding of male and female organisms map roughly onto the small and large gamete producers respectively. Evolutionary biology can thus be understood as telling us about the nature and effects of sex (the natural kind we pick out with our folk sex-talk), just as chemistry can be understood as telling us about the nature and effects of gold (the natural kind we pick out with our folk gold-talk). An economic historian might have expertise in the social significance of gold, but they’re not experts in what gold is; similarly, sociologists might have expertise in the social significance of human sex, but they’re not experts in what sex is (See Byrne 2024.)

II. Females and males

Now, the most immediately obvious hypothesis is to say that males just are the small gamete producers, and females just are the large gamete producers. (See Rifkin & Garson 2020.) But the point of producing gametes is to contribute them to offspring; so, producing small gametes is something like the internal analogue of successfully fathering offspring (similarly for producing large gametes and mothering offspring). If one produces small gametes but never fathers offspring, something has gone wrong: one has failed to achieve the aim of producing small gametes. Differential success rates in reproduction are the driving mechanism of evolution by natural selection, so the individuals that aim but fail at fathering offspring are an important part of the theory. But these individuals are much broader than those who actually produce small gametes: one might be killed as a juvenile, and so never even get to that stage. Or, if one is infertile, and fails to even produce small gametes, one is not off-the-hook for one’s failure to father offspring; rather, one has failed even more drastically. This broader class of individuals had better be included in males and females, to keep our theory of evolution simple and to appeal to the same categories as our other theories. Moving from gametes to offspring, we see similar specialization for either a high quantity of offspring, as r-strategists (‘rate’; e.g., rats or insects); or high-quality offspring, as K-strategists (‘capacity’; e.g., kangaroos or primates).

Further, there is some unclarity in when individuals count as producing large or small gametes: only when actively in the process of doing so? That suggests that human females are no longer female once they have produced all their eggs (before birth), an obviously untenable result. The most appealing generalization is that one is male or female just in case one at some point or other produces the relevant type of gamete; but this again faces the problem of permanently infertile individuals. The individuals who at some point produce the relevant gametes form an awkward middle ground between reproducing and aiming at reproduction. For that reason, it’s also odd to take males or females to be individuals who aim at merely producing the relevant type of gamete: the success is actually reproducing, not the internal analogue of reproducing. What turns out to be the simplest account of being male or female is just being an organism whose reproductive function is to father (contribute a small gamete to) or mother (contribute a large gamete to) offspring.

This account is clearly simpler than similar competitors, like one on which being male or female is having a part or undergoing a process whose aim is fathering or mothering offspring; or an even more complex one, on which being male or female is having a part or undergoing a process whose aim is producing the relevant type of gamete. (Compare Rifkin & Garson 2023; Byrne 2024.) This account and the competing account both allow that, in species with true (sequential or simultaneous) hermaphrodites, those individuals are both male and female. But in cases Not only are these competitors more complicated, but they also seem to be less explanatorily powerful. All mammals (by contrast with, say, fish or plants) divide into either exclusively male or exclusively female; properly functioning mammals and birds are either fathers or mothers, never both. But there are two reported cases (Shannon & Nicolaides 1973; Parvin 1982) of humans who had fathered children, but also had ovaries with egg cells. These individuals are clearly men, but also went through enough of the female developmental pathway / had parts which were geared towards producing large gametes. Thus, on the alternate views, they are female (as well as male), and so there are female men. But taking sex as determined by the proper function of the organism as a whole, it’s plausible that these were just males who also had partially functioning female gonads. So, they are not female, and so are not properly considered female men. This seems like the right verdict. So, the organism-level teleological view, unlike the more complicated versions of the teleological view, delivers the result that no humans are both male and female. Of course, one could complicate the other theories further, but that is an extra cost to their simplicity and a sign that they’re on the wrong track.

But consider pluralist views of sex, on which there is no sex simpliciter, but only, say, chromosomal / gonadal / hormonal / psychological / social sex. Then, the above cases were partially gondally female men. But this view seems much more complicated, and fails to explain why certain combinations are dysfunctional. And clearly, each type of sex is correlated. Without an account of sex simpliciter in the background, such correlation is mysterious. The same holds for views on which there is such a thing as sex simpliciter, but it’s just having a sufficient combination of the specific sex features. Sex simpliciter should explain the unity, rather than being an artifact of the unity. Of course, looking at these specific sex features is a way of learning about an individual’s sex; but that does not necessarily mean that these features just constitute sex.

Here’s one worry (see Rifkin & Garson 2023): plausibly, worker bees are female (biologists routinely classify them as such), but they lack the reproductive function of contributing small gametes to offspring (biologists don’t take them to be reproductively dysfunctional; rather, they are contributing what they are in some sense supposed to). So, being female can’t require (and so can’t just be) having the reproductive function of contributing small gametes to offspring. Accepting this consequence is an acceptable cost (and in particular better than complicating the theory). We could rule that when bees adapted to have sterile workers, most females became dysfunctional, but this was overall better because it increased the reproductive success of functional female bees. This move seems better, and perhaps even illuminating: sometimes, individual dysfunction better promotes the overall fitness of the species. Individuals with harmful mutations becoming sterile or dying early does not indicate that they have the reproductive role of not reproducing; but their dysfunction helps the species overall.

III. Women and men

Now, I argue that women and men are reproductively mature female and male humans, respectively. Since evolutionary biologists anyway need a notion of reproductively mature members of a given species (roughly, the potential mating pool), this seems to mesh very well with our biological account of sex.

The most plausible alternative is that women and men are psychological or social kinds, rather than purely biological kinds. On this sort of view, it’s more plausible that to be a man is just to have the right psychological and social profile (namely, one typical of mature males). But this implies that there are actually female men, e.g., those with 46,XX testicular DSD, who develop as if they were male (except for infertility) and so should be psychologically and socially indistinguishable from mature male humans. Here are some objections that might motivate the social or psychological view, and responses.

One objection (Dembroff 2020) is that humans who have just reached reproductive maturity are not yet men or women, but still boys and girls. Rather than reproductive maturity, humans must reach some socially determined stage to become men or women. Now, I grant that it might be odd to call these these people ‘men’ or ‘women’, or to otherwise treat them as men or women; but this adequately explains our reluctance to consider them men or women, and is perfectly consistent with the view that they strictly are (young) men and (young) women. But even if this objection holds, and we take there to be additional social requirements to be a man, it doesn’t directly tell against the necessary condition that men are male humans.

Another objection is that our core categories of humans are, in general, less biological than they are for other species. For instance, a very good candidate for a biological category is parents. But for humans, we (at least sometimes) include those who raise but do not contribute genetic material to children, and excludes those who contribute genetic material to but do not raise children. Although members of other species can be adoptive parents (Byrne 2022), we are not nearly as inclined to consider adoptive parents of non-human animals to really be parents. This seems to suggest that our important categories for other members of our own species may be relevantly different from our categories for members of other species (Heartsilver 2021). Once again, it seems like this feeling can be explained away by it being proper for some purposes to treat adoptive parents like biological parents, and rude to deny that they are really parents; we confuse this for the category of human parents being more inclusive than it really is.

I take the most plausible motivation for taking men and women as social kinds to be something like the following: persons are also fundamentally psychological or social. Now, women and men (contrast mature females and males) are naturally understood to be types of persons, not types of humans. But these might have different persistence conditions: plausibly, after teletransportation, one is not the same mature female human, but one is the same woman. If a man’s brain is transplanted into a mature female human body, one might be the same man as he was previously, just with a female body. Thus, there are (possibly) female men.

We might offer an error theory for why we sometimes think that women and men, as well as persons, are psychological or social kinds rather than biological kinds: one’s psychological / social profile is a very good heuristic for one’s being a man or woman (for instance, it’s a costly signal, unlike self-declaration), and we mistake this very good heuristic for being a man or woman as something that constitutes being a man or woman. In particular, it’s plausible that we take a person’s psychology as what matters most to us about them, and we confuse this with what the conditions for being that person. Further, since we use ‘man’ / ‘woman’ / ‘person’ more commonly in social contexts, and ‘male’ / ‘female’ / ‘human’ in biological contexts, we might confuse these differing associations with a real difference between, say, what a person and a human is.

Finally, one might object that men and women must pick out social kinds, because other areas (such as feminist theory) seem to suggest that women (and so men, to keep things symmetric) are social kinds: roughly, the idea might be that women are the constituency of feminism, and the constituency of feminism is a social rather than a biological class.

For this section, I’ll stipulate that psychosocial men and women are persons with the psychosocial and social profile typical of mature male and female humans, and that biological men and women are simply mature male and female humans. First, I grant that feminism (roughly) aims to promote the interests of women. Core to the legitimacy of this project is the claim that women are unfairly subjugated; but if women are a psychosocial kind, then that subjugation might just be part of what it is to be a woman. (Compare Haslanger 2000.) But then the question of why women are subjugated can’t arise any more than the question of, say, why bachelors are unmarried. By contrast, if women are a biological kind, then there is an interesting and important question of why they are socially subjugated.

Further, consider these two (wildly unrealistic) situations: in the first, psychosocial men occupy almost all public and private positions of authority, but (luckily) half of them are biological women. There is a psychosocial patriarchy, but biological parity. In the second, biological men occupy almost all public and private positions of authority, but (luckily??) half of them are psychosocial women. There is a biological patriarchy, but psychosocial parity. From a feminist standpoint, the second situation seems much more objectionable than the first (which might even be seen as success). But if women are psychosocial, then feminism is about promoting the interests of psychosocial women, and so the first situation is a horrific backslide and the second situation is a utopia from a feminist perspective. But this is clearly the wrong way around.

Another aim of distinguishing between psychosocial women and biological women might be to separate out the parts one takes to be (unfairly) socially imposed from those which are just matters of biology. The former are the targets of change for feminists, but the latter are accepted as practically unchangeable. But we have a perfectly good, separate notion of the former: masculine and feminine. We should allow that there are masculine women and feminine men; if women are just feminine adults and men just masculine adults, then these categories are erased. Taking one’s goal as ‘erasing femininity and masculinity’ sounds much less bad than ‘erasing men and women’, which sounds about the same as ‘erasing males and females’. Masculinity and femininity are relative to the relevant comparison class: of two individuals of broader similar psychosocial profiles, one male and one female, the female is masculine and the male is feminine. (Of course, if one directly compares the two, one might say that they are equally masculine or feminine.) But it would be wrong to say that the female is a man and the male is a woman. Being a man or woman tracks sex, not psychosocial attributes characteristic of a sex. Maintaining that men are necessarily male humans and so necessarily not female, we have the result that there are no female men.

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