Liberal assumptions

Sometimes I find myself writing a long and substantial comment in response to something I read. My late friend Steve Horwitz used to say, “Get a blog.” It’s been a long time since Facebook comments felt fun, and I’m not looking to get into Substack comment wars. I’m going to try to put more thoughts-in-progress here, along with pointing you towards content worth engaging.

Andrew Jason Cohen had a post at Prosocial Libertarians over the holidays about how libertarians and liberals ought to think about sex and gender and biology and social construction. His conceptions of gender and sex are moderate, I can imagine they’d be fairly uncontroversial but for the prominence of gender in today’s politics. (I agree with Samantha Hancox-Li that gender is already a major political issue.)

Cohen’s post sets out to introduce a framework for thinking about gender. I want to use it as a foil to talk about the assumptions many liberals still make in conversations about culture war issues like gender. I think Cohen and I probably agree—he’s just doing something else in his piece. So to be clear: I suspect he’s provided a useful arrow to have in your quiver if you find yourself talking to someone looking to inform themselves about gender. I only want to use it as a springboard.

To this end, I want to focus on his conclusion that libertarians, in particular, should embrace expanding conceptions of gender:

Cohen goes on to address a paternalistic worry: that people will make the wrong choice in gender transition. But he doesn’t address what I think of as the most high-profile worry among committed opponents of liberal conceptions of gender: concerns about the group harm of expanding and malleable gender identity.

Cohen’s basic framework can be used to illustrate this concern. He argues for considering gender as something that we express ourselves, construct together, and is subject to constraints. Individuals express and present themselves in the way that feels most authentic, but participation from others is part of gender construction. Other people are therefore one constraint on how gender can be expressed. Another constraint is biological—how bodies develop provides physical constraints on how much a body can match one’s gender.

Cohen argues in good faith against extreme arguments: the more common biology-as-destiny argument from the right, and also an argument that he ascribes to the far left that not only is gender socially constructed, but everything is.

He offers a personal story of someone who accepted that if everyone agreed that a solid wall was in fact a window, that would make it a window. I like his observation about the social interactions that go into constructing a wall, but a more pressing concern is that in failing to treat a wall as a wall, we lose our ability to interact safely and effectively with the physical world and its constraints.

Opposition to social construction can also be (it often is) downstream of other worries, rather than a principled starting point.

Back in 2017, trans rights were launched to the front of the culture war when Jordan Peterson argued that allowing gender to be determined by anything but a simple understanding of sex is akin to insisting that walls are windows or doors. He might be a little concerned about the individuals who might make bad decisions, but taking him at his word, he was much more concerned about collective harm from a refusal to sanction trans people and more liberal conceptions of gender. The argument is that to accept expanding and multiplying gender identities is akin to insisting that a wall is a door—he believes that some forms of self-expression undermine the collective ability to exist in reality. (If you must, see here.)

At least some liberals who boosted Peterson before the mask came off seemed to assume based on his use of “free speech” rhetoric that he shared liberal assumptions about individual and group freedoms. But Peterson has always been committed to social and political conservative beliefs about the need for society to control socially constructed concepts (and our participation in them) for the collective good.

Peterson is hardly the lone case, and it isn’t only aimed at trans people. National Conservatives push hard that the individual, private choices by women to pursue higher education, careers, or even just work outside the home have high social costs. These conservatives don’t share the liberal assumption of societies that can accommodate pluralistic individualism. I don’t believe that everyone who shares these concerns is a modern-day conservative revolutionary or on the far-right. Many used to believe that society was more robust than they think it is today and could believe it again.

Shared assumptions were recently safer bets. With the end of the liberal consensus, liberal political arguments have gotten more complicated. To argue for liberal gender politics, we now need to:

• make the argument for a framework that shows why it’s a logically fine way of thinking about identity (Cohen’s got this),

• argue against paternalist interventions that override the moral and political equality of the individual in question (Cohen addresses it), and

• argue more forcefully against the idea that society is too brittle to handle dynamism (my addition)

Arguing for dynamism isn’t new (Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies will turn 25 next year!), but the dominance of illiberal and anti-liberal political voices means it has to be more forthright and less an interesting way of conceptualizing politics.

The less we take liberal politics for granted, the better liberal advocates we’ll be.

If you’re thinking about gender and liberalism, Liberal Currents is indispensable. Here are a few of my favourites:

Misinformation Against Trans Healthcare by Vikas Valiveti
Gender as Art by Jason Kuznicki
The Biopolitics of Youth Transition and The Actual Ubiquity of Gender-Affirming Care by Samantha Hancox-Li
Abandoning Trans Rights Is Not A Path to Victory by Sophia Hottel

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Featured image from Thiago Rocha on Unsplash.