Sequoya Yiaueki was raised as a Native American in the US–and often treated and humiliated as a Native American—only to find that, apart from a minute fraction of DNA inherited from his mother, he is nothing of the kind.  Some family history together with a home DNA test kit showed that his grandfather was a Chinese immigrant to Philadelphia.  The nice mix of genetic material he inherited contributed to his looking like a handsome aboriginal man, an appearance that was then certified by family legend and social hostility.  But it was all false.  That was not who he ‘really’ was.

Why do I say ‘false’?  For one thing, because Yiaueki does.  He  feels his ‘Indian’ identity was ‘pulled out from under him’; he can no longer live a lie.  Many of us know stories of this sort.  I have a friend who, only in his fifties, discovered that he was adopted, and then had to go through a difficult assessment of his feelings towards the family that raised him, lovingly, but in a house of secrets and deceptions.  Another friend, a distinguished lawyer, transitioned in his forties and now lives as a woman.  Unlike many, she had  good support from her family and law firm.  Still, she now feels, sadly, that the earlier part of her life was somehow false.  And many of us in what one might, in an innocently homogenizing way, call the self-aware-non-straight-population, remember a time when that fact about our selves came as a challenge to the people we took ourselves to be.

These cases suggest something important about the value of personal autonomy.   We often defend it, and the political and social liberties that secure it, along the lines  J.S. Mill and John Rawls did:  its value lies in creating lives for ourselves, in making up identities, in choosing and pursuing ‘conceptions of the good’.  But then the cases mentioned above seem to reduce the importance of autonomy.  These are not cases about people choosing who or what to be; they are cases of people finding out who they already are.

To some, that shows that a liberal politics oriented to personal autonomy is wrong or shallow.  Many philosophers back in the 1980s were tempted by that conclusion.  Important features of our lives that orient us in the world and affect the way others respond to us are not chosen, created, or made-up; they are part of the context for any other choices we make.  People do not– cannot– choose to be indigenous, or biologically related to the parents who raised them, or gay.  That correct conclusion prompted a lot of loose talk about the importance of ‘community’ and ‘authenticity’.  (And we are are starting to hear that all over again, with complaints about rootless ‘citizens of nowhere’.)

The talk was loose because, even in the face of obdurate facts about ourselves, choices do remain.  For one thing, we can and often must choose what to do about those facts.  We can acknowledge them or deny them; we can celebrate them or regret them; we can make them a more or less central part of our identity.   So already there is a role for autonomy.   And it is an important role.  What we do about, or with, the people we find ourselves to be is often of enormous importance to our life prospects.   Even in 2018, and even in ‘liberal’ western countries, the decision whether to come out of the closet can be dangerous for young people–and so can the decision to remain there.

But that reveals a second aspect to autonomy and the rights that secure it.  It makes no sense to think about people ‘choosing’ to be indigenous, or biologically related, or gay (or black, or disabled…) but it is certainly  both intelligible and important for people to want the freedom to discover whether they are any of these things.   That can matter for exogenous reasons: for instance, knowing your genetic inheritance may be important to knowing your risks of a certain illness.  More often, it is important for endogenous, psychological reasons.  Most of us do not wish to ‘live a lie’.  Sequoya Yiaueki had no desire to live ‘as if’ he were Native American once he found out that he was not.   Of course, not everything need or should change in the face of  a momentous discovery, but to simply go on as before is often impossible.  This shows that  we have, over a certain range, a powerful interest in knowing who we really are.  And that puts a different gloss on many of the familiar liberal freedoms–freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, association etc.– they serve self-discovery as much as self-creation.

It is a matter of philosophical and political controversy whether a man can ‘choose’ to be or become a woman. (No one denies that men can choose to live as if they are women; and no liberal will deny their right to do so.)  But even for the skeptics, it should not be a matter of controversy that the freedom to find out whether one is a man or a woman (or a male or a female or neither) is of independent value.  As we blunder through these complex debates, I notice that many who are hostile to transgender people are also hostile to anyone having the freedom to explore or test their gender identity.  Another example.  In Russia, in Ukraine, and among decadent religions in the US and UK, there is not only overt hostility to gay people, but also hostility to the freedoms of expression and association that help young people find our whether they are gay.  (Here, that hostility expresses itself in arguments about sex education or pornography–both of which can lead children to discoveries about themselves that their parents would rather not be made.)

Personal autonomy is valuable for many reasons: some of them do bear, in the way Mill stressed, on our capacity for and success at self-creation;  but others bear even on those aspects of ourselves that lie beyond choice.  So we are not going to understand the importance of autonomy if we reduce it to debates about whether, or how far, some aspect of our identity is a matter of one’s own say-so.  Freedom is more valuable than that.

The UK House of Commons Report Report on Transgender Equality was needed, and overdue, and I hope that at least some of its recommendations find their way into law.  There is no doubt that, in the UK as elsewhere, trans people are routinely humiliated, abused, and discriminated against–not only by ‘usual suspects’ (the far right, decadent religions, and men who pathetically cling to the status that gender gives them).  They also suffer at the hands of those who are, or  say they are, here to help: in healthcare, in education, and in the legal system.

At the same time, the Report tries to do too much, on the basis of advice that is too narrow, and on a research foundation that is far too thin.  Here are some questions that need to be at least confronted, if not answered, ahead of any legislation.

1.  We need to get a lot clearer, at least in medicine and law, about what ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ actually amount to and about the (fairly rare) instances in which it is essential for law or medicine mark either of them.  This will not be easy.  In English law, and in common usage, ‘gender’ is sometimes used as synonym for ‘sex.’  (As in ‘the gender imbalance in the judiciary’. )  But the law’s concept of ‘sex’ is a mess.  And the gender-studies shibboleth that ‘sex is gender, all the way down’, repeated by lazy if well-meaning lawyers, is incoherent.  Yet there is a lot of good work by social theorists and philosophers on these problems.  It has left no mark on the Report.
2. We need to acknowledge more forthrightly than the Report does that there are real, material conflicts of interest that need to be addressed, in particular, conflicts between the interests of non-trans women and trans-women.  This work is not done in the Report, although a background assumption of a harmony of interests among non-trans women, trans-women, and gay people seems to hover over it, along with the hope that the lawyers will iron out any residual kinks.  Professor Kathleen Stock has shown that this is improbable.  And the furious, often hate-filled responses to Stock’s measured arguments–arguments that raise questions but do not dictate solutions–are one index of how serious these conflicts of interest are.  If the Committee and Parliament cannot even acknowledge them, the chances of coming to a fair accommodation among them are slim.
3. We need to distinguish, as the Report does not, between (a) the claim that people’s  gender is at present wrongly medicalized, and (b) the claim that a fair and feasible solution to (a) would be for the law, or medicine, to adopt and use everyone’s gender self-identification,  and for every purpose.  I assume there is no serious argument, in the ordinary course of life, against referring to people, and treating them, according to whatever gender with which they wish to identify.  But it does not follow that we never need–for therapeutic reasons, or scientific reasons, or reasons of justice– other standards for other purposes.  Of course, that does not mean that they should be the very standards now in use.  Those are so tainted by sexism and heterosexism that that would be unlikely.   But we do need to think this through.
4. We need to explore what should count, for legal or medical purposes, as self-identification.   Many contributors to the Report, and many more activist groups, (including Stonewall) seem to assume that it will be a matter of sincerely saying that one is female, or male, or neither.  Just tick whatever box you prefer.  But whatever we think the role of self-identification should be, this is a poor test for it. In medical procedures, saying ‘yeah, fine’ does not count as informed consent in the absence of a complex range of background conditions.  In law, saying ‘I promise’ does not count as a contract in the absence of another range of such conditions. We need to think through the parallel case of ‘gender self-identification.’ It is hard to resist the thought that behind some self-identification views is the idea that ‘no one ever has the right to tell me who or what I am!‘  But that is like saying ‘no one has the right to tell me whether or not I consented,’ or ‘no one has the right to tell me whether or not I promised.’  None of these things are simply ‘in the head’.  The inner conviction that, say, one is a woman stands in need of some sort of public criteria for it even to count as a conviction of the right kind, let alone a conviction that the law can and should use.   It is no help to say we should go by self-identification until we know what counts as self-identification.
5. At least in law, we should probably disaggregate the policy questions more thoroughly than the Report does.   There is no reason to think that the concept of ‘gender’ that is relevant to who has access to which passports or toilets is going to be the same concept that is relevant to determining who has access to the women’s locker room or to a job in a rape crisis centre.   The law does this sort of thing all the time:  ‘For purposes P, X shall count as Y.’   In some areas, the law is too quick to set up ‘package deals’ where everything comes together; sometimes it is too slow.  But I can think of no reason to assume, a priori, that the current package deal of gender must be maintained.

The Report is worth reading; its criticism of the medicalization and stigmatization of trans identities is correct and important.   Many proposed technical adjustments to the law will benefit trans people (and others).  But when it comes to the central issue of the role of self-identification, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the Report has missed, or perhaps avoided, the questions that matter most.

A colleague reports to me that, in one of her lectures, a young fellow began his intervention with the following preface: ‘Speaking as someone who presents as a man…’

What are we to make of this?

It is tempting to make fun of it.  In the circumstances, he could just as informatively have said, ‘Speaking as someone who presents as white…’ or ‘Speaking as someone who presents as having tattoos…’ or, for that matter, ‘Speaking as someone who presents as sitting in the third row….’

I need to point out that he was (I am told) not someone who ‘presents as a man’ in any sense in which that phrase is illocutionarily happy.   He wasn’t, for instance, a cross-dresser, or transgendered, or a male-looking intersexual.  He was a just an ordinary white man (more exactly, a teenager), with visible tattoos, sitting in the third row.

The suggestion been put to me that he may have been trying to demonstrate a special kind of woke-ness. He was showing his awareness that gender roles are partly constituted by self-presentation.  But it is a bit hard to suppose that this would have come as news to anyone in that class, or even outside it.  Can there be anyone left, even among the bad guys, who does not know that manhood is partly constituted by, and in, the presentation of self?  (‘Man up!’, ‘Be a man!’, ‘What kind of man are you?’) And since everyone knows this it seems odd to make such a grandiose gesture in support of the obvious, especially in a university.

A different suggestion is that he may have been trying to undermine, by affirming with irony,  the epistemic authority of men.   The ‘speaking as’ locution is often used in the first person to claim theoretical authority, i.e. the epistemic privilege of one’s own perspective, as in: ‘speaking as a woman…’ , ‘speaking as a Jew…’ ‘speaking as a professor…’  So the boy’s preface could have been meant as an ironic, post-modernising riff on male-authority claims. Not, ‘speaking as a man’ (=> ‘I know these things!’), but speaking as someone who so presents and, in drawing attention to that  presentation, thereby implicitly undermining patriarchal authority.  How? If all there is to a man’s perspective is what follows from man-presentation, then people will come to see that those who so present don’t have any real authority.   What sort of epistemic authority could come from presentation alone?   If I want to know how things stand in string theory, I will ask a theoretical physicist—but I’ll stay away from someone who says he ‘presents as a theoretical physicist’. I won’t even go to him if I’m wondering what life is like as a theoretical physicist.  For all I know he may mean that he just plays one on TV.  If any epistemic privilege comes with that position, is the privilege of an actor, not of a physicist.

There is a further catch. Part of what it is to be a man, in our culture, is to not affirm or imply that manhood is achieved solely by or in presentation.   To put it loosely, a boy who prefaces his interventions with, ‘speaking as someone who presents as a man’ raises the suspicion, in that very preface, that he is not really (or not yet) a man.  For it is unmanly to self-consciously present as a man.  And if one is not yet a man but hopes to become one, there is a lot more work to be done than hedging one’s remarks with reference to a man’s perspective.  That suggests the intervention under scrutiny may have rested on a false presupposition about our concept of ‘a man’, namely, that presenting makes things so.  But because that is so obviously false, no one was likely to count against the authority of men the lesser, or different, status of someone who merely ‘presents as’ a man, i.e. who is not a ‘real man’.  The other guys in the lecture, on hearing his remark, were unlikely to blossom into self-reflection, ‘OMG—that’s me too, a mere presentation, a performance!’  More likely they thought, ‘WTF—him again.’  If so, male authority probably emerged unscathed.

So maybe we should revise the account.  Perhaps the interventional preface was intended by the boy only to disown his own manhood and any claim to authority that might come with that.  His point was not so much social as personal: ‘I hereby choose not to speak as a man [which I am], but instead as one who merely so presents.’   I am not so sure, however, that one gets to speak as a man-presenter just by uttering prefaces like that.  (It would have been interesting to know what transgendered students in class thought of his intervention.  Would they have thought it enough to permit him to speak as, or with, them? I have my doubts.)

Offhand, my feeling is that even the purely personal explanation is deficient.  It is clear that although most social roles involve the presentation of self, few are wholly constituted by self-presentation. That is why a white woman cannot just ‘present herself’ into being black, and why—a fact that now causes much personal misery and  conflict—a male cannot just ‘present himself’ into being a woman.

But this point goes deeper.  By the same token, one cannot just ‘present oneself’ into actually presenting oneself.  That is to say, there are also social criteria for a particular performance to count as a presentation of self.  When the artist Greyson Perry dresses as his alter-ego Claire (below) he is not presenting as a woman, not only because he is not trying to pass, and not only because he is failing to pass, but because Claire’s outfits and speech do not even amount to self-presentations. They are performance art.

So I am now thinking, with some sadness, that the boy in the lecture hall not only failed to undermine patriarchal authority, and failed to disown his own masculinity, he did not even manage to present as a (‘real’) man.  Perhaps he succeeded in presenting as the sort of white college kid with tattoos who goes around saying ‘I speak as someone who presents as a man.’  I guess that too is a kind of performance art.

I am not denying the urgent need for change in our damaging concepts of masculinity (and femininity), nor am I pessimistic about the prospects for change.  It is a question of ways and means.  We can change these concepts and, to the extent that our selves are constituted by them, we can change our selves. But we cannot simply ‘present’—let alone think—ourselves into personal, social, or conceptual change.  That is why Marx wrote, ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.   He did not write, ‘the point is to change it by doing philosophy’.  And were Marx with us today, I am sure he would say that self-conscious self-presentation is about as effective in producing real social change as what he, somewhat unfairly, dismissed as ‘philosophy’.