A recent documentary by conservative commentator Matt Walsh asks the question What is a Woman? His guests provide various answers that the documentary attempts to challenge. One of the main contentions comes down to meaning, and so here is what semantics can bring to the discussion.
What Is A Woman to You?
The question of what is a woman uses a sneaky bit of sophistry. After all, it’s a simple question, isn’t it? The mistake Walsh makes, however, is that the words we use in our language are understood universally the same way, that there is something fixed about them. There are categorical concepts that help us understand the world. But there is no a priori concept of womanhood or manhood inherently out there in the world. We attribute meaning to things, and our words are connected by a framework of experiences relative to other frames. A far more honest question might read what is a woman…to you? or to be very clear, what does womanhood mean for you? But Walsh is not interested in personal accounts like this, because his worldview and his experience leads him to believe there is one concrete and obvious definition.
When Asking Philosophical Questions
All human reasoning is embodied in cognitive neural mechanisms and motor functions. Most of this takes place deep within our neural circuitry. When we ask philosophical questions, we use these neural mechanisms unconsciously to arrive at our conclusions. Since most abstract thought is metaphorical, it should be no surprise that the answers we arrive at are also metaphorical. Therefore, there are no pre-existing universal concepts, only metaphors that systematically and unconsciously shape our worldview.
Up is up consistently for all of us, so its meaning is coherent. When we say inflation is through the roof, we understand more is up. People don’t dispute the meaning here, but Walsh believes that a woman is something very specifically grounded in the same coherence, as though this experience is as equally universal as the sky is up. But when it comes to concepts, it’s not all black and white. Colour concepts, for example, is something we dispute because we experience them differently. My red is not necessarily the same red that you see. Some cultures orient the front of a football where Westerners would insist is the back of a football.
Ontological Differences
The way our brains understand the world have some universal characteristics in anatomy and functionality. However, our brains come to very different conclusions as we iterate on our conceptual systems. So, our experiences of the physical world, our bodies and how we feel about them can differ. In fact, Walsh need only remove his glasses to remember why he requires them at all and how different his life experience would be if he were forced to live without them.
All our conceptual frameworks are neural instantiations, giving rise to multiple perspectives and metaphorical meanings. The frame and values Walsh iterates from uses a strict father worldview. Since our conceptual definitions often boil down to values, Walsh’s characterization of what is a woman? or what is a man? may differ from my own. My perspective on strength, for instance, is rooted in compassion, not physical attributes or brute force.
Metaphors, Frames and Polysemy
Conceptual metaphors are physical circuits in our brain. They determine the frames of our worldly experience to relay the meaning of words. When you think about a train, your brain doesn’t just hear the word – it simulates your experiences of stations, news outlets, maybe the taste of coffee, seating areas, scents and sounds. On an unconscious level, your grammar is arranging the order of the words you’ve just read to format this experience in different ways.
You do this by accessing personal memories, identifying phonemes, grouping morphemes, all in an instant to create meaning. These relations are unconscious and each calls back to and overlaps with other conceptual frames. It’s little wonder then that as our experiences change, so too do our concepts, frames and definitions.
Some words die, as do some metaphors and languages. Some words are used to refer to multiple meanings. In linguistics, this semantic network is called Polysemy. In Old English the word Wif was used to disambiguate woman and wife to mean a female human. Today, people use the word girlfriend in different context, for instance as a casual greeting – wud up girlfriend? Or as courtship – she’s my girlfriend.
Hypocognition
Pre-modern concepts for natural disasters were often attributed to gods and spirits who could only be appeased by sacrifice. That’s because humans are conceptual engineers. When our language fails to account for an object, category or idea, we lack any experience of it and are thus blind to it. This phenomena is called hypocognition. Take the term compound interest. According to Scientific America, two-thirds of Americans are hypocognitive on compound interest.
Each conceptual milestone in human history involves, what cognitive historian Jeremy Lent calls a root metaphor. (A modern root metaphor characterising today’s western idea is nature as machine.) Be it gods, finance or colours, we are pattern seekers and concept makers. In this way, LBGTQIA people have conceptualised their personal experiences of gender and sexuality. Walsh shares a common folk experience that is cis normative. Many people are hypocognitive on trans experiences. Yet despite inheriting millions of years of cognitive evolution, Walsh remains incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of their lives. The reason is that Walsh sustains his worldview in specific metaphors about what a man is that also entail what a woman is as well. In other words, from his perspective, his self-image is a stake.
The traditional binary metaphors we use for these normative experiences feel concrete to us, because the way we systematically make meaning from them is an unconscious process. If I see argumentation as war, I will use the associated frames and metaphors (vs, shot down my argument, defensive on this issue, etc.) Likewise, the traditional frames we use to discuss gender and sex have patterned an understanding for us that feels concrete. This is probably why Walsh feels the need to hold firmly to it. But definitions are not arbitrary, they are grounded in embodied meaning and they can be flexible.
Categories & Mental Imagery
All neural beings categorize. This is a property of how animal brains function. If I told you that a polar bear hides its nose when hunting, you couldn’t chuckle at that mental image without being able to deduce that a polar bear is categorically white. Or supposing I ask you to imagine a flying pig. You might think of a pig with wings. Some people imagine a flying pig with a cape or maybe a spandex unitard. When I ask you to imagine a barking dog, what type of dog did you simulate? The point here is that meaning comes from our experience with the world, based on the actions and perceptions of any given individual, varying from culture-to-culture.
What Walsh fails to consider is the different experiences we have of the family and the metaphors those experiences passed on to systematically shape our unconscious mind. What is a woman? is understood differently from family units, cultures, languages and experiences. For example, Native American cultures recognized up to 5 genders, would Walsh be right to write them off as being wrong because it’s all just about the sex organs? If we can dismiss another cultural perspective, then are we really taking our own perspective that seriously? As we have seen, humans are not free to just think anything, we are limited by the conceptions that properly frame our experiences.
What The Science Shows
As usual, the science is not on the side of the conservatives, which is why they often rely on rhetoric and sophistry. Fortunately, if evolution is anything to go by, nature favours diversity and you can find transsexual traits all across the animal kingdom. This is because nature offers many different survival strategies. When a trans person consults with their doctor and explains to them that, despite their physical body, they feel different, those feelings must be taken seriously. There is an assumption that feelings have no place in scientific inquiry and that empirical research takes place dispassionately. But the science, again, shows something entirely different.
Empathy is Physical
Empathy is an important human toolkit we evolved as social animals. It is a physical network of emotional processing and mirroring that largely takes place in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). In fact, since the discovery of mirror neurons, it’s been argued that empathy is an important cornerstone of human development and evolution. Empathy allow us to reflect, act altruistically, enjoy arts, remember, learn and understand how others feel and it is a trait shared by many other animals. Our emotions and our feelings are what binds us on a cognitive continuum.
Facts and Feelings
In his book, Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio provides detailed case studies of patients who suffered severe head trauma. As a result, their cognitive ability to process emotions were hampered and in some cases disabled entirely. What we know today, from detailed brain image scans and head trauma, is that without your emotions you can not know what to want, and are rendered incapable of decision making. In short, be it science, diet, music, business, playing board games, all human reasoning is guided by hidden mechanisms and human emotions. This is how people reason about the meaning concepts entail, their personal identity and why it is important to take people’s feelings into account. In the end, discussions can be a life or death situation, particularly in gender affirming care. So, while facts don’t care about your feelings, your feelings help determine what is to be done with the facts.
Walsh’s Framing
There are pharmaceutical drugs and there are drugs. One word with a whole bunch of frames that simulate different ideas. When Walsh states, for instance, that “doctors are giving drugs to kids to prevent them from reaching puberty,” it invokes a frame that entails criminality and force, leaning into the war on drugs metaphor. But if I were to say, “doctors use hormonal puberty blockers to pause puberty,” it properly frames the clinical process. This is done to stop a person developing into a gender they are unsure of. If that happens, people can feel imprisoned in their own skin. Framing is about using a type of meaning that positions one’s worldview. Walsh frequently uses frames that set-up something nefarious, conflating subjects that only project his worldview, instead of the facts.
In an interview with pediatric professor, Dr. Michelle Forcier, Walsh claims that a 4 year old who believes in Santa Clause may not have a good grip on reality. The suggestion here is that they don’t understand enough to be talking about their experiences. Yet there are adults functioning in society who believe all sorts of lofty conclusions about reality. People believe in gods, flat earth, all manner of conspiracies to explain away their hypocognitive blind spots with no rational reason to do so. This is not the argument Walsh thinks it is, nor does it address the personal experiences that are grounded in one’s anatomy.
Whose Truth?
The reason many are still not getting this comes down to education. Walsh him-self seems resistant to a good education. When Walsh challenges Dr. Forcier on the truth, she rightly responds, “whose truth are we talking about?” Walsh seems to conflate the facts about sitting in a room with the truth about the world as one and the same thing. The clear distinction that Walsh misses here is that Truth is what is useful to us, Facts are the way things are. For example, science is built on an ever increasing body of stable facts that help us grasp what is true.
Some people discard the facts. Flat earthers have no reason to believe the earth is spherical, but it wouldn’t do much good for satellite companies to believe it. And yet it’s profitable for coal companies to dismiss the facts about climate emergencies. In the same way, Walsh discards the facts about biology, conceptual systems and our feelings to sustain his truth. Only in the Matrix can there be no spoon.
As Dr. Forcier explains, your gender is a constellation of things, not simply a binary concept of male and female. There are many factors to consider. While the documentary is conducted in bad faith, I believe Walsh is able to understand these concepts. Most humans are bi-conceptuals in nature. Should he accept these facts, however, Walsh would put himself in danger of cognitive dissonance, a burden too intellectually challenging to navigate for a man with his biases and insecurities. Not only that, but he has sunk his costs deep into the gift of hate media. Regardless, Walsh has his answer, as others have theirs, and though it may seem recursive, its meaning is far from redundant. What is a woman?
A woman – and all that entails.
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