What Is Gender? | Robin Dembroff

What Is X?

When it comes to gender, there are many big questions that people often get stuck on. On this episode of “What X?," Justin E. H. Smith asks Robin Dembroff, a professor of feminist and LGBTQ philosophy at Yale, to help untangle them. Justin and Robin start off by disambiguating sex and gender, with some help from the philosophical vocabulary of essence and telos. Gender, Robin argues, is the entire process of defining, classifying, and regulating people according not only to their body parts but on the basis of ideas of maleness and masculinity, and femaleness and femininity. The result: a set of norms and expectations that guide the direction of one’s life—and whose enforcement makes us miserable. If this is true, can any of these labels be salient identifications without limiting us? And if not, can we even imagine a life without gender?
And a special note from the host on Season 2: “I realized over the course of Season 1 that I'm not nearly as convincing a Socrates-figure as I had imagined. But this may be another way of saying I'm a better conversationalist than I thought myself to be. I find I generally agree with people, at least during the time I'm speaking with them, while afterwards their spell begins slowly to wear off and I recall all the more enduring commitments I have that are in fact in tension with all the things I was nodding along to just a short time before. This might seem contradictory, hypocritical even, to some who position themselves in the world as polemicists or fighters for some particular cause. But everyone believes what they believe for what at least they take to be good reasons, and it's worth learning what those are. Part of that learning is the effort we undertake in conversation to put ourselves in their position, and to see what things look like when we agree with them. So, while this podcast still strives toward a determination of Agreement (marked by the sound of bells), Disagreement (goat’s bleat), or Aporia (wind), the goat has turned out to be a rare character on this show. I make no apologies for that.”