All of Ediz Ucar's Comments + Replies

I see the two main arguments of the book as 1) we should understand "gender identity" as a bunch of subjective feelings about various traits, which may or may not cohere into an introspectively accessible "identity"; 2) we can understand gender categories as a particular kind of irreducible category (namely historical lineages) to which membership is granted by community consensus, the categories being "irreducible" in that they are not defined by additional facts about their members. These stand or fall independently of whether we accept gender self-id, although self-id is compatible with BG's understanding of categories in a way that it is not necessarily with clusters. See the last section of the review for reasons why we might sometimes prefer BG's analysis of categories on the outside view; I think it's potentially more useful for thinking about the role of categories in society and in people's lives. I agree this is not a knockdown case, but I certainly think it's a better framework than e.g. "men are those with the essential spirit of man-ness inside them," which is also coherent but not very interesting.

How does linking this make sense? I’m not disputing the definitions, it’s already settled as indicated in the copied text. And even if the OED were disputing this, it is already superior in authority to the OP, to you, and likely everyone else who read that link post, so its definitions are already accepted widely enough that random people on an internet forum can’t possibly alter that acceptance one way or the other.

That's a good question. I think BG's way of thinking about gender categories is potentially useful for racial/ethnic categories as well, particularly the bit about category membership as a conferred status. I think they'd probably agree with this. They don't really argue that we ought to have gender self ID; they explicitly assume this to be the case, and are more trying to show that it's coherent. I suspect if you asked them they would probably say that we ought not to have racial self ID, or that it ought to be much more limited than in the case of gender (here are some candidate reasons why one might think this https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-breaking-analogy-between-race-and-gender/), but they'd probably grant that it is at least also coherent.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69927-7 This is one of the better papers I know of examining sibling validation. To quote from the article: There's more in the paper if you care to take a look.