Joey Marcellino

I submitted this review to the 2024 ACX book review contest, but it didn't make the cut, so I'm putting it here instead for posterity. Conspiracy theories are fun because of how they make everything fit together, and scratch the unbearable itch some of us get when there are little details of a narrative that just don’t make sense. The problem is they tend to have a few issues, like requiring one to posit expansive perfectly coordinated infosecurity, demanding inaccessible or running contrary to existing evidence, and generally making you look weird for believing them. We can get our connecting-the-dots high while avoiding social stigma and epistemic demerits by instead foraging in the verdant jungle of “new conceptual frameworks for intractable debates.” Arguments about gender tend to devolve, not just for lack of a shared conceptual framework, but because the dominant frameworks used by both defenders and critics of gender ideology are various shades of incoherent. To the rescue are R. A. Briggs and B. R. George, two philosophers of gender promising a new approach to thinking about gender identity and categorization with their book What Even Is Gender? I appreciate that I’m probably atypical in that my first thought when confronting a difficult conceptual problem is “I wonder what mainstream analytic philosophy has to say about this?”, but What Even Is Gender? is that rare thing: a philosophical work for a popular audience that is rigorous without sacrificing clarity (and that’s clarity by normal-human-conversation standards, not analytic philosophy standards). Let’s see what they have to say. Why I Picked This Book BG are writing for two primary audiences in What Even Is Gender? First are people trying to make sense of their own experience of gender, especially those who feel the existing conceptual toolbox is limited, or doesn’t exactly match up with their circumstances. The second, in their words, are: > “people who, while broadly sympathetic (or at lea