McKitrick on Gender as Disposition

2024-2 Social Ontology Segment 2

 

Q) What is gender, according to McKitrick? What are dispositions and what sorts of dispositions does McKitrick appeal to in her account of gender? Provide examples.   

McKitrick criticizes Beauvoir, Haslanger, and Sveinsdóttir’s views on gender because these definitions lack any mention of the subjective or psychological aspects of gender. According to McKitrick, genders are dispositions to behave in certain ways—dispositions that are not always manifest. One’s having a disposition means that he or she is prone to act in certain ways under certain circumstances. More specifically, having a gender disposition is having a massive multi-track disposition or a cluster of dispositions, characterized by tendencies such as playing with certain kinds of toys, dressing in particular ways, or pursuing certain career paths. These are realized as gendered behaviors in certain circumstances.

 

Q) What do you take to be the biggest objection to McKitrick’s account of gender? Is there a way that she might accommodate your objection?  

According to McKitrick, x is gender G if and only if x has (sufficiently many, sufficiently strong) dispositions, and the relevant social group considers behaving in ways B1…Bn in situations S1…Sn to be G. Theoretically, there can be a discrepancy between the appearance and reality of one’s gender: a social group can make false assumptions about a person’s behavioral dispositions and thereby be wrong about their gender. This raises a serious epistemological problem because one of its consequences is that a person can be wrong about their own gender. Given that one’s knowledge about their own gender appears to have first-person authority, is it right to say one might be inaccessible to knowledge about their own gender? McKitrick suggests that this possibility is implicitly acknowledged by the standard of care for transgender patients. However, it is still unclear how we can know whether we have sufficiently many, sufficiently strong dispositions without making mistakes.