on games and gender
matt walsh, wittgenstein, and women
“What is A Woman?” is a 2022 documentary presented by the American conservative political commentator Matt Walsh. The premise is simple: he interviews various people, including activists, academics, your average American citizen, and going as far as traveling continents to ask a seemingly simple question: “What is a woman?”. The catch is that Walsh is trapping his ideological opponents in a corner by using their own words against them. They cannot give him the dictionary definition of the word “woman” with it being “an adult human female” because that would go against their beliefs of supporting transgender people, as a trans woman is not a female (used loosely here) but in their worldview she is still a woman. So how can that be? Did Matt Walsh really expose the “radical left” foolishness? Or is it just a play on words or a misunderstanding of human language? Walsh’s question has been weaponized as a rhetorical bludgeon against transgender identities. His frustration and the documentary’s central point lies in the perceived inability of giving a concise, non-circular definition for the given word. He was mostly met with answers such as “a woman is someone who identifies as a woman”. The documentary frames these answers as proof of the absurdity of the progressives.
Walsh’s project is not really something new. It is perhaps a reframe of a philosophical error that has been dismantled nearly a century ago. On one side stands Aristotelian Essentialism, the idea that there is a fixed, unchanging essence that defines what a thing is. On the other side stands Ordinary Language Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his later work in the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). While Walsh himself is not consciously doing Aristotelian metaphysics, obviously, the assumptions underlying the main claim are inherently essentialist whether he knows it or not. He is making a vernacular biological observation, “woman means female, it always has, everyone knows this, end of story”. Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers perhaps one of the most useful linguistic frameworks to identify what went wrong in Walsh’s project and why it seems to be undefeatable. Though, obviously, it has its critics. Some theorists argue that the theory of family resemblance relocates vagueness instead of solving it. Claiming that words have a cluster of features raises the question of which of these features are actually relevant, which is a fair point, but even granting that Wittgenstein may not have fully solved the problem of meaning, his philosophy is considerably more adequate to how language actually functions than the essentialist demand for a fixed definition. And it is the essentialist demand, not Wittgenstein, that breaks down when it is met with the actual diversity of language usage.
For Matt Walsh, the word “woman” is a pointer to a biological reality and any usage that deviates from that pointer is simply incorrect, a lie. Wittgenstein’s intervention shifts this framework of language from a reference (what a word is pointing to) to use (how the word functions in social interactions). Wittgenstein argues that philosophical problems arise when “language goes on holiday” (PI §38), meaning when we detach words from their everyday function and try to analyze them in isolation. Walsh’s documentary is a prime example of language going on holiday, he detaches the word “woman” from its natural habitat, social interactions, and analyzes it on a metaphysical essentialist level, demanding its “essence”. Walsh’s argument is not messy, it is highly structured and relies on presuppositions about how language functions, and this is the key to his argument: the requirement for necessary and sufficient conditions. A feature X is necessary for Y if you cannot have Y without X, which is how Walsh argues that biological femaleness is necessary for womanhood. A feature X is sufficient for Y if having X is enough to guarantee Y, which is how Walsh argues that being an adult human female is sufficient to be a woman. Walsh assumes that for the word “woman” to have any meaning at all, it must adhere to these two boundaries. And if someone were to point to an intersex person or a woman with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) who is XY, Walsh would dismiss these anomalies and would say something like “okay, but this is a rare case” or “okay, but something went wrong in the natural biological process that led them to be like this”. But notice what Walsh has done the second he utters that it is a rare case, he abandons a logical definition and adopts a statistical one, as he is no longer saying “biological femaleness is a necessary condition for womanhood” in any strict sense but rather “biological femaleness is usually present in women, with exceptions”. There no longer is a fixed definition that he himself demands. This is exactly the overlapping, exception-tolerating, cluster-based framework of language that Wittgenstein employs in his concept of family resemblances. Walsh is unknowingly doing Wittgenstein without realizing it, which is quite ironic, as he would just not extend the same flexibility to the cases that contradict his worldview.
Wittgenstein spends a large portion of the Investigations refuting the belief that every word must have a fixed meaning in the first place. He points out that many words such as “hello”, “but”, “not” and my personal favorite, “game”, do not refer to any object at all. The word “woman” similarly is not just a label for a biological object but a tool used in social organization and legal classification. A key argument for Matt Walsh is that if the definition for “woman” were to include trans women then this would render our very understanding of words as flawed and illogical. Wittgenstein addresses this issue directly in the Investigations:
‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’ – Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn’t one that isn’t sharp often just what we need?1
In many contexts, precision is actually a hindrance. If I tell a friend “stand right there”, the communication is successful, but if I defined there as 52°13’01.9”N 0°05’57.8”E, the communication would fail its social purpose. Similarly, the “blurry” definition of the word “woman” which relies on social cues and identity rather than a medical exam is precisely what we need in everyday communication. We do not want to inspect chromosomes to determine if it is “right” to use the word “woman” to describe a person, and I am not only talking about transgender identities here. One of the most notable Wittgensteinian discoveries is his concept of family resemblance. Wittgenstein argues that words do not have a single, fixed definition but rather a cluster of features that are shared between objects in overlapping ways. The word “game” does not have a single definition but rather a cluster of features that are shared between games.
Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”: board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? If you look at them, you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them. Board-games have their various affinities, and when you pass to card-games you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out and others appear. When you pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained but much is lost. Are they all entertaining? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games there is winning and losing, but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. The skill in chess and the skill in tennis are entirely different kinds of skill. Think now of singing and dancing games: the element of entertainment is there, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared2
(Apologies for the wall of text, but this section is one of my favorites).
He calls these family resemblances because the resemblance between members of a family overlaps and intersects. No single feature is possessed by all members of the family, but they are all recognizably of the same group. There cannot possibly be a definition for the word “game” that includes all games possible. Yet when you see a game, you just know it is a game. The meaning of the word “game” was known before the definition of the word was set in a dictionary. The word comes before the definition.
My intent in showcasing this theory in depth is an attempt at explaining how the word “woman”, like the word “game”, is a family resemblance concept built on a network of overlapping traits: genetic (XX chromosomes), hormonal (estrogen dominance), morphological (primary sex characteristics), phenotypic (secondary sex characteristics), social and performative (presentation, clothing, mannerisms), somatic and proprioceptive (the internal sense of the body map, which is what gender identity is), and legal and institutional (designation on birth certificate or ID). A paradigmatic cisgender woman might possess all of these. A cisgender woman with a hysterectomy lacks one partially. A woman with AIS lacks the genetic and morphological ones entirely. A trans woman, via medical transition, may share the hormonal, morphological, phenotypic, social, somatic, and legal ones. Walsh’s error lies in arbitrarily selecting the genetic and morphological traits and declaring them as the only valid fibers, but Wittgenstein argues:
We extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.3
The concept “woman” remains coherent not because one biological fiber runs through every single case, but because the overlapping strands of biology, sociology and psychology create a strong conceptual rope. This leads to the second most notable Wittgensteinian claim, that words gain their meanings from how they are used in the language. This is a radical departure from linguistic essentialism, and Wittgenstein states it plainly: “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI §43). By this logic, the dictionary does not prescribe the meaning of words but it describes the meaning, and this is an important distinction. The typical way of looking at a dictionary assumes it is telling us what the meaning of a word is, but in reality it is describing the meaning that we already understand from our usage of the term in the language. Thus, dictionary definitions can be a very flawed way of understanding how language actually operates. If using the word “woman” for trans women enables positive communication and social organization, then that is a valid meaning of the word. Including trans women within the definition of “woman” is not an attempt at violating basic logic but is simply how language works with a lot of other words.
Wittgenstein argues that all doubts hang on “hinges”, meaning propositions that we must accept as certain for our system of inquiry to function. “The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (On Certainty §341). For Walsh, “sex is binary and immutable” is a hinge proposition. He cannot doubt it because it frames his entire worldview, theological and social at once. When he asks “what is a woman?”, he is not asking for facts, he is asking the one he is speaking to to abandon their form of life and adopt his. “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do” (PI §217). The debate is intractable because it is a clash of two different forms of life. Walsh’s represents a form of life rooted in traditionalist, essentialist biology derived from his theological commitments, and gender theorists represent a form of life rooted in psychological and social adaptability. Wittgenstein is clearly not giving us a neutral stance on which form is “correct”, and I want to be honest about that. One of these forms simply makes room for more people than the other, and that is not a logical argument but a values claim and I am making it openly. The rigid essentialist mindset of the conservatives is crashing into a present where definitions are fluid, and in reality, they have always operated in a fluid way. The essentialist form is struggling to adapt to a world where technology and medicine have decoupled biology from social destiny, and clearly Walsh does not have to personally bear the cost of that failure, but millions of people do.
Wittgenstein famously asserted that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus 5.6). Matt Walsh’s language is limited to the biological, and thus his world is small and does not recognize millions of people who exist beyond that narrow definition. Reality is not a binary. And thus, if someone were to ask me “What is a woman?” I would shrug and say: “An adult human female”. The words are beside the point.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4
Further reading: More and Happier Women (Hypatia), Reconceptualizing Gender (Hypatia)