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ABSTRACT
Is it impossible to imaginatively simulate what it’s like to be someone with a different gender experience – to understand them empathically? Or is it simply difficult, a challenge requiring effort and dedication? I first distinguish three different sorts of obstacle to empathic understanding that are sometimes discussed: Missing Ingredient problems, Awkward Combination Problems, and Inappropriate Background Problems. I then argue that, although all three should be taken seriously, there is no clear reason to think that any of them are both genuinely intractable and also significant impediments to the kind of empathic understanding we might want. To that extent, the challenge to interpersonal understanding here may be more a matter of skill and work than a hard boundary.
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Notes
1 None of the terms used in this definition are uncontested, so I will not dwell overmuch on stipulating or defending my own usage; for definitional discussions see, e.g., Stueber Citation2006, Coplan Citation2011; Langkau Citation2021; Maibom Citation2022.
2 For what it’s worth, there may be average gender differences in colour-vision itself: not only are women more likely to be tetrachromats and less likely to be colour-blind, but some studies suggest that there may be differences in average perception of certain colours (see Block Citation1999 for discussion). But if this kind of subtle difference posed an obstacle to mutual understanding, gender would hardly be the place to focus: there is enough variation among individuals that we would have to start wondering if we really knew what anything looked like to anyone else.
3 With menstruation this is actually less true than usually assumed: there is some evidence that trans women on hormone replacement therapy sometimes start to experience a monthly cycle of rising and falling hormones, likely due to feedback mechanisms in the endocrine system. This can produce some of the physical and mental changes associated with menstruation, even without vaginal bleeding. (See, e.g., Brabaw Citation2020)
4 The meme-phrase ‘the feminine urge to X’ has become popular online in recent years, together with counterparts like ‘the masculine urge to X’ and ‘the nonbinary urge to X’. The meme appears to be self-consciously ironic when not absurdist: the first popular example appears to be ‘the feminine urge to stab’. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-feminine-urge
5 Others don’t: it may be that people comfortable in their assigned gender have a wide range of degrees and forms of gender identification, from deep commitment, through casual indifference (sometimes called ‘cis-by-default’, Brennan Citation2015) to nonbinary people who don’t realise they’re nonbinary yet.
6 There is an interesting tradeoff here between competing social goals: the narrative of confidence, of ‘we always knew’, has the merit of countering reflexive dismissal from cis people (‘it’s just a phase’), both in public discussions and in negotiating with the medical system, but it can also potentially exacerbate this hermeneutical challenge for trans people trying to identify and understand their own feelings, who may assume that if they didn’t ‘always know’ that is sufficient proof that they’re not trans.
7 It is an interesting question whether we can draw a sharp line between the two. One way of thinking about Hume’s missing shade of blue is that it can be manufactured by the imagination specifically by combining elements (e.g. hue, luminance, and saturation) drawn from seeing other shades of blue. See e.g. Mizrahi Citation2009; Roelofs Citation2014.
8 For discussion of this sort of difficulty see esp. Wilkerson Citation2009; Díaz-León Citation2017.
9 See Schkade and Kahneman Citation1998; Wilson et al. Citation2000; Gilbert, Gill, and Wilson Citation2002.
10 Hence one example of failed empathy that has become cliche: men who respond to complaints about public sexual harassment by saying ‘I’d love it if people catcalled me!’, because they imagine the focal experience (expressions of sexual interest from a stranger) against the background of their own past experience of sexual interactions and public embodiment, failing to appreciate how different women’s backgrounds are likely to be.
11 Wiltsher refers to the learnt ability to link differences in present experience with differences in social situation as ‘experiential mastery’ (Citation2021, p.323), and suggests that this is the most that privileged people can realistically aim to achieve in terms of empathic understanding of marginalised people.
12 Emma Goldman identifies this as a key failing of patriarchal society: ‘behind every marriage stands the life-long environment of the two sexes; an environment so different from each other that man and woman must remain strangers. Separated by an insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has not the potentiality of developing knowledge of, and respect for, each other’ (Goldman Citation1910).
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Luke Roelofs
Luke Roelofs is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington, writing about the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of consciousness, particularly defending constitutive panpsychism and the foundational moral role of empathy.