If a Label Carries No Properties, What Is It For?

I want to ask a question about how categories work. It arises from a debate about sex and gender, but the question is not about that debate and my answer does not resolve it — I have no settled position on the political questions and this post does not offer one.

The Question

The position, as I have heard it stated: the definition of a woman is not connected to childbearing, lactation, having a uterus, or any other physical characteristic.

Fine. The formal definition is not what interests me. My question is different, and it is a question about categories in general:

If the definition is not connected to any of those things, what is it connected to? Or is it just a word?

Why Categories Have Content

Here is the general principle I am working from.

We label things as we do because the label carries information. When you learn that something is a chair, you have learned a great deal: you can sit on it, it has a surface at a certain height, it will bear your weight, it is probably in a room. The word is a compression of a bundle of properties, and its usefulness is exactly proportional to how much that bundle predicts.

Sex categories have historically worked this way. The label carried statistical information about size, strength, reproductive role, average differences in various capacities, and much else. Whatever you think about how those differences should bear on anyone's treatment, the label was doing informational work.

Strip out the bundle and it is unclear what remains. Is the definition simply whoever applies the label to themselves? That is a coherent proposal, but notice that it makes the label carry no predictive content at all — knowing that someone falls under it tells you nothing except that they said so.

The Analogy

Say an apple has nothing to do with taste, nothing to do with appearance, and nothing to do with apple trees.

Then what distinguishes an apple from an orange? Just the word?

I am not claiming the cases are equivalent — people are not fruit, self-description matters for people in a way it does not for produce, and there are excellent reasons to let people describe themselves as they wish that have nothing to do with the informational content of categories. Those reasons may well be decisive.

But the conceptual question stands: a category that carries no properties is not doing the thing categories do. It has become a name rather than a description, and names and descriptions work differently.

What I Actually Think

Two things, and they sit together uncomfortably, which I suspect is correct.

First, this is genuinely confusing, and it is not only bad-faith actors who find it so. It is not a great mystery that people struggle here. The confusion is real, it has a coherent source, and treating everyone who expresses it as arguing in bad faith is both inaccurate and counterproductive.

Second, none of the above tells you how to treat people. Categories are tools for prediction; how we ought to behave toward one another is a separate question with separate considerations, and it is not settled by observations about the informational content of nouns. Someone can be entirely right about how categories work and entirely wrong about what follows.

I hold the conceptual point and I do not think it decides anything political. Those are different sorts of claim, and running them together is what makes this subject impossible to discuss.

This connects to something I have written about elsewhere: understanding is compression. A label that compresses nothing conveys nothing — which is a claim about information, not about anybody's identity.