engleski

A New Fuzzy Model of Gender

In 2002, Tauchert proposed a fuzzy model of gender identity as a means to break away from the hegemonic binarism of ‘male’ vs. ‘female’. She praised fuzzy logic for its expressivity regarding truth value: Whereas in classical logic everything is either black or white, fuzzy semantics allows also for an (uncountably) infinite amount of shades of grey in between the two extremes. In her model, Tauchert places the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ on the poles of a continuum, paralleling thus the somewhat older idea of the gender spectrum. Pictured like this, I argue, the two terms are each other’s fuzzy negation, and their relation can be interpreted as the opposition of fuzzy contradiction. The fact that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are located on the poles was, however, criticized for reintroducing gender binarism in a new guise: Infinite number of shades of grey notwithstanding, all of them are still a mixture of only two “primary colors” (e.g. Biana & Joaquin, 2020). This problem is avoided in the two newer models of gender (Magliozzi, Saperstein & Westbrook, 2016 ; Ho & Mussap, 2019), which offer independent continua for gender categories. The former offers a scale from ‘non-female’ to ‘female’ and a scale from ‘non-male’ to ‘male’, the latter provides also a scale for ‘other gender(s)’. Since any combination of identifications across the two/three continua is possible, the gender categories in the multispectral are not construed as opposites of any kind or degree. I argue, however, that there is a way to escape (the reintroduction of) gender binarism while still viewing the gender terms as mutually opposing. The kind of opposition needed to this, I show, is fuzzy contrariety. I propose a fuzzy logical hexagon (Dubios & Prade, 2012) as minimal model of gender categories, where gender identities can be said to be a mixture of three mutually contrary primary categories: ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘agender’. Finally, using Hintikka’s (1962) formalization of the notions of knowledge and belief and Demey’s (2019) decoration of the classical logical hexagon for the theism/atheism debate, I explore if the trichotomy of ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘agender’ can be expressed by a single operator aided by the connectives of conjunction, disjunction, and negation.

Gender spectra ; logical hexagon ; fuzzy logic ; doxastic logic ; epistemic logic

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