Greta Christina, “Are We Having Sex Now or What?”

Posted: Wed, Jan 15, 2025

Conceptual analysis

The idea is to explain a concept by unpacking it into necessary and/or sufficient conditions.

(1) Someone is a college student if they are a student at the UofA.

The statement claims that being a student at the UofA is a sufficient condition (it suffices) for being a college student.
Counterexample: you can be a UofA student without being a college student.

(2) Someone is a college student only if they are a student at the UofA.

The statement claims that being a student at the UofA is a necessary condition (it’s required) for being a college student.
Counterexample: you can be a college student without being a student at the UofA.

Something is a chair if and only if it can be sat on.

The statement claims that being capable of being sat on is both a sufficient and a necessary condition for being a chair.
Counterexamples to sufficiency: are there things you can sit on that are not chairs?
Counterexamples to necessity: are there chairs that you can’t sit on?

Something is sex if and only if __________.

[Get to know your neighbors first!]

Let’s talk through what happens in the reading: How has the answer to “what is sex?” become so non-obvious to Christina? Which potential answers has she tried, and why doe she find them unsatisfying?
Let’s think about the bigger picture as well: What’s the point of deciding whether something counts as sex? (Is there such a point? Is it an innocent one?) Who makes that decision for us? (Is it the right decision? Should they get to decide in the first place?)

I want to encourage us to get more and more comfortable uncovering and challenging implicit, taken-for-granted assumptions: “Sex is defined as …” -> by whom? who gets to say what sex is? on what grounds?
Philosophical questions like “what counts as sex?” can have real-world political consequences (i.e., they are not “value-neutral”): when sex is presumed to be penis-in-vagina intercourse (“PIVI”), whose perspectives are centered? whose are left out?
It can be useful to theorize “from margin to center”: thinking about what sex is to queer women may shed light on what sex is to straight women, but not vice versa.
Philosophy is not merely “opinions”: we can make a case for/against a view without resorting to authority, religion, etc.
Most importantly, I want us to learn to think critically and reflectively for ourselves—and we can actually make progress!