Semantics and Pragmatics: Blurring Boundaries and Constructing Contexts

[S]emantics deals with the interpretation of linguistic expressions, of what remains constant whenever a given expression is uttered…. Pragmatics is the study of situated uses [i.e., utterances or inscriptions produced in particular contexts] of language, and it addresses such questions as the status of utterances as actions with certain kinds of intended effects. Since direct experience with interpretation of language is experience with interpreting uses, however, we cannot always be sure in advance which phenomena will fall exclusively in the domain of semantics and which will turn out to require attention to pragmatic factors as well.

(Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000: 4–5)

Even when these words were written, it was clear that what might be “exclusively” semantic was far more limited than this passage (and the textbook in which it appears) might suggest. Theoretical linguists and philosophers of language increasingly see semantics and pragmatics as intertwined in many different ways. Semantics (with the help of pragmatics) is fundamentally about linking linguistic expressions to stuff in the world people share with one another (animals, trees, ideas, colors, happenings, machines, films, computer games, clothes, governments, shapes, numbers, bodies and their parts, etc.); the link is often called reference or denotation. Along with entailment and truth/applicability conditions, reference or denotation is a key notion in theoretical semantics. Pragmatics (drawing on semantics) is fundamentally about people using language to do things with, to, and for one another (enlighten, frighten, delight, implore, plot, inquire, amuse, invite, incite, arouse, promise, insult, etc.). Success in these linguistic projects depends on (more or less) shared referential linking. One key contribution has been the discovery of how much of what is conveyed when people speak is less a matter of the explicit content of what they articulate (sometimes identified with “what is said”) than of implicit understandings (“what is meant”), often triggered by assumptions in the communicative context about what should be specified and what can go without saying. Context, commitment, implicature, conversational maxims, and discourse are among the key notions for pragmatics. Neither semantics nor pragmatics, however, works in isolation. Dynamic semantics, for example, treats meaning as a map from one context into another.

In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers in formal approaches to semantics and pragmatics tended to consider the content of most lexical items as constant, with just a few “context-sensitive” indexical items like personal pronouns (e.g., I, she), demonstratives (e.g., this, there), and markers of temporality (the past –ed or words like today). Such indexical items got their content from contextual indices that specified, for example, the speaker, place, and time of an utterance. But it soon became clear that context-sensitivity is far more pervasive than originally realized. Familiar cases are those of gradable adjectives like tall or warm: Are we speaking of buildings or first-graders? Are we considering a February daytime temperature in Ithaca, New York, or on Maui, Hawai’i? Here we might just think of sliding scales up or down (though borders remain fuzzy). But things can be more complicated. What remains “constant” in the content of a word like “good” is limited by the contribution of the immediate syntactic context of use (a “good book” vs. a “good dancer” vs. “good sex”) and by the communicative context (discussion in the New York Review of Books vs. recommendation to a sports-obsessed young friend; assessment of someone in a ballet corps vs. selection of company for Hamilton; discussion with potential romantic partner or member of one’s book club). Here, it is not only gradability that matters—where things lie on some scale—but also what kind of scale or scales might be in play. And of course ongoing changes in language and in the world disrupt constancy of interpretation. Consider marriage, for example, which in 2018 in the United States includes unions of people with the same gender identity but a couple of decades earlier was restricted to those involving “exactly one woman and one man” (and, as discussed in McConnell-Ginet 2006, had varied interpretations in earlier times and in other places; see also Basu and Barrett, this volume).

People working in formal semantics and pragmatics by no means agree on how best to distinguish the fields, but it has long been clear that pragmatics is not confined to clearing up the problems left when semantics has done its job (a message sometimes taken from the foundational articles in Grice 1989, which really launched pragmatics as essential to a full account of linguistically conveyed meaning). There has been considerable discussion in the past few decades among formal linguists and philosophers of language about how best to understand the distinction between semantics and pragmatics (see, e.g., Roberts 2012 [1998]; Kadmon 2001; Carston 2002; Gauker 2003; Borg 2004; Cappelen and Lepore 2005; Predelli 2005; Szabó 2005; Birner and Ward 2006; Horn 2008, forthcoming; Ludlow 2014; MacFarlane 2014). I will not try to delineate the semantics-pragmatics boundary sharply or take a stand in what Laurence R. Horn (2006) has dubbed “the border wars.” Nor will I weigh in on boundaries among different kinds of meaning. I will, however, use what seem to me some helpful recently emerging ideas from semantics, pragmatics, and their overlap to organize my discussion of representative explorations of semantic/pragmatic dimensions of gender and sexuality.

This is not the place for an extensive discussion of the distinctions (and overlap) between what sex labels and what gender labels. Roughly, however, I take sex to be a matter of physical configurations of female vs. male, based on bodily characteristics. Reproductive organs, external genitalia, chromosomes, and hormone levels all play a role in the distinctions, but we now know that there are female and male poles and a wide range of possibilities in between, often labeled intersex. That we cannot so readily take sex as “simply” biological is shown clearly by how hard many cultures work to sustain the illusion of a biologically given perfect binary, rather than the spectrum that actually exists in human bodies (Fausto-Sterling 2000 is still an excellent source on this point; see also Ainsworth 2015).

Gender is, roughly, what societies and cultures make of sex, including pervasive gender hierarchies and widespread heteronormativity, where sexuality is taken to be founded on sex/gender difference. Current gender identities available in many U.S. and other Western communities include women, men, and in recent years a range of others—ciswomen, transmen, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc. Ordinary usage is far from consistent, and, as we will see later, there is controversy over who, for example, should be labeled woman. I have already used the clumsy sex/gender as a way of finessing the distinctions and debates involved where they seem irrelevant for my purposes. Similarly, we can distinguish sexual orientation from sexual identity as a matter of inclinations to engage sexually with certain kinds of people. Sexual identity I understand, roughly, as how one thinks of and presents oneself as a certain kind of person on the basis of one’s sexual orientation—a kind of person who is in important ways like others who share that sexual identity. The notions of orientation and identity are, however, often conflated in everyday talk. Some of these matters will be touched on in the discussion later.

Boundaries for applying words are seldom sharply drawn, and there is generally an openness to re-interpretation. Word meanings are indeterminate and readily shifted in ongoing linguistic practice. In an earlier article focusing on sexual identity/orientation labels like gay and lesbian, I suggested that content words were essentially empty, waiting to be given appropriate values as language users deploy them to do things (McConnell-Ginet 2002). This equation of ordinary language content words with the variables of a formal language is, of course, a considerable exaggeration. It overstates malleability, given that there are indeed substantial constraints on re-interpreting ordinary language expressions. Without standardly assuming mostly familiar interpretations, we could not enjoy reading novels, conversing with friends, and the like. But there is an openness to shifting—sometimes expanding, sometimes contracting, and sometimes keeping a core while adding some stuff or circumstances to which expressions are applicable.

Consider that the word rape in English usage several centuries ago simply did not apply to penile-vaginal intercourse forced by a husband on his wife. The crucial issue was that of consent. Sir Matthew Hale’s 17th century formulation is widely quoted: “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself on his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this context unto her husband, which she cannot retract” (see, e.g., Russell 1990: 17). Hale’s Law, as this “marital exemption” principle was called, was assumed in many Anglo-American jurisdictions well into the 1970s.

Despite Hale’s Law, nonconsensual sex within marriage was seen early on by some feminists as importantly like other kinds of nonconsensual sex in its infliction of harm on the women assaulted. In the 1870s and 1880s, for example, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell (cited in Freedman 2013) detailed husbands’ assaults on wives in their “Crimes against Women” column in the Women’s Journal. (Freedman offers a wide-ranging historical account of evolving understandings of rape in the United States, including its racialization; my discussion here draws especially on pages 54-56.) Although Stone and Blackwell did not protest the general tendency to cast black men as rapists of white women and to ignore white men’s rapes, they did hold white husbands responsible for sexual violence against their wives and their servants. Like wives and servants, sex workers also have generally been presumed to be unable to withhold consent. In the spring of 1986, Pasadena Superior Court Judge Gilbert C. Alston dismissed rape allegations brought by a 30-year-old Hispanic sex worker, declaring “A woman who goes out on the street and makes a whore out of herself opens herself up to anybody.” Alston’s decision was widely criticized, but he was not alone in his unwillingness to grant someone who has consented to some sexual encounters the ability to withhold consent for others, especially with the same person (see Bourque 1989: 4-6; the book also offers empirical studies of circumstances in which people are willing to label unwanted sexual contact rape.)

Second-wave feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by such work as that of Susan Brownmiller (1975), began to realize that labeling husbands’ forcing sex with their wives rape could be a powerful way to hold them morally and legally accountable. Progress was slow, but by the end of the 20th century the marital exemption had disappeared from rape laws in the United States as a direct result of the work of anti-rape activists. Although there continues to be some pushback, U.S. courts (indeed, courts in many jurisdictions around the world) now hold that a man’s being married to a woman does not mean he cannot rape her. (This also applies to men, more generally, known to a woman, whether or not he is someone with whom she has at some point consented to have sex.) And indeed it is no longer just women who can be raped. The generally prevailing norms and conventions for labeling sexual contact rape have changed significantly as part of our general understanding of what counts as consent to sexual contact.

Brownmiller and other second wave feminists made the important point that rape is about wielding power, but it is of course a particular kind of sexualized power. Work like that of discourse analyst Susan Ehrlich (see, e.g., 2001, 2007, this volume) helps us understand how, even though the boundaries of the word rape have expanded and continue to expand, there is an array of ongoing social and linguistic practices that help sustain sexual violence by constraining what can count as rape or even as the less seriously sanctioned sexual assault. Sexual violence, or the threat thereof, is part of what supports continued gender hierarchies, and thus there are significant vested interests at play in trying to limit the scope of what can be labeled rape (see, e.g., Raphael 2013). These topics continue to be explored in the era of the #MeToo movement. For instance, there is beginning to be talk of gray zone sex, which may not constitute rape, sexual assault, or even sexual harassment but is in some real sense not fully consensual and far more than a “bad date” (see Bennett 2018; thanks to Larry Horn for this reference).

But, some readers may say, this is not about language or what we call things; it is about sexual consent and coercion. They are right that this is not only about language. However, language and constraints on its application are fundamental to many, perhaps most, social arrangements. These arrangements include those involving sexualized power relations and sanctions, not only those legally imposed but those operative in corporate cultures and elsewhere.

Philosopher Delia Graff Fara (2000) very carefully and persuasively articulates the idea that human interests are central to meaning in her article “Shifting Sands: An Interest Relative Theory of Vagueness.” As Jason Stanley (2017) put it in his memorial statement shortly after her premature death in 2017, Graff Fara recognized that “the properties and objects we refer to are in part constituted by human interests.” Social constructionism of some kind has been long taken for granted by many working on matters of gender and sexuality, but Graff Fara (who never used the “constructionist” terminology and might well have been horrified to hear her ideas so characterized) was among the first to see that formal models of linguistic meaning could be developed in an interest-relative way without abandoning theoretical rigor.

Elsewhere I have analyzed how interests of various kinds were at stake in the debate over marriage equality, a debate that was often framed as about how to “define” marriage (McConnell-Ginet 2006). Recognition of the possibility of rape in marriage was seldom framed as a matter of language, but anti-rape activists saw expanding the borders of rape and contracting those of consent as central to their ongoing efforts to reshape cultural assumptions about the “naturalness” of sexual violence. We exploit the malleability of words precisely in order to further certain interests important to us.

There is now a large literature, most of it from social psychologists, sexologists, and public health professionals, exploring how people “define” such expressions as having sex, sexual abstinence, sexual fidelity, and the like. Former President Clinton’s statement that he did not “have sexual relations with that woman” inspired Stephanie A. Sanders and June Machover Reinisch (1999) to launch the now common research paradigm in sexual definition research. They asked people: “Would you say you had sex if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was X?” Intriguingly, some such studies had already been done in the pre-Clinton era. Jason D. Hans, Martie Gillen, and Katrina Akande (2010) found that their 2007 subjects, who were approaching adolescence when the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was breaking news, were far less willing than their counterparts of the early 1990s to count oral-genital contact as having sex. That a growing portion of young adults a decade ago apparently sided with Clinton in claiming that “oral sex” is not “sex” in some “full” sense may seem odd. If, however, increasing numbers of heterosexually identified young adults engaged in oral sex themselves, they may, like the former president, not have wanted to call what they were doing “having sex” for reasons of the sort discussed later.

As noted, investigators of sexual definitions often offer research subjects a list of sexual activities ranging from penile-vaginal penetration (virtually always considered “having sex”) to penile-anal penetration to oral-genital stimulation to “deep kissing” and “nipple stimulation” (rather seldom considered “having sex”). There is considerable (though not perfect) consistency in ranking of activities (see, e.g., Horowitz and Bedford 2017), even though there is also considerable variability as to where boundaries are drawn and also considerable ambivalence about whether certain activities count. To get at these very blurred boundaries, researchers have begun to move beyond the forced binaries of most early sexual definition studies. Kelsey K. Sewell and Donald S. Strassberg (2015), for example, allowed their research subjects to indicate more than the yes/no of most of the earlier studies.

Most of these studies have focused on undergraduate students identifying themselves as heterosexual. Not all, however. A study by B. J. Hill et al. (2010) explicitly targeted gay men and was prompted by perceived misunderstandings of communications aimed at AIDS prevention among populations presumed especially vulnerable. A study by Vanessa R. Schick et al. (2016) focused on women who identified themselves as having engaged in sexual activity with both women and men. And finally, a study by Ava D. Horowitz and Louise Spicer (2013) compared responses of young women identifying as lesbian with those of young women and young men identifying as heterosexual. Not surprisingly, how one identified one’s sexual orientation tended to affect one’s assessment of whether various sexual activities counted as “having sex.”

In contrast to these studies, Zoë D. Peterson and Charlene L. Muehlenhard (2007) moved away from the question of a forced binary by asking subjects to think through their engagement in four different kinds of situations: those they would classify as “not quite” sex; those they would classify as “just barely sex” (two different sides of a somewhat fuzzy borderline); those in which they were unclear whether “sex” applied; and those in which they disagreed with others as to whether they had “had sex.” In describing these situations, research subjects often talked about what might be at stake in the labeling—whether or not one was still a “virgin”; whether one had been unfaithful to one’s primary romantic partner; whether one was engaging in an activity at odds with one’s claimed sexual identity; and so on. Then respondents were asked to “define”—that is, give criteria for applying—the label have sex. The criteria they gave did not always mesh with how they had applied the label in their earlier discussion of their own experiences.

Peterson and Muehlenhard (2007) propose that “when deciding how to label a situation, sometimes [individuals] consider the anticipated consequences of applying a label in addition to the match between the situation and their definition. Individuals sometimes choose a definition or adjust their definition from situation to situation so that their definition will result in positive consequences. We will refer to such definitions as motivated definitions” (257). They cite Edward Schiappa (2003), who has argued that all definitions (and descriptions) are motivated or persuasive, as they “function to advance certain interests and not others” (170; quoted in Peterson and Muehlenhard 2007: 257). Examples 1 and 2 that follow, which reproduce study participants’ own spelling as they describe their own and others’ reasoning, illustrate nicely participants’ recognition of their own and others’ interests at stake (taken from Peterson and Muehlenhard 2007: 265):

(1) (in original spelling)

“I am not lesbian or bisexual but I have messed around w/1 girl 1 time. Besides kissing, she fingered me, and went down on me.

[Your feelings?] Wierd—she’s a girl and I don’t consider myself a lesbian. I am not physically attracted to girls. I felt kind of used and dirty—basically bc it’s not socially accepted.

[Your opinion about whether it counted as sex?] I didn’t think it did—bc there was no “penal” penitration.

[The other person’s opinion?] That it did count bc she is supposedly a lesbian.”

(2) (in original spelling)

“I messed around with his good friend, and then he got out a condom and we were going to have sex. He put it in one or two times and then we had to leave…. My friends boyfriend told people that me and his friend had sex, and I say we didn't because I don’t think it really was sex. They still bring it up sometimes, but we still disagree about what happened_It frustrates me to think that other people picture [me] as the type of person who would do that_I didnt think it was sex because of the fact he only stuck his penis in like 2 times and then it was done because we had to leave…. He said it counted because of the same reasons I said it didn’t. Plus the guy was a virgin and didn’t want to be anymore.”

These young women clearly see that such interests as acting in accordance with one’s claimed sexual identity, maintaining a reputation as a certain “type of person,” or losing one’s “virginity” (which some want to avoid and others want to have happen) can affect willingness to apply the sex label to a particular encounter. They understand that they and a partner may have different interests at stake in labeling a particular encounter. In cases like those reported here, relatively localized distinct interests push for distinct labeling. We will discuss later cases in which the control of word meanings is quite clearly part of general social control.

Individuals of course have a general background interest in coordinating their language use with that of others. This overarching interest limits adjustments to promote “positive consequences.” Most of the sex definition research has been driven by worry that physicians, educators, and counselors who ask or advise about “sexual activity” or use some other general label are not reliably communicating, given the range of ways such labels are applied. Someone whose stated interest is in lessening the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) needs to be more specific than is often the case. Of course, greater specificity cannot be guaranteed to produce the desired clarity—individual interests at odds with those of the various institutions and professionals monitoring and attempting to regulate sexual behavior will continue to confound communicative attempts. Nor is specificity always readily interpreted by communicative targets: terms like fellatio or cunnilingus may be unfamiliar and much vocabulary is excessively technical.

Interest-sensitivity of meaning does not result in a communicative jungle where just anything goes. People generally agreed that the insertion of a penis into a vagina constitutes “having sex” (even here, though, doubt was raised if the person with the penis did not experience orgasm or the penetration was very brief) and that deep kissing of fully clothed people, no matter how passionate, does not. Such widespread agreement shows some stability in the have sex label, placing significant constraints on its malleability. But the crucial point, which is made especially clear by Peterson and Muehlenhard, is that within these constraints, there is considerable room for jockeying in order to further people’s interests. This point will be important to the later discussion of conflicting interests and disputes over what I have called semantic authority.

Some features of our world are essentially mind-independent—for example, the hardness of rocks. Thus labeling that annoying thing blocking your path pillow rather than rock will not protect your foot from bruises if you kick it. Labeling a man’s sexual assault on his wife rape rather than love, however, can help protect her from further such assaults and their physical and psychic bruises. The relabeling does not have such consequences on its own, of course. The linguistic move works so effectively because it is not simply a matter of change in an autonomous linguistic system. The words rape and consent and practices involving their application are already embedded in legal institutions, moral evaluations, and many other sociocultural arrangements, discourses, and histories that connect to matters of gender and sexuality (and, of course, power relations). Changing the conditions for applying linguistic labels is part and parcel of changing those sociocultural matters.

Words live in social life, and their power derives from what people do with them in the course of living with one another. This includes what people have done in the past as well as what they may expect one another to do in the future. The interplay of language and life is well illustrated by looking at some of the semantic and pragmatic inquiry that has focused on sexual identity labels. Sexual identities, unlike rocks and probably even more than sexual acts, are highly contingent and historically specific.

There has been considerable discussion of sexual identity labels. In past work, I have offered brief accounts of the (relatively recent) histories of the English labels queer, gay, and lesbian (McConnell-Ginet 2000). All three of these are sometimes (misleadingly) subsumed under the medicalized label homosexual, which dominant U.S. cultures take as denoting those who are not normative heterosexuals or, now commonly, straight. In the United States and many other Western societies, the major axis on which sexual identities are supposed to develop is inclination toward engaging in sexual activity with someone whose sex/gender identity differs from or matches one’s own. Those seeking difference comprise the (dominant) straight identity; those seeking sameness comprise gay, or for women, lesbian, identities. The category labeled bisexual fits here uneasily, as M. Lynne Murphy (1997) persuasively shows. Similarly, asexual and pansexual are not really part of the assumed geography. And if one’s gender identity is nonstandard for whatever reason (someone who embraces a gender identity distinct from what was assigned to them at birth or who resists gender identities altogether), the straight/gay axis may also be problematic. Julia Serano (2013) notes that labeling a woman whose primary sexual interests are in men as gay because she was born with male genitalia is profoundly misleading. Serano and other transgender theorists have instead proposed terms like gynophilia “attraction to women” and androphilia “attraction to men.” Philosopher Robin A. Dembroff (2016) proposes that sexual orientation (distinct from identity in this discussion) be a matter of “bidimensional dispositionalism”—that is, a matter of the sex and/or gender properties of those with whom an individual is “disposed” to engage with sexually. What is critically important about Dembroff’s account is that, like Serano’s, neither sex nor gender of an individual has anything at all to do with their sexual orientation. Rather, it is the sex and gender properties of sexual object choice that matter. And Dembroff’s theory is neutral on what these may be, allowing for far more than the normative binary for both sex and gender. The queer label is sometimes used to try to escape all these distinctions and sometimes to bring in people whose sexuality is non-normative in some other way—for example, those engaging in consensual bondage or in polyamory or any other non-vanilla kind of sexual practices.

The slogan “born that way” is now often invoked to emphasize that inborn dispositions probably drive much of sexual attraction and desire, that most people do not freely “choose” their sexual proclivities. Kira Hall (2005) reports that the “third-sex” hijras of India use essentially the same lines to claim divine sanction for their third-sex difference. For many Westerners, Lady Gaga’s “It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M, Just put your paws up ’cause you were born this way, baby” provides an anthem with which to resist homophobia. The slogan has resonated with many self-identified gay men and lesbians, who may very well have resisted attraction to others in their own gender category before finally recognizing themselves as not fitting into dominant heterosexual norms. At the same time, we should be wary of assuming that we are “born” to develop one of the sexual identities readily available in our own particular time and culture or to engage in the particular sexual practices that are culturally recognizable. And even when it is sexual orientations and not sexual identities in which we are interested, what is hard-wired is unlikely to be anything like completely determinative.

Holt N. Parker (1997) offers an account of sexual identity and sexual actor categories used in ancient Rome, usefully summarized and discussed in Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick’s (2003) book, Language and Sexuality. Parker argues that it is not that the Romans equally valued all kinds of sexual practices and preferences, but that there was nothing particularly noteworthy about, for example, a man’s inserting his penis into the anus of a boy. If an adult male was penetrated, then he might be censured for passivity, as men were normatively sexually active, but the man would not be censured for having a sexual partner who was also male. For the same individual to play sometimes an active and sometimes a passive role would have been surprising. Yet a woman’s playing an active role, whether with a man or another woman, was, Parker says, “monstrous.” And so on.

The important point for present purposes is that categories like gay and straight are not transhistorical (on categorization processes, see also Canakis, this volume). Even at a given historical point, gender/sexual identity categories do not necessarily travel to other cultures. There is now a considerable literature showing that, for example, many non-Western cultures recognize multiple genders and really do not have identities that correspond to gay or others familiar to those in dominant Western societies. This is one reason that some Native Americans who see themselves as falling outside normative U.S. gender and sexual categories have created terms like two-spirit, drawing on myriad distinct tribal traditions that ceremonially recognize both gender and sexual possibilities beyond standard Western binaries (Davis 2014).

In many non-Western cultures whose populations have felt the effects of the Western “gay rights” movement, some activists organizing around minority sexualities have adopted gay to label themselves. But many have seen that label as inappropriate to their own sociohistorical setting. Many simply reject the whole idea that one’s identity, the “kind” of person one is, depends on either the sexual acts in which one preferentially engages or whether one is attracted to people of the same sex. Andrew Wong (2005, 2008) has documented in some detail the history of the extension by Hong Kong activists of the term tongzhi, usually translated “comrade” and widely used among Communists in mainland China during the second half of the 20th century. Although the terminology has seen some media use, those uses are primarily disparaging, and many Hong Kong people who are attracted to others of the same sex reject both gay and tongzhi as labels along with the whole idea of identifying themselves as distinctive sorts of people.

With more and more international attention to AIDS prevention and treatment, Western professionals who took the virus to be a disease of gay men were eager to find ways to reach what they considered to be their major target population: men who regularly engaged in sex with other men. With some recognition that labels like gay were often culturally inappropriate, they began using the English phrase men who have sex with men, reduced to the acronym MSM. Quite apart from all the issues surrounding interpretation of have sex with, including those discussed earlier (as well as matters of circumstances and frequency), and from the fact that it is not only men who face the possibility of AIDS infection, this bureaucratically introduced acronym has had a checkered career. Tom Boellstorff (2011) gives a fascinating account of the acronym’s genealogy, noting that even at its inception there was recognition that the label was not completely “satisfactory,” with its future collapse presented as imminent. Though intended to provide an identifier based just on “behavior” and not on identity or for that matter desire or anything other than physical activity, MSM seems to have been more or less dead on arrival—or at least destined not to stay in the confines assumed by those who initiated and promoted its use.

Large-scale public talk about sexuality inevitably draws on and is part of the sociocultural construction of sexuality. It is never “neutral” but always enters into discursive histories of values and of fears and desires. Identity claims often figure in these histories, and it is not surprising that sexual identity labels are so often contested and so often the object of social practice. Even when a label purports just to describe (presumptive) sexual practices—to ascribe an orientation (or perhaps just a practice) rather than an identity—there is room for debate and for maneuvering.

A further important point is that it is not just explicit components of meaning, like application conditions for words, that get shifted when people construct new kinds of social relations and hence new sorts of contexts. Linguistic communication also relies on discourse norms that what “goes without saying” not only need not, but generally should not, be said. At the same time, discourse norms require us to make explicit what needs to be specified. When the social world is changing, so are views of what needs to be specified and what goes without saying. We can, however, specify matters but present them as unremarkable and not open to debate. Here, too, if there is social conflict, discourse norms may become contentious. Presuppositions are what are conveyed as unremarkable background and not “at-issue.”

Basic kinship terminology in English presupposes a gender binary: there is mother and father (mom and dad and other variants, all coming in gender-differentiated pairs), daughter and son, sister and brother, aunt and uncle. Only cousin is gender-neutral, and, interestingly, it figures in some early discussions in the literature on presupposition. D. Terence Langendoen (1971), discussing the sentence “My cousin is no longer a boy,” claimed that the sentence (because of the semantics of boy) presupposes that “my cousin” is still male and asserts that he is now an adult (and thus boy no longer appropriately labels him). Langendoen seemed to be relying on a background assumption that the sex/gender of an individual does not change. But discussing Langendoen’s example, Robert C. Stalnaker (1974) noted that although language users might often assume the permanence of sex assignment as something that “goes without saying,” there are nevertheless contexts—since sex/gender change is indeed possible—in which the sentence could be used to report the transitioning rather than the aging of the speaker’s cousin. And as more and more contexts allow for the non-universality of binary gender assignments, the “presupposition” alleged by Langendoen fades, and indeed the assumption that one’s cousin (or friend or colleague) is either boy (man) or girl (woman) has less force. So my cousin will still be my cousin even if they affirm a gender different from that assigned at birth, but my brother is likely to become my sister under such circumstances.

Possibilities for kinship relations have also been complicated by reproductive technologies. A transgender man can now gestate and vaginally deliver a baby who has grown from an egg his body produced that has been fertilized by a sperm produced by the trans woman to whom he is married. Neither his nor her relation to the baby seems adequately captured by mother or father, which carry with them inappropriate cisgender presumptions. Sometimes there is a sperm donor known to someone (either a ciswoman or a transman) who wants to bear a child without engaging in heterosexual intercourse. There is no conventional ordinary name for a relationship that might continue between the sperm donor and the child who grew from the egg that their sperm fertilized. S. Bear Bergman and his husband Ishai (see Bergman 2013) dubbed the sperm donor involved in their son’s birth, who continues to be their close family friend, “Spuncle Jacob.” But of course spuncle would not seem appropriate if the sperm came from a transgender woman, as has happened, given the term’s evocation of uncle, which presupposes its referent is a man.

English speakers have long taken it to “go without saying” that people can be readily sorted into women and men, girls and boys—and also that once sorted, an individual’s gender category remains constant. Standard gendered personal pronouns for third-person reference become problematic when these traditional assumptions are challenged, as they have been in recent years. English linguistic practices make it extremely odd to make repeated references to the same individual without using a third-person pronoun.

Talking of people one knows is generally easy unless one does not know the pronouns they want others to use in referring to them. This includes, of course, both now and at earlier times in a life history. (Actually, this oversimplifies things. Speakers will consider the expectations of their addressees and others in their audience, which may make them reluctant to use, for example, a nonstandard pronominal choice even when they know that is the referent’s preference.) Speaking about strangers, however, is potentially sticky. Not only is there no standard nongendered option (though they and its other forms have gained traction), but one cannot be sure on the basis of appearance just which form the referent might find appropriate. I am a ciswoman, and I am perfectly content to be referred to by they, but most cispeople would be at best puzzled were they to hear someone referring to them with a nongendered pronoun. And transgender people who identify as women or as men often want others to use traditional feminine or masculine pronouns in speaking of them in recognition of the gender they affirm (for further discussion on pronouns, see Chen, this volume; Conrod, this volume).

Some universities and other educational institutions now routinely ask students for their “preferred gender pronouns” (widely abbreviated as PGPs) and send these to instructors, asking them to respect students’ preference for how others should speak of them. Occasionally, meeting venues provide name tags allowing attendees to indicate their PGPs, and a very few people offer their PGPs when introducing themselves face-to-face or online (“Hi, I’m Sally, and my PGPs are they, their, and them though I’m perfectly happy with the she/her option.”). Not surprisingly, the vast majority of English speakers have not heard of PGPs and still assume that choosing between the she and he options is always appropriate. They may occasionally be slightly perplexed (and may sometimes use they in such situations), but pronouns are not a huge concern for them. Even if offering or requesting PGP information when encountering new people becomes a widespread linguistic practice, there will be many situations in which a pronoun is called for to refer to someone whose PGP is not available. For such reasons, I strongly advocate widening the use of singular they as a default nongendered option. Those who protest that the pronoun’s plurality should rule it out of consideration might be less resistant if they are reminded that you began as the plural of thou, and we now find its use to refer to single individuals as well as groups unproblematic. In addition, there are many people around the world who use English regularly but have some other native language (or even several other languages they use for work and at home). Some nonnative speakers whose own language does not gender pronouns frequently make what native speakers and the person spoken of take as the “wrong” choice. For such nonnative speakers, a nongendered default like they might also be welcome.

In the meantime, the idea that people should specify “their” (preferred) gender pronouns has become more and more prominent, especially among younger people. Indeed, as reported in McConnell-Ginet (2020: see especially pp. 199–207), in January 2020 the American Dialect Society chose “my pronouns” as its “word-of-the-year,” and Dennis Baron’s (2020) What’s Your Pronoun: Beyond He & She was published and favorably reviewed in the New York Times.

But many speakers of English remain dismissive of pronoun concerns. Language users mostly talk and write or text with little explicit attention to their language choices. Being forced to weigh pronoun choices feels “weird” to many and makes them (us) uncomfortable. They (we) may even notice their (our) cis- and hetero-based privilege, which is discomfiting indeed. Most people like to think of language as just “there,” as neutral. They do not enjoy being reminded that some familiar linguistic practices are unsustainable as social practices become more sensitive to the interests of those outside standard gender/sexual binaries. Few of us want to recognize our own place in a sociosexual hierarchy that subordinates gender and sexual minorities.

Why should you ask women what it is to “have sex”? Why is there no definition of “having sex” for all human beings? Gynecology and sexology experts should provide a clear definition of “having sex” …. The definition of “have sex” must be unique, simple, and easy to understand, clinically useful, specific, and reflecting current scientific knowledge. Gynecologists and sexologists should define having sex/making love, the situation in which orgasm happens in both partners with or without vaginal intercourse: a definition for all human beings.

(Puppo 2012: 225)

Sexologist Vincenzo Puppo (2012) is clearly dismayed by research on sexual definitions like that discussed earlier. The particular study that appears to have animated Puppo to write his admonishing letter to the editor of the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology was C. M. Mehta et al. (2011), which used semi-structured interviews with young women to elicit their ideas about what counts as “having sex” and also about when sexual events began and ended. Puppo’s response clearly shows that he takes quite seriously the linguistic division of labor that philosopher Hilary Putnam (1975) posited when he argued that meaning “ain’t in the head.” Putnam’s famous example was beech. He noted that many, perhaps even most, English speakers know that the word denotes some kind of tree but would be hard pressed to distinguish a beech from, say, an elm. Not to worry, however, says Putnam. Within our community there are tree experts who, in the linguistic division of labor, can settle questions of whether or not a particular tree should be labeled beech or, perhaps, elm. Such individuals hold what I like to call semantic authority on the matter of tree labels.

Puppo claims semantic authority in the area of sexuality for scientists like himself and denies authority to random “women,” whose opinions on the matter he dismisses as irrelevant. He wants his colleagues to develop an exemplary definition that they can all then use to “educate” the rest of us. The aim is to regiment talk about these matters (and, apparently, also to promote particular approaches to sexual activity that will guarantee orgasms for all—he assumes that “having sex” is equivalent to “making love”). Scientists and other experts in particular areas are appropriately accorded semantic authority for some matters—for example, understanding the mechanisms through which certain kinds of activity increase the risk of transmitting infection. But that, of course, is far from all of what having sex is about.

The primary sex/gender labels (female and male, woman and man) are woven into the fabric of everyday life. And these labels have been at the center of struggles over semantic authority. On public restroom doors, they have raised great alarm. Houston proposed equal rights legislation back in 2015 that, if passed, would have allowed transgender people to use whichever public facility they felt comfortable entering. In a post-election analysis, Justin Wm. Moyer (2015) quoted Houston retiree Loyce Parker, “anybody with a penis, I don’t want them in the ladies room.” Some “radical feminists” seem to agree with Parker. Sheila Jeffreys (2014), for instance, proclaimed that the label woman could not apply to someone having or having had a penis, whether or not that person was now living as a woman. According to Jeffreys, transgender women are not really women at all. This position has been discussed somewhat sympathetically in popular accounts (Goldberg 2014) but strongly criticized elsewhere (e.g., Johnston 2014).

With identification of beeches, few have any objection to ceding semantic authority to tree scientists. There is considerable disagreement, however, over semantic authority in the gendering of human beings. Transgender activists argue that each individual should be authorized to settle the question of their own gender and should have that kind of semantic authority (for a similar perspective within linguistics, see Zimman, this volume). But in the United States, for example, individuals are answerable to all kinds of institutions, including notably governmental agencies, in the matter of how they are to be classified: Their semantic authority is often challenged.

In the absence of agreed-upon semantic authorities for assigning gender identity, Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) observe that “[s]tate actors … are forced to choose and monitor a particular criterion for defining sex when assigning legal gender identity”:

In the United States there are state entities with jurisdictional power to define sex [i.e., these entities hold semantic authority]. For example, states, territories, and the federal government each issue all sorts of identification documents—from passports to birth certificates to drivers’ licenses to pilots’ licenses to Social Security cards. Even state entities that do not issue identity documents but do segregate on the basis of gender make their own rules for gender classification—prisons, hospitals, schools, drug rehabilitation centers, youth service providers, social services. To add yet one more layer of complexity, judges have added to the chaos by finding that one’s legal gender for one social function may not hold for others.

(Moore and Currah 2015: 64)

Of course there are also nonstate entities like colleges and universities, clubs, and events segregating by sex/gender, each of which makes its own determinations. Recent years have, for example, seen all of the elite “Seven Sisters” Eastern women’s colleges open their doors to trans women, though on slightly different terms and with different policies on people who might have been admitted as women and then transitioned to male status. The Girl Scouts of Western Washington made headlines in the summer of 2015 when they returned a $100,000 gift that came with stipulations that it was not to be used for transgender girls. “We won’t exclude ANY girl” they announced, and quickly raised online more than $250,000 from supporters of their trans-inclusionary policies. Increasingly, trans-friendly female-only groups accept someone as a girl or a woman if that is what she says she is—that is, they give semantic authority to the individual whose sex/gender identity is at issue. But others, like the “radical feminists” mentioned earlier, continue to resist, insisting that possession of a penis at some stage of life is absolutely criterial for application of male, boy, or man (and also insisting on “dead-naming”—that is, using pre-transition proper names, most of which are marked as masculine—by, for example, calling a trans woman “John,” the name given at birth, rather than her present name “Joan”).

Some jurisdictions have now added a third gender option to the traditional two. As of January 2018, California even allows people to change their birth certificates to read nonbinary rather than female or male, with nonbinary understood as covering any sort of alternative to the standard two categories (on nonbinary identification, see Steele, this volume). But, says Dembroff (2018), “adding ‘nonbinary’ to the list of legal gender options does not address the core problem: Any legal system that requires a person to record their gender perpetuates government control over our bodies and identities.” Noting that what has happened here is a replacement of traditional reliance on genitalia to reliance on (presumed stable) self-identification, Dembroff continues: “There is no single way to articulate the basis for gender identity, and not all citizens have stable and clearly defined identities. Any legal categorization of gender identity, which necessarily requires external criteria of identity (such as attesting to it under “pain of perjury”), is sure to be reductive and inadequate.” The article correctly observes that classification as female was used to exclude women from casting ballots, enlisting in the military, and enrolling at Yale. Dembroff notes, however, that “these designations [of legal gender/sex] have also been used at times to correct sexism” and mentions Title IX, going on to show the complications of interpreting the law’s support for female sports in contexts where gender fluidity is more salient. Somewhat wistfully, the article recognizes that getting the state out of the business of gender classification is not yet an obtainable goal.

Currah, a political scientist who has specialized in transgender studies, has been exploring issues of the state’s involvement in regulating gender identities for more than a decade. “We won’t know who you are,” was the comment he heard from one official during discussion of a proposal to allow changes in sex designations on New York City birth certificates (Currah and Moore 2009). He and his coauthor note that the comment clearly indicates that governmental interest in tracking its citizenry partly drives sex classification—and the strong commitment to ensuring the permanency of that classification. Currah is currently writing a book with the working title Not the United States of Sex: Sex Classification and Transgender Politics. In a 2016 post on paisleycurrah.com (Currah 2016), titled “Feminism, gender pluralism, and gender neutrality: Maybe it’s time to bring back the binary,” he notes the tension between gender-inclusivity and tracking and understanding sex-based subordination. He says that “one crucial tool was lost [in the move away from the centrality of the sex/gender binary to notions of gender and fluidity]: the emphasis on asymmetry. A gender theory, a transgender umbrella, that transcended the binary, that observed and enabled a multiplicity of differences, could no longer say much about women’s subordination.”

This is the puzzle: If we abandon binary sex/gender categorization altogether, how do we recognize that the two binary poles, female/woman and male/man, have virtually everywhere served to support not just (beliefs in) difference but gender arrangements that subordinate those labeled women or girls? Dembroff (2018) noted that sometimes binary classifications have proved useful in challenging sex-based injustice; they [Dembroff’s PGP] use the example of Title IX and addressing sex bias in sports. We may want to move away from sex/gender binaries, but it is not something that will happen overnight. So long as sex/gender categories continue in wide play, we need to use them to understand how the pervasive categorization affects people’s lives.

Currah was spurred to his comments by noticing that there is much wider public support for transgender rights than for abortion rights, which are primarily needed by women (and those few transgender men or gender-fluid people with unwanted pregnancies). Reproductive sexuality is not symmetric, and controlling female bodies has been central to maintaining male subordination of females. So long as people think of and treat one another in sex/gender-asymmetric ways, sex/gender labels will continue to incite struggles over semantic authority. In McConnell-Ginet (2020), I distinguish generalizations about internal essences of people placed in some socially significant category from those about external treatment of people so categorized. It is not the category labels themselves that are problematic but what we do with them. But it is difficult indeed to negotiate a path that recognizes and welcomes blurring of oppressive categories and at the same time allows us to address the injustices those categories are used to rationalize.

Over the last several decades, looking at matters of gender and sexuality through the lenses provided by linguistic semantics and pragmatics has transformed scholarship on linguistically conveyed meaning. The rapid changes in sociocultural understandings of gender and sexuality have made it impossible to maintain the view of fixed linguistic meanings of words relevant to this domain. Indeed, research in linguistics and philosophy of language informed by feminist and queer perspectives has led to recognition of significant malleability of words in most domains. And we have begun to understand that it is because language is woven into the fabric of life that social change and linguistic change proceed hand in hand. The word rape and understanding of and attitudes toward sexual assault have to change together, because applying the label rape has material consequences.

Material consequences are especially obvious in legal domains. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII, which prohibits “discrimination on the basis of sex,” protects lesbians, gay men, and transgender persons against workplace discrimination. The majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia was authored by conservative justice Neil Gorsuch. Both Gorsuch’s opinion and the two opinions authored by the dissenters, justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, claimed to be driven by “originalist” views of “the public meaning” of the word sex in 1964, when Title VII was first enacted. Yet, as William N. Eskridge, Brian G. Slocum, and Stefan Th. Gries (2021) brilliantly demonstrate, none of the three opinions offers either an empirically defensible view of what sex meant in 1964 nor a linguistically and historically realistic view of linguistic and social dynamism and their interplay. As they show, society and the word sex have changed (or at least its application and assumptions informing its interpretation if not its meaning), as has Title VII (via amendments and its history in the judicial process, precedents). What constitutes “originalism,” and whether constitutional “dynamism”—seeing the constitution as a living document with meaning that societal change continues to alter—can be countenanced without handing legislative power to justices, are issues that will continue to be debated and contested in, for example, upcoming challenges to Roe v. Wade.

People do things with words, which therefore need to serve human interests, to have “useful” meanings. Interests in many domains are varied and they sometimes conflict. Interest-sensitive meanings shift readily and are sometimes contested—which activities should be labeled sex, for example, depends on what is at stake in that labeling. What (or who) gets labeled and who does the labeling enter into how sexual preferences and activities are viewed and socially regimented. The label MSM, for example, was imposed externally in globalized AIDS-prevention campaigns but continues to be transformed in ways that confound the aims of its creators. People’s experience of themselves and their sexuality is partly—but by no means completely—shaped by labeling practices in particular times and places.

Linguistic practice involves not only explicit meaning but also what is conveyed implicitly by discursive norms not to say “what goes without saying” but also to “specify what needs to be specified.” Discursive norms operative in most contexts where English is being used take for granted a sharp, exhaustive, and stable binary gender/sex classification. Many content words seem to presuppose this split (kinship terms, for example), but third-person singular pronouns bring out quite compellingly the pervasiveness of presuppositions that people are readily sorted into two sex/gender categories and that, once sorted, they remain in their categories.

It is hardly surprising, then, that many people resist moving away from familiar gender/sex binaries, even as there is increasing social recognition of nonbinarism. There is a long tradition of ceding what I call semantic authority to “experts.” In many cases—like whether a tree is properly labeled beech or elm—this seems relatively unproblematic. But when the question is whether a person should go into the toilet facilities labeled Women or Men, who is to be accorded semantic authority is far more complicated. The critical point is that meaning is deeply intertwined in power relations and social structures—and both linguistic meaning and sociopolitical realities are profoundly “dynamic,” always changing.

Thanks to Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett for asking me to contribute this chapter. Both went above and beyond ordinary editorial practice to offer excellent suggestions and useful references. Sadly, I cannot blame either of them for remaining deficiencies.