Hiphination.files.wordpress.com



Season 3, Episode 7: For Women Only (Part 2)Full TranscriptBarry: The following episode contains discussion of sex and gender-based discrimination and violence. Listener discretion is advised.Barry: I'm sure you're following the debates in Britain, where the government signaled last year that it wants to make it easier for transgender people to get a gender change certificate. It's really there that I see the debates today look just just like the debates from the 70s when you had to live through them. What do you make of them today?Sandy Stone: I don't think they new things changed really from the 70s.Barry: Sandy Stone.Stone: Because the nature of hate doesn't change with time.Raymond: The problem has gotten bigger.Barry: Janis Raymond.Raymond: Meanwhile, people are not really talking to each other about this because the kind of accusations of transphobia.Stone: Hate in its current form is hate in its essential form. Raymond: The San Francisco library just launched a transgender exhibition that displayed objects like baseball bats, machetes, guns, and we killed her.Barry: I mean there's a lot of inflammatory rhetoric and accusations.Raymond: Yeah, but it's for the most part, it's not coming from feminists. But I hope that one of the things that we could agree on is that, ultimately, we can talk at least about why this is such a crisis, what gender is, where it comes from, and how it has its roots, you know, in a patriarchal society.Barry: You're really convinced that the arguments come from hate?Stone: Mm-hmm. Barry: Because they're presented as reasoned conclusions that come from a certain view of gender. So that they say we should really talk about the right view of gender. All the philosophy, you think, is just a cover for hate?Stone: I think the things that happened to individuals, the things that they are through, that caused them to hate, are, you know, for them, important. I've had, at this point in my life, a chance to have deep experiences with a number of TERFs and I find that there there is a depressingly small number of events in their lives that caused them to become the people they are. I find that most of them have had terrible experiences with men who have hurt them. They see trans women as men because, initially, we have to live as men in the world, and so we've performed as male, and that's an excuse for some TERF people to say to trans women, 'You're men.' But their pain is real for them, you know. For us, they're dangerous.Tape: From Slate this is Hi-Phi Nation: philosophy in story form. Recording from Vassar College, here's Barry Lam.Barry: Personal experiences can be typical or atypical, reflective of realities on which you can generalize, or simply outliers on which generalizations would be very dangerous. Last episode, we began our discussion of trans inclusion in sex segregated spaces by looking at an event in the 70s at Olivia records involving Sandy Stone and Janis Raymond, the founders of competing traditions in the philosophy of gender. This week we look at the battle over gendered spaces in the years since Sandy and Janice. Both are retired now, well into their 70s and 80s. The disputes are now amongst the new generation.Tape: I'm Laurel Westbrook. I'm an associate professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University.Barry: Sociologist Laurel Westbrook studies popular opinion about gender and gender categorization. I went to their work to figure out if there was a way to scientifically identify just what was driving views about trans inclusivity and exclusivity in public debates. Was it reasoned theories of gender, or rather fear or hate? In the past ten years or so, there have been these sporadic and sudden appearances of debates about gender categories in the popular press. There's usually some triggering event, like a proposed change to a law or a sporting event or some celebrity does or says something these debates inevitably lead to what Westbrook calls a gender panic.Westbrook: A gender panic is a moment where people's common-sense understandings of gender are challenged, and people can experience an intense emotional reaction. Westbrook and their colleague, Kristen Schilt, decided to look at mainstream newspapers to identify patterns and how people were talking about gender categories during these gender panics. And also they wanted to see what seems to quell them, because eventually, they do seem to go away, only to emerge again somewhere else later on. And if you're a sociologist, looking at the popular press a lot more informative than looking at the academic literature on gender, because:Westbrook: --journalists are part of our regular culture, right? So the things that they're writing about, and the people they choose to interview, and the quotes they choose to include, reflect dominant understandings. But folks who don't know anything about the topic, right, so someone who had not heard of a transgender person before, reads that newspaper article, and they learn something from that. And so in that way, newspaper articles also shape understandings.Barry: Westbrook and Schilt took thousands of articles, op eds, letters, anything that appeared in newspapers, and they put it in this textural analysis program called Atlas TI. From there they could see patterns, like what starts a gender panic, how media debates typically play out across gender panics, and then, what finally seems to quell the panic.Westbrook: Interestingly, controversial moments all turned out to be debates about transgender people having access to sex segregated spaces, which were almost always women's spaces.Barry: Finding number one: gender panics only occur when there's some possibility of extending rights to women-only spaces to trans women. In fact, and this is finding number two, trans men don't seem to cause any gender panics. None.Westbrook: We marked for when people were talking about trans women and when people were talking about trans men, and the folks who were opposed to transgender rights never mentioned trans men at all. And that's a pretty stark thing with the coding, right, when you just get zero on how many quotes you have that reference that.Barry: This is not to say that Westbrook and Schilt found that trans men didn't face harassment or discrimination. In fact, some data I found suggest that trans men, as well as gender non-conforming women, actually face the highest rates of verbal harassment in women only spaces, even more than trans women. What Westbrook and Schilt found was that, in the popular imagination, people weren't thinking about trans men when they were panicked about access to sex segregated spaces. Only trans women.Westbrook: Then we looked back at like, okay how are they talking about women? Really, what they were talking about was a man, specifically often a man in a dress, going into these spaces. And that produced a sense of panic for them.Barry: This was across the board no matter the triggering event. Westbrook insured looked at debates over trans inclusion in men and women's sports. They looked at debates about bathroom access, and, years in advance of the UK consultation on gender recognition certificates, they looked at birth certificate changes of gender laws in the state of New York. Consistently gender panics were almost all focused around trans women, and, finding number three, they seem to be quelled under one specific condition, just one. As long as trans women were willing to do one thing, they could be included, panic over.Westbrook: Genital surgery.MusicWestbrook: It is genital surgery that makes people comfortable, where your genitals then look like what our culture has said female genitals should look like. And then people are calm. it wasn't that people were terrified of trans people writ large. They were specifically terrified of trans women who they imagined to have a penis. And they saw that penis as inherently able to harm someone. You can see this in the discussions over and over again about access to locker rooms and bathrooms, also the discussion of prisons. The terror was that trans women in women's prisons would rape people. Right so this penis thing came up over and over in all of those spaces. The most surprising space that came up in is in terms of the laws around participation on sports teams. So trans women must remove their testicles, and must prove that their hormones are, and these are not my words, they're theirs, as 'weak' as a woman's. But they also have to remove what doctors would call a penis. And that's baffling, because you don't, unless you're used to doing a very odd sport, use your penis when you're competing as an athlete. Barry: And so a hypothesis that Westbrook and Schilt put forward in 2014, when one of their papers was published, was that gender panics weren't really gender panics. They're penis panics. Gender panics aren't about gender, but about sexuality.Westbrook: What folks were holding in their minds when they were thinking about trans women was that trans women, because they were labeled male at birth, would behave in a stereotypical way that we think men do, which is, that they would use those spaces as a way to seek sex. So this belief that men are inherent rapists is what caused folks to focus exclusively on transgender women accessing these sex segregated spaces, and ignoring transgender men because they didn't see those transgender men as potential rapists.Barry: and the reason that Westbrook and shell think this is happening is that interactions between trans and cisgender people in sex segregated spaces are all being simulated in people's imagination, rather than being based on what actually happens in the world. In the popular imagination, trans men don't have penises that pose a rape threat to women. In contrast, people seem to imagine trans women posing a rape threat to just about everyone, not just women. Something else that Westbrook has studied is the long tradition of media depictions of trans women being threats to straight men.Westbrook: What I found in my analysis of murders of transgender people is that a highly disproportionate number of those murders occur in sexual interactions.MusicWestbrook: The narrative that was reproduced in these news stories was that trans women were really gay men who would present as women in order to lure heterosexual men into homosexual encounters. It's sort of this interesting, like, trans femme fatale thing, right, I will trap you. In these newspaper articles the risk that trans women posed to cis men was that they would trick them into a homosexual encounter, thereby making them gay. And as you look through these newspaper articles about these murders, you actually find that some of these men claimed to be raped. These were consensual sexual encounters, but because it was an encounter with a woman who was labeled male at birth, rather than a woman who was labeled female at birth, these men then say, 'No, I was raped.' And then, of course, we have the narrative that we've been talking about most of the time, which is that trans women, because they are quote unquote, 'really men,' will rape cis women. And what's interesting in the bathroom narrative is then you have to believe that trans women are all attracted to women which shows the ways in which beliefs about heterosexuality play a huge role in terms of discrimination against trans people because the belief is that your core, because you're a labeled male at birth, your core must be attracted to females because everyone must be heterosexual-- although most trans women are straight, which means they are attracted to men. Barry: Westbrook and shall put forward their theory in 2014, the theory that gender panics are actually penis panics driven by a fear of the penis as a rape threat. And since then it's gotten tested every time gender returned to the public sphere as a topic of discussion. The North Carolina bathroom bill controversies happened in 2016, the UK gender certificate laws in 2018. Each time Westbrook and Schilt got to see the discourse never changed or evolved.Westbrook: This is devastating, right. So most academics would love to see their findings confirmed over and over in the news. This is not the sort of finding you want confirmed.MusicWestbrook: we've been taught that transphobia applies to all trans people. But what we found is that transphobia is actually gender specific. Julia Serano calls this transmisogyny, which is the discrimination against trans women both for their femininity and for their perceived rejection of masculinity. There's this extra layer of gender inequality, so we think of gender inequality as men versus women or trans versus cis, but here's this moment where it's merged, where there's two levels of gender inequality making it so that, when a trans person is discriminated against, it's much more likely to be a trans woman than trans man.Tape: Hi Phi Nation will return after these messages.MusicBarry: There's an argument about the sanctity of women's-only spaces that I hear coming from the lesbian feminist community, rather than the conservative community, right. And their claim is, even if it isn't the case that, as they put it, male bodied individuals are essentially violent, the claim is that they are socialized to be so. That socialization is enough for them to be excluded from, you know, women's only spaces, and they point to data, you know, like, you know very high percentage of women are sexually assaulted. And the ones who are sexually assaulted by and large are sexually assaulted by males.Westbrook: So I think that identity politics makes a really dangerous move around safety. So we have an idea about a safe space, is a space where people share my identity. But really, a safe space is a space filled with people who are kind and compassionate. You can't use identity as a proxy for those things. Lots of lesbians have experienced violence at the hands of other lesbians, right. So lesbian domestic violence is a real thing. If you make a space that's comprised only of cisgender lesbians, you still have the potential for violence. The way that you make a space that doesn't have violence is you fill it with people who are not violent.Barry: Some data to back up Westbrook's claim here. Between 30 to 33 percent of lesbians report having been sexually assaulted by a female intimate partner. And this is outside of incarceration institutions. Inside, it's an even higher rate. Or is it?Westbrook: It's still true that most of the perpetrators of sexual assaults on women are men. All of our data shows that the person most likely to sexually assault a cisgender woman is a heterosexual cisgender man who knows them, right. So, is a member of their family, is a friend, of the family, is a friend of theirs, is someone they're dating, someone they met at a bar, etc. We have this whole narrative the stranger-danger narrative where some scary man is going to jump out of a bush and attack you, and that's incredibly rare.Barry: In the fight over women-only spaces, the view from another side, the gender critical feminist side, is that there is a tension between the advocacy for women's rights and the advocacy for the inclusion of trans women. They think there is something justifiable about the asymmetrical treatment that trans women face.Tape: I'm Holly Lawford Smith, and I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne.Barry: So what are your feelings about the existing rules in the UK?Holly: So I think there's something to that. Having to live for two years in the gender that you want to acquire, or you say you already are, but you want to be recognized as. It's a kind of commitment device, right. Like it shows that you're sincere or serious. There's some social cost to living that way. Two years is a non-trivial amount of time. So I think it's signals something A: to the community that you might be asking to accept you. So for example, it signals to women that there's a good case for your inclusion, and it sort of prevents it from being a really trivial thing, where people are putting on gender like they put on costumes, for example. You just decide that that's something that you want.Barry: Safety based considerations are important to Lawford Smith, but she also argues that there are considerations of fairness and justice that exclude trans women from women only spaces. Considerations that don't apply to trans men and men only spaces.Lawford Smith: I think may be one important distinction here is going to be in terms of dominant groups and oppressed groups. It can be really important for oppressed groups to gather together. It gives all sorts of goods, like a feeling of solidarity, the ability to discuss and exchange experiences in the world that's kind of run by or controlled by dominant groups. In one place you see this theme show up is in the current Netflix show, Dear White People. So you have a college of black students. And you see how kind of important it is for them to have space that's just for black students, and it excludes white students. There's a place for them to discuss their experiences of living in a white supremacist world. And so I suppose that's maybe the thing that comes into this discussion about people clustering or the importance of spaces. I think dominant groups don't have a right, so white men don't have a right, to cluster in a way that protects their interests and keeps subordinated groups out. But I definitely think subordinated groups have a right to cluster and join together to defend their own interest, to organize politically, to experience solidarity.Barry: The premise, then, is that women as a category make up one of these oppressed groups, right, and I think that a lot of people accept that as the first premise. Okay so let's take that as a premise, right, and now let's talk about this idea that letting in people who self-identify as women. In what way does it violate the principle that an oppressed group gets to the cluster together? It's still an oppressed group of women, isn't it?Lawford Smith: There might be a question of what it takes to have changed your gender. So then that's gonna depend on your theory of gender.Barry: There's an assumption here that Holly Lawrence Smith is making. you might call it the assumption that metaphysics precedes policy. Inclusion in a space depends on what gender you are and that's determined by what gender really is. That's where all this gender metaphysics come in. You don't have to by that assumption. We're gonna see what happens when you give it up but as long as you do buy, it we're gonna need to take a brief interlude to explain about a hundred years worth of theories of gender. for that I needed a lot of help.Tape: I'm Robin Dembroff. I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at Yale University.Barry: Robin Dembroff, on theories of gender, in under four minutes.Dembroff: The most, what we might call traditional, view of gender in the West is to think of gender in terms there being two kinds, men and women, where these two kinds are particular biological kinds.Barry: The biological sex account of gender.Dembroff: And so by that I mean someone is a man or a woman depending on what sort of primary and secondary sex characteristics they have. Barry: Theory 2, gender as an oppressive social norm.Dembroff: in reaction to this biological view of gender, you get what you might call externalist views of gender, or social views of gender, which are saying it's this whole social system of forcing someone into a particular way of being on the basis of what those sex features are. One way of thinking about this is in the kind of pithy Simone de Beauvoir line, gender is the social interpretation of sex. So a lot of particularly second wave feminists, a lot of what they're saying is, being a woman in our society isn't just, you know, having a vagina and XX chromosomes. It is being hugely constrained with respect to sexuality, with respect to occupation, with respect to gender expression, and dress as even with how one can walk and talk and it just saturates everything about your life, to be assigned female at birth. A lot of that movement was trying to break those things apart and say, look, we can embrace our womanhood in the sense that we are female-bodied people, but that doesn't mean we need to embrace womanhood in the sense of all of these social meanings that have been set up and that we're policed into following in a certain way. Barry: Theory 3: Self-determinative views of gender.Dembroff: Which comes from, more, of the visibility of trans people. Which is saying, look, gender isn't just something that's imposed on us though. It's also something we can claim for ourselves. So gender also is, or maybe is instead, a sort of identification with or a sense of kinship with or a disposition to perform gender in a certain way, or to have kinship with a certain group, namely like with men or with women. And so once you think about gender in terms of identification, is a new kind of autonomy or ownership over one's gender that didn't exist on the previous more externalist way of thinking about gender. So we can think of that kind of family of views as internalist views.Barry: And finally, political views of gender.Dembroff: We're seeing an emerging ways of identifying one's gender, which in my work I call political gender kinds. Which are people who claim certain gender category memberships such as agender, genderqueer, non-binary, and so on where these are based less on how one is treated by society it's certainly not at all based on one's biological or reproductive features, nor is it really based on having a particular sense of kinship with a certain group or certain dispositions. But rather it's based on a sort of placing oneself outside of the gender system and its entirety, and saying I reject all of this and I don't want to be constrained by gender norms at all. I want to just step outside of the system. Now of course, yes, just by virtue of saying I'm genderqueer doesn't mean that one is not in fact treated a particular way by those around. But it's a sort of political statement. It's a sort of putting one's body very literally on the line and saying you can treat me in those ways, but I'm going to claim, in this very deeply existential way, that your system doesn't fit me, and we should change what that system is.Barry: We saw last week that the species of feminism descending from Janice Raymond is distinctively second-wave. It's a social and externalist count of gender, placed in opposition to the view that gender can be claimed for oneself. That's still the view today among gender critical feminists.Lawford Smith: So I think one quite compelling theory of gender is being subject to a certain sorts of treatment, expectations, and so on on the basis of being assumed or perceived to be female. That's kind of a feature of a patriarchal society. And a definition like that, of course, is going to include some trans women, whichever of the trans women are perceived and regularly read by society as women. They're going to be subject to that sort of treatment. But again, it's like, that's not all trans women. And now consider the person who 40 spent years or however long living as a man, gaining all the sort of social advantage of living as a man in a society like ours, then at some late stage in their life decided that that's not right for them, and they want to live as a woman. In fact there are well-known cases of these kind of people. Some of them still look exactly like they looked all their lives. They have their beards, and they have masculine physique. So there's no distinguishing these people necessarily from other males, right. So what are they bringing to the table? A: They're part of the class of males that we can say things about statistically and that those things justify us wanting to have protected women's spaces, right. So things about male violence or male crime rates whatever else. And male socialization is going to have had a huge effect on their behavior, the way they experience the world, the way they feel, the sorts of shared experiences that they have in common with women. So coming back to this thought about it being important for oppressed groups to have spaces where they can organize politically, discuss their shared experiences, have a place away from the dominant group just to be free and relaxed, that can't happen if people like that are in the space. And now, if it becomes illegal or even just socially really frowned on to ever have an event that's female only, because it's labeled as being transphobic or trans exclusionary not to want trans women in that group, even if they're the kind of trans woman who has just transitioned last year and has a lifetime of male privilege, so that I see it's a real problem.Barry: So let's take for granted that the case that you've described as somebody who's gained male advantage their whole life. Will you also accept that they're oppressed in other ways?Lawford Smith: Yes, of course, yeah.Barry: Doesn't that count as a consideration in favor of them being, included? Because, women, there's a lot of different kinds of women, and I would imagine there's power differentials between groups of women.Lawford Smith: Absolutely, yeah. Barry: And you will accept that, say, white women cannot exclude black women.Lawford Smith: Absolutely, yeah.Barry: But it can't go the other way around. But if you're gonna accept that there are ways in which trans women, and the kind that you've described, have have been oppressed in other ways, why isn't that enough to get them into the space, morally speaking? Lawford Smith: Yeah I mean that's also a good question. I think the answer is going to be that women-only spaces are not and should not be the only spaces for all oppressed peoples.MusicLawford Smith: So it's not that we think people with certain sorts of disabilities are really marginalized in society. That sucks a lot for them, and it would be really important to make that better for them. Oh, chuck them on and with the women! I just think that sort of reasoning there's something wrong with it. So it's not that anything that's a women only space is a space for all marginalized vulnerable people to get away from, white men, let's say. I think there's important reasons why women need to band together, or people with a certain set of experiences, like African Americans in the US, will want to band together. It's not saying anything about what other oppressed groups have a right to, it's just saying that's a separate question and that should be dealt with separately.Tape: We'll return to the rest of Hi Phi Nation after these messages. MusicDembroff: I think that one of the main problems with this approach, this kind of trans exclusionary approach--Barry: --Robin Dembroff, Yale University-- Dembroff: --is thinking that the subordination and discrimination that someone faces when they're perceived as a reproductive being, and the sort of way of describing is the only candidate for talking about what discrimination against women is, or what gender discrimination is. So I agree with them, actually, that it's important for us to think about the political work that we want to do with the term 'woman' and who we use it for when we talk about women's rights, or we talk about what it is to be a feminist. And I think that the kind of subjugation that female-assigned people face is an important a really important aspect of that. But the kind of transmisogyny that trans women face, I think, is also an incredibly important form of gender discrimination, that it would be a mistake for people who are assigned female to say, oh that has nothing to do with us. Because it very clearly does have something to do with people who are female assigned. Like the kind of misogyny that is responsible for the subordination of people who were born with female genitalia is the same misogyny that's responsible for the violence and the marginalization of trans women.Barry: So you identified the source of misogyny as coming from the same kind of thing whereas as they would not. Because, literally, Holly said to me women only spaces shouldn't be the spaces for all oppressed people. Saying that to me describes, like okay, different people are oppressed in different ways and so like okay there's women and then there should be women-only spaces and then maybe other spaces for other people.Dembroff: Yeah, I think that that's it's a mistake to frame it that way. I think for one the oppression that trans women face again I think is completely connected, and, in fact comes from the same source as the oppression against female assigned people. But even if you take female-assigned people, the kind of oppression that female-assigned people face is also going to be very different depending on whether someone's non-disabled or disabled, whether someone is black, white, Asian, so on, what their race is, what their socio-economic class is, with their education status is, with their sexuality is, and so on. so if we're going to talk about including people on the basis of them having undergone a particular kind of oppression, you're never going to find a unified account of that because people's social experiences are just so different depending on their social identities.Barry: Right, so that's the other source of the problem. They're assuming that there's some kind of unity to the explanation of the oppression that you don't think that exists.Dembroff: Well, I think that there is a sort of unity again, in the sense that I think that misogyny is responsible for all this kinds of treatment. But I don't think that, if you looked at the sort of subordination and treatment, that everyone who has been assigned female at birth has faced, they're gonna find one common description of that experience, aside from its kind of origin and misogyny.Barry: Dembroff's idea here is, that if you had to look so broadly at oppression so as to include all female assigned people, then lots of other people are going to be oppressed in the same way. Gay men, men who don't conform to masculine stereotypes, and trans women, are also mistreated on the basis of their sex features. The writer Julia Serano pointed out that the same patriarchal norms telling females to be feminine are the ones telling males that they can't be. Because the norms say that masculinity is more valuable than femininity, that the two are incompatible, and that masculinity is only for males. That's the source of gender oppression shared by trans women, cis women, and others alike. Dembroff also offers a deeper critique, not just of gender critical feminism, but of any view assuming that metaphysics precedes policy. That's not how things work. The facts about gender don't determine how you treat people. If anything, it's the other way around.Dembroff: People really do think they're having first-order metaphysical disputes about whether someone belongs to this particular category, women over this particular category, men. But once you really break down what's going on, you can see that a lot of the motivation for framing the dispute in that way is because of a bad assumption about how the nature of gender categories should align with how people are treated. What I've argued, in print anyways, is that there's this kind of assumption that's shared by both sides to this dispute, which I call the real gender assumption. Which is the assumption that someone should be treated as a man or treated as a woman only if they so-called really are a man or a woman. And both sides think this, and because of they they want to treat people differently-- like one side wants to treat trans men in ways that apply masculine norms to them, and another side wants to deny that trans men should be treated by masculine norms, their justification for their differing views about how a person should be treated rest in this metaphysical claim that that person really is a man or really is not a man, if you're on the other side. And because of that, the whole dispute then becomes about this metaphysical question. On my view there can be an answer. So I should say it's not that I think that gender kinds aren't real. I think they are real. I think they're not universal and immutable. And that's part of what goes into this dispute, too. So I think, for example, if someone is in a dominant context where the category of men is structured so that someone's a man if their assigned male at birth and have what we typically think of as male coded genitalia. When that person says trans men aren't men, they might be saying something true, but I think it's a problem that, one, they use that claim as justification for treating trans men in a certain way; namely, not treating them as they want to be treated. But also that they think that this is some kind of universal, immutable fact about a social category that justifies continuing to reinforce the category with those kinds of boundaries around it. As opposed to thinking, okay, maybe the way that we've currently set up this social kind, trans men aren't men, but that means that we need change who belongs to this kind. So let me give you an analogy that might be useful for people. So if you think about a kind that we can very easily see as a social kind, like being a voter. It was true prior to 1920 in the United States that women weren't voters, right. But anyone who is for women's rights would also understand that just because, if you said in 1918 women aren't voters, that sentence was true, that doesn't mean that it should continue to be the case. When we think about gender kinds as kinds have been given a particular sort of social meaning, whether or not the basis of that social meaning is self-identification, or certain biological features, or anything, like that, who gets that social meaning is flexible, and we can change who belongs to those kinds of categories.MusicBarry: When you say that both sides agree to this certain kind of real gender assumption, does that mean that there's going to be an aspect of your view that, that a person who's insistent on this 'trans women are women and trans men are men' will say that you are in some way problematizing their statements?Dembroff: I think that it's pretty common for people to appeal to the same kind of essentialist assumptions that the other side is making in order to find a kind of common ground for dispute. So think historically about the gay rights movement, and the claim 'born this way.' I think the idea that our sexual orientations are something we're born with is probably, at least for many people wrong. I think sexual orientation is for many people much more fluid than that. But the claim 'born this way' had a lot of political impact because it played into a certain kind of essentialist thinking about sexual orientation as being natural or unnatural that already existed on the other side. And so, similarly I think, when it comes to trans issues, trans people are meeting people who are coming from more dominant contexts where they're at.MusicBarry: Let's talk sociologically, in real life. We’ve been talking very theoretically. So like my experience is that younger people don't give a shit about, like they think more like the way you think. So like my students, right, or like, 18-year-olds or 19-year-olds, are not at all worried about including trans people in spaces. But 40 year olds, 50 year olds year olds, 70 year olds care a lot. And there's you know, if you're in the 70s and 80s, there's something happening, right. To be a butch lesbian or a black lesbian, like a lesbian separatist, it meant something. People took a lot of risk, and there was a lot of cost in their lives to build certain kinds of communities like that. And the inclusion of trans women in that space is incredibly threatening.Dembroff: In my view, they've climbed the ladder and they're refusing to kick it away. They've climbed the ladder and they're holding onto the ladder for dear life. I'm incredibly grateful to the feminists who've come in the decades before me, who have set up a world where I can be genderqueer. I don't think me being genderqueer is a threat to what they did before. I think it's building on what they did before. And so in the same way that, like, a lot of these people who identified as lesbians, or you know someone's a lesbian, not queer, you know. They've created spaces where it was safe to defy gender norms, and now they're policing gender norms by saying that the norm, the relaxed norms, albeit, from the ones that they grew up in, that relaxed set of norms-- those are the ones now that we have to adhere to. And people can't even push the boundaries on those.MusicLawford Smith: it shouldn't be so difficult to have this discussion.Barry: Holly Lawford Smith.Lawford Smith: There are two vulnerable groups. Females are a vulnerable group, and transgender people are a vulnerable group. And lots of their interests are compatible, but there are just there's certain points at which they come into conflict. And we have to be able to have a conversation about that. There's a campaign on Twitter called 'Get the L Out,' which is like, take the L for lesbian out of the LGBTQA cluster. And then there's a campaign from people who are angry about trans activism, which is 'Drop the T,' right. So there's already this sort of fracturing about who should be in this alliance, but yet that alliance is strong precisely because it's managed to gain a critical mass of people from different parts of this community. Well, my fear is that, because there seems to be so much establishment and institutional backing, at the moment, behind the movement for trans rights, and it feels like it's snowballing over some feminist concerns, that if there was a fracture, it would be the trans activist side that won it.MusicBarry: As of 2019, the wing of feminism tracing from Janice Raymond is losing. Olivia Records became Olivia Travel, a travel company that serves the lesbian community. It's trans inclusive and thriving. A Michigan Women's Festival, the women's music festival coming out of the lesbian feminist community and ran from 1976 to 2015, had to close down after boycotts for being trans exclusive. After a few years of having the same debates we've been talking about, the remaining women-only colleges amongst the Seven Sisters in the US: Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley, all became trans woman inclusive. Here at Vassar, the last remnant of our women-only era, the women-only dorm, Strong House, became gender integrated. The students decided that it should be a space for all oppressed people. These changes didn't come from the top down. The people who lived in these spaces made the choices themselves. It's been a few years now, and things are fine. In fact, they're great. Any turmoil leading to the transitions just melted away and people have just gone about their lives. It just seems like to survive today as a feminist institution, you just can't exclude trans women anymore. Younger women just aren't having it.Barry: So being amongst the younger generation, are you hopeful that the alliance, the LGBTQ, like that big alliance, is still a healthy alliance to have? Or do you think that some of it includes a kind of intolerance within it that, maybe, that's not a helpful way of, you know, grouping an alliance, or how do you think about it?Dembroff: I do think it's a useful alliance.Barry: Robin Dembroff.Dembroff: I don't think of it in terms of-- intolerance is not how I would describe it. I'd think of it in terms of tension. But I think that tension is good. So we have these gender categories that have been constructed, and that we've been forced into since we were born. And those are very constraining, and very rigid, and a lot of us in the LGBT community have chosen different ways of trying to break out of those very rigid categories. Not all the ways that we've chosen to break out of those categories are going to be compatible in the future, for being the new dominant way that things will be. There is going to be this kind of struggle or this tension. I don't think that gender queerness undermines being a butch lesbian, but that doesn't mean I don't think there's a tension between those things. I think there is attention a lot of that tension is us figuring out what the future is going to look like but that doesn't mean there isn't an alliance now between those different ways of being.MusicBarry: You said that tension is good. Why do you think that that's good?Dembroff: It keeps any of us from being tyrants, or being unchecked in our ability to tolerate other people's dispositions, other people's ways of being or thinking, that we're just gonna fall right back into the universal and immutable way of being.Tape: Hi-Phi Nation is written, produced, and edited by Barry Lam, associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College. For Slate podcasts, editorial director is Gabriel Roth, senior managing producer is June Thomas, senior producer is TJ Raphael.Barry: Special thanks this week to Evan Urquhart for editorial assistance.Tape: Production assistance this season provided by Jake Johnson and Noah Mendoza Gute. Visit for complete show notes, soundtrack, and reading lists for every episode. That's .Barry: In the Slate Plus segment of this episode, I asked sociologist Laurel Westbrook, who focused on safety based arguments for excluding trans women, what they thought of Hollie Lawford Smith's fairness based arguments for having cis women-only spaces, or in this case, lesbian only spaces that precluded trans women.Barry: What if the goal isn't per se, safety, what if it's just as an oppressed group we should have the right to have a space that is for our group I mean as such right with like the safety considerations asideWestbrook: The challenge with that is, how do you determine who's a member of your oppressed group?Barry: I then called up Holly Lawford Smith in Australia to talk about where she would situate gender critical feminism today in public discourse.Barry: Do you think that your side is winning or losing in the court of public opinion?Lawford Smith: Oh, losing, completely losing.Barry: Get the Slate Plus version of this, and every other Slate Podcast, by joining Slate Plus now at hiphiplus. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download