Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog



The current transgender debate polarizes Western societies like no other. Most strikingly, it divides some of the most vulnerable minorities – radical feminists and lesbian rights activists, and transgender activists. The Institute of Art and Ideas values dialogue and plurality. That is why we asked a range of thinkers, on different sides of the debate, to express their views on what philosophy needs to do to help us all better understand the transgender experience. ___Robin Dembroff___Robin Dembroff is Assistant Professor at Yale University. Their research focuses on feminist philosophy and metaphysics, with a particular emphasis on the social construction of gender and sexual orientation.People take gender categories and norms for granted. We see someone and reflexively judge their gender. We don’t reflect on how gender constricts our choices and behaviour. But philosophy teaches us to question our personal perspectives and cultural assumptions. Once we put these to the test, we begin to see the enormous, self-reinforcing social forces that create and control gender. One way these forces function is to impose and police rules about masculinity and femininity. Another way they do so is by perpetuating the myth that, from birth, we ‘naturally’ are destined to be either men or women. Philosophy contains powerful tools for criticizing these forces. It illuminates the relationships between social categories, ideology, and political power. Understanding these relationships, in turn, helps us build categories and concepts that do represent trans experiences and identities. The need is great. There is no such thing as 'the' transgender experience and identity, just as there is no such thing as 'the' woman's experience and identity. But while experiences, concepts, and practices of trans people and their communities differ widely, philosophy helps us see that they are held together by shared resistance to powerful social ideologies that reject or ignore them.___Kathleen Stock___Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy, University of Sussex.? She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, and sexual objectification.Philosophy can ask: what is a transgender identity? More generally, it can ask what “identity” is, and interrogate the central role that the notion now plays in contemporary politics. On one interpretation, one’s identity is wholly subjective: it’s whatever you believe you are, right now, where your beliefs guarantee success – if you now believe that you are such-and-such, then being such-and-such is your identity, and there’s no way you can be wrong about that. Sometimes we hear that identities include, not just being trans or not, but also having a sexual orientation: being gay, or heterosexual, or bisexual. But if, for instance, “subjectively believing you are heterosexual” is equivalent to “actually being heterosexual”, then this presumably means you are automatically heterosexual as long as you feel that term applies to you. And this looks wrong. Aren’t there independent, non-subjective conditions to be fulfilled, to count as being a heterosexual? You have to be genuinely attracted to the opposite sex, for one. Lots of people believe they’re straight but aren’t. Self-deception is possible. So possession of a heterosexual identity, in an interesting sense, seems to require more than just subjective belief. If that’s right, then we should think harder about making a transgender identity only a matter of what one subjectively feels is true about oneself right now.___Susan Stryker___Susan Stryker is an American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is the author of ‘Transgender History’.Philosophy could help change social understanding of transgender experience by loosening the purchase that naturalized, ossified, stagnant concepts of embodiment and identity have gained on our consciousnesses. Within biopolitical modernity, we have inculcated a cultural belief that the body is a stable and unambiguous anchor for both subjective identity and social categorization, and that the linkage between identity and categorization expresses a truth invested in and guaranteed by the material specificity of our biological substance. This is merely ideology, metaphysically elevated to the status of an ontological given. Because the hegemonic biopolitical regime of which gender is a part implies that we who are trans cannot or should not exist, yet obviously do exist, the false ontological premise becomes a justification for any and all actions taken to insure that we shall not exist. Philosophy can critique this premise in ways that allow it to be recognized instead as a historically contingent socio-political accomplishment—one that perpetrates violence against those whose existence contradicts the fundamental assumptions of the paradigm.___Julie Bindel___Julie Bindel is a British writer, radical feminist, and co-founder of the law-reform group Justice for Women, which since 1991 has helped women who have been prosecuted for killing violent male partners.Philosophy can change the way we understand both the social imposition of gender identity, because gender is nothing more and nothing less than a social construction based on sex stereotypes. By thinking philosophically about what it means to be a woman, or a man, we can differentiate between biological sex, and the rules imposed upon women and girls, in order to render us socially, sexually, socially and politically insubordinate to men.Being a woman is not an abstract, philosophical concept though. Under patriarchy, our position is rooted in material reality. But women are not subordinated by our biology, but rather by the meaning imposed on our biology under patriarchy. It is patriarchy that decided women are defined by our biology, and not women ourselves. Part of our oppression is being denied reproductive rights. Any female is required to live under male dominance and adhere to gender rules of femininity - in other words - subordination. If being a woman in this society was merely a philosophical idea, we could rid the world of male dominance quickly and easily.___Holly Lawford-Smith___Holly Lawford-Smith is a political philosopher at the University of Melbourne, interested in radical and gender critical feminism, and their perspective on questions about sex, gender, and gender identity; and the ethical and political questions arising from proposed legal changes to trans people’s and women’s rights.One thing philosophers are good at is digging down into the details of a claim, working out whether it’s coherent and consistent, and clarifying what’s really being said so that people who are arguing about it can avoid talking past each other. One claim being advanced by a small segment of the population at present is that everyone has a gender identity. This claim does several things. First, it displaces alternative understandings of gender, e.g. gender as harmful stereotypes, shifting focus from how someone is treated by others in the world to how a person feels about themself. Second, it imposes a form of self-understanding on a large number of people. People who do not experience dissonance in living as men or women are told they are ‘cisgender’, that they identify with their manhood or womanhood. This claim is unfalsifiable: there’s no way to tell the difference between a person who has a gender identity that isn’t dissonant for them, and a person who doesn’t have a gender identity. Many feminists inspired by the second-wave insist that they are in the latter category. Philosophers can help us understand what a gender identity might be, and whether it’s a fitting characteristic to replace sex in law.___Rebecca Kukla___Rebecca Kukla is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She is known for her work in bioethics, analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.Much of my own research is in the philosophy of language.?What does this have to do with the lives and experiences of trans folks? I am interested in thinking about the pragmatic effects of speech acts such as calling someone by a name or pronoun - one that they identify with, one they have asked to be called by, or one they have asked not to be called by. Sometimes people act as though verbal disagreements over what name or pronoun to use for someone are simple disagreements over fact, in which people are making competing assertions. In contrast, I think that addressing someone by a name or pronoun is a speech act more complex and with more morally significant effects than merely describing them accurately or inaccurately. Recognizing someone as having a gender or name places them in social space, and helps determine concrete facts about how they will be treated, what expectations will be placed on them, and what they can and cannot do.I am also interested in the pragmatic force of the speech acts of avowing that one has a particular gender, and of asserting that someone does not have the gender they say they have. Following other scholars such as Naomi Scheman (1999) and Talia Mae Bettcher (2009), I think people have a special kind of authority when it comes to avowing their own gender, because having such avowals respected is deeply tied to respecting someone’s right to privacy and self-determination. Conversely, telling someone they are wrong about their avowed gender is a kind of ethical violence against them. Bettcher asks us to consider, by analogy, a case where you tell your spouse you really want to go home from a party, and he tells you that no, you do not want that. In doing so, he co-opts your right to speak for yourself, to be the authority over your own experience. The point is not that you are infallible about your experience. You could be wrong, or lying, about your desire. But part of how we demonstrate respect to people and allow them to be self-determining agents of their own identity is by giving them important kinds of authority over who they are and what they experience. Your spouse might be disappointed or surprised that you want to go home, but they don’t have the social or ethical right to tell you that you are wrong about what you want. Bettcher argues that avowing a gender identity is like avowing such a desire, albeit with much more at stake. Respecting and recognizing people’s avowals of their own gender identity is a matter of basic respect for their authority over their own experience and their right to be self-determining actors in pervasive and intimate ways; it’s not just a matter of agreeing on a set of neutral facts about them. That is, gender avowals and denials of those avowals are speech acts with special social and ethical force, not just speech acts that state information.IAI News Editorial Staff 26th July 2019 ................
................

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

Google Online Preview   Download