The woke philosophy bro emails, part one

I teased this on Twitter and now I have to deliver. So here goes.

A couple of years ago, I had a short-lived relationship with a failed philosophy academic. Let’s call him Bruce.* Picture a man in his early 30s, a textbook neurasthenic, tending toward abstruseness, perilously near-sighted, with rumpled curls and year-round allergies and an expansive vocabulary and an affinity for Dries Van Noten. That’s Bruce.

After a bout of red-faced sputtering over some throwaway comment I’d made in a bookstore, I received the first of many emails. I wish I could remember what I said that caused so much offense, but alas, all I can recall is that I made a comment incompatible with the “correct and important” statement that some men can be women if they say they are. A long exchange followed, wherein I wrote down my thoughts about gender for the first time—and first encountered a set of by now quite familiar talking points that identify as counter-arguments—and after which we never slept together again and I joined Twitter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The emails are quite long, so we’ll go in batches. Here’s the first round. You’ll have to wait until round two to unearth the real gems.

(Also worth noting that these emails aren’t a perfect reflection of my current views. Three years of thinking and writing and talking about the issue have clarified, complicated, and shifted some things for me.)

---

Eliza,

We, it's probably worth being explicit about this though I don't know how clear it might already be, I think disagree about these things—I have no problem with saying, and think it is correct and important to say, that trans women, respectively men, are women, respectively men (and also think there are pretty benign—I mean not benign in origin but, basically, not prejudicial to the statement—reasons why people tend to focus more on the "women" half), whereas I infer from what you said at _______ that you do not think that. I don't know how important harmony about this is to you—how important it is to me is not something I had really considered before—but it should probably at least be out there.

Fondly,
Bruce

---

Bruce,

The issue is important to me. I am not sure how important it is to me to agree. Honestly, that depends on how familiar you are with the movement's claims, demands, tactics, and consequences when you say you think we disagree. I've spent a lot of time digging into this, trying to understand it. I, too, thought it was benign at first, but now that I can see the bigger picture I find many of those claims, demands, tactics, and consequences deeply troubling, rampantly sexist, stunningly reckless with children's health and wellbeing, and so on. I guess the one-sentence version of my perspective is that gender is a system of social control that legitimizes the sex-based oppression of women and girls (and isn't so great for boys and men either), so I want to see us abolish gender, not double-down on sexist gender stereotypes while dismissing the material reality and relevance of sexed bodies and sex-based oppression and shredding sex-based protections, spaces, and speech women and girls still need to facilitate their full, still-nowhere-near-equal participation in society. 

There's a lot to say about it. I guess to start: In what meaningful sense can someone who was born male and socialized as a boy/man be a woman? In what sense is it 'correct' to say "transwomen are women"?

— putting off, for the moment, where any of that leads.  

Eliza

---

Eliza,

I fear the following got rather long (much longer than your restrained response) and perhaps somewhat vehement—I mean it is something I feel strongly about!

I am reasonably familiar; in fact, there's a smallish irony, to me, in your starting off with "I too thought it was benign" before wising up, because I used to think several of the things you go on to mention (though I wouldn't have been able to formulate them with any specifically radfem theoretical vocabulary)—like, I definitely used to believe that transitioning could only be a matter of reinscribing some kind of gender essentialism (because I thought that only with reference to some pernicious essentialism about "woman" or "man" could someone have understood themselves as not one but the other, and wouldn't it be better "just" to broaden the limits of what expressions are considered acceptable (as if doing that, and recognizing the claims of trans people, were somehow mutually exclusive)).—This was not a belief that survived the first time I actually met a trans person (a man, as it happens), and is anyway an issue which is known and discussed within the community and its sympathetic theorizers, since some trans folks really are attracted to stereotypical markers of femininity/masculinity. (But then, so are plenty of non-trans folks, and no one thinks that their claims to be women/men are problematic or should be denied, even if one might think that the way they live out their being a woman/man is not the best.) Becca Reilly-Cooper, for instance, from whom I think I garnered this impression early on, or by whom it was reinforced, just seems to me to be wrong about this, and to draw the wrong lessons from it anyway.

As a prelude to answering your question:

It is true, that I find many of the radfem positions that tend toward trans exclusion somewhat hard to grok: for instance, I don't see how one can maintain simultaneously that contemporary gender is a system designed to legitimize the oppression of people born with ova and that "woman", understood as the gendered term for such people, just means "adult person born with ova". (It's probably true that there are people who are classed as women and who externally conform to female stereotypes who are born with no ova—I mean, beats me, but life is a tapestry and whatnot—but "person born with ova" at least seems more specific than "female", which has its own problems.) Because that understanding of "woman" obviously fails to do any legitimating work (and it anyway can't be what their interlocutors who wish to claim womanhood mean by it, so objecting that a trans woman can't be a woman because she isn't an adult born with ova rather misses her point—she isn't claiming to be that), and (as a side point) itself seems rather controversial in itself—like, it's telling that there's no emphatic use of the ostensibly more biological "female" corresponding to the obviously gendered "now she's a WOMAN". And I would have expected those who wish to abolish gender categories as such to be supportive of boundary-crossing of all sorts (as in this essay)—it's a way of disputing the authority and ideology of gender to throw the doors open.

It does of course make sense to hold on to gendered categories in the midst of organizing against them, since oppressed groups need solidarity and space in which to combat their oppression, but to insist that trans women's inclusion in womens' resistant spaces (or, like, bathrooms) relies, afaict, on a prior assumption that trans women must really still be wolves in sheeps' clothing, literal or metaphorical rapists (which IIRC on at least some radfem accounts is not even hyperbole) who face no oppression themselves, or at least none that would give them common cause with ova-owners, with only illegitimate interests in entering those spaces, even though their interest in not being beaten or murdered for their ostentatious transgressions of gender roles strikes me as pretty legitimate. IMO the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing take is only plausible, and maybe not even then, if you take gender to be a sex-class system and nothing else at all, which I think requires repressing almost everything we know about culture and subcultures. (I like this Bonnie Mann letter on how radical feminism needn't have taken the path it has.) And that take is itself, to me, regressive, a doubling-down on sexist stereotypes, essentializing to its core, dismissive of and callous toward the experiences of trans people, in a way that fetishizes a material reality that is, in fact, malleable (and of which, given that people want to avail themselves of that malleability, hardly something that trans people who transition could be said to ignore). I just do not see at all how welcoming trans women (say) to the feminist table will harm the cause of feminism or the full participation and flourishing in a sexist society of women of any description.

The basic thrust of the specific response to your question is to challenge the "socialized as a boy/man" part. What underlies the claim that a trans woman has been thus socialized? No doubt, before transitioning, such a person, with a stereotypically male name and a stereotypically male Adam's apple will receive some of the unearned benefits that accrue to men. But it's not as if there's exactly one way to be socialized as a man (I never had to learn to be cautious around cops or, in certain neighborhoods, white women in the presence of white men, and for that matter was recently utterly baffled when a friend attempted to engage me in some fairly bro-y if basically innocuous talk), and any number of people who receive such benefits are discomfited, some profoundly, by their blithe interpellation as male. Perhaps they resist being taken as male; perhaps they go out of their way to present as much as possible as female. (The trans man I mentioned before went most of his life, before transitioning, being as butch as possible, and passing as male almost completely. Post-transition, when I met him, I simply took him as male, without knowing anything about his history. Why not? I'm not in the habit of asking for birth certificates before referring to someone with "he".) And such people, though they will indeed not face the oppression that those who present directly as women do (normally, that oppression is not contingent on a prior inspection of gonads), do face oppression as a result of their flouting of expectations. (FWIW, this is basically right out of the SEP article I mentioned before, talking about The Transsexual Empire: "What is lacking in such an account is the possibility that transsexuals might be oppressed as transsexuals.") As for the sense in which it could be correct to call trans women "women", well, I think it is, basically, right to assent to someone's sincere avowals, absent a pretty strong reason not to; if someone comes to me as a woman (resp. man), and goes so far as to state that they are a woman (resp. man), though most folks of course don't even have to do that because one just goes by appearances anyway, who am I to say "no you aren't, and the proof is that is your genitalia at birth"? (This is actually one of the things that Bettcher points out: we place a burden of justification on trans people that we don't on cis people, even though by rights if you're suspicious of trans peoples' claims you ought to at least withhold judgment, pending a birth certificate / crotch check.) Beyond a general habit of deference to things like that, there are lots of options for how precisely to understand the claim, which I actually don't have a very strong opinion on, because it seems to me to be just to make and accept the claim, regardless of how it ends up getting cashed out—which is why the more in-the-weeds bits of Bettcher's article, e.g., seemed less interesting to me than the programmatic bits.

Fondly,

Bruce