Woke philosophy bro emails, part two
In which Contrapoints is highly recommended and I have "occasional irenic moments"
You can find part one here!
If I were writing these responses today, I think I’d just say: Sex matters. You know it. I know it. Let’s stop pretending. As far as ‘transwomen are women’ goes—that thing you think is so “correct and important” to say—let’s put it into practice: That means that we either treat some males as though they were female in settings where sex matters, which undermines women’s rights, or else we’re treating some males as though they were female in settings where sex doesn’t matter, in which case why are we treating men and women differently to begin with?
But this was the first time I’d ever written any of this down and I hadn’t thought about it long enough to be so concise. As far as his emails go… enjoy.
Eliza,
Happy trans day of visibility! :D :D :D
The below is disorganized and not really in the state I'd like it to be, but I'm not sure when, if ever, I would actually be happy with it, and am conscious of having taken quite a long time regardless, so I'm adopting the strategy that got me through grad school and just sending it as the shambles it is. (Plus, it seems a fitting day.) Fortunately I was just alerted to what seems (at almost exactly 2/3 of the way through) to be a thorough & good video on youtube making many points that seem very sound to me:
which I therefore commend to your attention, with the proviso that you'll have to be willing to endure being called (not personally, but, you know) a TERF, something that, as I understand it, many radical feminists who, how can one put this, are not super accepting of the claims of trans persons don't care for. (Though IIRC it was introduced as a neutral descriptive term. Pejoration is real!)
I think one of the fundamental issues is that I don't believe it's true or useful (in the sense that even if it were true, it would still be misleading) to say that women are oppressed on the basis of sex, where that's understood to mean something like their ability to conceive. There are certainly forms of oppression that target those who can become pregnant in the capacity that makes them most saliently different from those who can impregnate (the assault on abortion being the most obvious), and there are certainly sexist movements that are explicitly geared around forcing women into a domestic, childbearing role (the odious "quiverfull" people), but I think there are several problems with having that exhaust the analysis:
Most obviously, it can't mean that each woman who is oppressed is oppressed because she can conceive, because she might not be able to and in some cases (clearly old enough to be menopausal) that might be obvious. So it has to be something like her being presumed to be a member of a class whose members normally can conceive (and it has to be a presumption because she might be intersex, or chimerical, or in some other way not actually a member of the class the oppressor presumes her to be a member of). But if you can be a member of "the sex class that can get pregnant" even though, in fact, you can't get pregnant, then—why can't people who, from birth, wouldn't have been able to get pregnant? (Some of those people are born with uteruses &c, even.) What's the conceptual impossibility there? There already are such members; why can't there be more? This is all compatible with people being treated, whether against or in conformity with their will, but without inquiry, as having membership in this or that sex, regardless of how they would prefer to be thought of; trans people (as well as cis butch women who get called "sir", and for that matter effeminate men who are addressed as women) are under no illusions about that. There are trans people who adopt external practices and adornments that accord with social expectations precisely so that they will be treated more automatically as women, or men, as the case may be. The actually existing reality in which people are taken to be such-and-such without anyone's asking seems to harm rather than help your position, since a trans woman who is automatically taken to be a woman will be, well, taken to be a woman. (Nor, of course, does the adoption of such practices mean that such people think that those things exhaust or are even *any* part of womanhood, or are good, or anything like that—though of course some might—rather than being signifiers that can be exploited.) And trans women who pass just do face sexism; no such dialogue as the following has ever taken place (and not because of the Simpsons-derived catcall):
CATCALLER: Shake it, madam; capital knockers!
TRANS WOMAN: I'm trans, asshole!
CATCALLER: My apologies, sir; how about a cold one?
(Trans women who don't pass are just reviled.)
I also think the reification of "two sexes" as fundamentally explanatory is actually just falling prey to exactly the patriarchal ideology that establishes two sexes, one above and one below—does things like surgically "correct" children born with ambiguous
genitalia-and is to that extent regressive. (Many of the specific things you bring up don't require citation of a binary sex contrast as analytically basic rather than part of the apparatus of oppression putatively being opposed; cf. the general scholarly consensus that "race" is not a real biological category, which still doesn't prevent doctors from identifying populations prone to sickle-cell anemia. Hell, one could even imagine the establishment of various classes of sporting competition, as in boxing, if it really came to that, considering that some of the people bearing the brunt of the testosterone-related tests designed to exclude trans athletes have been … cis women with high testosterone levels. Ditto for bogus concerns like "oh we can't say 'vagina' anymore only 'internal genitalia'" which is not actually anyone's line; cf https://aeon.co/essays/why-trans-inclusive-language-is-no-threat-to-cis-women) To be "oppressed on the basis of X" is already to take X out of the natural, morally neutral realm, and to place a cultural value on it, so it seems incoherent to me to say that women are oppressed on the basis of their reproductive capacities *and then* there's a cultural layer, "gender", placed on top. It's cultural from the word go! For support in this claim I call on … Monique Wittig!
Less obviously, I think it's implausible as an account of anything but, perhaps, the shadowy origins of the fact that it's women and not men who are, broadly, oppressed, and men and not women the oppressors. The actually existing practices of oppression, though, can continue going on relatively free of whatever original justifications there might have been. (It can't be a true *psychological* claim about individual oppressors, certainly.) Any plausible materialism about anything should acknowledge that practice can lose their mooring like that. (There is a very good paper, partly about this but somewhat more broad, called "Science Fiction Double Feature: Trans Liberation on Twin Earth", which I recommend! https://philpapers.org/rec/GEOSFD And which seeks to preserve a "material" connection to gender!)
If I may, there are several things about your email that collectively seem both to be somewhat tangential (if not actual non sequiturs) and to be based on caricatures of the positions you're arguing against (I'm sure I'm guilty of the latter turn and turn about, since my general engagement with the topic as a whole is of somewhat recent vintage):
E.g., when saying "Yes, some women object to males naming and defining women ... as if males imposing definitions and meanings on women ... isn't a longstanding feature of life under patriarchy", this just seems to reveal an odd construction of who you think you're arguing against. I mean I realize that *I* am a man (and I know that, despite our present disagreement, you don't mean "men" like me, so one might reasonably find your phrasing question-begging), but you can find plenty of cis women and trans men (i.e., also women, by your lights) willing to say the exact same things you impute to trans women (men, by your lights), so this just seems off the mark, not to mention needlessly antagonistic, since I don't think the trans liberation project really needs to be seen as threatening to cis women in any way. (Partly because I don't think there really is a common, obvious, noncontroversial understanding of "woman"—I certainly don't think "adult human female" is one—that could be in the process of being dislodged. Even on the "gender is the social meaning of sex" line which would have womanhood be the social meaning of femalehood there are lots of distinct things that get run together. In contrast to your statement that these things aren't that complicated, I think they're really quite complicated; there's a good paper on this by BR George called "What even is 'gender'?": https://philpapers.org/rec/GEOWEIwhich tries to sort out various strands that easily get run together, and it's, you know, not simple! Some things really are simple—many questions are simple to *ask* though their answers are complex, and for each complex question, as Mencken said, there's an answer that's clear, simple, and wrong. The radfem answer is clear, simple, and wrong.)
You seem to believe that there's no difference between a trans woman a gender non-conforming man who's, I don't know, impatient with the strictures placed on him, and who would be better served by a relaxation of the social order. This just isn't a reasonable or true belief; certainly not one based on attention to trans narratives (though perhaps the view is that they're bedeviled by false consciousness and needn't be paid attention to—I invite you to consider how receptive you'd be to a man making an analogous claim about women's self-understandings).
You adduce health outcomes, as if it would be impossible to do this without insisting that someone has the gender they were assigned at birth through their whole lives, or as if trans women/men believe they're exempt from (say) checking from colorectal/breast cancer, respectively, something that is, again, simply not true.
You seem to believe that because people are assholes on twitter to people who are also being assholes on twitter (there are really very few conversational contexts, especially on twitter, in which one could say something like "you know, homo sapiens exhibits sexual dimorphism" and *not* be accurately taken to mean, perhaps not quite this strongly but in effect, "trannies fuck off") as evidence for the proposition that trans women are violent thugs, which is just completely beneath you. (Despite your occasional irenic moments, in fact, I get the impression that you're kind of disgusted by trans women and would like them to go away, please. Do you know any trans people?)
(I don't have a whole lot to say about it, or rather I don't want to say a whole lot about it because I fear being tiresome by going point by point and am tiring myself, but I also think the concerns about children are way overstated; delaying the onset of a
puberty which comes sooner and sooner anyway to wait and see seems pretty in line with "primum non nocere" to me, and indulging a child's desire to be called he/she/whatever seems *totally* harmless; kids are pretty open-minded about things about which they haven't been instructed not to be.)
Fondly,
Bruce
Bruce,
I think we're coming at this from different planets, so I need to try to think my way on to yours...
What I can confidently say about your immaterial realm of ideas and identities is that it's inescapably male. I can't imagine such an untethered place. It feels like a chapter out of Invisible Cities: perhaps you're speaking of a city where, as it happens, no women live? Or the laws of gravity don't apply? Or else a city of the always-now where only lucky children live, pure spirit, never aging into consequences? Maybe the place you're talking about is like that.
In any case, I think I understand you. But I don't think you understand me, and you won't unless you untangle sex and gender (you think our bodies' reproductive functions are cultural from the word go?). If you can't do that, there's nothing I can say that will get through to you.
You write: "I also think the reification of "two sexes" as fundamentally explanatory is actually just falling prey to exactly the patriarchal ideology that establishes two sexes, one above and one below—does things like surgically "correct" children born with ambiguous." Patriarchal ideology does not establish the two sexes. Human biology does. Patriarchal ideology does create and enforce a hierarchy of the sexes, through gender. Female and male are coherent concepts. They reliably refer to the set of female body parts, or male body parts, required for human reproduction. Gender refers to the cultural stereotypes and roles imposed on people based on their sex.
Even so, you're piling bad faith on me. I agree that your mischaracterization of some things I said would be, as you say, "beneath" me. Fortunately for me, you've misunderstood me.
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