Again: what do you mean by “identity”?
There was this today:
Two male-bodied trans gender runners came first and second. What do you say to the girls who train so hard but can never win? Yet can’t even say: this is not fair. https://t.co/P3KKNL4unZ
— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) June 7, 2018
Terry Miller of Bulkeley wins the 100m girls dash i. 11.72 (meet record). Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell 2nd, RHAM’s Bridget Lalonde 3rd #cttrack pic.twitter.com/4GmLRyicDI
— GameTimeCT (@GameTimeCT) June 4, 2018
And there was a piece by Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed with the subhead
As last year’s Hypatia debate revealed, writing philosophy about being transgender is tricky. There are outstanding debates about which questions actually matter and who is best situated to philosophize about transgender identity, along with pitfalls to avoid — arguably facile comparisons among them. (As you may recall, Hypatia’s editors and associate editorial board split over an essay comparing being transgender to being transracial).
So Flaherty implies that comparing transgender to transracial is facile, but why is it facile? She doesn’t say.
In a new, talked-about series of essays, Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, in Britain, brings another set of tricky question to the fore: If there are inherent differences in interests between cisgender women and trans women, why aren’t academics debating them?
“Something is afoot in academic philosophy,” Stock wrote in one essay she published on Medium. “Beyond the academy, there’s a huge and impassioned discussion going on, around the apparent conflict between women-who-are-not-transwomen’s rights and interests, and transwomen’s rights and interests. And yet nearly all academic philosophers – including, surprisingly, feminist philosophers – are ignoring it.”
It’s not surprising at all though. Last year’s Hypatia “debate” revealed why – it’s because of the colossal amount of bullying, shaming, dogpiling, ostracizing, and backstabbing that goes on if a feminist philosopher doesn’t ignore it. It’s not a genuine debate; it’s a highly dogmatic and pugnaciously enforced doctrine.
Stock suggests that part of the problem may be fear of being labeled transphobic for asserting that there are important differences between cisgender women and trans women — what is called the “gender-critical” position.
“May be”? Get serious.
Jenny Saul, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield in Britain and a moderator of Feminist Philosophers, borrowed a comment Audrey Yap had posted about another article on “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” or TERFs, as cisgender women who don’t count trans women among their ranks are sometimes called. Saul said Yap, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria in Canada, did a “great job of explaining why many of us [are] very hesitant to have these discussions.”
Here’s what Yap said: “What I do have a serious problem with are people who are happy to speculate about gender identity, and whether trans women are really women, as though it were an abstract philosophical puzzle to be solved, and not something that is about actual living people. When taking one side of an argument involves the invalidation of a lot of people’s identity and lived experience I think it’s right that we be extremely hesitant to take it.”
These are philosophers, remember. Philosophy as a discipline is generally quite rigorous about defining terms, especially the terms that are at the core of what is being analyzed. Given that fact, I think it’s bizarre that Saul finds Yap’s comment “a great job of explaining.” To make sense of her comment we need to know what she means by “identity” and “lived experience” and how either or both can be “invalidated” by one side of an argument.
That is, after all, the pulsating spitting third rail of the whole thing – you may not try to figure out what all this means and how people back it up because if you do you are doing something very wicked to people’s “identity.” But what does that even mean? And in what sense is it political? Why is it a political absolute that “identity” must be respected? And is it even the case that identity in general must be respected or is it only this one kind, and if so, on what grounds? But don’t ask, because that invalidates…and around the circle we go again.
From Flaherty’s article:
Isn’t philosophy ALL ABOUT examining “presuppositions” that are “built into the starting points”?
I thought that was sort of the goddamn point of philosophy? One of the major ones, at least?
I don’t think they’re similar at all. The first two are moral questions, and people from multiple disciplines have discussed them for centuries. The third is, what, ontological? And psychological. And quite new.
And come to think of it, isn’t “the question whether women ought or ought not be subjected to the rule of men” central to feminist philosophy, at least historically? It’s certainly central to feminism. We answer the question definitively (“no, they should not”), but it’s not a taboo question. Is it?
It’s especially problematic because of the strain in trans activism that takes agreement on definitions – which aren’t even necessarily clear or consistent – as a sine qua non for being a tolerable participant in discussion. Agreement on how trans identity is conceived is the only alternative to being regarded as a perpetrator of violence – and that gender identity conception is loaded so that classic feminist questioning of the construction of gender identities will mean questioning and criticizing precisely what the trans activist is demanding as a recognition of their personal gender identity.
When you can’t get into a discussion without worrying about pink baseball bats with barbed wire coming at you, when you’re not allowed to consider definitions carefully else you get labelled a TERF and taken as a legitimate target for violent retaliation… well, you’re going to find more compelling questions to consider. No one gets hazard pay doing philosophy or feminism.
Lady M – yep, it is. We answer the question but with reasons.
Mind you there are varying degrees of patience. When it’s incels on Twitter the answers may be a little brisk…
Lady M, it’s not only a valid question that feminists and their supporters answer definitively, but also one that is constantly being asked. And not only asked by incels, MRA’s and sad old fucks. Also being asked and indeed answered in the affirmative by government policy, legislation and societal and corporate practice. In short, no one blinks at debating whether women as a class should be subordinate to men.
Now, if I really wanted to bring a shit storm down on my head, I’d suggests that refusing to allow women to even ask the question, let alone debate, whether a trans-woman and a born-woman are the same and have the same lived experiences, needs and agendas is actually a subset of subjecting women to the needs of men.
I wouldn’t be that foolish of course.
But one big difference is that non-feminist philosophers are allowed to discuss that (pace Jordan Peterson) and get a lot of sympathy in the press for acknowledging that many men do not agree with feminist philosophy (note: I am being very, very kind to Peterson, since that is really a whitewashing of what he says – but I don’t have to point that out here, right?). There are tons and tons of discussions around what it means to be queer; these take place on a biological level as well as a philosophical level. There are also discussions surrounding what it means to be male, and the topic of toxic masculinity. But…hands off trans ideology…
Try asking a trans person what it means to be a woman, and you’ll get a thousand different answers, and rarely are they answers that I…or most other “cis” women…would agree with. And we can’t agree on an answer, either, because being a woman isn’t a “thing” that you can put a quick and easy answer on. It means different things to different women, but most of all, it means dealing with misogyny and loathing and lower pay and getting shit if you leave the baby at day care for a few hours a day (whether you work outside the home or don’t – I have a friend who uses daycare about 8 hours a week so she can have time to breathe, and she isn’t working outside the home. People crap on her, although it’s none of their business, and she is quite devoted to her children).
We (we not meaning us here but we in a larger sense) have built a wall around the idea of trans, and to even ask “what does it mean to be a woman” is now considered an act of genocidal violence. To talk about “pregnant women” is an act of genocidal violence. To question the gender binary is considered an act of genocidal violence by people themselves claiming to be challenging the gender binary (but who are actually reinforcing it by insisting that gender is somehow innate).
How can it be? Since accommodating all the conflicting ‘identities’ means that there’s almost no common thread beyond misogyny. A ‘born that way’ gender essentialism so intense that it would make Jordan Peterson (or even Pat Robertson) balk is shackled to vapid claims about ‘fluidity’ that cannot escape the Dolezal comparison.
Just break out the baseball bats when anyone asks a question.
There’s also this weird hijacking of the guilt we definitely ought to feel for continuing to treat people of racial minorities badly. We’re supposed to transplant the whole history of something completely different because someone says so. The fact that doing so is wiping our feet on already trampled-upon women doesn’t seem to come into it.
^ EXACTLY.