Episode post here. This episode transcribed by Dusty Dallman.
Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a
philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago,
but which today is being brought to you from Palo Alto. With me is
R.A. Briggs, professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and they
are here to discuss gender. R.A. Briggs, welcome back to
Elucidations.
R.A. Briggs:
Thanks. It’s great to be back.
Matt Teichman:
So you might think that gender is pretty
straightforward. You might think: what’s the big mystery here? Just to
take my own example, I was taught by my parents that there were two
genders, man and woman, or boy and girl, and that boys have this kind
of body and girls have that kind of body. And that’s how you tell who
falls into what category. These days, it seems like some people are
arguing there’s more to the story than just that. What else is there?
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah, so there’s a lot in your question that I
want to pull apart. One thing you said is that you were taught that
boys have one kind of physiology and girls have another kind of
physiology. And a pretty old philosophical
distinction
that is common in feminist philosophy is between sex, on the one
hand—which is the physiology—and gender, on the other hand,
which is the social role. So when you classify people as men and
women—or boys and girls—in your day-to-day life, you’re often
looking at something other than the physiological cues you got told
are associated with being male or female. Being ‘male’ or ‘female’ are
the words people use for the sex categories; that has to do with
what your reproductive biology is like. And being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’
is what people use for the gender categories, which have to do with
what your social role is like.
Sex and gender are different, first of all, because they play different explanatory roles. If I want to know why somebody got pregnant, appealing to their sex characteristics is a good explanation. If I want to know why somebody got discriminated against at their job, their sex characteristics might not be the first thing to point to. So there’s the distinction between sex, on the one hand and gender, on the other hand. And I should add that like quite a lot gets lumped into the gender category that could be pulled apart farther. Later in this interview, I’m going to be talking about work with my colleague B.R. George, and B.R. George also has interesting discussions of different things that can go under the gender category.
So we’ve got the sex/gender distinction. And you mentioned the idea that there are only two gender categories: boys and girls, men and women. These days, there are people who consider themselves neither—or consider themselves to be fluidly moving between those gender categories. Another thing about the way people commonly think about gender is that you start off with one and you get put in that category when you’re a baby, and then you stay in it your whole life. And there are lots of people who move between gender categories. Those are some complications to the picture that you gave me.
Matt Teichman:
Okay, good. So sex, according to this
terminology, is a set of biological features having something roughly
to do with a person’s reproductive capacities. Gender is something
like ‘the social meaning of sex’, or the social significance of
sex—or, in any event, it’s some set of social roles. Like the
expectation that if you’re this gender, then you can go on maternity
leave; and if you’re that gender, you can use this bathroom. Things
like that.
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah. Actually—and here again, I’m appealing
to B.R. George’s stuff—it gets used for a bunch of different
things. There are the categories themselves: man and woman, which
are social categories, and those are genders. I’ll be talking more
about those in a bit. There’s also expectations based on which
category somebody is a member of. So if you have somebody who’s a
member of the ‘boy’ social category, you might expect them to wear
khaki colors and play with guns when they’re a child (which is kind of
disturbing, but let’s move along). There’s the categories, there’s the
expectations based on the categories, and there’s also people’s
internal feelings about the categories. So you might think: look, I
should be a member, or I am a member of one category rather than the
other. Or I don’t care what category I’m a member of. Or I feel like
I’m a member of both. Those are all sometimes referred to as ‘gender’,
and people like to conflate them.
Matt Teichman:
One thing you often see happen in everyday
conversation is: I don’t know if we exactly conflate sex and gender,
but we assume that they’re interchangeable. Sometimes we’ll invoke
‘maleness’ as an explanation for something and sometimes we’ll invoke
‘manhood’ as an explanation for something. But in the popular
imagination, they’re often assumed to be kind of interchangeable. And
what we’ve just done is pull them apart—but they’re still related
somehow, aren’t they? So what’s the relation?
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah. One obvious relation is that they tend to
co-vary. People with male physical characteristics tend to be men and
people with stereotypically female sex characteristics tend to be
women. I don’t want to assume that everybody has one or the other, or
that there are no gray areas there. But there are stereotypical
clusters of characteristics that are associated with sex. And they
tend to co-vary with gender, but I think it’s more than that.
You quoted the slogan: ‘gender is the social meaning of sex’. I think that sex categories explain why gender categories count as gender categories, rather than something else. There are a lot of social categories that don’t count as genders. Being a night bachelor, for instance, is a social role. It influences how people see you, how people treat you, but it’s not a gender—whereas being a woman is a gender, being non-binary is a gender, being a man is a gender. Genders are social categories that have something to do with how we interpret sex, or how we understand sex characteristics. And they somehow get their significance from sex characteristics.
Matt Teichman:
One thing that’s interesting about some of
these gender categories you mentioned is: it’s not always clear that
each of those corresponds to a sex, in the way that some of the
traditional gender categories we discussed might be thought to.
R.A. Briggs:
Absolutely. Genders have something to do with
sex, but some of them are a little bit far from sex. And I think that
you’re picking up correctly on that. To be a gender, you have to
somehow be traceable back to biological sex. Being a man is somehow
associated with a set of biological sex characteristics; being a woman
is associated with a different set of biological sex
characteristics. Being non-binary is connected to being a man or a
woman: to be non-binary is to not fall into either of those categories
comfortably. So it’s traceable back to ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and ‘man’
and ‘woman’ are traceable back to the biology; so ultimately, there’s
a line that goes from non-binary to biology. But it’s a complicated
set of connections.
Matt Teichman:
So what about if you’re a trans man or a trans
woman? That is to say, what if you were assigned the sex ‘female’ at
birth, and then in adulthood, you decided that actually, you’re a man.
So you’re going to transition and thenceforth, be referred to using
male pronouns, and publicly identify as a man. What’s your connection
to male physiology, in that case?
R.A. Briggs:
Your main connection is via the ‘man’ gender
category. You join this social category, and you opt in to be
classified as a man by the people around you. That’s what you want,
and hopefully, if you successfully socially transition, what you
get—what you ought to get. So you are connected to the man
category. The man category is connected to biological features
associated with maleness. You may or may not end up with some of those
biological features. I certainly don’t think that to be a trans man,
you have to end up with a penis, for instance. One common
misconception about how transitioning works is that there is a magic
operation, which probably consists in the installation or removal of a
penis, and makes you biologically as much like members of the sex
associated with the gender you want to join as possible.
Transition is really much more complicated than that. It involves a lot of social changes, like getting the markers on your IDs changed, and asking for a male name and male pronouns. It can involve various medical changes—which generally, I think, are the business of the person transitioning and not the business of others—although lots of people have been kind enough to share information about how this medical stuff works. People might take hormones, they might get various surgeries, or they might not do any of those things. It really depends on the individual. But the main link, I think, is between the person and the gender category, and then from the gender to the sex.
Matt Teichman:
So with some of these new developments,
certain authors have argued that acknowledging a person’s gender is a
consensual act, in the sense that they should have definitive say over
how other people gender them. Maybe you could walk us through why that
is.
R.A. Briggs:
Right. So Kate
Bornstein is the earliest example of
somebody I know of who uses the phrase consensual gender. She says
gender should be safe, sane, and consensual. And what she means by
that is that people should get to opt in or opt out of gender
categories based on what they want, rather than what the people around
them project onto them. The idea is not necessarily that you should
have some kind of libertarian free will, or that you don’t have any
reason to choose one rather than the other. Maybe you have your
reasons and you’re stuck with them. But given your reasons, you should
be able to tell others: yes, I’m a woman; no, I’m not a woman; yes,
I’m a man; no, I’m not a man. Why is that? Basically because it
results in less net misery. Also it’s a personal aspect of a human
being that they should get to control.
Oh, I should talk about Julia Serano. So, Serano has this really useful concept of gender entitlement, where she notes that rather than being internal to a person, a lot of gender is projected onto them by others. Again, gender means different things in different settings; there’s how you feel about the social categories, and then there’s how people treat you with respect to the social categories. And you can make the mistake of thinking that people’s treatment of you with respect to the social category is some sort of natural part of you that’s internal to you.
So if you have somebody in, say, a skirt suit walking down the street, you might think: she’s a woman, and her woman-ness emanates from her being. But in fact, what you’re doing is you’re projecting a bunch of woman expectations onto her. Perhaps you get closer and you see ah, the person in the skirt suit has stereotypically male characteristics. Maybe he’s a cross-dressing man. And you project another set of expectations onto him. To work out what the right set of expectations is to project onto this person, you might think the right thing to do is to ask them what expectations they’d like projected onto them, rather than just making assumptions.
Matt Teichman:
Let’s say I’m trying to figure out what gender
I am. You mentioned earlier that it’s not simply a matter of what my
physiological reproductive capacities are, because people can
transition. That’s enough to show that those two things aren’t
strictly aligned. But you also mentioned that my gender isn’t just
something I can randomly choose. Like if I feel like being a man,
let’s decide to be a man, and if I feel like being a woman, let’s opt
to be a woman, the way you choose a career. It seems like it’s not
just willy-nilly, like I can choose anything and it doesn’t really
matter. So what is it that determines whether I’m a man or a woman, if
not my biological reproductive capacities?
R.A. Briggs:
I guess I’ve committed myself in writing to an
official story about this. The official story is: what determines
whether you’re a man or a woman is whether it’s right to place you in
the man category, given fixed facts about what that category is
like, or whether it’s right to place you in the woman category,
given fixed facts about what that category is like. And this idea
comes from Esa Díaz-León,
who notes that man and woman can be normatively
loaded
categories, and the criteria for putting somebody in one category
rather than the other can be normative. That’s what determines whether
you’re a man or woman. But you might have some further questions like:
what are the relevant norms? That is not a matter on which I’m
officially committed in writing, but unofficially, I think the
relevant norms are: give people what suits them or what would benefit
them and fulfill them the most. The way to find out what would
fulfill you the most is to do some introspection and experimenting.
Matt Teichman:
And to say that whether somebody counts as a
man or a woman is a normative matter is to say that there’s such a
thing as people being correctly classed as men versus incorrectly
classed as men?
R.A. Briggs:
Yes.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe the idea is: we could write a whole
further paper going into detail about how do we correctly class
people, but for now, all we need to do is assume that there is such a
thing as a gender being a ‘good fit’ for a person (in some sense or
other). And we can just assume that there’s some story to be told
about that.
R.A. Briggs:
That’s right. Another important part of this is
that usually, if you want to know what is a good fit for a person, a
good way to find out is by asking them. That doesn’t tell you what’s a
good fit for you, but it tells you what’s a good fit for others, at
least.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. So one worry that some people have about
decoupling gender from sex in the first place is that it’s advocating
some sort of skepticism about biology, or that it’s denying the basic
findings of science. Do you think that that’s a legitimate worry to
have?
R.A. Briggs:
Not really, no. I think that you can believe in
sex and you can defer to biologists about how sex characteristics
work, but still think that there’s a distinct set of social categories
for gender. Actually, this marks an interesting difference between
gender and race, where the science on race all suggests that there are
not really interesting biological categories where races are. Whereas
there probably are interesting biological categories roughly in the
vicinity of gender. But in both cases, you can have social categories
that are interesting independent of the biological reality.
Matt Teichman:
Okay; so we’ve been talking about how an
important part of having a gender is occupying a certain social
role. What if we just went all out with that approach and defined the
woman gender as being socially subordinated on the basis of your
presumed reproductive capacities, and we defined the man gender as
being systematically privileged on the basis of your being presumed to
have the male’s biological role in reproduction? Something like
that—where we build in people projecting, from their assumptions
about your physiology, into a certain social role of either being
subordinated or being privileged—what if we built that into the
notion of gender?
R.A. Briggs:
This is Sally
Haslanger’s pair of definitions
of woman and man. And I’m going to tell you what I like about
these definitions before I tell you what I don’t like about these
definitions. A good thing about these definitions is that they go a
long way toward capturing how women can be really different from each
other, and still have a lot in common. If you tried to define gender
as based on stereotypical characteristics, you’d always find, for any
stereotype you could give, some woman who was a woman without
fulfilling the stereotype. And similarly, for any stereotype of men
you could give, you could find a man who didn’t fulfill the
stereotype, but was still completely a man.
Haslanger gets around that by saying, look, women don’t have any stereotypic characteristics in common. What they have is perceived biology—not necessarily even actual biology, but perceived biology—plus sort of being oppressed based on that biology. It’s kind of nice because, you know, first it gives you something that people can have in common without sharing a stereotype, and maybe without sharing a mechanism of oppression. So even if white women and black women are oppressed in really different ways, they’re both oppressed. Second, these definitions give you a tool that’s designed to combat sexist oppression. One way to get feminism up and running as an appealing project is to say that to be a woman is to be oppressed in certain ways. This makes it sort of urgent to have an anti-oppression project that fights on behalf of the rights of women.
Those are two good things about Haslanger’s definition, but I think there are a couple of things that don’t work about this definition, even though it’s an advance on the previous state of the art. I want to stress that this is an accomplishment and the fact that it’s not perfect doesn’t mean that it’s useless. But one problem is that it just seems to misclassify a lot of people. Take non-passing binary trans people. They are not presumed to have characteristics that are evidence of the biological role that goes with their correct gender. So if you’ve got a trans woman who doesn’t pass and is in a transphobic society, people might misclassify her as a man systematically, and that doesn’t make her a man—that doesn’t make it correct for them to classify her as a man. In cases like that, Haslanger’s definitions of woman and man are going to misclassify people. They get the extension wrong.
A second problem is that if you build oppression into the definition of woman, you might make it sort of mysterious why anybody should want to belong to that category; and if you build privilege into the category of man, you might make it very suspicious that anybody should want to belong to that category who wasn’t assigned to it.
Matt Teichman:
Oh, I see. So it’s suspicious because maybe
transitioning to being a man might—in this context—look like kind
of a power grab, or an attempt to like move up in the social
hierarchy?
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah. That’s a thing that I have heard people
say that I think is unfair.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. We’ve discussed a whole bunch of
different genders that people can be, and we’ve noted that this
‘social positioning’ definition does a great job of not making any
reductive assumptions about what it is to be a woman or a man, where
you take one stereotypic trait and then try to cram every other woman
or man into that cookie cutter mould. It does a great job of that, but
one potential downside to this approach is that some people end up
getting miscategorized. A trans woman who’s in a community where
she’s recognized by other people to be a trans woman, rather than a
cis woman, and is getting systematically misgendered—we shouldn’t
say that somebody in that situation is a man in virtue of the way
that they’re being socially positioned. That’s a bad prediction.
R.A. Briggs:
Yes.
Matt Teichman:
How do you propose that we get that part of
the story right, while also keeping as many of the virtues of the
‘social positioning’ definition as we can?
R.A. Briggs:
I think that we can keep something like
Haslanger’s definition as a slightly mythic story about how genders
might have arisen in the first place. You can think of what, in the
paper that we’re talking
about, my coauthor and I
call primordial genders, as being social roles that are assigned
just completely based on sex. Now, maybe there have been such roles in
the past; maybe there haven’t been. But in some way, this is a useful
approximation to the way the world works.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe what we can say is that even if it
didn’t technically work exactly this way always, we’re now in a
situation in which, in many cases, we behave as though it always
worked that way.
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah. That’s a helpful way of thinking of it. So
you have primordial genders, which are social categories, but then
social categories can persist and keep on existing, even if the rules
governing them change. This is true of a lot of social categories. So
you can introduce, say, the Stanford University Anime Club, for the
appreciation of anime, and your
bylaws might originally say that we can only watch Utena Tenjou,
Revolutionary
Girl. And
then you can have appreciators of other forms of anime come in and
say: no, we’re going to change the bylaws and make them more
flexible. Maybe we’re going to be the Anime and Comics Club, even. But
the club can persist through all these changes in rules because it’s
continuous: it’s got overlap in members, it’s got overlap in social
role, it’s got sort of gradual change of rules. And genders can be
like that. So if a social category starts out based on sex and then
changes gradually, then it can remain a gender.
Matt Teichman:
It almost seems like an evolutionary model of
the social role of gender. Maybe it started off being
straightforwardly: you fall into this biological category or you fall
into that one. Then, very slowly over time, these tiny little
incremental changes over a huge population made it change into
something a little bit different, where the membership conditions
ended up changing.
R.A. Briggs:
I think that’s not a bad analogy. So maybe
species work like this too, where the characteristics of a species can
drift around without destroying the species.
Matt Teichman:
What would this account say about the example
we just had earlier, of a trans man in a transphobic community who
isn’t passing as a cis man?
R.A. Briggs:
This person isn’t excluded by the definition of
the category man from counting as a man anymore. A funny thing about
our account is that it doesn’t yet say—the thing that I told you
about primordial and historical genders—it doesn’t tell you who
counts as a man. It doesn’t tell you whether this person counts as a
man—it doesn’t tell you whether a cis man counts as a man
either. We’ve got to say more; and this is where the normative stuff
that I was talking about earlier comes in. I said: who counts as a man
or a woman is who ought to be counted if you hold fixed features of
the categories, but make society otherwise more just. I think that a
trans man who lives in a transphobic society and doesn’t pass ought to
be counted, and so I think that person is therefore a man—because
they ought to count as a man.
Matt Teichman:
So that’s what the distinction between
primordial and historical gender gets us. It gets us that you can have
the same category we had before, but the conditions for membership in
it can change slightly, over time. And then, the second part of the
story—what you were calling the normative part of the
story—tells us the way you figure out if somebody is a man is
whether they should count as a man. That’s going to have something
to do with what gender is the best fit for them—or, in any event,
it’s a story we’re going to tell down the road.
R.A. Briggs:
Both of those things. Also, I should introduce
one distinction that I wasn’t super clear on, which is: there’s a
difference between conditions for actually counting as a man or a
woman and conditions for being counted as a man or a woman by the
people around you. And those can come apart. So you can have a woman
who is mistaken for a man by everybody around her. I definitely want
to say the conditions for being classified as a man or a woman can
change over time. Can the conditions for actually counting as a man or
woman change over time? Probably.
Matt Teichman:
And the only purpose of drawing a distinction
between actually counting as having a particular gender and being
thought by other people to count as a particular gender, is to allow
for the possibility that other people might get my gender wrong?
R.A. Briggs:
Right. That’s the point of that distinction.
Matt Teichman:
You’ve written about this fun thought
experiment involving two different planets that are very similar to
our own planet, in which people’s reproductive capacities and the
social roles they ended up having played out in different ways. Maybe
you could tell us a bit about that thought experiment.
R.A. Briggs:
Yes, and before I do, I should give my coauthor
B.R. George credit for a lot of the hilarity here. Our thought
experiment is meant to illustrate why Haslanger’s definition of man
and woman won’t work, and why nothing similar to it will work in
getting the classification of people right. We imagine two
science-fictional planets. One, Patriarcha is an exaggerated Western
liberal democracy, with the sexism that still exists in Western
liberal democracies.
There are two gender roles, ‘blokes’ and ‘sheilas’. And while these have formal equality under the law, they’re treated very differently and they’re stereotyped very differently. People get to be a ‘bloke’ by having stereotypically male physiological features. That’s how you get into the bloke category; and once you’re in the bloke category, you are expected to not cry much, you’re expected to be the primary breadwinner for your family, you’re expected to be ready to punch people who need punching. If you’re a sheila, on the other hand, you get into the category of sheila by having stereotypically female physiology. Once you’re in there, you’re expected to be sweet and sensitive, to take care of other people’s feelings, to take primary responsibility for raising children—to generally be decorative. So that’s Patriarcha.
We also have the planet of Amazonia, which is somewhat different. It too is a liberal democracy with formal equality of genders and sexes—both under the law—but it’s got somewhat different gender roles. On Amazonia are ‘grrls’ and ‘bois’. ‘Grrls’ are expected to be the primary breadwinners for their family, they’re expected to be able to punch whoever needs punching, and they’re expected to be stoical and not show much emotion. You get into the grrl category by having stereotypically female characteristics. So the stereotypes for the grrl category are very much like the stereotypes for the bloke category on Patriarcha, except that you get into the grrl category, by having a different set of reproductive features—the stereotypically female ones.
The boi category is expected to be subordinated to the grrl category. Bois are supposed to sort of take care of others’ feelings, they’re supposed to be sweet and sensitive, and they’re supposed to be primary caregivers for the children. And so, the expectations on the bois are much like expectations on sheilas back on Patriarcha. But bois get into that category by having stereotypically male physiology.
Of course, the sociobiologists of Amazonia have lots of rationales for why these gender roles are natural and spring from the essences of people. After all, grrls are traditionally associated with the sex that has to protect children, and it’s natural that they would be fierce and tough. Bois, who have to compete hard to win the attention of a mate—because girrrls have more reproductive investment—are of course going to have to kowtow to the grrls’ whims, are going to have to show their value by being decorative and pretty and making a home. The sociobiologists of Amazonia say all these things. I don’t know whether we should believe them—probably only as much as we should believe the sociobiologists of Patriarcha—but so they say.
So those are the two planets, at least in the beginning of this thought experiment. As time goes on, Amazonia and Patriarcha both liberalize a bit—just a bit. Their gender stereotypes remain intact, and the fact that one gender is typically dominant over the other also remains intact. But they relax their rules for membership in the genders. They allow for transition. We can imagine that they don’t have the resources for medical transition: they have a hard time getting people hormones and surgery, but they allow for social transition. You can opt in or opt out to the bloke category, the sheila category, the grrl category, or the boi category.
As opting in and opting out becomes allowed, the demographic makeup of these categories shifts, so that blokes, sheilas, girrrls, and bois all become about 50⁄50 balanced between people with stereotypical male characteristics and people with stereotypical female characteristics. At the end of this process, the bloke category and the grrl category are sort of identical with respect to their relationship to biology. Half of blokes are sort of stereotypically male, half are stereotypically female, with respect to physiology. They’re identical with respect to stereotypes and expectations.
And yet it looks like blokes are men. The category of blokes started out as a category of men and kept being a category of men, and didn’t get destroyed by this liberalization. And the girrrls are not men because the category of girls started out as a category of not men. You might even think it started out as a category of women. It didn’t get destroyed by this liberalization of who is allowed to enter and exit—and so, didn’t become a category of men. So you have these two functionally indistinguishable social classes, where one’s a class of men and one isn’t. The stuff that they share in common can’t be enough to determine whether you have a class of men or you have not a class of men.
Matt Teichman:
So the moral of this thought experiment then
is that once both of these two respective planetary societies have
undergone a social revolution, making gender into something fully
consensual, the sheilas and the bois should be indistinguishable from
each other in terms of their social function. They are also completely
free to opt in or out of those roles, irrespective of what their
biological makeup is. Being a Sheila should be the same thing as being
a boi, if having a gender were nothing more than occupying a certain
set of social roles. So the upshot of this thought experiment is that
we need more because we don’t actually want to identify being a sheila
with being a boi.
R.A. Briggs:
Mostly. Being a Sheila and being a boi can’t
consist in satisfying certain stereotypes, nor can they consist in
having certain physiology, nor can they consistent in any mixture of
stereotypes and physiology.
Matt Teichman:
Great—it has to be this funny relationship
of being part of a cultural practice that started a long time ago and
originally functioned according to one set of rules and now functions
according to a set of different rules. It’s got to be that historical
conception. That’s what’s required to distinguish these two
hypothetical genders.
R.A. Briggs:
Right. And that’s what’s required in particular
to be a man or a woman. So the thought experiment is really about the
categories man and woman—
Matt Teichman:
—[gasps] really?
R.A. Briggs:
Yeah, but not about the category gender, for
instance, and not about the categories bloke and sheila, except
insofar as they relate to man and woman.
Matt Teichman:
So not necessarily relevant to being
bi-gender, or to being genderqueer, or to some of these other examples
we’ve discussed.
R.A. Briggs:
Right—the thought experiment doesn’t really
speak to those. It’s just a counterexample to accounts of man and
woman that define them only in terms of reproductive biology and
social role right now, without looking at the history.
Matt Teichman:
Why do you think it’s important to have a
theory of what men are, what women are, or what gender is, in light of
these social developments? Is it that having an account of what it is
to be these things can help us do a better job of being these things?
What’s the big-picture motivation?
R.A. Briggs:
I think the big-picture motivation is to have
concepts that are well-designed to fight sexism and
transphobia. Haslanger is focused on the project of fighting sexism,
and her central examples are examples of cis women, who make up the
majority of victims of sexism—so I think that’s completely
fair. Although if you don’t happen to be a cis woman, that’s no
consolation to you, and your interests matter too.
The nice thing about Haslanger’s definitions is that they let you see this common anti-oppression project that all women have. A limitation of the definitions is that they don’t show you why men should also be part of this anti-oppression project, except for disinterested reasons. I think that there is also sexism that harms men—and this is one of the reasons that men should be invested in feminism. And they don’t correctly capture the investment that trans women have in an anti-sexism project, and an anti-transmisogyny project.
Our definitions are aimed at getting a better version of that project off the ground. I think they’re also aimed at rebutting people who think that trans identities make no sense. It’s false that trans identities make no sense, and we’ve got a ‘how possibly’ story—how could you have categories of man and woman such that binary trans people really belonged in the right one rather than the wrong one. We give a story about that. And I think it’s also good to help people understand themselves: what are these categories that make up a part of my identity?
Matt Teichman:
R.A. Briggs, thanks for joining us again!
R.A. Briggs:
Thank you.
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