The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Inclusive Dialogues: Feminism and Transgender
_J_
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
PedantRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
A student group at Mount Holyoke College has decided to cancel its annual performance of The Vagina Monologues, saying the play excludes the experiences of transgender women who don’t have a vagina.
This reminds us of a sentiment expressed by Linda Alcoff in her 2006 book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self:
As the gap between sex and gender, nature and culture, widens we seem to reach an odd place. The socially constructed categories of male and female, originally based in reproductive biological differences, now take on a meaning wholly distinct from those biological distinctions. We start with "has vagina" equals "female", and reach a point where "has vagina equals female" is considered reductive and exclusionary.
My diagnosis is to say that sex / gender labels have lost their utility, and we no longer need the distinction. However, I recognize that diagnosis does violence to the lived experiences of some human beings. Chaz Bono, in the book Transition, details the struggle of matching one's gender identity with one's physical body. Individuals go to great lengths, involving medication and surgery, to modify their biology in order to foster comfort with their self. At the same time, we maintain that reducing sex / gender to those biological features is reductive.
This is especially problematic for feminism. Feminists have worked for years to make "woman" a socially meaningful category, to gain equal status with "man". Now, the category for which they fought has blurred. We strive for equality, but no longer have a clear sense of the groups for whom equality is sought.
What does it mean to be a woman? Can any definition be offered that is not reductive and exclusionary? What do you think of the decision of the students at Mount Holyoke? For whom do feminists fight?
At its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” the email said. “Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive.
This reminds us of a sentiment expressed by Linda Alcoff in her 2006 book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self:
Thus, spurred by both the transgendered movement and the development of reproductive technologies, the naturalism of sex appears to be withering away. Certainly, the categories of reproductive roles, and the categories of sexed identity are subject to variation by cultural practices and forms of political economy.
As the gap between sex and gender, nature and culture, widens we seem to reach an odd place. The socially constructed categories of male and female, originally based in reproductive biological differences, now take on a meaning wholly distinct from those biological distinctions. We start with "has vagina" equals "female", and reach a point where "has vagina equals female" is considered reductive and exclusionary.
My diagnosis is to say that sex / gender labels have lost their utility, and we no longer need the distinction. However, I recognize that diagnosis does violence to the lived experiences of some human beings. Chaz Bono, in the book Transition, details the struggle of matching one's gender identity with one's physical body. Individuals go to great lengths, involving medication and surgery, to modify their biology in order to foster comfort with their self. At the same time, we maintain that reducing sex / gender to those biological features is reductive.
This is especially problematic for feminism. Feminists have worked for years to make "woman" a socially meaningful category, to gain equal status with "man". Now, the category for which they fought has blurred. We strive for equality, but no longer have a clear sense of the groups for whom equality is sought.
What does it mean to be a woman? Can any definition be offered that is not reductive and exclusionary? What do you think of the decision of the students at Mount Holyoke? For whom do feminists fight?
+3
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
correct, they did not
i invented women about 130 years ago
Ensler changed it back in 2004, when there was the first all-trans* performance with a new specific monologue. I guess Mount Holyoke was using the old version.
I've got more of a problem with the play because it depicts a 13 year-old being raped and reminiscing that "it was a good rape", which is fucked up.
IBT Genderbread man - the genderbread man is made up nonsense.
The term was not invented by feminists. The biological category of "female" was not invented by feminists.
Feminists, and the tradition of feminism, have shaped our contemporary understanding of "women". What it is to be a woman, how we are to understand the role of women, etc.
Arguably, modern women were invented by feminist discourse.
Pretty sure that the whole world shaped women.
Transgender people are also problematic for this point of view because they have an intrinsic gender identity.
It's a big complicated thing that's had to change with the times over the couple century and a half or so.
On the other hand, if gender is not constructed but the roles are then that has rather different implications.
I'll be the first trans woman to chime in on this and offer my two cents.
For the statement, "We strive for equality, but no longer have a clear sense of the groups for whom equality is sought," let me say this: don't overthink this. The groups are pretty clear -- cis women and trans women. It's not that complicated.
Yes, being transgender makes labeling confusing at times. For instance, I don't feel any more or less "gay" than I did before I came out, but that's the label I carry now because I've always liked women. But the issues that define the struggle for trans equality are deeply, deeply (I cannot emphasize the depth here) rooted in feminist theory, and likewise the oppressive forces that hurt trans acceptance stem from the same patriarchal oppression. So supporting feminist ideology is analogous to supporting transfeminist ideology unless you're stuck in the 2nd-wave mindset, which preaches the concept of gender essentialism, and I hope to god no one here believes in something so stodgy and unhip and scientifically-proven as false.
The concept of "being a woman" is just as reductive and harmful as the concept of "being a man," as gender identity is as fluid and exists on a spectrum as broad as sexuality and gender expression. Dave Nevarro wears full makeup and dresses extremely effeminately, but is heterosexual and identifies as male. Ellen Degeneres wears suits and sneakers, yet no one questions her place as a woman.
Instead, let's not worry about the mainstream finding a hard definition for terms that are innately unable to be concretely defined. Science has shown and continues to show that gender identity is fairly innate, and with many people starts at an extremely young age. I myself was about 10 years old when I realized I wasn't like other boys, well before I knew what "transgender" was and a good two or three years before I started puberty.
I am a woman. I am a trans woman. The struggles I face on a daily basis due to who I am and how I present myself are the same struggles faced by all women living under harmful misogynistic social codes. Trying to codify that further into rote values will only be more reductive and othering. It's not helpful.
Right, but to what does that amount if "woman" or "man" is a meaningless label in the first place?
I mean, granted, this discussion takes place outside of the reality of tomorrow or today. People use those categories all the time, but ought they?
I tend to agree with your later post that humans by their nature employ heuristic reasoning that requires types and tokens. And that's not a bad thing! Types help us out all the time. Without the category "car" I can't reason about the next car I come into contact with regarding whether it will kill me if it hits me.
Genders are outgrowths of the same kind of reasoning.
I think that the fight worth fighting though is to take gender in a more role and expression kind of direction. "woman" and "man" can be roles that people play, and perhaps pick up and discard as necessary. Even without that, I think that it's a worthwhile thing to have in our world, we just need to divorce it fully from biology, so that it can be something that anyone expresses.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Yeah. I still do not understand how this works. How can an individual have an inherent internal affinity for an externally fabricated social construct?
I would suggest that your examples of Degeneres and Navarro are complicated by the fact that they are sexually male and female and outside of the social literature it's rare that people perceive a difference between sex and gender
As for the idea that as a transwoman you face the same struggles as ciswomen seems intuitively false (depending on the level of abstraction you choose to use) - I guess if you want to be as general as "conform to the social expectations of your birth sex" then it would be correct. In the sense that the details of what those social expectations are then they seem to be rather different. I would grant the idea that you face the same struggles AND MORE though, probably.
Contemporary feminism has changed fairly radically from one generation to the next. Aside from a sort of purely tautological sense were feminists have argued that they should be able to define themselves, I would state that this is not the case.
You can have layers of construction. A spoon is constructed to have a stem and an end with a bowl section. It's traditional role is to move a portion of substance using the bowl section, but it can be used to cut or to strike without losing its features.
For a person, this is the relationship between gender traits and life roles. However, gender is much less defined than a spoon, and varies far more than cuttlery. Everyone has their own concept of a spoon, and some may have none.
I think it problematic to explain sex / gender in people using analogies to constructed objects.
Hunks of metal do not claim to be inherently spoony, and violently rebel if we tell them they are forks.
I do not comprehend this analogy on any level.
You don't think that the feminist movement throughout history has shaped our understanding of what it means to be a woman?
I mean, this seems just plainly false.
I think that it's very clear that in societies where there is a strong feminist movement historically the women who are born today are going to have meaningfully different notions of what it is to be a woman. For instance, as a mother. Feminists have pushed for the notion that in order to be a woman, one need not be a mother. That one can be a woman without that. One of my good friends is committed to never being a mother, and I think that this has been enabled by feminists who have come before and pushed for her to still be able to consider herself a woman.
J isn't arguing something super controversial here, I don't think.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Femininity is presented differently by different cultures, but many people have strong identities seeming totally intergrated with it despite various incongruities.
It is sort of one of those things where I just shake my head, think 'geeze, humans aren't they weird and interesting. I wonder what we can do to make life better for them.'
Don't you think part of making things better is understanding how sex and gender ought to be?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Ought to be?
Yes
If there is a better, there is a way that things ought to be in order to make that happen.
I'm not getting moral up in here (necessarily), despite the normative language
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
It just seemed like you were dismissing the discussion on pragmatic grounds. Helping people with the here and now instead of worrying about the theoretical.
I was responding in essence that an understanding of the theoretical provides a way of understanding how to achieve such a vague end.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Aside from your problematic phrasing, what exactly is the endgame you're hoping to achieve?
There literally could be nothing better for my life than when people find out I'm transgender, their first and only reaction is a very unflustered acknowledgement.
Naw.
Like, I'm totally OK with, "expressed freely without coercion or judgment.". Wherever that ends up.
But, that has nothing with how gender or sex ought to be, and is directed at basically everything around them.
Okay, forget the analogy then.
Gender is a list of traits assumed of a person who is identified as part of that category, historically usually assigned by their sex. Traditional masculine and feminine traits, varying by culture, are assigned to one gender or the other wholly or proportionally.
Gender roles are roles considered appropriate for people who who are assigned a particular gender. These are usually justified by the traits assumed of the gender categorization.
These days Western culture is slightly more inclined to separate the traits out and assign the roles to the traits rather than to the gender, making gender an increasingly nebulous concept. Instead of "Men, as aggressive types, are leaders" it's "Aggressive people are leaders." Which is itself making a lot of dubious assumptions, but doesn't automatically exclude women.
This is a a kind of naturalism / universalism that is problematic for the "cultural fabrication" account of gender identity.
Why not say that each culture is doing its own thing? Why do we need to group those things into the "femininity" category?
I doubt that you can answer that question without making an appeal to biology or nature.
A culture may express femininity differently from the next, but all cultures have a value for "feminine" and "masculine," which I would argue supports the idea of some innate behavior of some sort.
However, it seems like you are really searching hard for answers that science and sociology don't even have tacked down yet. There are semantic and philosophical arguments supporting transgenderism, and there are actually biological and scientific studies that support the phenomenon, so yes, it may boil down to appeals to biology.
Because I assure you, I never would have voluntarily chosen to be trans. Not where I grew up, and not with the family I have.
That's how categorization works. Subjects don't change what they're about if they're occurring in separate countries. Each culture does it's own "thing" but there are general principals in how they're structured that appear on a global scale, like art is still art in France and Indonesia.
Totally!
I mean, I don't see that as being at odds with my intention.
My endgame, I mean, pie in the sky probably not going to happen is that we thoroughly understand how to understand sex and gender (if there really are such things as meaningful categories) and the interactions between them (if there are any) that we can use to come up with how we ought to behave toward one another and construct social policy. Also, if we could encourage human virtue that would be great.
Really, I just think that none of our concept are better left unexamined than examined and analyzed.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I understand where you're coming from, and that's fine, but we already have a tenable solution to meeting your endgame that doesn't involve bleeding-edge science and philosophy.
It's called feminism.
Do you think that J is arguing that there is no such thing as transgenderism?
Because your middle part seems to indicate that, but I don't want to read too much into what you wrote.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I'm not not okay with this.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
No, I just think he's looking to quantify something that may or may not be quantifiable, and he's doing so as an internet armchair philosopher (as we all are), when people who actually get paid to do that kind of thing for a living are still having trouble with those questions.
Also, he seems to overthinking the concept of inclusivity; starting from a point of, "being a woman doesn't have to mean you have a vagina," he's seemingly extrapolating that, "if everyone can be a woman, is anybody really a woman?" To which I respond, "that's not really an important question in a practical sense."
It absolutely is problematic.
That the existence of the categories is universal. Is problematic for the cultural construct argument.
That the categories are not universal is problematic for the inate argument.
That the internal desire and social value of these traits does not match the ability of individuals to express them is a nightmare for the individuals involved. And some of the traits themselves are pretty problematic too.
If either argument is absolutely true, does it change the last bit or how it should be dealt with?