These questions take on new urgency
This reads like parody but apparently isn’t. Dear god.
I’ll just quote the rest to make things simple.
And here’s the abstract: Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave?
The relatively recent visibility of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans people gives us new reason to return to questions that feminists and other gender theorists have been grappling with for decades.
These questions take on new urgency in light of the increasing violence and discrimination trans people face across the world—in one of the most recent instances of this discrimination, for example, Ukrainian trans women are reportedly being denied passage out of the country, despite their legal status as women and the imminent danger they face at the hands of Russia’s transphobic policies, because they are being misgendered as men.
What, and Ukrainian women are having a fucking picnic??! And Ukrainian men are having a fucking picnic having to stay behind and fight to defend their country??!
According to the account I defend, womanhood is best understood as a family resemblance concept. I propose a normative reading of this view that recognizes that decisions about which features are taken to make up paradigmatic cases of womanhood are fundamentally political. This makes possible a conception of womanhood that does not continue to center the experiences of traditionally femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, while simultaneously making sense of actual historical failures in this regard.
Oh yes those stupid femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, those Karens, who should all be replaced by men who call themselves women.
I’ll argue that when a TERF complains that trans women haven’t had the same experiences as “real” women who were assigned female at birth, what she’s really saying is, “Trans women haven’t had the same experiences as women like me.”
Very academic, calling women “TERFs.” She might as well call us doo-doo heads.
If 30-plus years of intersectional feminism has taught us anything, it’s that this is precisely the move that feminists need to stop making.
Yes but as Aristotle always said, woman doesn’t intersect with penis.
Do transwomen have legal status as women in Ukraine? Somehow I really doubt that.
I couldn’t read through this end of this shit (which is rare for me).
But, based on the opening lines, I propose an even more incloosiv version:
Who counts as a human? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of humannhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every human will encounter on his, her, their, or xir journey from diapers to the grave?
The relatively recent visibility of and sensitivity to the experiences of transhumans, assigned animal or vegetable or even mineral at birth, gives us new reason to return to questions that humanists and other sentience theorists have been grappling with for decades.
Hay’s using Wittgenstein’s family resemblance concept* to define womanhood is just her coming up with a set of conveniently inclusive stereotypes in order to allow some men to claim they are women. How you dress or what you do doesn’t define what a woman is though, which “Woman: Adult Human Female” actually does successfully do. Enough of the pretense, or to put it bluntly, oh come the fuck on.
* – I just googled this concept because I Am Not A Philosopher, and it’s not hard to understand, really.
That’s one hell of a way to describe the harassment, sexual assault, rape, period shaming, body shaming, fear of all the above, judgement of behaviour, insistence that you smile on demand, care for others, sacrifice yourself for others, denial of education, healthcare, job, legal and other opportunities, etc that pretty much every girl and women goes through – sometimes starting even before puberty. I didn’t realise it was all such a lark or I might have transitioned myself /s.
But sure, make it about clothes, makeup and head tilts.
BKSA,
Ukraine does in fact have a legal process by which citizens/residents can change their gender on legal documents and identification.
On the topic of treatment of trans people in Ukraine, it does seem to be pretty awful. Ukraine is by and large a devoutly orthodox Christian country and deeply socially conservative. Pathways to legal transition are long and from what I can gather rather similar to what they were in western countries until quite recently. As a result only some trans people have actually obtained papers legally showing their changed sex and I suspect even fewer have surgically transitioned.
Whether it is legal for border guards to be turned trans women back at the border I don’t know, and I suspect the Courts are unlikely to be addressing the issue anytime soon given everything else going on.
War is shit for everyone. Trans women saying they are afraid they’ll be forced to join the army need to recognise that men are also forced to join the army. It’s also worth pointing out that the Ukraine army has a very high proportion of women in combat roles by comparison to other countries, so ‘being a woman’ in the Ukraine military would not be unusual. Similarly for tans men. I think part of transition is accepting the legal consequences and responsibilities that go along with that. If all ‘men’ are being called up or become eligible for military service, that seems to go with the territory.
I don’t mean to deny that this situation is terrifying for trans people, or possibly even a breach of their legal rights. I sympathise. I just don’t see that in actual practice they are a great deal worse off than their non-trans citizens.
What makes a person male or female is fundamentally biological. The political comes after that. The “political” is about power. Which sex has power? The male sex has wielded far more power for far longer than the female sex. Why is that? It derives from biological differences. One sex tends to be bigger, and stronger, than the other. One of the sexes has to spend considerable time, 9 months per instance, propagating new human beings, while the other sex does not carry this burden. The women also bear far more of the burden of caring for the children, until they are old enough to function independently.
What a leading way to put it. No, women won’t all have a “shared set of adventures and exploits.”
What we will share is the fundamental fact of existence in a female body as opposed to the other kind.
From that it follows that the vast majority of us will share at least some experiences unique to women. Menstruation, for example. The possibility of pregnancy. Pregnancy itself, and childbirth. From that follows the sociopolitical consequences of being female, which vary quite a lot by nation, ethnicity, and class but consistently over the past few millennia have meant subordination to those other people–the male-bodied ones.
Why have women historically been seen as subordinate, inferior, the second sex? It ain’t because we share “a set of adventures and exploits.” Biology, evolutionary psychology, and history all converge on an answer: It’s because we’re the ones who have the babies. We’re the ones who have the babies and males are the ones who want to the babies we have to be theirs. Add in the fact that we’re smaller and therefore can be bullied and the origins of male supremacist social structures are not hard to trace.
I doubt that chimps believe that females are inferior to males, but the males are dominant. (Bonobo females’ dominance over males is collective, not individual–sisterhood can indeed be powerful.) Our species developed language and our peculiar narrative tendency and then invented stories to account for a pre-existing state of affairs. Probably. (I’m skeptical about Golden Age tales of peaceful Matriarchal civilizations and Noble Savages living in perfect equality with one another and harmony with Nature.)
I’m oversimplifying. I could be wrong. But you don’t have to have an amateur interest in primatology and evolutionary biology to notice that there are some profound physical differences between the sexes, and that these differences have consequences. It strikes me, not for the first time, that people like Carol Hay, for all their “sex positivity,” must live in profound alienation from their bodies.
Ha. maddog put it so much more economically than I did!
[…] a comment by Lady Mondegreen on These questions take on new […]
Who counts as a woman? Women. Women count as women. This concludes my talk on trans inclusion. Refreshments in the foyer, please buy my book or maybe a t-shirt.
If I had the misfortune of finding myself in the path of rampaging Russian soldiers, I would sincerely wish for them to “misgender” me. That way, I could expect to just be killed, and not raped and then killed.
“Women are Women”
Cool, all we need to do now is figure out what the word means and we will finally know what a woman is.