On II.1, would it be fair to say that the ‘if’ in your final paragraph is doing a lot of heavy lifting?
On II.2, the simple fix seems to be to refine the descriptors used to label the data, rather than to insist that data relating to transwomen be labelled as ‘male’.
On II.3, the suggestion appears to be that transgender identities do not arise out of a sense of personal necessity or intuition, but are assumed as a convenient premise, and that the validity of a given identity—and the extent to which its premise will be indulged—will vary according to how contextually sympathetic the identity’s dynamics appear to be. This seems to rest on a self-serving assumption and to provide only a messy and unstable set of principles against which to understand transgender identities.
Also on II.3, Lawford-Smith’s argument seems circular and confused. It reads to me as ‘transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be a woman, because they’re not women’. The argument also seems to characterise gender identity as simultaneously being fixed into mutually unknowable binary categories while also being something fluid that can be mutually knowable in the right cultural context. Again the principles being set out strike me as messy and unstable.
On (II.1): Yeah, that's where I expect nearly all the action to be (with notable exceptions like Andrea Long Chu).
On (II.2): I wouldn't generally insist on transwomen being labeled 'male' for these purposes—if anything, having the six (sex) x (gender identity) categories, like in the Aella chart, is more illuminating. If the proposal is to just use the gender identity categories and hide sex, though, I think Stock's worry applies.
On (II.3): I'm happy to grant that all such identities do "arise out of a sense of personal necessity or intuition" (perhaps again with notable exceptions like Andrea Long Chu); I'd still maintain that the extent to which such identities should be indulged varies with how harmful such indulgence is.
Also, I've only quoted Lawford-Smith's conclusion, not her argument for it (which is linked)—for instance, the fact that society is so male-centered is supposed to justify the asymmetry in understanding between transmen and transwomen.
The more robust framework would be to assess the validity of identities independent of unstable variables such as cultural context and subjective notions of sympathy and merit. The alternative risks capriciousness.
The question of which identities are to be ‘indulged’ (this word seems unnecessarily loaded—I think a better substitute would be ‘extended civic tolerance’) ought to be one of crafting public policy that is appropriate to context, rather than one of the fundamental validity of transgender identities themselves.
Within this framework tolerance would be extended—or not extended—to allow, e.g., the inclusion of transgender women in certain spaces, rather than as recognition of them as being transgender women.
I read the linked Lawford-Smith article—my issues with her argument are based on what I found.
I agree with the first three paragraphs, actually! The thought in my original comment was: even granting for sake of argument that these identities are totally valid, the extent to which we should accomodate them is still varies quite a bit—including, for instance, whether newspaper headlines should say "man" (unnecessarily cruel), "transwoman" (best), or "woman" (misleading and sometimes absurd).
I don't think Lawford-Smith's argument is objectionably circular; in particular, it can't just be "transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be a woman, because they’re not women", as she wants to block the analogous argument about transmen. In particular, the condition seems closer to something like: "transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be female, because (i) they didn't learn it firsthand, and (ii) society isn't sufficiently female-centered for them to learn it secondhand".
‘[T]ranswomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be female, because…they didn't learn it firsthand’ is still circular though, because it simply presupposes and asserts that transwomen’s firsthand experiences don’t count. Why? Because they’re not women. And round and round and round.
Lawford-Smith’s framing in this sense first (when dealing with transwomen) places primary importance on the experience of biological female sex, then (when dealing with the exception for transmen) pivots to placing primary importance on the availability of good cultural data on the female experience.
Femininity and masculinity can’t be ineffable experiences that arise from the body in some cases while also being transmissible sets of cultural ideas in others, with the differentiation turning solely on relative differences in policy concerns as between transwomen and transmen.
The error here is, as above, the conflation—or possibly the inversion—of legitimacy of identities and tolerance of identities.
I am a cisgender man. Because this is my identity, it would be improper from a policy perspective for me to share certain spaces with women. It’s my identity—taken to be legitimate—that determines the degree and nature of tolerance that applies to me in a given context. The impropriety of my sharing certain spaces with women is not what legitimates me as a cisgender man. That would be absurd.
The answer to why transwomen’s firsthand experiences don’t tell them enough about what it’s like to be female is not “because they’re not women”, but rather “because they’re not female”. Even people who think that transwomen are women should accept that transwomen—especially pre-transition—don’t know firsthand what it’s like to be female. Most of the action, I take it, centers around whether transwomen can learn enough about what it’s like to be female secondhand (or perhaps even firsthand post-transition). That there’s still room for substantive disagreement here suggests that there’s no objectionable circularity.
Fair point RE my conflation of female/woman—sloppy use of language on my part. The circularity argument still stands though as Lawford-Smith has conflated ‘female’ with ‘woman’ herself.
The circularity is objectionable, in my view, because it obscures the discussion and undermines better mutual understandings of the substantive disagreement. The broader conversation doesn’t progress.
The actual issue, put simply, appears to be that Lawford-Smith—and those who agree with her—are concerned that, *notwithstanding the validity of transgender identities*, policy issues arise from treating cisgender and transgender women as being wholly and undifferentiably alike.
If this is an accurate description of the issue, they would do better to skip the logical contortionism around identity and get straight to the substantive policies they want to see implemented and the rationales they say support those policies.
For some reason this kind of directness and simplicity is often—in my experience—lacking from gender critical discourse. So many words are wasted trying to logic transgender identities away, even if doing so doesn’t actually serve—or actively undermines—the central argument being made.
What do you make of the Bogardus argument that preferred pronouns function as a shibboleth, such that if you’re broadly gender critical, you should refuse to use them for the same reason Christians should refuse to desecrate icons?
if refusing to use preferred pronouns means something like refusing to put “he/him” in your bio, i think that’s fair (it’s just an allegiance-signaling thing anyway); if it means refusing to call a transwoman “she”, i think this is not going to be a very strong consideration—feels like an atheist refusing to say “bless you” when someone sneezes
On II.1, would it be fair to say that the ‘if’ in your final paragraph is doing a lot of heavy lifting?
On II.2, the simple fix seems to be to refine the descriptors used to label the data, rather than to insist that data relating to transwomen be labelled as ‘male’.
On II.3, the suggestion appears to be that transgender identities do not arise out of a sense of personal necessity or intuition, but are assumed as a convenient premise, and that the validity of a given identity—and the extent to which its premise will be indulged—will vary according to how contextually sympathetic the identity’s dynamics appear to be. This seems to rest on a self-serving assumption and to provide only a messy and unstable set of principles against which to understand transgender identities.
Also on II.3, Lawford-Smith’s argument seems circular and confused. It reads to me as ‘transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be a woman, because they’re not women’. The argument also seems to characterise gender identity as simultaneously being fixed into mutually unknowable binary categories while also being something fluid that can be mutually knowable in the right cultural context. Again the principles being set out strike me as messy and unstable.
Thanks for the comment!
On (II.1): Yeah, that's where I expect nearly all the action to be (with notable exceptions like Andrea Long Chu).
On (II.2): I wouldn't generally insist on transwomen being labeled 'male' for these purposes—if anything, having the six (sex) x (gender identity) categories, like in the Aella chart, is more illuminating. If the proposal is to just use the gender identity categories and hide sex, though, I think Stock's worry applies.
On (II.3): I'm happy to grant that all such identities do "arise out of a sense of personal necessity or intuition" (perhaps again with notable exceptions like Andrea Long Chu); I'd still maintain that the extent to which such identities should be indulged varies with how harmful such indulgence is.
Also, I've only quoted Lawford-Smith's conclusion, not her argument for it (which is linked)—for instance, the fact that society is so male-centered is supposed to justify the asymmetry in understanding between transmen and transwomen.
The more robust framework would be to assess the validity of identities independent of unstable variables such as cultural context and subjective notions of sympathy and merit. The alternative risks capriciousness.
The question of which identities are to be ‘indulged’ (this word seems unnecessarily loaded—I think a better substitute would be ‘extended civic tolerance’) ought to be one of crafting public policy that is appropriate to context, rather than one of the fundamental validity of transgender identities themselves.
Within this framework tolerance would be extended—or not extended—to allow, e.g., the inclusion of transgender women in certain spaces, rather than as recognition of them as being transgender women.
I read the linked Lawford-Smith article—my issues with her argument are based on what I found.
I agree with the first three paragraphs, actually! The thought in my original comment was: even granting for sake of argument that these identities are totally valid, the extent to which we should accomodate them is still varies quite a bit—including, for instance, whether newspaper headlines should say "man" (unnecessarily cruel), "transwoman" (best), or "woman" (misleading and sometimes absurd).
I don't think Lawford-Smith's argument is objectionably circular; in particular, it can't just be "transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be a woman, because they’re not women", as she wants to block the analogous argument about transmen. In particular, the condition seems closer to something like: "transwomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be female, because (i) they didn't learn it firsthand, and (ii) society isn't sufficiently female-centered for them to learn it secondhand".
‘[T]ranswomen cannot be women because they cannot understand what it feels like to be female, because…they didn't learn it firsthand’ is still circular though, because it simply presupposes and asserts that transwomen’s firsthand experiences don’t count. Why? Because they’re not women. And round and round and round.
Lawford-Smith’s framing in this sense first (when dealing with transwomen) places primary importance on the experience of biological female sex, then (when dealing with the exception for transmen) pivots to placing primary importance on the availability of good cultural data on the female experience.
Femininity and masculinity can’t be ineffable experiences that arise from the body in some cases while also being transmissible sets of cultural ideas in others, with the differentiation turning solely on relative differences in policy concerns as between transwomen and transmen.
The error here is, as above, the conflation—or possibly the inversion—of legitimacy of identities and tolerance of identities.
I am a cisgender man. Because this is my identity, it would be improper from a policy perspective for me to share certain spaces with women. It’s my identity—taken to be legitimate—that determines the degree and nature of tolerance that applies to me in a given context. The impropriety of my sharing certain spaces with women is not what legitimates me as a cisgender man. That would be absurd.
The answer to why transwomen’s firsthand experiences don’t tell them enough about what it’s like to be female is not “because they’re not women”, but rather “because they’re not female”. Even people who think that transwomen are women should accept that transwomen—especially pre-transition—don’t know firsthand what it’s like to be female. Most of the action, I take it, centers around whether transwomen can learn enough about what it’s like to be female secondhand (or perhaps even firsthand post-transition). That there’s still room for substantive disagreement here suggests that there’s no objectionable circularity.
Fair point RE my conflation of female/woman—sloppy use of language on my part. The circularity argument still stands though as Lawford-Smith has conflated ‘female’ with ‘woman’ herself.
The circularity is objectionable, in my view, because it obscures the discussion and undermines better mutual understandings of the substantive disagreement. The broader conversation doesn’t progress.
The actual issue, put simply, appears to be that Lawford-Smith—and those who agree with her—are concerned that, *notwithstanding the validity of transgender identities*, policy issues arise from treating cisgender and transgender women as being wholly and undifferentiably alike.
If this is an accurate description of the issue, they would do better to skip the logical contortionism around identity and get straight to the substantive policies they want to see implemented and the rationales they say support those policies.
For some reason this kind of directness and simplicity is often—in my experience—lacking from gender critical discourse. So many words are wasted trying to logic transgender identities away, even if doing so doesn’t actually serve—or actively undermines—the central argument being made.
What do you make of the Bogardus argument that preferred pronouns function as a shibboleth, such that if you’re broadly gender critical, you should refuse to use them for the same reason Christians should refuse to desecrate icons?
if refusing to use preferred pronouns means something like refusing to put “he/him” in your bio, i think that’s fair (it’s just an allegiance-signaling thing anyway); if it means refusing to call a transwoman “she”, i think this is not going to be a very strong consideration—feels like an atheist refusing to say “bless you” when someone sneezes