Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) discusses the issues in a measured and informative way here and here. Those who recall the reaction to an earlier philosophical discussion of Germaine Greer's views can surmise why so many avoid the topic. But philosophers shouldn't, for reasons Professor Stock addresses.
An excerpt from Professor Stock's second essay below the fold:
The Gender Critical position is the view, focusing on the concepts of womanhood and woman, which argues the class of women is defined as such by the occupation of an oppressed role in a patriarchal society. This oppressive role is theorised as being based on certain biological and reproductive characteristics, or the perception of them based on external appearances (e.g. intersex people with external female genitalia). To put it in plain terms, this view thinks that it is inherent to the structure of womanhood to be someone targeted for abuse on the basis of a perception of biological characteristics. On this view, women as a class have been historically raped, used as prostitutes, trafficked, expected to do the majority of domestic labour, paid less than men, treated as ‘baby machines’, excluded from Universities, denied the vote, married as children, had their wombs hired out, and so on, based on the perception of their possession of having wombs, vaginas, ovaries and breasts, as well as presumed associated ‘weak’ constitutions and inadequate brains. This sex-based oppression, the view says, is what defines them as ‘women’.
This view looks like it straightforwardly entails that biological males — those with XY chromosomes, and male-associated genitalia — cannot usually count as women, since they can’t normally be subject to this kind of sex-based oppression in a systematic way. Those who hold the view are radical feminists, many of whom are also socialists, Trade Union members, Marxists, anti-climate change and anti-nuclear campaigners. In the popular and broadsheet press, with some honourable exceptions (here and here, for instance) this view is largely reductively treated as automatically ‘transphobic’, ‘disrespectful’, and ‘abusive’.
I am asked whether I hold this view. I honestly can say that I do not yet know whether I endorse it or not. I am currently weighing it up. I have been for a while. I feel absolutely no external pressure to reach a view; it is a matter of private conscience what I think about this, as it is for everyone else. People are entitled to affirm it, and deny it, in a free society. Whether or not I hold it, will make absolutely no practical difference to the way I interact with trans people. I’ll continue in all circumstances to treat them with respect and sensitivity and a complete lack of any discrimination.
I am also asked, more generally, what I think being a woman is. I’m fairly sure it isn’t a feeling in the head, or a set of ‘feminised’ preferences and behaviours. I don’t feel like a woman, particularly, and most of my preferences and behaviours are not remotely feminised. I am nonetheless a woman. For the rest, I am still thinking about it. I severely regret the list of restricted options available in the academic literature. Philosophers who in other contexts are highly creative in theorising about ontological matters tend in this area to state certain rather simplistic mantras dogmatically, no doubt partly out of fear of criticism. (Indeed it is not clear that any other sort of claim would be published).
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