..at 3:16 AM (Richard Marshall's new site for interviews with philosophers).
UPDATE: Green, who is the Professor of Philosophy of Law at Oxford, and who has also written extensively on philosophical issues related to sexuality, briefly discusses in this interview some of his views on the questions raised by the gender self-ID law in the UK:
It is wrong for the medical professions, especially pseudo-scientific fields in psychiatry, to be the gate-keepers of gender change. To feel utterly heartsick living as a man, and to want to live as a woman instead, is neither an illness nor a symptom of one. Many men can probably understand mild versions of that feeling. In a tiny minority of cases, people who loathe their gender stand no chance of leading happy lives without the help of medication or surgery, and at that point the medics do need to be involved (and closely regulated). But we should not also hand over to them the authority to decide who is entitled to what designation on their passport, or to use which toilets. These are questions of political morality.
The controversial issue is what should replace medical designation, for legal purposes. In ordinary personal life and interaction, we should treat people, and refer to them, according to whatever gender identity they prefer—or none. It is an insult to do anything else. But it does not follow that that is also the right answer in all legal (or scientific, or medical) contexts. When the question ‘who has the right to do X?’ turns on gender, and has legal effect—authoritative rulings, coercive enforcement, stigma etc.—we need to give greater weight to the interests of other people. It is no longer just a question of decency and good manners. When a former-man who is now a trans-woman demands, as of legal right, access to traditionally gender-segregated facilities (change rooms, toilets, prisons), or programmes (affirmative action), or employment (in rape crisis centres) the stakes are high. Historically, much gender-segregation was wrong, but in these cases its purpose and effect is to advance the interests of women. For trans-women, admission to these spaces and programmes is an important sign that they are finally, fully women. But for other women, it would be to take away spaces, resources, and programmes that they need. The conflict of interest is real.
In this context, ‘self-identification’ means that law should give decisive weight to the sincere affirmation of someone who was not formerly a woman that now she is. It matters that the affirmation be sincere, and to some extent stable, not only for practical purposes but also to reduce possible (if largely hypothetical) strategic and aggressive uses of self-identification. One option is something like the Irish model, requiring a statutory declaration and providing for penalties for abuse. But this will not resolve all the issues. I share Kathleen Stock’s view that there are deep conflicts of interest here between women and trans-women. We may be able to avoid some of them, but I’ve a feeling that there will also have to be legislative compromises. We won’t get there, however, until we can have an adult discussion of these things.
These, by the way, are all normative questions about law and policy. The conceptual question whether trans-women count as women is another matter. (So too, the ‘metaphysical’ question, if there is such a thing, whether trans-women are women.) On this issue, I hew to Simone de Beauvoir’s view that our concept ‘woman’ includes an important path-dependent element, and I think that most trans-women lack the life histories that constitute woman-hood. But there is room for argument about that. ‘Woman’ is a cluster concept, and anyway it is not as if ‘man’ or ‘woman’ have sharp boundaries. There is also room for argument about whether, if Beauvoir is right, we ought to revise or abandon the concept ‘woman’. This is really a question of whether we should ditch our gender concepts altogether. (There is no case to be made for ditching the concepts ‘female’and ‘male’; despite indeterminacies, we need the sex categories for too many scientific and medical purposes.) The question is too large to address here, save to say this: We cannot, change our concepts by philosophical argument, let alone by stipulation. We would have to change our world.
These sensible remarks, predictably, produced an outburst of "condescension from below" from the usual suspects:
Nate Sheff (Connecticut): "The grand synthesis: what goes on the gender part of your passport is whatever Les Green says."
Erin Islo (Princeton), purporting to paraphrase Green: "doctors shouldn’t make these decisions, patients themselves shouldn’t have the agency to make these decisions, a bunch of barely sentient corporate-sponsored tubs of vanilla pudding should make these decisions. it’s about political morality after all!”
Christa Peterson (USC): "This is repulsive and DEEPLY UNSERIOUS haha philosophy is horrible!"
"Deeply unserious" indeed.
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