One by Kathleen Stock (Sussex); an excerpt:
On one hand, many women feel blindsided by the argument that trans women should be considered literal women, and question the effect of the trans movement on female sex-based rights and protections, as they have come to define them. On the other, many trans people are aghast at what they feel are attempts to block their political advancement toward equal social and legal status.....
To understand what’s at stake, it’s helpful to delineate two argumentative positions at play: (1) sex eliminationism, which argues for the abolition of the recognition of biological sex as a meaningful category; and (2) gender eliminationism, which argues for the abolition of gender. As a feminist and philosopher who finds herself stuck between these two positions and their passionate advocates, I see it as a defining challenge of our complicated modern times to carve out some pragmatic middle ground: to find a narrative and set of policies protective of both the rights of trans people in a gender-conforming society, and those of females in a misogynist society. In attempting this, we should recognize that many on both sides of the dispute share at least some common ground. Specifically, they both share a deep discomfort with the sociocultural norms and stereotypes associated with being a woman or a man. I believe that this common ground may provide some basis for rapprochement.
And another by Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's U); an excerpt:
My first dick pick was actually a dick flick. I did not invite it, expect it, trade for it, pay for it, or hit on the student who sent it. It was purely donum gratis. I did have a strictly platonic crush (in the English, rather than Platonic, sense of ‘platonic’) on a graduate student who had a very non-platonic crush on the penis-guy. My platonic friend sent me the (disguised) link to his colleague’s penis performance, which was posted to a well-known ‘amateur’ porn site. (My friend also sent it to many UT law students: I called him out on that, but too late.)
I had written academic papers on pornography and sexual objectification but I never considered whether they had any bearing on students. I had argued that the post-modernist reductionisms of the 1990s (‘sex is gender’, ‘woman is a performance’) were poor guides to the conceptual or moral issues raised by same-sex pornography. But I did not yet see that that these theories were also cocked, primed, and ready to blast away at compromises between the conflicting interests of women and trans-women. If there is no material reality or significance to a penis, if it is merely a production of ‘discourse’, then a lesbian has little ground for complaint if her Tinder hook-up arrives wielding a penis, even one less striking than a vegetable marrow. I did not welcome videos of an actual, material penis–especially not one attached to a student I knew–but I did not reflect on the fact that are were also many other places that penises do not belong.
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