...at The Philosopher's Magazine. This part of the interview, I thought, was especially interesting:
Biological sex is not a social construct. But even if it was, it wouldn’t follow, for heaven’s sake, that biological sex “is not real”. Money is a social construct. Crime is a social construct. Science is a social construct. War & Peace is a social construct. Music is a social construct. This interview is a social construct. Yet all of these things are perfectly real. They have the reality of historical and social formations. They don’t have the reality of the natural kinds that science is concerned with, like Panthera Tigris Tigris and H2O and tungsten. But whoever said that the only real kinds of things were the natural kinds?
By contrast with biological sex, gender is a social construct. It’s real, but it’s a historical and social reality. Das ewig Weibliche exists. Though “ewig” is a bit of an exaggeration.
Does that mean that gender is more easily changed than biological sex? No, not necessarily. Just because something is a social construct it doesn’t follow that it’s easy to change; just because something is a natural kind it doesn’t follow that it’s not easy to change. You will sooner extirpate the weeds from your garden than end the history of racism. For similar reasons, the fact that gender is a social construct does not imply that gender is easily abolished or even readily malleable.
Whether gender should be abolished is another question. My own view is that gender is in fact oppressive in this society, but not necessarily oppressive in any society. The best way to spell out how it might not be oppressive is to use your imagination, and generate pictures of possible societies where it isn’t oppressive—either at all, or not as oppressive as it is in our society. Science fiction and fantasy can help us here. One such imaginary society, not a perfect one, not so much a eutopia (a good place) as an allotopia (a different place), is Lissounes, an Ursula-Le-Guin-ish fiction of mine that is out there if you google it.
So anyway, where do trans women fit into my picture of sex and gender? (I’ll talk about trans women here; mutate the mutanda for trans men.) Well, as far as I can see, it’s basically about bodies. To be a trans woman, as I understand it and as I’ve experienced it, is to be born with a male body, and to have a deep and enduring wish to have a female body instead. It’s not about gender at all; at least at the most basic level, it’s entirely about biological sex. It’s not about thinking that you have a Girly Essence or a Lady Brain, or that your mind (or soul?) is female but your body male, or that you were the Queen of Sheba in a previous incarnation, or some dodgy hippy metaphysics like that. You might think that as well, of course, but that’s not the heart of the matter. At root it’s very simply about wanting to be female; female-bodied. But not just wanting it a bit; wanting it in a way that is all-consuming, that goes to the roots of your psyche. And that drives you mad if you don’t do something about it.
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