Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Gender

  • Categories: Limited; Inevitable; Necessary

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ “I wonder if we will ever stop putting people into these categories. Could we ever just allow people to be individuals?” The student said this as we were talking after class. What started off as a conversation about class, where we were discussing the politics of banning books in schools, became […]

  • A Conversation with Holly Lawford-Smith

    by Moti Gorin ____ Moti Gorin (Colorado State) talks with Holly Lawford-Smith (University of Melbourne) about her new book, “Gender Critical Feminism” (Oxford University Press). Please pardon us for some choppiness in Moti’s audio/video. 0:00–25:06 Background and Opposition 25:06–35:00 Overview of Gender Critical Feminism 35:00–50:00 Gender Critical vs “Mainstream”/“Liberal” Feminism 50:00–58:55 Engaging with “the Literature” […]

  • The Summit and the Battle

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ I won’t shock you when I point out how nasty and unproductive social media arguments often are. I’ve also come to find them repetitive and predictable, which is why I recently wrote about my decision to pare down my already thin presence on social media. Here, I want to think a […]

  • Terfs, Transwomen and Trekkies

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ Recently I read a definition of ‘Terf’: they are “cis women who deny the womanhood of transwomen.” [https://www.zeit.de/zett/queeres-leben/2022-04/phenix-kuehnert-weiblichkeit-trans-frau]. That made me think about the question of group membership. How do you acquire it? Strangely, it is never through self-ID. Traditionally there are two routes: [1] via the current members; or [2] […]

  • ‘Identify’

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Until about five minutes ago, if you’d asked me what some customary uses of ‘identify’ are, I would have given three: [A] Where one expresses sympathy for and solidarity with a group to which one does not belong, as in, “I identify with the plight of Afghan women, in the […]

  • Helen Joyce on her NEW book: Trans — When Ideology Meets Reality

    by Daniel A. Kaufman _____ I talk with Helen Joyce, British editor of The Economist, about her new book: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (Simon & Schuster). https://youtu.be/YW9aPRyKnZk 5:00 The overall aim of Helen’s new book. 11:20 The history and evolution of our conception of being transgender. 27:30 The current conception of being transgender, and […]

  • Sources of Human Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ People differ in all sorts of ways. Most of our differences generally go unnoticed when we interact. For example, with regard to a store clerk yesterday, I didn’t notice what her eye color or dominant hand is. But other differences, as the saying goes, make a difference. Historically and into the […]

  • Material Girls: A Conversation with Kathleen Stock

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Kathleen Stock (Sussex) and I discuss Kathleen’s new book, “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” Among other things, we talk the implications of switching our focus from Sex to Gender Identity, why Sex remains essential, and the impact of gender identity politics on the gay and lesbian community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2YZwK6TOaw&ab_channel=ElectricAgora […]

  • The Power of words

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ In the Old Testament, we read: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” God could make things happen by saying the appropriate words. We also read in the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word.” The idea that words have power is still with us. Take superstition: […]

  • The California Dragon

    by Bev Jackson ___ The word ‘sex’ is having a bit of a moment. Not in the bedroom sense, but in its sense of biological sex, male or female. When J.K. Rowling tweeted “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” she ignited […]