Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Legal Fiction

  • 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 […]

  • Feminism, Conceptual Engineering, and Trans Identity

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought. –Shakespeare, Henry IV Making Language Better If we can improve our language, by making concepts (roughly: the meaning of words) more precise or by naming something so far unnamed, we should do so. This is what motivates “conceptual engineering,” a relatively new branch […]