Tag: Transgender
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In Defense of Linguistic Luddism
by Moti Gorin ____ The Luddites weren’t a complacent group of workers. They worried about the loss of their jobs as a result of the introduction of new technologies, and so they went about destroying the textile machines that were rendering human laborers obsolete. The word ‘Luddite’ has since become a pejorative, applied to those […]
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On The Disgraceful treatment of Kathleen Stock
by Andrew Gleeson ____ Late last week British philosopher Kathleen Stock announced on Twitter her resignation from a professorship at the University of Sussex. This followed a long and vicious campaign against her over several years by radical transgender rights’ activists both on and off the university campus. Stock’s early work focused on aesthetics, but […]
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‘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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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On Sex and Gender Identity: Perspectives from Biology, Neuroscience and Philosophy
by Laeti Harris, Louise Moody, and Pam Thompson ____ Introduction This essay will explore the material qualities and political significance of the sexed human body, which has evolved in the service of sexual reproduction, although is not limited to that purpose. Our exploration is motivated by the relatively recent emergence in western cultures of campaigns […]
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Legal Fictions: Changing Sex by Changing Gender
by Miroslav Imbrišević A couple of years ago the question ‘What is a woman?’ entered the public imagination. Germaine Greer said in 2015 that transgender women are not women, and the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in 2017: “A trans woman is a trans woman”. But the controversy about who falls under the category ‘woman’ […]
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Mini-Symposium on Sex and Gender: Foucault and the Construction of Transgender Children
by Heather Brunskell-Evans ___ Thirty years ago, ‘the transgender child’ would not have made sense to the general public, nor would it have made sense to young people. Today, children and adolescents declare themselves transgender, the NHS refers some children for ‘gender-affirming’ therapy, and laws and policy are invented which uphold young people’s ‘choice’ to […]
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Feeling Like a Man
by Daniel A. Kaufman If someone who looks like a man and has XY chromosomes tells me he feels female – I cannot tell her she is ‘wrong’. Would you? –Prof. Alice Roberts, University of Birmingham (1) ____ The thought behind the idea of gender self-identification is about as confused as any in contemporary public […]
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Sex / Gender / Politics
By E. John Winner Introduction 1953 saw the release one of the worst films ever made – Glen or Glenda, written and directed by the master of bad cinema, Ed Wood. Promising to be an exploitation film about the then new transsexual surgery conducted in Sweden, it is really a boldly auto-biographical revelation of Wood’s […]