It was written in the, I guess it was 1998, so it was, it was back in the day, I want
to say.
I mean, it wasn't that long ago, it was like what, 12 years ago, but it was important, it
was sort of when, when trans stuff was first sort of like really sort of like coming out
in academia, transgender politics and really being theorized, and, and so this is one of
the earliest examples of a non-trans, more or less, analytic feminist philosopher thinking
through some of these issues.
And a lot of the way that she proceeds is by thinking in terms of analogies, right, so
she thinks analogies between transsexual women and secular Jews.
We're also going to look at a piece by Cressida Hayes, which picks up some of the things that
Janice Raymond and Abu said, comparing transsexualism or transsexuality with a hypothetical transracialism.
And I think that she has some interest in the news about that as well, and in his background,
we're going to start off by talking about the, the Christine Overall article on transracialism,
transsexualism, that kind of sets up the Cressida Hayes piece.
I also threw in there, and this is the one that kind of like doesn't quite belong with
these, it's a little bit different, the one that we're going to conclude with is the
romancing the transgender native piece in the transstudies reader.
And I wanted to look at that because it is also thinking about intersections of gender
as well as race and culture, but it's doing it in a different way that I think is important,
and so I wanted to sort of end by thinking about that piece, and I'll try to do more
by way of sort of linking it to the other articles and saying why I wanted to look at it.
All right, I'm not going to at this point stand up and lecture unless I feel compulsive need to.
I'm going to stand up a little bit because I can't help it.
To get things going, I want to sort of, let's start with the overall article, the Christine Overall.
Can we read that?
All right, so preliminary remarks, comments, criticisms, concerns, summaries, impressions.
Didn't like it? Why did you like it?
Well, I was looking at her, I guess the proposed arguments that she said that the rejector would come up with,
and they don't seem all that convincing that someone actually came up with that,
because they all seemed like they would connect easily and turn around and use against them.
This seemed very well-developed, and just like the whole, how she, isn't what Hayes, is I don't know,
what Hayes says about how she treats gender and race as if they're equatable.
All right, okay, good.
So overall, this thesis is that she wants to show that...
Let's see.
Transsexualism is ethically, politically acceptable, and so is transracialism.
That's the thesis, about which we're talking about availing one's selves of particular technologies
to alter one's body in particular, so we're talking about wildly altering technologies.
This is the thesis of the piece. Sasha is worried about it.
For two reasons. One, you wanted to cite Hayes, who raises worries about this.
Would Hayes worry about this?
She treats them as if they're one and the same. I mean, rather, they're related, but they're on the same page.
Right, so she treats them as analogs of each other.
So Hayes is worried that overall, this kind of maybe helps yourself to freely to the thought that we can treat these...
I mean, she does arguments to try to show why if we accept one, we can accept the other.
But Hayes is worried that there's an assumption here that in thinking about one,
we can easily move to thinking about the other.
And there's a worry that Hayes also has, so she can guess.
Sex, gender, are analogs.
We can just sort of look at one and then think about, yeah.
I thought one of the initial principles that overall stated in the beginning was that
people agree that racial classes are social instruction, your history and that stuff.
And that's the same argument that trans-actualism is trying to make.
But for some reason, Hayes, I don't like the move that she was trying to make.
She was privileging worries and trying to say that it's a social construct, but it's a different...
There's no way... It's socially constructed.
It's like I couldn't understand how she was trying to privilege...
Why did she think she was trying to privilege Hayes?
I think she was trying to privilege to pull it off, you know, so that it didn't make the argument.
Because it's kind of funny, I couldn't tell whether she was trying to help the trans-actualist cause
or bring down cultures that try and say that they're all different.
So you have a lot of worries with the Hayes.
And some of the questions, so...
I wrote it down here, why can the accident of me being born white not be seen as just accidental
as me being born male?
In both cases, it could have been otherwise.
I could have been born with a darker skin complexion or without a penis.
But the medical science has actually shown that there is some correlation between the stability
of the mother's condition when she gets pregnant and the sex of the child.
So there seem to be some more influence on a child's gender than on skin color, right?
Skin color seems to be more random than the sex of the child according to a study like that.
It's one of the markers for passing.
She brings up passing in a different place.
Hispanic woman is too dark to pass as Anglo.
On the other hand, she passes as Anglo.
I do feel that she was like, especially in privileged ways, is just that when she's critiquing overall,
is that people make a sweeping assumption that they're analogous,
even if you agree that they're socially constructed.
But the way in which they're socially constructed is different, varying,
and that's what she's wanting to aim at.
When she talks about race, her belief about race is tied to ancestry, belief about email.
That is a different experience than being an individual who feels that your sex, your identity,
what you feel you are, and you can learn into what documentation society views you.
So to learn it is a two-different experience, and you can't sweep it under a general assumption that all overall does.
That's what I think she's doing.
Yeah, I think that you're right.
I think that Hayes is making the point that her idea is that socially constructed,
yes, both are socially constructed in her view, and we want to think about what she's meaning by socially constructed.
But she thinks that just because you're socially constructed doesn't mean that they're constructed in the same way.
There can be different social constructions.
And she thinks that in order to really understand what's going on, you can, as it were,
pluck these things outside of their context, their historical context.
You have to look at how racist and racializing discourse evolved historically and what was going on with it,
and what is the history of race and racism, and what is the history around discussions of sex and gender.
And so you need to understand that very specific cultural context, historical context,
in order to understand fully what's going on.
You're right.
I think that she's saying that the assumption that one, because you're both socially constructed,
that therefore they're interchangeable doesn't work because they can be socially constructed differently.
I mean, baseball is socially constructed, right?
Malls are socially constructed. How far does that get us in terms of assuming that malls and baseball are analogous?
I mean, do you know what I mean? How they work could be very different.
Does that make sense?
Let me go back to Sasha.
You're also worried, so this is one of your points, is you're worried about this thesis
because you agree with Hayes that, above this assumption that these are analogous, they might not be.
But you've led them with some other concerns.
That the arguments that she had proposed that the re-jector would come up with weren't convincing.
So this is just more like from an argumentative point of view, you just thought that...
She didn't have very good points to credit them with.
So you said that you don't think that she considered all the possible things that the re-jector might say,
or that her replies to these specific things were poor?
I'll say that she just... I guess the first thing is that she didn't really consider too much depth of what they might have.
Okay, so if you were a re-jector, then what would you say that I would have?
I hadn't thought of that.
I think what I would maybe not say is not a use-and-forth argument, which is about the surgery,
about it being strained on a healthcare system.
I didn't even see where I came in from.
What are you talking about?
I think that it's almost become, I would say axiomatic, almost.
Is that status in feminist theorizing these days?
And that is that you can't pluck out generous sex suppression from other forms of oppression.
The idea is that all of these things are going to be profoundly intermeshed in significant ways.
And we saw that, you know, a good example of that was a discussion last time.
We were thinking about lesbian separatism.
Now this idea says that women are oppressed in this heterosexist dyad,
where women are, as it were, made, connected to, and depended upon,
and used by a man and a heterosexual relationship.
It becomes, break away from this vision, this vision that is egocentrically geared toward men,
and form a culture of women that is independent of that, where women love women, right, and women.
So here's a vision that is obstructed from, say, race, and is obstructed from race.
And so what ends up happening is you have, you know, black feminists saying this project is not going to work for us.
Because why are we going to give up having, you know, relations of solidarity with the black men
who have been subjected to racial oppression for a long time?
You're requiring us to prioritize, as it were, one fight over the other, to put it crudely, and why?
So we talked about that last time, right?
Here's the point that I want to make, is that even that account of gender oppression, again, in lesbian separatism,
the one that looks like it's only about gender, and the one that only talks about gender and maybe heterosexualism, that one,
that doesn't represent itself as having anything to do with race, has everything to do with race.
It has everything to do with race because race is dropped out of the picture,
but when you're spinning a theory or outlining a politics, the question invites itself,
who is in a position to allow race to drop out of the picture?
For whom is that a non-issue, right?
Well, for someone who isn't suffering racial oppression, that's who.
So it's not going to seem that important to you.
You're not going to outline a politics that includes fighting racial oppression because it may not be as relevant.
So yeah, so obviously you can abstract it.
So again, my point is that even in cases in which it looks like, oh, it's just about gender, it's not just about gender.
There's actually a power move hidden there.
There's a racial power move going on that says race is not important.
So you get a better point about prioritizing, say, race over sex or racism over sexism or whatever.
And I think that a lot of folks these days would say, you know, this prioritizing or privileging is for the birds.
It's not really a fruitful endeavor that will be offered to you is focused on the ways in which these things are always in complicated ways blended with each other.
Does that make sense?
I mean, that's why I think that things roughly stand.
I mean, to give stupid examples, at least I think I'm really crude.
But I mean, there's a way in which historically speaking, racial stereotypes have also been gender stereotypes.
And you think of ways in which, you know, folks from the Orient, I mean orientals, have been historically feminized.
And individuals of African descent have been masculinized.
So here you have intersections of racism and deployments of gender stereotypes.
Does that make sense to you guys?
So the issue is, yeah, I think that certainly Hayes agrees that this stuff is intersected.
The issue is, what happens when we sort of pluck them out and we go, let's compare race and sex and see, right?
And can we assume that they are analogous, right?
So she's interested in people who say, let's compare race and sex.
If sex change is acceptable, then race change is acceptable.
One of the problems with that is that it seems to assume that we can abstract race from gender and abstract gender from race to make the comparison.
Are you guys with me in that?
I mean, and that's the problem.
A great example of that is if you remember back to the Democratic primaries between Obama and Clinton, remember that?
And in some representations, it was sort of like pitting race against sex or race against gender, right?
But notice that Obama has a gender and Clinton has a race.
So what that did was, by focusing on race versus gender, is it erased or alighted the fact that gender and race was involved in both cases.
So this is worry about like pulling out race and pulling out gender and then comparing them.
That you're actually forgetting that when you've got a handful of race, you've got a handful of gender.
If you've got a handful of gender, you've got a handful of race.
Yeah.
Were you basically saying that overall making a sort of an apology, saying if a, then a sort of thing, you can't separate them out at all until you look at the issue?
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that because I don't think that it is tautological.
And Hayes doesn't think that it's tautological.
One doesn't follow from the other.
I mean, just because whenever you have a handful of gender, you have a handful of race and conversely.
It doesn't follow from that that if transsexualism is ethically, politically acceptable, then so is transracialism.
Because when we look at the history of race, the way in which race discourse plays out, that it's going to be heavily gendered,
may be different from the way in which, you know, discourses around sex and race.
I mean, sex and gender play out, which are also going to be heavily raised.
I mean, the history can still be different.
The context can still be, still be different.
So Hayes's point, I think, is still going to be in play.
Does that make sense?
I thought Hayes was the only one.
I mean, it's way more nuanced because you have a legal, social, but with respect.
I mean, I wondered about the time note.
So, I mean, you know, suppose you had Martin Luther King, and then you decided,
well, the way I can get out of this deal is to get a race text.
I think people would be like, you're a royal salad.
And so, or when the, I'm going to legal with the one drop rule, you know,
at that time, I mean, you do that, and it just really feels like you're really jumping shit, right?
So I think the historical element that she, I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's anything like that.
Hey, it's presentation.
Yeah, it is, that's the question.
Yeah, and when we get more, right now, we haven't really, I don't take us to have actually fully jumped into the Hayes article yet.
We're still, I think, considering the overall, but I think when we get into the Hayes piece,
we need to, I want to talk about some of the details.
I don't feel like I want to go through overalls, various different possible responses,
the replies to them.
I'm sure that you can look at them yourselves and see what you think,
unless there's anyone that has a particular concern to you.
I do want to make another observation.
And this is, I think it goes beyond the concern that maybe this piece is not sensitive enough to historical context.
There's another concern that I have, that you may have felt a little bit uncomfortable with this piece,
or it may have felt different to you from some of the pieces we've looked at up to this point.
And those of you who are familiar with philosophy, and most of you here are philosophers,
might have felt that this actually read more like a philosophy paper, a straightforward analytic philosophy paper.
So if it seemed wrong or different to you, and it seemed more like a philosophy paper,
then I think that that's interesting.
And I want to talk a little bit about that, actually where I want to go with this.
So there's one, this abstraction from historical context, and two, the use of a hypothetical.
Transracialism doesn't seem to exist in the same way that transsexualism does, but let's consider it as a hypothetical.
Now in philosophy, particularly analytic philosophy, we're very comfortable with considering hypothetical cases.
Suppose that someone's in an accident, their brain is split in two,
each of them's theories is like scooped into a corresponding body, who's who?
Hypotheticals, we're very used to that. Are you with me?
So one of my concerns is that it feels like that to me.
Why does this bother me? Why does this start to make me feel a little bit uncomfortable?
Makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable because then I start to feel that transsexualism is being used as a case study
to almost go into a hypothetical.
Because it doesn't really matter. Transracialism is hypothetical.
So transsexualism might as well be a hypothetical because concrete realities are irrelevant.
So they're not puzzles that we're considering, hypothetical cases, to consider a philosophical position.
And then I want to ask Richard's question, which he asked about Hayes, and I want to come back to Hayes too,
and I want to put it positive overall. What are the political motivations behind this project?
When you're doing this philosophy, when you're writing this philosophy, what is the goal behind this philosophy?
What is the agenda? And is there a political agenda?
Can you guys get me on this? I want to get you on this.
Because, I want to bring this on home, because if the point is only to investigate things philosophically
or to show an interesting philosophical position by what we might come up with
by considering different arguments, by considering hypothetical, artificial situations.
I worry about that as a political project, particularly when we're talking about individuals
who continue to experience real transphobic violence, who continue to experience oppression,
whose lives, this gets me back to the Vivian Namaste piece on doing theory.
Do you remember that? Where she worries about, you know,
whose interests are being served by the theory, who's involved in the theory, and why.
Because, you know, I think that it's cool, I'm a philosopher, I love making the philosophical point,
and I'm not being fair to her overall, because clearly she does have, I think, you know,
that this has a political trust to it.
However, I guess I don't feel that it's political enough.
I don't feel that it's political enough in a way that is sensitive to trans politics.
Does that make sense to you?
And I start to feel like transsexualism is being used as a test case, or a hypothetical case,
to establish an interesting conditional with them.
It's not clear to me how this helps improve the lives of trans people.
And so then I start to feel like transsexuality, the phenomenon, is being harnessed
to make a cool philosophical point.
Does that make sense to you?
I think maybe being overly harsh, but sort of being sensitive to ways in which
trans people have been traditionally objectified in theories and, you know,
and also being an analytic philosopher.
You know, I'm very sensitive to sort of the use of transsexuality as kind of like, you know,
a hypothetical case or a test case to spin on an interesting philosophical theory
that has no political traction.
Thank you.
