I'm going to wrap this up with Koyama so that we can go on with our presentation.
One of the things, though, I think that Koyama might miss or not talk enough about is that
maybe certainly the argument, certainly the argument that the trans women don't have the
right experience to be allowed in does seem to trade on these views about being a universal
woman experience, and therefore does seem to play into these problems around race and
class.
But as I think that some of you have pointed out, the view that the trans women should
not be allowed may not at bottom actually have to do with this view about experience.
And I actually think that sometimes it does.
I think that sometimes it validly does, but I think that very often it's a cover for the
view that the trans women simply aren't really women at all, and for the view that the trans
men are really, in fact, men, or the trans men aren't men at all, but they're really
women.
I think that if that's what's underlying it, then what is fundamentally operating in terms
of the exclusion and inclusion, the very basic form of transphobia, which is connected to
the natural attitude about sex.
Final point that I want to make, and it's a worry that I have, so I like Koyama's vision
of a trans feminism.
In particular, I like the idea of a trans feminism that would be centered within an analysis
of multiple oppressions, and take all of them seriously.
I do worry about a particular problem, and it's this problem, and as I argued, I think
that one of the most important things that comes out in the current trans gender movement
and the Empire Specs Act is the idea that we don't just have the oppression of women,
and again, I'm putting this clearly, but we also have the oppression of trans people.
Actually, I think that there can be an additional dimension as well, the oppression of sex people.
Now, what I'm worrying about is how, so if you take seriously this idea that we're going
to have an intersectional model, an idea that looks at the intersections between gender-based
class, and there's a little bit of a problem that arises, which is this.
If you allow for multiple dimensions of gender, or gender oppression and resistance, how do
you conceptualize the intersections, the intersections of what, gender and gender?
How do you think about them interconnected?
To find true in the problem, I want to criticize what I think is kind of an underlying presupposition
of the transgender paradigm.
I think that the transgender paradigm places trans people problematically with respect
to the binary.
It says either you're in between, you're outside, at least you're problematic with regard to,
something like that.
I've argued earlier, I think, in the course, that that's problematic because it doesn't
respect necessarily a trans person's self-identification.
What if that trans person says, I don't see myself as in between, I don't see myself as,
I see myself as a real woman, I see myself as a real man, I see myself as in the binary.
To position them as sort of outside the binary, or problematically situated with regard to
the binary, is to disregard their self-identity, and is to fall prey, in my books, to a form
of transphobia.
But here's another problem, which is, if trans people are problematically situated with regard
to the binary, then how do you make sense of the intersections between oppression of
women and oppression of trans people?
They never converge, because trans people, to put it crudely, are outside of the binary,
women are inside of the binary, so you never have a place in which there's any confluence.
You never have, your theory can't accommodate ways in which a person is both oppressed as
a woman and oppressed as a trans person, when you vote, does that make sense to you?
So I worry about the adequacy of the beyond the binary model of oppression of existence.
I think that we might need to tell a different story to help round this out, to help make
it possible to really do a kind of trans feminism in which we have the kind of intersections
really seriously theorized.
Do you want me to send a seal?
All right.
So let's, I'm going to stop now, and.
