They say the relationship between cultural genitals and gender attribution is reflexive.
The reflex they've been talking about.
The reality of gender is proved by the genital, which is attributed,
and at the same time, the attributed genital only has meaning
for the socially shared construction of the gender attribution process.
So it's being used as evidence to bring down an interpretation,
and yet it's understood through the interpretation which is being brought down.
I'm not sure if that meaning is for the people doing the interpretation
or the responder to those questions.
Is the responder in a way their idea of what's gender is in the process of doing this,
and answering this, is constructive, is that what you're saying?
Yes, so we're playing a game of 10 questions, right?
You're going to ask me these questions,
and unbeknownst to you, I'm just making shit up.
I'm just testing you, and there is no answer to this question.
Is this person saying male or female?
I'm just like saying, what would have happened if I threw, now I'm going to throw my skirt,
now I'm going to throw what I thought was wrong.
Now I'm going to throw something else in just to sort of hold a mess with the world.
So there's no answer, but the idea of the documentary method
is that individuals are going to take each time I answer that question,
you're going to take that as an answer to the question,
and understand it as sort of pointing to a larger pattern,
as contributing to sort of a larger structure,
and you'll read it in terms of that larger structure.
But it's not, because I'm just making stuff up.
But you're using this documentary method,
and you're taking the thing as document, or as pointing to a larger pattern.
Is that sort of like, what we discussed before,
are sort of like, you know, like innate or common sense,
trying to make sense of anything that's wrong to us,
and trying to make rash minds make sense of it?
That's exactly right, that's a beautiful point, that's exactly right.
This is exactly sort of within that, is that when we get the unfamiliar cases,
we try to rationalize it, we try to confer this interpretation upon it,
in which it makes sense, right?
And that's why Garfinkel, for example, wanted to supposedly press radically
to sort of get that failing so that you could see what was going on underneath.
I still don't think he, I still have a problem, I'm not clear how to articulate,
is that from that point, how he can conclude that there's this ontological fact,
biological fact about sex.
I mean, that's getting off the...
But Garfinkel doesn't know, he's bracketed that.
Yeah, he's bracketed, but then because of the bracket,
he, oh maybe I'm misinterpreting bracket,
that there is a natural attitude about sex.
Okay, so to clarify, so he thinks that these people,
and I didn't introduce this terminology, that was another part,
people he calls normals.
Normals are every day folk who participate in the natural attitude about sex.
They engage in these sort of routine, these what, routine eyes,
liaison, constituting the social reality of sex,
and they believe that sex is in the form of social interaction.
They're normals.
Normals are people who treat theory, the philosophy room,
with like, don't throw your useless theories at me.
I know, you know, male and female, gotta dig its male, not its female.
I mean, that's the attitude, right?
Do not throw a science my way, do not tell me that, you know,
some frogs change their sex, I don't want to hear it.
That's just weird.
You know, intersex people are just freaks of nature
that shouldn't be taken seriously, the normal.
Garfinkel is studying the normal, in a sense.
He himself does not want to be a normal.
I mean, I guess he sees himself as studying normals.
And he sees the normal as the person who postulates this idea
of sex as an injective fact.
Garfinkel isn't sort of like saying that sex is an injective fact.
He's studying normals, and how normals sort of create this fabrication of sex as an injective fact.
Yeah.
Does that help?
So does it.
I want to, this is taking longer.
There's a couple of important points I want to make about Constantine McKenna,
and then I'll stop.
So this idea of gestalt and interpretation is important for them, right?
You know, they lay down some important interpretive principles.
Even if there's no sort of, they don't think that there is a rule or a procedure
for sort of infallibly telling you that this is like the person's sex.
You're always going to have this give, even in the case of genitalia.
But they do think that there is sort of like this, what do they call it?
It doesn't categorize them as schema.
But basically the idea is default to male.
And default to male, and when you default to male, if your interpretation is male,
then you're going to interpret all the features in that as male features.
Or you're going to tend to that idea.
And the idea is that in order for a female feature to actually read as a female feature,
there has to be an absence of male features.
This is what the Endocrine Study shows.
There's a tendency to sort of like assume male unless shown otherwise.
Which is a really important and interesting finding, right?
It points to this idea of, well, it fits in with this idea of,
we do it less male, but using the pronoun he as sort of neutral, but it also defaults to male.
We talk about mankind or so forth.
Make assumptions about whether this kind of person is male or female.
This is, I think, of that kind of thought, that in general when we're engaging in this process,
the assumption is male unless proven otherwise.
And we're going to read all features as confirming of male identity on this interview otherwise.
So here's another key important idea that we have, which is what ultimately determines gender is none of these features.
It's gender attribution.
It's the overall interpretive assessment that you make.
So you interpret someone as other male or female.
And this is, you know, obviously this is a gestalt.
You're reading these features in terms of interpretive framework, right?
You're also making the interpretation based on those features.
But sex, MacArthur talks about sex sort of being achieved through managed activities.
He talks about what Agnes does.
There's far more emphasis in Castor and McKenna on the interpreter.
We need to talk about the importance of display and so forth.
But for them, it's gender attribution, right, that is playing the key role in the sex of the individual.
So that is totally designed about Castor and McKenna that I think they say some things that are completely false.
Their idea is that once the gender attribution is made, it's fixed.
So once someone gets a beat on you and goes, oh yeah, that's a male or that's a female,
it is really hard to shape this.
And because of the natural attitude, the idea is that we think that sex is invariant,
it's not going to change, right?
They think that it's fixed.
You need to do a lot of work to change it.
So if you look on page 177 towards the end,
and they say this earlier, they say gender attribution is so impervious to change.
This is the second paragraph of page 177 towards the middle.
Gender attributions are so impervious to change that the person will be seen as crazy long before she is seen as being the other gender.
For this reason, transsexuals find it most difficult to be seen as their new gender by those people who made their acquaintance in their original gender.
The first impression will not dissipate for a long time.
If, however, the first impression is made, when the transsexual is in his or her new gender,
it will be most difficult to discredit that attribution, regardless of the information given to the attributor.
If transsexuals understood these features of discrediting, they would, one, focus on creative decision,
creating decisive first impressions as male or female,
and two, then stop worrying about being the perfect man or woman, and concentrate on cultivating the naturalness,
the historicity of their maleness in maleness.
What they're interested in saying here,
Garkvinkel suggested that you have to constantly manage to maintain your status as male or female.
Work through constantly how to do it.
That's not true. Once an attribution comes down, it's generally fixed, it's very hard to move,
and what you need to do, if there is any ongoing management work that needs to be done,
is to reserve the sense of naturalness.
I just don't think this is true. It's just not true to my experience.
I have such a personal experience, and it's not true to, I mean, I've seen lots of times where people like, you know,
God be on me as female, and then later on decided that I was really male.
It was very easy for them to make that move.
And it wasn't that they thought that I changed my sex, it wasn't a problem about the invariance of sex,
it was that they realized they'd made a mistake and that I was really, really a male.
You see this all the time, you know, cases in which the trans people are, you know,
in a formal relationship with someone who doesn't know that they're trans,
and then it comes out later that they're trans, and it's like, oh my God, here she tricked me, right?
Then there's suddenly, then the assessment, then the gender attribution does change.
Does change.
What's being challenged here is not the invariance of gender or sex, it's something else that's going on.
They're reassessing what they thought they knew.
But I think that this poses a real challenge to their idea
that once gender attributions are laid down, they're laid down, they're not reassessed.
They are in these conditions.
Susan?
I think that there is actually something right about it.
I think that, and I'll give the case of Jake Kale, who I've met as Jake,
and I know that he's transgender because, you know, he's living on it.
And I can see him as who he is, and I can understand that he's transgender,
but I can't, and I can hear his history, and understand that that's his history, right, that he was a little girl.
But it doesn't compute as anything more than a story.
Like, if I had met Jake before, maybe that'd be different, but it just isn't.
So I can go backward, like reassess to, okay, so he's trans, but I can't make that move further back.
But I think if I had met him before, it would be easier.
So I think there is something there about your first impression, and then just whatever, you know.
If your first impression is, you know, crazy, then that's going to be the first impression.
If it's just regular, then that's going to be harder to shake.
Yeah, I agree with something right about it, but I don't think that the way the formula is correct.
I'm not sure it's about first impression, by the way.
I think it could also have to do with depth of intimacy of the relationship.
Because I have this where, like, you know, I meet someone, and they read me as, like, you know, non-chance female,
and then, you know, if I get carried away philosophically and don't mind my piece in cues,
then they're going to go, like, oh, that's, you know, later on, or something, you know.
So it's not a first impression.
But often, gender attributions are really made firm when a greater intimacy is secured,
or at least a greater familiarity with the person on a kind of interpersonal thing where it gets fixed.
Yeah, but the point that I'm crossing it with, I really do think that the formula is not quite right.
I don't, I do think that these things can be overturned far more frequently than they think they can,
and I think it may show some problems with how they're trying to figure things out.
I don't think that it just wouldn't be that easy to make a claim like that.
Because wouldn't it depend also how deeply you were one of the normals?
And so if you're really ingrained in that, it's going to be a different situation from if you,
oh, yeah, these things change, you know, you know, biology is messy, you know.
And even when the normal is going to, like, you know, like, you know, Garford could talk to these kids with Agnes,
you know, a lot depends on how the person's understood morally.
Like, because when you get these cases of, like, you know, a genital reconstruction surgery,
a normal could go and say, yes, this person was really a so-and-so,
they're going to try to get him out of the natural attitude, or they could not.
Or they're right, you don't know. So, yeah.
So even in the case of the natural attitude, this is going to come up.
It'd be interesting to look at the, they might be girls' movie,
the actual interviews for the suspects that raped and murdered the Hillary Spank's character,
to see what pronouns they're using and how they're referencing.
Filming, are you talking about boys don't cry?
Boys don't cry, that's it.
Sorry, I mean girls, sorry.
Boys don't cry.
I just don't understand what film you're talking about.
Do you use that as a film? I don't know.
Yeah, I do.
Okay.
Everybody get together.
Can you film?
To see what actually, because I, because see what actually they're referring,
what pronouns they're using and such, now they're referring.
Because when she was exposed, or he was exposed as a she,
they had a violent reaction and, assumably, it was,
if their initial impression, which was of a certain depth, was broken,
you'd be able to see that and how they talked, right?
How they respond, talked about it, about the incident when they were being interrogated.
So who'd be interesting to see?
It's actually an interesting case.
This is one of the reasons I would think that this is actually quite complicated,
and I agree that there is a point here,
which is, in the case of,
when she was a young teenage trans girl who was killed in 2002,
she was apparently having sexual relations with some guys,
who then apparently discovered that she was trans,
and then there was this violence and she was killed.
So all the rhetoric was, you know, we thought that she was a woman or a girl,
and it turned out that she was really a so-and-so.
But it's interesting that even, so Jose Merrill,
when he was interviewed, one of the killers,
when he was interviewed, while he represented Gwen as really male,
he also kept using the pronoun she.
I found that really interesting.
This goes to your point.
But I suspect that the reason for that had to do with the intimacy that sort of cemented that.
It made it hard to shape that,
that in some way he had experienced her intimately as female.
And because of that, it had become ingrained and he couldn't move away from it.
And it was a kind of cognitive dissonance, you know.
Alright, let's think about it when described as penises.
But who don't see them as penises?
They might see them as like, you know, a chatty clit,
or something else by some sort of other name.
So, are they wrong?
I don't think it's a matter of right or wrong.
It's just that that's the cultures interpreted differently.
The interpretation is different.
And the way of categorizing is also different.
Because in that environment, you're going to have females with tissue
that some people would describe as a penis.
And you're going to have males with what some people might describe as vaginas.
They might describe as, you know, one of my fuck holes.
Notice that the word penis, right, which we think is maybe innocuous,
seems to, I mean, I don't know if this is connected to it's meaning or not,
but it does seem to be a background story at least that is connected to it.
So, like, we think that penises are supposed to do something.
Maybe imagine a particular kind of sex that they're supposed to play for.
Imagine there are four sex at all.
We imagine that they're private and should be, I mean,
and all of those things seem to be completely open to social-cultural interpretation.
We sort of separate in the basis of male and female in terms of restrooms, right?
I mean, that seems to me such a fact.
A material fact, right?
It's how we're interpreting the, what, you've got to hide it,
but now it's going to matter where you go.
So, I guess what I'm going with this is that you could grant the existence of fleshy stuff.
You can say, but look, interpretations are highly variable,
and it's not clear that you're going to, just by acknowledging the existence of fleshy stuff,
you're going to get any kind of male and female out of it.
So, I would argue.
But Jessica, do you want to say something?
I understand.
Sorry.
No, don't worry about it.
Gender presentation, I understand, to be a tire, posture, how you groom yourself,
how you move around, how you take up space, take up a lot of space,
you sit with your legs wide apart, folded.
Do you like move around a lot?
How do you do your voice, right?
Is your voice monotone?
Do you flip it around?
All that kind of stuff, right?
It could be right as gender presentation.
That's not what they mean.
That's not what they're talking about.
And that might be what you have in mind.
I don't know.
What they mean by gender attribution is an interpretation.
It's like, I look at you, I size you up, I make an interpretation.
Of course, it's not nearly that consciousness, Thomas.
Look at you.
I think it's obvious what you are.
Oh, yeah.
You're obviously male.
Oh, yeah, you're obviously female, right?
And what we're doing, I think, is we're making an interpretation.
And for them, gender attribution, I think, is mostly genital attribution.
So based on the evidence, I think, an interpretation is the gender attribution
by which you're sort of like the gender is instituted.
But when I'm doing it, I'm also, I don't see that you have a penis or vagina,
but because I've made the assessment that you're male or female,
I'm going to make assumptions about what's between your legs.
What they're saying is, if anything is primary,
it's not some biological sign, but what we call gender attribution.
What they mean is, it's not genitals that determine sex, it's gender attribution.
It's process of social attribution by which we interpret individuals
and attribute these things to them.
I actually think that kind of right here, the way they're denigrating the genitalia
may read as a little bit contrary to what they say in their earlier piece.
It kind of reads that way, even being a little bit flip here.
Because they do make a big deal out of genitals in their earlier work.
They're so central.
The point they're trying to make here is that they're not central
in the sense that they're what determines gender.
They're saying gender attribution is what determines gender.
What makes you male is not having a penis, what makes you male is the social process
by which you're interpreted male.
For gender attribution, so what matters is mostly what other people think of the individual.
I suppose that you also make a gender attribution of yourself.
We'll talk about that, but you know, am I male or female?
Some people might have to go through that.
What do you think?
Are you finished beating up on these people?
Yes.
I used to tell you too.
My worry is, what we were talking about last week about stereotyping
and who doesn't really help her, her, you know, kind of getting down to it
and getting out of all the theoretical mind experience, things like that.
They're pushing for an asexual term or something beyond gender.
I have no worry about that in general.
If you're beyond gender, who isn't helping?
Is it helping the person that feels like they're not socially in tune with the male or the female gender?
If so, if we're put into a beyond gender category, let's say you're a 13-year-old assigned male or something like that.
When can you maybe feel like you have a huge, even worse of an identity crisis
and make you feel like you're an asexual being completely if you don't really think of yourself as male or female?
That just has kind of an odd side effect, maybe.
Well, if gender asexual is so deeply associated with personhood,
if you take that away, then you'd be taken away with personhood and you'd suck.
Yeah, that seems really just...
Maybe this is a bad idea.
If we're gender, we all get to be hits.
Yeah, and that seems like a bad idea to me, and that seems to be what they're pushing.
But I think that they would want to say, let's prize a part personhood from gender,
so we can still be persons but not have gender.
How to prize? Is that a certain way?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard with our grammar, the English grammar.
With all grammar, the English grammar is hard.
You know, I have to say, and I think this might be part of the point you're pressing,
and it was one of the points that we're pressing.
I'm kind of sympathetic to it.
It says, why are they so into like the third definition of trans?
What's all the big fuss about this?
I only have one answer.
This was written, what, probably in the late 90s, I think?
I have a question here.
Probably in the late 2000s.
Right around the turn of the millennium.
Right on this time, we have transgender, you know, from the mid 90s to the 2000s.
Right on the gender, it's like ramped up.
And everyone's just like, in the gender stuff, hot to trot over like the trans stuff.
And it's all about beyond the binaries.
That's all about, you see this with stones already, like, you know, transcending
or like, you know, problematizing the binary, you know, going beyond that.
And I think that this is part of that moment of a kind of like celebratory,
let's get beyond the binary, let's get this transcend gender,
let's be third gender, let's be something else, let's be, you know,
get wild and crazy, it's, you know, like that.
This is not an answer.
It's not a justification for what they're doing.
It's more of a like historical point.
I think this is part of the period, actually, where this was like really exciting to people.
It's just exciting to some people.
I do have worries with it.
I mean, it's utopian in some sense.
And that might be good as far as it goes, but I don't know how practically useful that is,
any kind of roadmap.
And I know that there are concretely some individuals who don't identify as male or female,
who identify as both, identify as genderqueer.
And that's real.
There ought to be a place for that to be respected.
But it seems to me that there are also individuals, including trans individuals,
who right now feel that it's really important when it identifies male or female.
Personally, this is just a personal observation, you know.
When I've bought so hard in my life to achieve my womanhood,
to have people take away gender,
I forget it.
What do you mean?
Right.
You know?
I just got here and you want to go away?
Sure.
Forget it.
I get my hair done.
So there's a sense in which, you know, I think that it's a bit utopian
and when we reflect on the current situation,
I think that there are some trans people for whom the gender binary remains important.
And, you know, as a point of,
I don't want to go back to counting about this in the publication,
but there is a way in which at the time that this was really announced,
there was, in some circles, usually on university campuses or whatever,
people became very cool to be like genderqueer,
gender trans grassy ways that were always safe.
Because a person was not at risk and so forth,
and to celebrate gender fluidity and so forth.
And that was all well and good, but
it just didn't seem to me to touch on a lot of the deep realities,
a lot of the real social realities that some folk were dealing with.
You know, in terms of violence on the street,
in terms of, you know, transphobic violence, in terms of life.
In terms of being more of a real social setting, that's more...
