Did you guys enjoy the, of course not, did you guys enjoy the Yale Articles?
Which of them?
These came out in the mid to late 90s.
And these are the first, they're a little bit different from some of the other trans stuff that was coming out at the time.
These are, I think they're the first real examples of an analytic philosopher.
I mean, Jay plays Trink's, you know, with a philosopher, thinking through some of the trans stuff when it's, when it's being theorized.
So, a little bit of a different methodology and I think some of the stuff.
Alright.
Okay.
Hale's responding to a Vedic statement about lesbians not being women.
I completely lost my drink a lot.
Oh, he thinks that her claim is based on two assumptions.
One being that women, that the concept women relies on, that people that are within that concept are conforming to cultural standards.
And he never wanted that he says that, I'm completely losing my drink, I thought, I'm sorry.
The other assumption is that the concept women is a necessary relation to men, basically.
But he says that, you know, since she doesn't really specify what she means by a concept woman, she just kind of assumes that you know what she means.
That he's assuming that the binary relationship in the concept woman that she's talking about is marriage.
But he says that marriage is not the only time the binary relationship that women have to mend.
And he mentions, I think it's on page, for those of you who have the book, it's on page 285, Prince of Bonham.
He uses an example of an ad, a personal ad from a lesbian magazine.
And what he says is that basically this example demonstrates how the Vedic ignores the way that we use gender,
not just in a theoretical or philosophical context, but how we use it to communicate desires and tendencies every day.
So basically she ignores how much it's used regularly.
And then a few pages later he comes up with a quote unquote reconstruction of the concept woman.
Where the first five or six or so are basically six characteristics such as the actor's double king is, presence of arrests and whatnot.
The next one states that a woman, to be considered a woman, she has to identify herself as a woman.
And then the last of them he calls secondary sex characteristics such as legal proof that you can be a woman.
You have a consistent history, you have memories and whatnot.
And that's basically it. But let's see, I thought of maybe a few issues with that.
I was thinking initially, so after he looked at his reconstruction and he says that the first five or six or so of the characteristics are the ones that have a lot of social weight on them,
such as like I said, absence of a penis, presence of breasts and whatnot.
And I was thinking, well, let's see, there are so many different examples of the ways that those conditions can be filled.
And since those are the stronger ones, if those conditions are met, does that make that person more womanly?
Or is it more like an all or nothing kind of thing?
Or he doesn't really give any kind of homesickness.
What do we do now?
We have this reconstruction as he calls it, and he doesn't really specify what we're supposed to do with it.
So we have all these different cases of where a woman can meet, let's say one through six, but they can't satisfy some of the other ones.
Is that how are we supposed to take them?
Is your question, what is the political upshot of this analysis?
Basically, yeah.
And what do we do with this analysis?
Yeah, what do we do?
So we have this information, but what does that say about that, are we supposed to imply that there's different degrees of womanhood?
One of the things he says is, is your question, what is applied to your upshot of this analysis?
Basically, yeah.
And what do we do with it now?
Yeah, what do we do?
So we have this information, but what does that say about that, are we supposed to imply that there's different degrees of womanhood?
And one of the things he says, sort of like, if you think about it as your reply to, to Wittig, is while she's saying that lesbians aren't women,
and Hale is saying, well, some are, some aren't, and for some there's no fact that the matter seems to be position on it.
So the no fact of the matter idea I think is kind of interesting, right?
So he's suggesting that the category of women is, you get admitted these hard cases, but we can't tell one way or another.
There isn't a fact of the matter whether or not a person is a woman or not.
Which goes against the natural attitude, which goes against the natural attitude.
So in some ways, he sort of, his analysis kind of intervenes in the natural attitude.
I mean, I think that's one of the things he's trying to do.
But I mean, is your, is your question like, you know, what, if we, I mean, I'm not even sure if we wanted to step into his analysis,
but if we do want to step into his analysis, what are the political consequences of it?
What do you guys think? I mean, I think, one thing I might say is that, well, maybe we'll be a little less rigid in terms of like,
you know, how seriously we take the category of women, we'll recognize that in some cases it's not clear whether or not someone is open or not,
because we don't know, right? So that, that sort of pleads for perhaps more sophistication or less rigidity in the treatment of the category.
You know, asking that that's one of the, one of the upshots.
But do you mind if I just sort of throw, you have other questions too, right?
I have another question I'd like to present.
I think what I'm trying to get more at is if we have, we're going to have different cases of where different conditions will be met over other ones,
say they'll be, some women might meet the weaker ones versus the stronger and vice versa.
So we have these different cases of different conditions that can be met in different combinations.
So depending on how those conditions are met, say, are we supposed to take them out in numerical values,
so you meet a majority of them, so you're more of a woman than this other person?
Or, I mean, is, am I misinterpreting something?
I'm just not sure after we have this.
I mean, you're asking, but what is, what is the recipe?
Something like that.
I mean, I know you can't evaluate all the different cases that could be possible.
But if we have different possibilities of meeting the stronger conditions versus the weaker ones,
what does that say about the woman?
I think I'm not sure, I think you're on to something.
And I say that because it feels related to the point that I take, sorry.
I'm not sure that it's the same issue, but maybe we'll press this point a little bit later.
Yeah, I mean, maybe you should be more precise because maybe I'm reading something into it that is not what you're meaning.
But so there's questions of some characteristics that he lists that he says are weighted more heavily than other ones.
So all of these things, apparently, so this is, he's giving a bit constituent family resemblance account for the category of woman, right?
Do you all know what that means? Family resemblance?
I mean, just think of families.
You know, you've got your dad's chin and you've got your grandma's ears or whatever, right?
So there's some commonalities, but there's no one commonality or no one set of commonalities that the entire family shares
or overlapping similarities that some have in common and some don't, right?
So there's never going to be a recipe for deciding, right, these are the exact features that specify the necessary sufficient conditions for membership
within the category.
And so Hale's idea is that this is what's going on with the category of woman, presumably with the category of men too,
that these are family resemblance concepts and we have these 13 different characteristics that he enumerates
and then some of them are weighted more heavily than others.
So clearly, he lists the first one, absence of a penis, following DeKalster and McKenna's study, right?
Well, this is genitalia as being one of them more heavily weighted,
which is presumably much more heavily weighted than seven having an occupation considered to be acceptable for a woman
or leisure pursuits, right?
So probably, you know, absence of a penis or having a vagina counts more than selling or something like that,
in terms of the category of membership.
So this is what was with your concern and what should we do with this discrepancy?
Or how do we decide how much value these different features have or what happened?
Since these, these clinicians have different weights on them and there's different cases that'll satisfy some more than others
or some less than others, what does that say about the quality of womanhood?
What does that mean in general? What womanhood in these cases here?
Like, are you worried about, like, ranking?
Something like that, yeah. I mean, is, is, is there, like, an implied percentage in there?
Are we, I don't know if I'm maybe agreeing to it too much?
I mean, I think your audience, I mean, he does seem to think that some people are going to be pushed to the edges, right?
And some people are sort of pushed to the periphery of the category
and some people fit more within the, the middle of the categories or the centrally
and some people, he thinks, even fall out of the category or risk of falling out of the category.
So that would seem to, I mean, I doubt very much that he would say that we can have a nice need in orderly ranking
but it does, he would suggest that roughly some people, because, right, because it's going to, it's going to be hard to
rank if we don't have necessary and sufficient conditions if these categories are weighted differently
and there may be weighted different things, different contacts, it's going to be hard to come up with a firm ranking
but he does seem, like, he wants to go in for the idea that some people are going to be sumptually located
in the category where some people are going to be more marginally located
and some people might even fall outside of the category altogether.
Some people might not be clear if they're in the category or not, there may be no fact that they might not be in the category
so he does seem to, and you're worried about this.
I am because I'm not sure if the ranking of the reasoning is implied.
Is that something that we're supposed to, to see, because that's what I saw.
After I read it, I said, well, so we have those possibly different cases
but then what happens to those women say, we need, like I said, the stronger ones but they don't meet the weaker ones.
Are they women because they've met a strong position?
Or is it all or nothing? Or is it contingent based on which ones you need?
I'm not sure I'm following you.
It seems like what Hale's doing with the 13 characteristics is primarily descriptive.
This is the common characteristics in our culture that define a woman
which he also then goes on to say none are necessary or sufficient.
So I think maybe the question is, this is my question anyway,
since he's advancing this primarily descriptive on the reading, is there anything he would advance as prescriptive?
Like this is what we should use to define a woman because it seems, since none are necessary and sufficient,
potentially maybe a combination are necessary and sufficient, or a completely alternate view.
You know what I'm saying? I don't know if he necessarily does it in this article or elsewhere,
or even somewhere else in trans scholarship, but is there a prescriptive view of,
since you know this is our culture's perception and it seems to fall short, here is what it should be.
I'm trying to think if he says it here in this article.
I think he does it sometimes, but I mean he's interested in outlining,
I think you're thinking about maybe political strategies, what we should do with it,
because I mean, let's sort of place this in context where we're responding to a view
that sees the category woman as sort of an inherently oppressive category.
I mean, so counting as sort of like more of a woman or more simply the category woman,
it's not necessarily going to be a grand thing to what any kind of scale.
I mean, there's one thing. In fact, I mean, Hale thinks that his category is essentially normative,
right, it's value-laden, and he thinks that it's internally incoherent, actually.
Did you guys catch that?
He said the flat-out.
He said the flat-out.
So we need to make sure that this is a, so he's describing this.
I mean, he's not just describing categories that go into those categories.
I think he's also sort of explaining in part how it's an oppressive category,
a category that sort of is internally incoherent for a person.
When situated, you're punished for not conforming to the category,
and you're punished for conforming to the category.
You're double-blinded in this way.
There's a political analysis also going on.
And so, you know, through, and I'm not sure I know whether he's under here,
but he endorses different kinds of possible strategies for resisting this, right?
He doesn't think that there's one necessary strategy that we should endorse.
Heal endorses a multiple strategies approach with regard to these categories, right?
So sometimes it could be expanding the category, sometimes it could be resisting the category,
sometimes it could be altering the category, you know,
and a lot is going to depend on the situation.
I was going to also say that kind of also felt like maybe he wasn't doing it,
but I kind of got this from the reading that Heal was also kind of looking at the privilege that Widdig had,
that she or Widdig herself was able to just discard gender just like nothing.
But I think that that kind of like has a point of privilege because to a person like Heal
or to like a transgender person, like sometimes gender matters
because they're like material consequences to not conforming or being hard,
or having like, I guess like to me like from the 13, like the, I guess like the first five of like,
the sexual kind of like predetermined biological characteristics
that like there are material like punishments for you for not conforming.
So I kind of felt like to a certain degree like Widdig has the privilege of just being like,
okay, I don't want to be a woman or like, or lesbians aren't women,
but that there's also like a sense of power from that statement.
I don't know. I mean, I think that I mean certainly Widdig thinks that like it's not like there's no oppression,
you know, if you're allowed to be a, but I mean the idea is that it's, it's going to be different.
Right? If I must add, womanhood is sort of an oppressive,
is an inherently oppressive category.
I guess I understand Heal in this situation is just thinking that her view is a really simple.
And just sort of, you know, I mean, I actually, I don't, I guess I would disagree with your,
I think that he sort of looks at it and goes that she just sort of gets it descriptively wrong
and that, you know, we analyze the category, the category is richer, more complicated than they might have thought,
that it doesn't just, for example, involve a particular, they have a sexual role.
It involves a different kind of thought.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I thought that what he initially starts off by saying is that
any definition that can allow for the conclusion, the argument,
where is the argument beneficial for sort of trying to attack the gender roles,
but any argument that is being able to run analytically to lesbians and not women
has an inherent flaw on it somewhere, you know, with how it's describing women.
And then he goes back and says, look, this is how she set up.
But I thought it was interesting.
One of the things, and Susan actually might have some things to say about this,
I mean, I don't think that Heal is actually saying, I mean, you might say,
and you mentioned someone whose response is this, you know,
what do you mean lesbians are women?
I would have thought that was the one thing lesbian had to be.
It was a moment.
It's like your precondition of being a lesbian.
His point is not that.
His point is not, like, that, therefore, that it is wrong, because obviously this is the case.
I mean, he comes up with a more sophisticated position,
which is basically, as far as I understand it, some lesbians are women,
some are not women, and for some there's no fact of the matter.
So he doesn't accept sort of the stock of what does it say, lesbians are women,
clearly that's the one thing you have to be.
Well, I was just saying that any definition that allows for that,
that all lesbians are not women, there's got to be something.
He said it was politically beneficial, right, that it's useful as a political strategy.
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the ideas you might have,
why might be, well, sort of translate this head,
unimpressive stereotype, right?
I mean, so there's a way in which, you know, and he talks about this argument from reality,
where, you know, well, are lesbians really women?
Are they real women?
You know, because isn't a real woman someone who wants to be with a man?
Right?
I mean, there's that kind of folksy attitude that you might expect a normal to hold,
for example, normal to hold.
And so the view that lesbians are women at all kind of turns out on the head, right,
by saying, yeah, well, women is an impressive category
that is inherently defined with respect to heterosexuality,
and insofar as lesbians are not within that role of heterosexuality,
they fail to actually conform to the role of women,
and in that sense are not women.
I mean, I think that that was kind of like, you know, the insight that Hale wants to do justice to,
but in a way that doesn't, that sort of like says that,
you know, I think that the gender category of women is more complicated than all that,
and we can't, we'll reduce it, for example, to a heterosexual, you know, connectedness to a man.
Does that make sense?
I think that also plays into the next point I was trying to bring up,
which was number six seems to be the pivotal one that I got from this 13,
having a gender identity as a woman.
Because we discussed this, the first ones, the first set are biological,
and everything else after that is basically passing, you know, maintaining the appropriate women,
but the only one he really doesn't bother with,
that he doesn't sort of, the one that sort of hinges everything on it,
that's sort of like the deal breaker is number six.
Why is that a deal breaker?
Because if you don't have a gender identity as a woman,
that's the first five which would seem to force you to view that you'd be a woman, right?
Does that make any sense?
According to the first five, if you had all the first five, you'd be a woman, right?
Mm-hmm.
Biologically, right?
Right.
Even if you didn't do any seven through twelve,
if you were totally, you didn't do any of the normal stuff, right?
I think it's all hinges on whether or not that person identifies as a woman.
Does that make any sense?
Does it, though?
Okay.
I mean, I mean...
That's what I got from him.
That was the key linchpin.
Without that, everything else falls apart.
If the person didn't identify as a woman, it doesn't matter to me, is what I got.
I don't know, but what, I mean, I actually don't see that in here.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, that's just one feature among many.
Okay.
And it may not.
I mean, like, suppose, for example, that a person shows up.
I think that it hails you, right?
If someone shows up and they go, I'm a woman, okay?
This person, though, has every single other feature that would say that they were, say,
not a woman, right?
So this person, right, this person has a penis, this person has no breasts.
This person does not have uterus ovaries, fallopian tubes, right?
But let's say the conchari has testes.
This person has imbalance, right?
I have a lot more androgens than astrogens.
This person was tested and was found to be XY.
This person drives a truck.
This person, right, likes playing rugby and so on.
We go through all this stuff, right?
And meets all these conditions, right?
But this person claims, right, that they are a woman.
I think that it hails view in the dominant categories,
consumption of womanhood, this person is not a woman.
We're about to flip side of that.
If everything figured out to be a woman, except for number six,
they did everything that was, you know, the gender appropriate stuff, right?
But identified themselves as a woman.
I think that Hel would say, it looks like the consequence of the view is that they are a woman.
Okay.
Because he doesn't assign sort of a privileged role to self-identity, right?
That's actually a criticism that's a worry that I have with Hail's thing.
I would actually want to pass more on the importance of self-identity
and how it fits into the arena politically.
But I think that in this analysis, that is just one factor among many, right?
And if all the other things outweigh you, well then you could be SOL, yeah.
It's on the point that you're pressing that maybe what he's saying is, you know,
sort of regardless of what your sort of internal sense of your gender identity is,
it's almost irrelevant in just like the concept of woman is sort of assigned to somebody.
It could be assigned to whether you want it or not, right?
And you can be forced to live that way whether you want it to or not,
whether you're serious about the way or not.
And people are going to treat you that way.
And the state is going to treat you that way.
And you're going to be recognized that way.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And remember that this is an analysis of talks about a dominant culture as a conception of woman, right?
Defines you vaguely.
And this is interesting.
I think that this is going to be, you know, bear this in mind then when we turn to the second article
and we look at Levitite Boys and their daddies and he starts talking about, you know, sexual subcultures
and how words are used differently and how bodies are re-established in different ways, right?
That's something else.
