Now, we raise the question, well, which is right?
And, of course, that's the wrong question.
We have different ways of, different kinds of culture, different kinds of interpretation,
and it's not a question of which way is right or which way is wrong.
We have questions about which culture is stronger and which culture is at risk from other interpretations.
Does that make sense to you?
These are some of the most important passages, I think, in this piece.
I want to make sure that we need time for the page 234, the second paragraph.
One could claim, of course, that daddy is a woman who is also a Levedike daddy,
and that being a Levedike daddy is one way to be a woman.
However, this culturally imperialist claim is the point,
to insist that Levedike boys and daddies are women all the time in all situations and for all purposes,
is to insist on ignoring the cultural situatedness or more accurately,
the multiple cultural situatednesses of Levedike gender informativities.
Further, it is to insist on ignoring this in favor of upholding a patently depressive hegemonic sex gender sexuality system
that imposes the overarching category of women and men at the expense of alighting the specificities
of how sex gender works in queer cultural discourses and practices.
The decision of which of these views to accept as a political decision is the decision of whether or not
that dominant culture sex gender discourse will be given discursive primacy over Levedike sex gender discourse.
If I had to take away any paragraph that I thought was the most important to me, that would be that paragraph.
Okay, it's still, I don't know, because I thought about Levedike as something private,
that something bad, and you know, it's not, I mean, if I was like a porn actor, right,
I don't know that I would bring that to the table.
We're talking about sub-cultures.
Maybe that is a porn, watching, and sub-culture.
I don't know, it just seemed like, I still can't see the application of that.
Is it the SM that's bothering you specifically?
Yeah, I read it at multiple levels. One is to say, you know, for example,
when you transform different body parts with these very, seems like very raunchy words, right?
Fackle, asshole, you know, this kind of thing.
I'm like, does that run counter to what, I mean, how does a woman feel about that?
How does a woman feel about that?
Well, if you're supposing the person identifies as a woman in that context.
But I mean, even if the person did identify as a woman, I mean,
the woman may not identify as a lady.
I mean, this wouldn't be, like, I'm trying to be, like, open, right?
Reading this doesn't do anything for me.
It actually makes me think that this is, what is this discipline?
I mean, is it just this, it's almost like, this is like South porn, sort of,
and you sort of, I don't know, it's just counter impulsive in a way.
Well, I appreciate your honesty on that point.
And I think that that's one of the great things about this, this is actually my favorite Hale article.
Because it does two things.
I mean, I really think that it deploys a right kind of model that actually helped us know he's been here.
But I think that actually to be able to talk about subcultural life,
that is important to some people, and often pushed away and not talked about, right?
To think about that, to think about what goes on in those cultures,
to theorize that in a way that is politically savvy.
I think that it's important.
I mean, let me just sort of, like, back it up a little bit.
I mean, so in this seminar, we're talking about gender,
and we're talking about sex, and we're talking about sexuality.
So we're talking about the natural attitude.
So we're talking about penises and vaginas, right?
We're talking about the different kinds of sex.
We're talking about homosexuality. We're talking about heterosexuality.
We're talking about alternative sexual practices.
All of these things are going to matter.
And it's true that it's not for the faint of heart.
You know, some people might get squeamish around particular issues.
And that may have to do with, you know, how these things are coded in our own relationship to those issues.
I don't think that that means that it's not worth talking about.
You know, I think, maybe I didn't express myself well.
I mean, it seems to me like for all of what, so you're saying, like, feminist theory.
For all of what feminist theory tries to achieve with, like, respect for women and this kind of thing,
it just seems like it was kind of thrown, because it's like, here's this environment where you perpetuate these stereotypes.
You talk about, you know, like, women in these kinds of ways.
What stereotypes are being perpetuated here?
I don't think that these are, I have to interrupt and say I don't see any kind of typical stereotypes of all being perpetuated here.
Like, daddies or beaters?
But I think that, I was like, I think that, like, we're the, like, here for the leather community.
Like, for this example, like, I think I go back to this concept of, like, having a consensual gender.
So, like, this is a very liminal space where these acts are able to be what they are.
And it's because these people are consenting to do what they need to do with their bodies and somebody else is also respecting them.
And so, like, you create, like, a consensual gender or a consensual play there.
So, I don't think, I don't know, like, that's what I kind of got from it.
It's just, like, it's, like, a liminal space, but, like, what you might not see there is that, like, you're kind of, like, putting your blinders on also.
Because it's, like, you're kind of equating, like, their play as perversion maybe, like, in a negative sense.
But it could be, like, both, like, a good perversity, I don't know.
I want to roll this back to a practical worry, which is we have another paper to go.
And I want to make sure everyone has a chance to talk.
So, what I want to do is try to, I think we're going to have to continue some of this conversation next time.
But I want to start on the last paper.
Because I want, I want to come away with a point that's important that I want us to come away with from this article.
And I think that it can be done independently of BDSM.
And I say that knowing full well that issues around BDSM are politically complicated.
I actually don't think that they're always so straightforward.
And I think that that can be a whole issue in itself that we would need to talk about.
And maybe what's throwing you off.
What I do think is important is the idea that bodies can be subject to multiple meanings, multiple interpretations.
And that this can be split in terms of a dominant culture and a subculture.
And this is not a question of a right or a wrong, but it's a question of power.
And we'll come back to that later.
Alright, so with that in mind, let us move on to our last talk.
Give up?
Janice Raymond declares that to answer the final solution of women perpetrated in this transsexual empire.
For a long time, the only people writing about transsexual community were non-trans people.
By starting off with these quotes, I believe Hale wishes to establish them negatively,
outside of child perpetrated trans people.
After attending a society for men in philosophy meeting, Hale, having just started his trans-sensitivity process,
asked his colleagues if they thought he should continue to teach philosophy of feminism.
And asking this, he explains three different kinds of narrations he experienced as a transsexual man.
From those who answer this question.
In the first type of information, he was still referred to as a woman.
In the second, a precedent-deserted context of transsexuals were limited to.
In the third, he was asked if a man could be a feminist at all.
He explains his third one, ignores the fact he is a trans man,
and thus erases a critical part of the subject's situation.
This third type of information experienced by Hale is a result of trying to fit everyone into a stripped gender binary.
It is a binary assumption that one who is not a woman was therefore by default the man.
However, asked him, can men be feminist, ignore the fact that Hale was actually born by a large family,
and spent a great part of his life living as a woman.
This being the case, it is obvious that a woman hailed experience the impression that goes with being a woman.
Something that non-trans men have never had to deal with.
That Hale is transsexual is an important part of what defines his subject's position and his relationship to feminism.
Another difference between FTMs and non-trans men is how each self identifies.
Hale explains there may be non-trans men out there that don't identify as men,
but being transsexual gives one a different range of possibilities for self-identification.
Such as Kate Kornson, who self-identifies as being a man or woman,
some FTMs dismissively position themselves as neither or both, or all of both, and neither or either.
Along with these different possibilities also comes being excluded from some groups.
For example, Hale admits to feeling uncomfortable with the already given gender categories
in states that are trans people away of the day when there will be more gender to choose from.
And this is a question I had with these parts.
So thank you for asking myself as I read this article and some of the others we have written for classes.
Why is it so important that people be placed in one of these two categories?
That's actually my question. Why is this so important?
First of all, why is it so vital to know what gender or person is, of what uses this information to us once we find out?
And part of my answer for that is, as a woman, for safety purposes,
I think I would like to know if that person approached me in the middle of the dark street as a matter of woman,
for the obvious reason that someone biologically male could potentially do the harm that someone biologically female cannot.
I would like to discuss in class earlier for identification purposes in our official documents and through driver's license or passport,
in my opinion, no person's gender.
Other than these reasons, I can have any reason for knowing a stranger's gender.
We could talk about that, or I could keep reading whichever if anybody has anything to say about.
What do you want to do? Do you want to stop and talk the butter? Do you want to go on?
Honestly, I'd rather be a little quick.
Can you slow down just a teeny bit?
Yeah, sure. Thank you.
My second question relating to this is why I tried to squeeze people into one of these two gender categories.
And it's obvious, I think it's obvious, there are more than just two categories.
If anything was too groups to be used loosely, no trans or non-trans women embody strictly only female qualities,
not physically or otherwise.
The same is true with non-trans and trans men and male-ness.
Everybody about the qualities and characteristics from both already given gender.
Then we have the hard flesh, blood, memory, narrative, and consciousness.
In this section, Hale discusses the difficulties trans people go through to get access to medical technologies they need.
He references Sanki Stone and her work on exposing and criticizing how transsexualism is thought to be a disease
and the capitalization of trans people.
Hale discusses a globalized situation in which trans people are cornered into either a trans person
at least when they're called sick and gets the medical treatment they want,
or they stand around, refuse to tell the story that doctors want to hear,
and are refused the medical technology they need.
This double-fine situation is one of the questions.
At this point in the article, I started wondering whether non-trans people have to go through the same nonsense
that trans people go through when trying to get, say, breast augmentation surgeries or rhinoplasty surgeries.
In the beginning of this article, mutilating gender, Dean's fate gives a real depiction of what it would be like
if everybody that wanted some sort of reconstructive surgery had to go through and were trans people have to go through.
A woman seemingly almost painfully embarrassed in front of the doctor explained
she has always been a small nose woman trapped in a large nose body.
He diagnoses her with rhino and genetic disorder and tells her she needs to live as a small nose woman for three years
and gets to live from psychiatry for her surgery, quote, just to be sure.
The twist for non-trans people highly provides also depicts how the medical establishment tries to control
and force trans people into getting into either of the two already given gender.
Ed discusses two types of silencing.
The first takes the shape of non-trans people writing and discussing trans people without any real authority.
Medical doctors psychiatrists discuss trans people at length and mostly negatively.
They make a team as if what they have to say as professionals on trans issues is enough
and there is no need to hear from actual trans people.
Another form of silencing is reducing trans experiences to non-trans trans.
Part of the trans person's life is embraced by the fact that they are trans is ignored.
This is what Hale was referring to when he described the third type of erasure.
Hale tells a story in which is that it was recounting an event that took place when Hale was a child.
His death is not known whether to call him a little girl or a little boy.
There are no available grammatical structures with which he could compose one sentence that referred to him both as a girl child
and as an adult male.
This is a problem because if there is no way of speaking about a trans person while taking their whole trans experience into consideration
then it is as if they do not exist or as part of them never was.
Hale exposes the problem of language.
Extension into language therefore into social ontology requires gendered civility both over time
and at any given time that someone was left.
Last section is displaced persons.
In this part of the article Hale discusses who being a dislocated person means
and what space a dislocated person actually occupies.
A dislocated person does not essentially have it a gender category.
They flit about the margins of several categories.
Flitting is the type of movement proper to ghosts.
Preachers object from full social existence when instead have only partial limited social existence.
Trans people do not neatly fit into already given gender categories without denying some critical aspect of their lives.
The article with some concerns or fortunes in the relationship between FTMs and feminism
basically regrets that FTMs subject position is not the same as non-transmen subject position.
FTMs live part of their lives as women thus might have been involved in feminist politics
in a way that non-transmen never were or never can be.
He explains how as FTMs they are encouraged to take on role models to mimic maleness
and to be greedy of seeing too much like other groups.
It becomes a question of either going with already given examples of maleness
or choosing to hold mass communities that attract us and ourselves to feminist and gender care politics,
standards of non-impressiveness.
He asks that people make their gender secondary in constructing themselves.
We must care more about our moral and political values than we do about our gendered self-identification.
Thank you.
My first question was why try to fit people into the two different categories
when there have been intersex people since forever?
Why did it become just two categories?
Why weren't there more of a variety of categories?
This is my first question.
I'm ready to pass.
I don't know what people know what to say to that.
It's like a big question.
I mean, I don't know.
We have some interesting things to say about that.
You're talking about safety issues.
I wanted to like take those up a little bit.
But what we say after that?
I mean, remember about like...
About wanting to know people's gender.
Well, to me, it doesn't seem important to know whether a person is male, female,
anything in between or outside of those two categories,
except maybe for safety issues.
If I'm walking in a dark street,
I would want to know if the person walking anywhere near me is male or female,
obviously because I can be raped by a man, not by a female.
I can be harmed by a woman, but not in the same way that a man can.
I have an issue with your use of obvious,
because that isn't obvious to me.
You can, in certain definitions of rape, you can be raped by a female.
I would be more concerned with, within your example,
I would be more concerned not with gender,
but with size, perhaps, or circumstances.
I mean, physically, I'm a five foot tall woman.
Everyone is bigger than me.
But I mean, if perhaps maybe I was, you know, like five foot seven or five foot eight,
and maybe worked out more or something like that,
I wouldn't be so afraid of a man necessarily walking behind me
but maybe a bigger male or a bigger woman.
And I mean, I don't think that maybe it's because of the time,
maybe it's because of, you know, just the way things are now
as opposed to the way they used to be.
I don't think it would be a safe thing in general to think of,
you know, just because a woman's behind you, you're safe in a dark alley.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I get that.
And also, besides size, there are also guns.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, so, I think this is a really fascinating issue,
and I think that I'm glad that, you know, you're pressing in that way.
Because there's a particular assumption
built into sort of male and female, I think,
that you're bringing out about, you know,
male being associated with sexual offense
and female being associated with sexual violation.
And that's actually, you know,
registered sometimes even lately.
Like it's peculiar, back to the California penal code,
the rape is defined in such a way that
only individuals with vaginas can be raped.
So there's no such thing as, so anything else might fall into the category of sodomy.
Which is interesting.
Or it's, I think it's categorized as sexual assault,
rather than outright rape.
But I'm really wrong.
The naturalist categories of sodomy as well.
I mean, if there's animal penetration.
Right.
Of course.
But anyway, my point is this,
is that I think that thinking about,
how we think about male and female
in terms of the relationship of sexual violence,
is important.
And not something that we should,
you know, necessarily take for granted.
I think it plays out all the time.
You know, I think it plays out in issues like around,
restrooms and stuff like that.
You know, in issues around safety.
But of course, it's quite possible for an individual with a vagina
or something that they describe even differently
than that, that someone else might call a vagina
to inflict sexual violence upon someone else
who has material that may or may not be described as penis.
Or what have, I mean, so,
I don't think that, you know,
there's a necessary sort of conceptual correlation
between, you know, this particular type of analogy
and that particular type of analogy.
Does that make sense to you?
There's a statistical correlation, however.
You shouldn't overlook.
There's an empirical, right?
There may be empirical matters,
but I think that those are different, yeah.
Well, I mean, that was my only,
that was my reason for if needing to know
or wanting to know a gender.
I mean, that wasn't my main issue,
but other than that,
I would figure why no person's gender,
what use is that to me to know
if somebody is really, um, okay.
Did I ever tell you my story about the FBI?
Yes.
Yeah, I did.
Okay, sorry.
Sorry, sorry about the story.
That's kind of what I thought about it.
No, but I was going to just remind you of the story.
I mean, so, at this point,
you know, I had like conflicting IDs
and this connected to the hell piece.
And, you know, immigration office said,
well, which is it?
And I said, well, email.
And he said, well, I have to put down mail.
It's for the FBI.
Um, and I just thought that was interesting
because I think that there is some sort of presumption
about the FBI didn't need it to know what it was really.
And the presumption was that mail is what it was really.
And this was presumed important for the FBI
they needed to know.
I mean, that connects to some of your worries
because maybe they wanted to worry about issues about,
um, sexual violence and vulnerability.
I don't know.
I think that's what I thought about.
Why is it important?
Maybe that reason.
Um, oh, okay.
I'm going back to the,
I guess nobody really has an answer to it.
Why just the two groups?
Somewhere in this article,
it says that, um, people are awaiting a day
where we can have more gendered issues from.
He himself doesn't find that he's been to the already given
gender, well, definitely to.
What else is there to choose from?
There should be more.
And why, why isn't there?
Why are people so attached to the two
that they don't allow for more different varieties
of what gendered issues are?
I think you brought up the intersex question,
I think, in a lot of ways,
what my play against it is,
I mean, from what I've,
from things that I've read or whatever,
um, seems like intersex cases,
um, sit, like a straightforward answer,
like these voices or these cases have just been,
like, either lost or forcefully displaced, right?
I think, um, like Michelle Foucault,
another example is he has a case study
of culturine bobbing in the 1960s, right?
An intersex person,
like a case study of an 18th century intersex person,
and that wasn't, I suppose,
brought to, like, public life until the 1960s.
So I think a straightforward example is,
like, there's these, I guess,
regimes of power, right?
The Foucault would,
what he would call regimes of power,
but I suppose are constantly, I guess,
um,
like I said,
forcefully displacing, like,
relegating these cases,
so,
or supplementing them into something
much more culturally acceptable,
like, Hurricane Bobine would have been,
like, put into an institution,
and then veiled behind medical discourses.
Hence we look at that narrative.
So I think there's kind of a beginning
of why, maybe, the question of,
why are we two?
Is the question of what is the interest
in ensuring, I mean, one way
of phrasing it is,
what is the interest in maintaining
the natural attitude?
Is there...
I don't know.
I don't know what the answer to that question could be.
It seems very hard to answer.
I mean, it's gone for...
Maybe there is no answer. Yeah.
This could be something, I mean,
kind of mildly related,
but in terms of functionality,
perhaps, and I don't necessarily
place it gender,
but the idea of reproduction,
how, you know,
and the human race kind of
reproduce itself.
I don't necessarily...
this might be assuming too much
with sex and gender together,
because your question is why are there not more genders,
but if you sort of step back from that
and say, how do we as a race reproduce,
what are you asking?
Because I don't want to be too quick to be like,
oh, violence and gender, same thing
in terms of the discourse of this class,
but I think that that could be,
I don't know, some kind of viable
question.
How does the human race reproduce?
Because the question then could be,
are you a person that can
have a child?
That seems like a fairly...
and not have a child.
I have one, but I can't
just take one, I don't want the transitive
for it.
And how does that fit in?
We haven't brought that up yet.
That's interesting.
I mean, so,
let's just go with that for a little bit.
Enforcing out
intersex individuals.
Because I just want to connect it
to the issues that we're talking
with, you know,
why must there be two?
Let's just suppose,
suppose, you know,
there's like an argument, we'll say,
well look, there's individuals
who, you know,
I'm trying to remember
the correct biological
who deliver gametes
in a particular size
smaller than
gametes involved.
So, I think that the biological way
of doing it in terms of
the size of the gamete,
and so you can
talk about a rough
categorization that way, right?
So, here's a basis
in production, we have a little basis
for categorization.
But the question was
what would the vested
interest be in pushing
out
intersex individuals?
But now we can sort of like, you know, broaden it
because like, you know, not all
individuals, even if they don't fall
into what we would categorize as
intersex, are
able to do production.
So,
why would all those things fall away?
What would the interest be in those things
falling away? Are you with me on this?
I mean, just, I mean, so
just pointing to, for example,
a rough
economy in terms of
you know, reproduction,
um,
doesn't seem enough
to explain, for example, how
intersex get, intersex people get
forced out of the
equation.
Are you, right?
I'm not sure
about this.
The question was, like, I mean,
I'm sorry, and it's getting
late, so I'm getting a little bit punchy,
and my points aren't as sharp as they should be.
So I take it that this was the question.
The question was,
why to?
Now, this question could be
raised in different ways.
I'll understand it this way. Why so sharp?
Why sort of like, yes or no?
Why the, why the binary?
Right?
I mean, you said
not advocating it, but
floating it is, sort of like,
what if someone said, reproduction?
Yeah, and to really quickly verify,
I actually was responding to, why would you care to know?
Not so much,
why only to?
Because I was responding to her question,
why would you even care to know
what somebody is?
Not advocating it, but floating it is,
sort of like, what if someone said
reproduction?
And to really quickly verify, I actually was
responding to, why would you care to know?
Not so much, why only to?
Because I was responding to her question,
why would you even care to know
what somebody is?
Right.
So that's interesting.
So the way I was hearing you was that
reproduction would be like, why only to?
And of course, it wouldn't answer
why only to, because
it wouldn't explain.
But then I would also, I guess
in response to the, I would still worry
about like, why would you need to know?
I would say, well,
what if you're not interested in
reproducing?
I mean, you know,
that's avoided.
Is that true?
But I mean,
what if you flipped, and it's like,
not only by logical reproduction,
but like, cultural reproduction
and like, upholding
hegemony in a sense, because I kind of feel that
even like, when
Hale was talking a little bit about like, intersex,
it's
I don't know if it was him or something, but like,
that there's always like, that back in
the day was just kind of like, well, we're going to see
where this person fits. And it was
mostly like, whether it's not,
whether it's like, biological reproduction or not,
it's like, cultural reproduction, like, to
just keep the norm.
Because it's like, I kind of feel like
here in the U.S., like
the American dream is basically kind of like,
to be heterosexual and to have
kids and to own a house and
to have all these things right, but I think
that it's kind of
whether or not you could reproduce biologically,
as long as you could reproduce that image,
then that fantasy
still allows for that
fantasy to still be there.
No, I totally see what you're saying.
I think that especially
in terms of two, that we're talking about
why only two, I mean,
for sake of interest, what if we just made it
two biologically people that can
gestate a child and people that cannot?
You know what I'm saying? Because that I feel like
is a fairly clear biological
distinction. You know what I'm saying? Like,
these people can have children
in the sense of carrying them, and these people cannot
because then you would get people
generally assigned male birth
and intersex people on one side, and then you would have
Does that make sense what I'm saying?
So when would they get older?
Yeah, and then they'd all go into
the other category, I guess. I'm just saying
like, at the very least, in a biological
description, the way that seems.
So that's awkward to me too because
there's only going to be a very small amount of people
in the one that can actually gestate a child
from the point that I'm 13 to like, hopefully
50? Hopefully not, never mind.
But you're
saying what if a woman is born without, you know,
a uterus or something like that, there's going
to be a whole lot of other people in that group
and in, like,
in maybe
a practical sense, that really doesn't seem
to distinguish anything from anything from me.
It really just seems to lump a whole mess
of people into one group and
pregnant broads into another group. You're
saying, I mean, it really, that's a very
awkward thing for me to think of.
Yeah, I'm just, like, sort of trying to bring it to the table.
No, no, no. I think it's just a girl for this.
Sure, sure, sure.
Well, it would be
interesting, though, I mean,
if people were,
if relationships were
focused around
reproduction and we were attracted to the
person who,
or we decided to partner with a person
for the purposes of having a child, right?
And that person presented
as male or female, like the case of
the pregnant guy, right?
That person presented as male or female
and it's irrelevant,
right? If you both are coming together
to have a child and one of you can
do one part, one can do the other, not a great
a child, that's great. And then outside
of reproduction, relationships
could then move forward in the same sort of way
in which it doesn't really matter because you're
not having kids anyway.
And then
you can see sort of, you know, ways in which
that wouldn't be cool
with a lot of people because of
fears around homosexuality,
right?
So that might be one reason that they want a very
broad distinction,
you know.
Well, I think,
you have been spoken,
I mean, I think wrong.
How far back and
what if we can take a question
and think of it as how roles
seem to solidify
into two categories
and how far back in history
can we look at
in, with respect to
the feminist study or Chris study
that will help us
illuminate it.
Has it always been like this?
Has it always been, you know,
back in western, when western
culture
was developing
the practices and the gender roles
that are assigned to
female male, how does that
those practices
get passed on
over the years?
And has there been
studies that fall back?
I mean, the fact of the matter is, I mean,
the studies that sort of suggest that the very
idea of
a binary
or a dichotomy in western culture
is a relative reason
for the invention
and that there had been
more of a one-sex model
whereby
females were
viewed as sort of defective
or male-formed
males.
You didn't have the same kind of
kind of dichotomy. So, yeah, there's been
lots of, you know, I mean, and of course
cross-cultural studies as well.
So I think, I guess
what I want to say is this, like, why
question, I think
is big and also
conceals so much complexity
because, you know, we may
have the why question
now,
why now, but maybe
the answer to the question now
is different from what the question was
50 years ago.
Maybe it was different then.
I mean, and so
I'm not always
and also with why, you know, we
can start making what we mean by what
caused it.
Are we attributing a particular function,
social function to the dichotomization?
What exactly
do we mean when we're asking why?
And what is it going to get us
by asking why in the end?
Right? I mean
what kind of illumination are we
seeking for what purposes?
This is what I only got for today.
