R. A. Briggs

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293 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2018 last heard Jun 2018

R. A. Briggs’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 106: R. A. Briggs discusses gender · 22 Jun 2018 podcast

So if you try to define genders based on sort of stereotypical characteristics, you'd always find for any stereotype you could give, some woman who was a woman without fulfilling the stereotype, and similarly for any stereotype of men you could give, you could find a man who didn't fulfill the stereotype but was still completely a man.

So Haslanger gets around that by saying, look, women don't have any sort of stereotypic characteristics in common.

What they have is perceived biology, not necessarily even actual biology, but perceived biology, plus sort of being oppressed based on that biology.

So it's kind of nice because, you know, first it gives you something that people can have in common without sharing a stereotype, right?

And maybe without sharing like a mechanism of oppression.

So even if white women and black women are oppressed in really different ways, they're both oppressed.

And second, these definitions give you a tool that's designed to combat sexist oppression.

So one way to get feminism up and running as an appealing project is to say that to be a woman is to be oppressed in certain ways.

So this makes it sort of urgent to have an anti-oppression project that fights on behalf of the rights of women.

So those are sort of two good things about Haslanger's definition.

But I think there are sort of a couple of things that don't work about this definition.

even though it's sort of an advance on the previous state of the art.

So I want to stress that this is an accomplishment, and the fact that it's not perfect doesn't mean that it's useless.

But one problem is that it just seems to misclassify a lot of people.

So take non-passing binary trans people.

They are not presumed to have characteristics that are evidence of the biological role that goes with their correct gender.

So if you've got a trans woman who doesn't pass and is in a transphobic society, people might misclassify her as a man systematically.

And that doesn't make her a man.

That doesn't make it correct for them to classify her as a man.

So in cases like that, Haslanger's definitions of woman and man are just going to misclassify people, so they get the extension wrong.

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