Trans Rights and Gender Identity

Beginnings...

For over a year now off-and-on I’ve been working on a project that explores what the debate about the status of transgender identities—about what does or does not constitute being a “real” man or “real” woman—reveals to us about, amongst other things, the relationship between sex and gender. I approached the topic with various explicit interests or concerns. The first is in the general question of when a change in the meaning or usage of a term is for the better and when it might in fact be for the worse. The second address that better/worse contrast, since my standard for evaluation is in terms of the balance required between individual freedom and our obligations to others if all are to flourish. A third interest is more personal, since it was provoked when my then ten-years-old daughter came home from school one day and announced that unlike her older sister she would be spared the (anticipated) horrors of menstruation because she could change her gender... Determining what befuddled a ten-year-old child about the employment of the terms “sex” and “gender” might not have promised to shed much light on something that provokes such anger and disagreement; but the more I read and thought about the implications of various positions the more I came to see her befuddlement as representative of a more general confusion, albeit one framed in less artless terms. What finally spurred me on to write, however, was the treatment doled out to the kind of women I’ve seen as role models for my own daughters bullied and threatened in public by men, and by colleagues confessing that they are too frightened to speak out for fear that they’ll face disciplinary action from their employers or aggression from their students. The term of art here—the accusation levelled and feared—is that people who deny the “right” of trans people to assert their identities are being “transphobic”. So my first full posts will address a simple question: What is Transphobia?