The new politics of gender identity | Kathleen Stock

the present ideas about gender identity are quite reactionary and they sort of go along the lines of if you are sex non-conforming maybe you're you're in the wrong sex [Music] Kathleen stock welcome to how the light gets in thank you for having me so you've become sort of famous for your views on gender identity and the relationship between trans identity and female identity and I wanted to start with some kind of basic distinctions in this debate so the relevant to section that has come to Define it this debate over the identity of trans people is on the one hand sex on the other hand gender the first one is supposed to denote the sort of biological physiological makeup of people and the second one is meant to recognize a kind of social identity and a social role that people play and the claim is that those two things can sort of become untethered from one another what's your view on this distinction and do you do you accept that kind of fundamental distinction I wouldn't put it quite that way to be honest it's certainly not where the present discourse is um the sex bit was fine the gender bit is spiraling off in something that's actually not very social at all it's supposed to to be psychological it's supposed to be individual and it's nothing really to do with how you're perceived by others so it's not social in that sense it's to do with how you feel now obviously I think there's a social explanation for how people feel but it's not construed as social so in other words the kind of definition of gender that we got in the 1970s um to some extent partly from feminists partly from psychologists working with people with differences of sexual development and that that was a social idea of a role like that was Associated either masculinity or femininity and those things can come apart from sex like you could get females that are masculine and and males are feminine but then that sort of some somewhere around this Century got tumblrized into it's in your head it's an identity and you know we don't need to explain where it came from in fact now people think it's innate the new story is it's part of you a central part of who you are that's got to come out at some point and that's a whole different uh distinction to the original one so so you so this is the the bit as aware of that you kind of gender politics that you kind of find problematic the idea that it's somehow a private mental state that defines your gender identity not this kind of social role that you play well I wouldn't care at all if people weren't trying to reify it into law and policy right I have no idea no no problem with people saying that they are one thing or the other or acting in any way or altering their bodies if that's how they feel but um through quite powerful institutions and and it's happening internationally actually um there's this idea that your inner gender identity which can come completely apart from your sex and your gender expression even in the old sense should determine your rights and access to spaces or resources or sports teams or rate crisis shelters or whatever now that obviously poses a problem particularly for females uh I think um because it allows males to basically say they have this private state that nobody can tell them they don't have built into the policies you know it's all part of the rhetoric that nobody can tell you that you don't have the identity that you think you do so and and as soon as you say you've got that identity you've got it so you then get access to all these things and in the and that you know we can go into the problem but I think there are some problems there um so if if we were still as it were in the 1970s era of like where we thought of gender as this kind of social expression of identity um would that be okay to sort of be formalized in kind of law to to separate biological sex from gender expression we and kind of make it concrete that that's kind of recognized by law if we were to go back and start again it's a I think it is a good question what laws we'd want but I certainly think we should always have some kind of law that affects uh sorry that um protects uh what you might call gender non-conforming people I would say sex non-conforming because this word gems just got so polluted um from discrimination so that would cover men who want to dress like women or change their bodies to look like women or and women who want to look like men and lesbians and gays and all sorts of things you know nobody should be discriminated against for being sex non-conforming and I totally have never obviously I'm not a sex particularly sex performing myself so but and it's not just a selfish move I just don't think that there's any problem with those sorts of laws but that's not where we are in fact you know if anything everything's got so messed up that um the present ideas about gender identity are quite reactionary um and they sort of go along the lines of if you are sex non-conforming maybe you're you're in the wrong sex and that's quite reactionary to me you've often said that your position on this issue of gender identity and and the status of trans people gets misconstrued or misunderstoods can you tell me what some of the main ways your viewers misunderstood well it's not hard is it I mean it the debate the public debate is set up so that any criticism at all of the idea of gender identity is construed as transphobic so there's this kind of ad hominem move to my character my motives my intentions all the rest of his most it's the crudest kind of uh it's not intellectual and the slightest it's just like she must be a bad person because that's the only reason she could have any problem with any of this so yeah in that context then people will start spinning all sorts of lies about my position what I'm committed to but I'm not committed to um she wants to take away try the rights of trans people is the about us bold as it gets and obviously I don't but there is some discussion to be had about what rights means in our country you know and is it the right of a male to save a woman and go into a sports team I would say not but is it a right to be protected from discrimination yes it is so then you have to ask what discrimination is you know so it I don't think there's any kind of subtle um misinterpretation of me going on the people that have a vested interest in misinterpreting me um don't want me to succeed obviously they don't want me to win this argument in fact they don't want me to have it at all as you you can see one fundamental claim is that trans women are women from the kind of other side as aware of the debate and you claim trans women aren't really women trans women men aren't really men and that when people make those claims they have a kind of status of fiction can you tell us exactly what you mean by that what you mean by fiction here what I mean by fiction um I mean they're immersing themselves so fiction I take it that we can um get involved in fictions or we do all the time we're just in dramas at the theater watching telly reading books you know we can imaginatively position ourselves in certain States it also happens when you're acting um I think it's a a basic human capacity and I think when people for well-meaning reasons or otherwise go say trans women are literally women there's no difference between a woman and a trans woman or at least no relevant difference I think they are immersing themselves in a fiction and that's quite a charitable explanation to be honest because if they really believe that then there's something gone wrong with their beliefs because the standard categorizations of woman and man relate to sex and always have in every natural language because every natural language needs a differentiation between the females and the males and the adults and the young I guess some people have taken your have taken offense at this sort of claim as they interpret it basically as you saying that trans people don't really exist right well they are a fiction like just the usual bad faith interpretation but tell me what the difference is between saying that Sherlock Holmes is a fictitious character as a fiction or Santa Claus is a fiction they exist in certain contexts they're the difference is that I'm not saying trans people are a fiction they're people who exist not mad um I'm saying the best analysis of the claim is that people make about trans people and that sometimes people make about themselves not all trans people by the way I know plenty of trans people say like I know plenty of trans women who say I'm a man so I'm saying that if you say I'm a woman knowing or I say of a trans woman she's a woman knowing their sex nature I think it's a charitable explanation of what's going on there linguistically that they are in a fiction but it's not it's not anything to do with this status of trans people as existence but the idea but the identity is in question here right so the identity itself isn't real the identity well it depends what you mean by identity um and what you mean by real um if identities can be like like issued out of imaginative States then they're real but should we is the question of priorities right should we automatically capitulate to these identity statements uh socially and politically every time they're made or are there other identities in a probably a more materialistic sense because you know identity used to mean the thing that people saw you as as well as the thing you felt you were that's all gone out the window it's just how you feel inside now so there are other identities that trans people also have they're humans they you know and they're male or female and those identities sometimes they may not they may not identify with them but they are still relevant in some cases to where they should go in Social space or whatever it is but one of the cases where there is that sort of social recognition so when some person is socially recognized as being a woman is not treated differently in most social circumstances any different to if they were born a woman what do we make of it then isn't that then a kind of confirmation confirmation of the fact that they're women yeah well no because a woman isn't an appearance it's not just appearance it's a recognition of a certain State yes but that's just like no offense but that's kind of middle class academic word games because in every natural language the woman is the sexually mature female and it doesn't matter how they look and do we really want a world in which the women have to look according to a certain set of social prescriptions and you know how how glamorous do they have to be how feminine you know it's just nonsense right so you want to make free of all that we want to say there are men and the women and they can look any way they like but there is a question about you know in terms of practicality for trans women for instance or trans men if they have taken you know gone through loads of surgery taken loads of hormones and have completely altered their opinion so they do like look like the opposite sex like that's a question about you know how they is obviously very awkward for to ask a passing transsexual to use the um facilities of their own sex in my book I say fine there's nothing we could do about that and it would be awkward um I think we should have third spaces where possible but that's really more for people who don't look like their identity because they're the ones that disrupt all the social norms like we just can't have a situation where a male who looks like a male can walk into a woman's bathroom or changing room or whatever and say I belong here because then anyone can basically what makes that space so it's complicated so I don't I completely deny the um trans women are not women trans men are not men I know that's terrible for everyone to hear but I just think it's true um but that still doesn't settle the question of what happens politically and socially for people who have genuinely you know socially transitioned but in some ways isn't that the Crux of the issue right so we might never come to agree about the kind of metaphysical status of or you know the kind of you know social status of women and they're just genuinely is a disagreement there and we're probably never going to convince each other as it were and so then the question becomes what is the stage is what's the state supposed to do and what's the role of the stage that's the certainly my entry point because I wouldn't have got involved in this just for the sake of it I'm not interested in going up to people and telling they're not you know that I disagree with their own understanding themselves but that's not what we were where we were at self ID was coming down the line in 2015 it's still coming down the line in Germany um it's already here in other countries um Spain it's coming so it's a live issue and then we have to think of solutions because we can't just have it um according to the the lobbying groups they're trying to push through this very radical um is that policies so to go back to the um sort of issue of bathrooms and other women's spaces uh female prisons for example and things like that right that one of the arguments that these trans trans women should be potentially excluded from those spaces because they might be kind of the physical threat to women but on the other hand the argument is well that that may be but these people would be even more vulnerable if they were to use say male toilets or bathrooms or be sent to a male prison so what do we do in those we have alternative Services quite obviously and there's a ton of money in this area that could be put into lobbying for alternative services but in fact what we have for instance in Brighton near where I live is we have um all um Rape Crisis and uh services are trans-inclusive none are female only so that's in Balance there should be female only and there should be trans inclusive but um I was just going to go back to that point about um trans women or women that's it does become relevant here even though you say it's just a kind of abstract question because I think you'll find I mean yes it's one of the arguments people use that for instance trans women can't go into male prisons because they'd be vulnerable to violence but another argument is they need to go into those spaces because they're women and it's sort of their right as women to go where women go so that's that's you know lots of different arguments have pushed a leverage to push this through but um it doesn't it's not abstract anymore when it's being demanded that women move up or put themselves in potential dangerous situations because fellow women are um have the right to be there and you can see that in sport you know why is Leah Thomas swimming in a women's competition well because she's a woman she just looks very different to all the other women and she's faster right um yeah I guess you know that there have been arguments that there should be assertion kind of rules and constraints that have to do with sort of bodily physiology but not necessarily with sage and Italia right so the things like with I don't know hormone levels or something like that when sport yeah um there's been all sorts of arguments I mean at the moment self-id is the one of the main criteria you just get to go where you want but does that actually happen dude yes of course it happens I mean it's happening um amateur level all over the place for a start so whatever and then even at Elite level the um ioc have recently dropped the testosterone reduction requirements but then they've sort of shoved it back onto other sporting bodies lower down the chain as it were to make up their own rules but no there are um and in University sports teams there are policies that just say sure anyone who feels like a woman can compete in this women's event so yes it happens so to go back to this issue this question of like fiction and the kind of like what makes um the claim that someone's a woman kind of true I was wondering whether it's not the case that a lot of our social identities are sort of fictions in some way and I have here in mind for example adulthood right so whether we recognize someone as an adult in some way it's linked to a particular age but that's almost kind of arbitrary right it's kind of just a social convention it's a social convention we've decided that at 18 people have a new legal status and what we did in 17 and yeah but just because there's some sort of ambiguity around the edges doesn't mean it's completely arbitrary so that's that's a fallacy but um it's not it's it's usually linked to an attempt to get sexual maturity right and but it yes there is ambiguity and there's cultural variation in how people construe adulthood but you don't find cultures on the whole making two-year-olds adults you know there is a ballpark very they're in and it's it's in a kind of well-functioning society adulthood would be linked to brain maturity the capacity to make decisions some sense of autonomy and that's not random that's linked to development so I don't think so so you think there are certain hard facts in the world which determines I think you are you're sort of moving there between oh there's just not some sort of observable cut-off point that everybody um agrees with to oh it's all totally arbitrary and I'm saying there's loads of things in the world that like yes there's some kind of vagueness in where we arrive at so there's some social contribution but it's not just sort of you know um throwing some dice in the air and seeing where they land or something it's it's an attempt to get something right that was already there okay but but something is there as it were something exactly where the world is there yeah there are people that you know born go through development age and die that's not social convention when it comes to the issue of the threat of violence against women from men that claim they're women um I wanted to ask you what do you think the sort of core driving force of violence against women is and whether it is somehow linked to physiology or whether it's linked more to the kind of social roles that you know men and women play in society you know men are more sort of powerful physically on average than women and so maybe that does enable them to maybe um sure that enables them to act violently against women but that's perhaps not the cause and that's where I'm kind of like trying to see whether it is a social role there in everything in the human world pretty much one of those things exceptions you know there's a natural contribution and there's a social contribution so um and it's as we've just established in the question of adults it's hard to find the boundaries but you know what we can say is that males on average like other um great ape species that we are you know the chimps bonobos the males um tend to be well particularly The Chimps but nobody's a bit different but um powerful bigger shoulders taller longer limbs uh bigger lungs bigger extremities and all the rest of it obviously that's not an essential claim there's variation I'm six foot tall you know but you can make generalizations um now there's testosterone as well in the mail and testosterone causally predisposes males to at certain points in the Life in particular to be aggressive physically aggressive depending on their situation now societies can put in place measures to try and protone that down you know you can have elaborate kinds of Behavioral codes you can have a strong cultural state or whatever it is but you can do things and obviously some societies are much more violent than others but the base level is not nothing and I think what we're you know it's very easy for people that go to how the light gets in academics not people that are really in their bodies very much in my experience academics to kind of get all abstract about oh all these possible permutations if I you know and it also it's non-coincidentally gives academics power because they get to construe the world any way they want but there are facts about males and females and they make a difference to our social life and we need to protect females from predatory males so every society needs to protect females from petitry males and it's crazy to unpick all the good work feminists have done since the 70s and putting in these domestic violence refuges and Rape Crisis shelters on the basis of this mad idea that a man who thinks he's a woman is a woman bunkers but that kind of brings us back to the original discussion we had which is is that the main claim that you find problematic is this sort of like well when it's operationalized when it's operationalized I mean when I started this I didn't really want to get into well I mean like when I started discussing it I thought I could leave out the woman question I thought I could just I said well they're not female you know I I would and I would say male Bodied and people would say oh what a transphobic dog whistle she said male bodied you know did you hear it she said a trans woman was male bodied a lot bigger so at some point you know anything you say adverting to the sex is interpreted as unacceptable and at that point I started to realize that it was really important I'm afraid to say trans women are not women I mean given all the lobbying around it the t-shirts from Stonewall you know there's been a whole for 10 years at least there's been propaganda pumping through our institutions saying trans women or women get over it and you can't get more aggressive than that but when it comes to male bodies I mean what what about people that begin to not look like you know well they're still male bodied I mean that's the are we talking about genitalia here what are we talking about what you talk about you asked the question well I'm asking you what do you mean by male body I mean because I mean someone who grows you know breasts and being on a developmental pathway determined probably eight weeks into conception to produce small mobile gametes which you might then have your testicles chopped off you might then have artificial breasts you might then have a penile inversion you're still male you haven't changed sex it would be it would be unprecedented in the natural world we're not clownfish you know we're not sequential hermaphrodites we don't change sex we can aestheticize ourselves to look different ways and we do but really the idea that a trans woman is a woman because she looks like a woman it's just teaching treating a woman as a skin suit I mean women aren't skin suits where is your work taking you next I mean this was a big diversion from your normal work on the philosophy of fiction and Aesthetics it wasn't that big a diversion was it because it was about fiction so right yeah well I'm not in the University system anymore as you may have noticed and I'm not going back so um now I'm just writing for a popular audience on various things I'm trying to get away from all these arguments I've made them I think they're compelling um I'm actually more interested in how our institutions have let this happen and how our academic classes have let this happen and I think there's lots of interesting questions about that so I'm writing for various Publications on that sort of thing Kathleen sock thank you very much thanks for having me [Music] the more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to The Institute of Art and ideas at IAI TV

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 156,378

Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, kathleen stock, kathleen stock interview, gender identity debate, trans, female, male, identity, biological makeup, social identity, physiological makeup, individual, gender politics, private mental state, gender expression, sports teams, rape crisis shelters, access to spaces, innate, sex vs gender, social construct, freedom of speech, women

Id: GJhndRR4vF0

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023