Aidan Anderson - Philosophy of Gender

      I would say that I am very sympathetic to social construction theses regarding gender, femininity masculinity, etc. I want to clarify, though, that I will not be talking about sex in this post, only gender. The status quo with respect to gender and the norms that come with it could have been constructed in a different way, or perhaps not constructed at all. Men tending to hold positions of political power, or women tending to do domestic work are not inevitable in the way that the law of gravity is inevitable. Our understanding of gender could change given the right historical and societal conditions, and we know this is true because it already has changed in the past.     So who cares? Why bring up the point that gender is socially constructed in the first place? For me, I think it is important to bring up, because my opinions on gender, as of now, align with third grade of commitment that Hacking identifies in regard to social construction cla...

" Do you think there is any way to balance radical feminists’ opposition to gender binarism with trans people’s hard-won right to their preferred gender expression?"

     This blog post is a response to the question: If a human being is male in one respect (chromosomally, say) and female in another (perhaps morphologically), ought we to count them as male or female? Why? Which sex sub-categories should be the arbiters of cases like this?       The most important thing to consider when answering this question is that I am not a biologist, doctor, geneticist, or any other sort of expert in sex in human beings. So remove all of the salt from all of the world's oceans and take my answer with it.         If a person was in one respect a male and in one respect another, then I think we ought to count them as just that, rather than place them into either the category of male or the category of female. It is either this, or, despite their apparent sexual ambiguity, they meet the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a female or male. But if the latter option is taken into account wh...

      I agree with Dembroff and Wodak's radical claim that we have a negative duty not to use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone. The arguments presented in their paper made sense and they convinced me to agree with their conclusion. I am not really sure how to explain how the argument convinced me, without just resorting to just mapping out the logic of the argument, and that seems uninteresting and impersonal, so I think my time would be better spent discussing my biggest takeaways.     This paper really made me question why we use gendered pronouns in the English language at all. Prior to reading, although I recognized that intentionally referring to someone by the wrong set of pronouns was disrespectful, I thought that use of gendered pronouns in conversation was fairly innocuous. After reading the paper, however, I realized that it is not the case that the use of gendered pronouns are innocuous (as using the wrong set of them can be d...