{"id":517775,"date":"2023-04-27T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=517775"},"modified":"2024-08-09T22:09:28","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T20:09:28","slug":"72-shades-of-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/company\/72-shades-of-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"72 shades of gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent events have been punctuated by strange debates about sex and gender, reminiscent of theological quarrels about Adam's navel. However, these controversies have an origin and an internal logic that this article sets out to explore.<\/strong>uisser.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The 1er<\/sup> June 2022 saw the release in the USA of a documentary entitled \u00abWhat is a Woman? Narrated by political columnist Matt Walsh, the film features a series of interviews during which this question is put to a variety of feminists, health professionals and academics. Their answers are by turns embarrassed, confused or obscure; it seems that none is able to solve this enigma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A therapist, for example, explains that \u00abwe now know that some women have penises and some men have vaginas\u00bb, while the director of the \u00abWomen, Gender and Sexuality\u00bb program at the University of Tennessee retorts to the narrator: \u00abwhen someone tells us who they are, we should believe them\u00bb; seeking to say what a woman objectively is, he greedily points out, signals condescension and transphobia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did we get here?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Up until a decade ago, the term woman had a common meaning that was widely shared across the spectrum of moral and political sensibilities. It referred to an adult female human being. Today, however, the exercise requires knowledge of a rich nomenclature articulated around a metaphysics of sex and identities trans<\/em>. Produced in concert by LGBTQ associations and certain academic niches, transgenderism consists of a set of revolutionary ideas about human nature and the relationship between our bodily reality and our subjective experience: the assertion that it is possible to be literally \u00abtrapped\u00bb in a body that is not one's own, that people are the \u00absex\u00bb they claim to be regardless of evidence to the contrary, or that our \u00absexual\u00bb identity is in no way determined by biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It's a basket full of theoretical resources for making explicit the experience of people whose \u2019gender identity\u00ab does not conform to the traits associated with the sex they were \u00bbassigned at birth\u00ab, and for promoting the institutional and linguistic reforms postulated as necessary to defend the rights of these people. This movement raises both philosophical and practical challenges, which are at the heart of the objections formulated by a number of philosophers, psychologists and scientists such as Alex Byrne, Kathleen Stock, Colin Wright, Tomas Bogardus, Debra Soh and Paul McHugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read also | Here's why gender theory is dogma<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Very much in vogue in recent years, transgenderism is nonetheless a recent seedling planted in the soil of half a century's worth of gender theories. Borrowed from linguistics and originally designating the social and cultural traits associated with each of the two sexes, \u00abgender\u00bb took conceptual flight under the pen of feminist intellectuals in the 1970s. The distinction between sex and gender became a tool for condemning the arbitrariness of social norms that subjugated women, and denouncing the \u00abbiological determinism\u00bb that was supposed to justify them. Gradually, gender came to refer not only to the characteristics associated with femininity and masculinity, but to capture the very meaning of the terms \"sex\" and \"gender\". man<\/em> and woman<\/em>. The latter are then qualified as \u00abgendered\u00bb, i.e. no longer determined by sex but by cultural dynamics and social roles. Being a man and being a woman become \u00absocially constructed\u00bb categories, like marriage or traffic rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in the wake of these developments that recent conceptual innovations are emerging. A number of advocates of the cause trans<\/em> have realized that defining women in terms of \u00absocial role\u00bb means excluding from this category male transgenders who do not intentionally present themselves as women, or who are not perceived as such by society. A definition based on \u00absocial role\u00bb implies that only those individuals to whom society assigns the subordinate roles and statuses considered by feminist literature as constitutive of \u00abbeing a woman\u00bb are included in the \u2019woman\u00ab category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Circular or incoherent theories<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This problem of inclusivity therefore called for a new definition that went beyond the distinction between sex and gender, and depended neither on biological reality nor on a \u00absocial construct\u00bb: the psychology of the individual. In a way, sex becomes gender, which is determined by subjective experience: the only necessary and sufficient condition for being a man or a woman is to identify oneself as such. Canadian actress Ellen Page, who became Elliot in 2020, can thus be considered overnight not only as a man in the traditional sense of the word, but as never having even been a woman. The distinction is between an \u00abassigned\u00bb sex on the one hand, and a \u00abgender identity\u00bb on the other. The latter designates a person's intimate feeling of being a man, a woman or one of the countless gender identities that escape this binarity (queer, non-binary, two-spirited, xenogenre, etc.). By 2022, there were already at least 72.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this revision is motivated by a concern for inclusiveness, it nonetheless leads to a definition that isn't one: \u00aba woman is a person who identifies herself as a woman\u00bb tells us nothing about what the word designates. This difficulty explains the confused and hesitant reactions to the question \u00abWhat is a woman?\u00bb.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n