I have just finished reading
Stock, K. (2021). Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. London: Fleet.
As the subtitle suggests, a significant part of the book is about feminism and, specifically, the response of feminism to gender-identity theory. I am not at all sure that I want to get into the ins and outs of the male-female, man-woman, gay, lesbian, transexual, bisexual, and everything else arguments the bedevil these conversations. Suffice it only to say that Stock shows, fairly convincingly, that there is a great deal of woolly thinking going on in some quarters, especially in the various lobbying groups, the consequences of which could be devastating for some other groups, particularly cis women.
Still, I by no means wish to get embroiled in some of the nasty invective that these conversations (in so far as they are conversations) usually include. I would like to focus on one of the assertions which is made by some of the lobby groups, that of ‘situational epistemology’.
On the face of it, situational epistemology is a fairly straightforward idea. Only a transsexual person can really know what it is like to be the said transexual person. I think that we can concede that without a problem. After all, only I know what it is like to be me. In fact, I am the world expert on being me. I can tell others, perhaps convincingly, what being me is like, but they cannot know that without actually becoming me, which is impossible.
The next step in the argument is the one which bears some examination, though. As the transexual person (or anyone else for that matter) is the only person who can speak of their experience, and as the said transexual person (but not the others) is oppressed, then only the transexual person can say anything about how transsexual people should be treated. This is where the dubious step, in my view, occurs.
We have conceded that only an individual can speak about what it is like to be an individual. However, a vociferous transexual, by the lights of situational epistemology, can surely only speak with authority about how it is to be themselves, not another transexual, or another woman or man or bisexual. The claim then that only transexuals can speak about policy towards transsexuality because they are the oppressed people, on the face of it, is a valid claim. The problem is that this is only a valid claim if all other transsexuals agree with them and by the light of situational epistemology that cannot be the case. There is no reason to believe that an articulate, educated, middle-class transsexual person can speak for someone less well educated, for example.
This sort of leads on to the next problem with situational epistemology. As John Donne put it centuries ago, when the word ‘man’ could still refer to the human race: ‘No man is an island’. Put another way, Aristotle observes that ‘man is a political animal’: a man of the polis, the city. We are humans and we live in communities. Even the least sociable among us lives in a community, and that community, in part at least, defines us.
The problem here with situational epistemology is that the claim is made that only person X can speak about being person X, and, therefore, only person X can hold valid opinions about how person X and their like (assuming some common trait among people that person X claims to represent) should be treated by everyone else. That is, put another way, person X comes to dictate to everyone else some aspects of society and its arrangements because person X is recognised as representative of people with the trait that person X has (suppose it is trait A). Person X represents all people with trait A, and then has the authority to say that people with trait A should be treated in manner M by society.
The problem here is twofold. Firstly, person X is silencing everyone else with trait A who might, or might not, wish the be treated in manner M. Secondly, in fact, person X is silencing everyone else, including people who might be harmed by society treating people with trait A in manner M, at least if the arguments deployed by person X and their supporters against any detractors are merely to abuse and accuse them of a heinous crime against people with trait A, pushing such people back into being an oppressed minority.
Thus Stock has a problem with transsexual lobbyists who argue that people who declare themselves to be female should be able to use female changing facilities, female prisons, and so on. The problem is that this implies a naive anthropology, that is that someone who declares themselves female is, and should be treated as, being female. There is no accommodation for the fact that people might be making such a declaration for their own persons, in the case of males claiming to be females, for personal sexual gratification.
Now, this is not to say that there are not in existence some people born with male bodies who genuinely are caused psychological harm by being counted by society as males for all time and everywhere. But nor should we be so naive suppose that all such claimants, especially when the claims are made by people who make no effort to in fact transform are genuinely females. Such claims have an impact on society, in this case, on the safety of females in woman-only areas of society.
The problem here is a broader one than our response to transsexuality. The problem is the relationship between the individual and society. The ethic deployed by the transsexual lobby groups is highly individualistic. It has to be right for the person declaring themselves to be something other than their biological sex. However, to ignore that accepting this on a large scale could cause significant problems to other sections of society is rather narrow-minded, to say the least.
We are not isolated, autonomous, atomised individuals, no matter how much postmodernism might claim that we are. We still have to live in a society, and that society has to provide safety and security for all, not just for one group which declares itself to be oppressed and to be able to speak for all such oppressed people.
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