Member-only story
Trans identities and biological essentialism
One should never go full Wittgenstein, lest you end up seeing the world as an overlapping series of subjective realities. At least that is the easy part of understanding that while there are objects in the world, how we perceive them are utterly subjective. Using philosophy to work through exclusionary feminist arguments is interesting because I constantly feel like I am working through a completely different problem to the one they are presenting. Wittgenstein’s central conceit of the labels we put on things are not the things themselves is hard to wrap your head around, especially when we are used to thinking objectively, yet when it comes to trans issues is really helpful in unpacking many of the issues at hand. The notion that biology is fixed and immutable is an interesting one, but I personally think that it is the Cartesian scepticism that our sense of self is woo that really drives home how reductive biological essentialism really is.
I have found myself wandering through the philosophical implications of trans identities a lot lately, and it strikes me that the whole obsession about sex is really an extension of the notion that bodies are the thing. Those who claim sex is the central axis of identity, indeed the only axis of identity, seem to think that all women’s bodies are fairly uniform, and that women are inherently physically Inferior to men. This…
