Ep. 351: Guest Sophie Grace Chappell on Transgender (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 351 is something like, what philosophical issues are involved in transgender? We're speaking to Sophie Grace Chappell from the Open University about her new book, Transfigured. More information about this text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, often feeling I do need some kind of theory to justify my own existence.

0:35 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Mark: Welcome, Sophie. Please introduce yourself however you would prefer.

0:43 Sophie: Hello. I'm the professor of philosophy at the Open University. I write on ethics, ancient philosophy, epistemology, things like that. I also publish poems and I translate the Greek poets sometimes. And when I'm not doing any of that, I climb mountains or play the piano or play tennis. This we'll just hang out with books.

1:05 Mark: So we had heard about you. We posted on our Facebook group last summer, what is a trans philosopher? We should talk to what are the central books, because it's such a, you know, a novel field as far as philosophy goes. It's not like there's a Judith Butler who you had on the show, but, you know, her gender trouble is sort of like, okay, people read that, but there doesn't seem to be the equivalent. Is that right so far? Is there a building trans literature such that if you took a course that was covering equity of various sorts, that there would be like, oh, this is the philosophy book you would read? Or are you trying to write that right now?

1:37 Sophie: Is that I hope I've written One of the things that people might refer to in writing Transfigured. There are a lot of books out there, a lot of them quite recent, as you say. So there are books like Gender Heretics, there's Sandis and Daniel Miles Shurrock column that's just come out. And so, yeah, I think there is a growing literature. One of my own favorite reference points in the literature is actually quite an old book. It's Conundrum by Jan Morris, which is from way back, I think 1973. So that's quite an old book, but it gives a description of what it's like to be trans. That I think makes a lot of sense.

2:15 Mark: I mean, of course we can probably find phenomenology literature that goes quite a bit back. I was very excited once I was reading your book to talk to you because we've done a lot of wittgenstein in fact, we just did some. Rorty, it's the thing that we just read. And it seems like your views on transgender and gender ideology, quote unquote, are mostly sort of deflationary, pragmatic. We can agree on facts that there are some people who are born one gender who want to be the other gender. The fact that they want to be the other gender means that there is a specific thing, whether culturally constructed or, you know, it just sort of doesn't matter what the origin is exactly, but that is desired.

So it's not the Judith Butler thing or what is often imputed to her as, we need to get rid of all gender norms. No, that would make it so. It wouldn't even make sense to be transgender if there was just no gender anymore. But your idea of we can agree on these facts. Is there a key philosophical issue? Because it seems like I actually pushed off on this podcast, even covering race for a while, because I just thought there's nothing philosophical there, like, don't be a racist. You don't need a philosophy book. And it wasn't until reading Du Bois and other.

And Fanon and other folks like, oh, actually, there are deep things about the phenomenology. And what's a good starting point? If you're saying. If you were starting to teach a philosophy class that was covering the transgender unit, what are sort of the key questions you would start us on that we can.

3:34 Sophie: I'm very sympathetic to your idea that it's. It's just at bottom, a matter of actually common sense and of responding with empathy, compassion, justice, love, maybe even to the facts the world presents you with. And one of those facts is that there are people like me who are born in one kind of embodiment and wish they'd been born into the other kind of embodiment. So for me, it's a matter of the body. Actually, as is most basic, it's a matter of the body. But there are people for whom, apparently, it's a matter of social presentation. And of course, the social presentation follows on the body, because we have the gender norms.

We do. And there's an imaginable state of society where people don't present themselves in gendered ways at all. That's very far from how we are. I think myself that our conceptions of gender are rooted in the body, and in particular, that they're rooted in the power asymmetry between typical female bodies and typical male bodies. This is one of the things I argue in Transfigured, that I think there is such a thing as gender. And I think there is such a thing as bodily sex and the two sometimes come apart, but the two are also deeply interrelated.

So you can imagine a society where people don't have any gender differentiation, where gender's been abolished, but nonetheless there are people who wish they'd been born with the other body, the other kind of body on that binary from the one that they were born with. And for people like that, I would still be a person like that in a world without gender, I would still be. If you like the term transsexual rather than transgendered, we can talk about the history of those terms. And I would still be someone who wants to express that fact about my nature.

And if there is no gendering in our society, then it's an interesting question how I do that. But the fact remains that there are people who are like that, people who are, as we might say, go against the grain in the way that they're natured. And it's a simple matter, I think, of justice and fairness and also compassion to accommodate people who have that nature, to recognize that they exist, to recognize there's nothing wrong with us any more than there's anything wrong with being gay or left handed or whatever you like, and to make social space for us in the society.

Now, in a society with no gender, perhaps our social space has already been made automatically. In a society that has gender, then you can use gender to express the fact that you are transgendered or transsexual in that way. But what's needed from other people is simply recognition that this is how some people are. And there's nothing remotely, actually, there's nothing unusual about it. And we are a small but persistent minority. In all societies that are known to me, there's something like this at least bubbling under the surface. And we're a small, persistent minority, and it's not hard to accommodate us.

We're not, as some have said, a huge problem in a sane world. We're just part of the way the world is. And when society is at its best, society has usually managed to accommodate that fact. So, yeah, I mean, that would be my starting point, I think, some very simple facts about the way human beings are.

6:54 Dylan: And one thing that struck me in reading your article in your book was Mark called it pragmatism. And you were agreeing with that, Sophie?

7:02 Sophie: More or less, yeah.

7:03 Dylan: Okay, more or less. You explained it a little more with a little more detail. You made me think about the notion that the world is just more complicated, even or more dynamic, isn't the word it's more rich than the typical modes that most appear in it. And gender or sex differences would be an example of that. And you see this, you know, if you're a scientist and you go look in biology, right, you find very quickly that the notion that there are only two genders, that there's male and female, actually isn't true naturally in the natural world. There's all kinds of examples. And even in species that have bimodal distributions, even amongst physical presentations, there are always exceptions. Yeah.

7:50 Sophie: And the chromosomal foundation, where there is a sex binary, the chromosomal foundation is very widely different across different species. It's not in all species a matter of XX and xy. It's all sorts of things.

8:03 Dylan: No, ants are a great example where that's not true. But the pragmatism, I think, where you were talking, I was most keyed in on this kind of bodily essentialism, I'll call it maybe that you might not quite agree with that, but the way in which you were seeing body as the foundation, to me, opened up the notion that people might say, well, that essentialism means that, oh, you would have distinct male and female. You would say, you don't want to give up essentialism in terms of bodiness, but you would give up strictly the binary modes or even the primary modes. And you start talking about, would it be all the way out to each individual, or is it a kind of essentialism that there would be just multimodal but a finite number compared to the species?

8:52 Sophie: That's a question about gender, it seems to me, and how a society organizes is thinking about gender. There are a lot of isms flying around now. I'll just deal very quickly with a couple of them. So essentialism is often taken to be a bad thing, particularly in feminist theory and in continental philosophy. And sometimes it is a bad thing, I think, because what can happen is that the conception of the species norm can be used to tyrannize people who deviate from that norm. And that certainly happens with trans people. It has happened historically with sexual orientation.

It's happened with lots of things. So I'm an essentialist, if you like, in the sense that I believe. Well, I certainly believe it's true. The human beings are essentially embodied creatures. One ism that gets thrown at trans people and trans advocates is that we're supposed to be dualists and we're supposed not to care about the body. That's not true at all. I can't speak for all trans theorists, but that's certainly not my account. To me, the body matters enormously. My body is who I am. My body is what I am. But it's part of being the me I am in this body.

In this body or as this body. It's part of being that me that I am. I think a simple way of putting is to say crosswired. Some people are crosswired, and I'm one of them. So that's essentialism on pragmatism. Well, I'm interested that I'm being compared to Rorty here. Because in many ways, I'm about as far from Rorty as one could guess. I mean, I'm an objectivist about truth. I'm absolutely not a relativist. So I'm not a pragmatist in the Dewey, James Rorty kind of sense. I'm more like a Platonist, actually. I'm definitely an absolutist about truth.

But what I do think is useful. I mean, there's lots of useful things in a pragmatic framework, in a pragmatist framework. And one of them is this. The thoughts, which a lot of philosophers have pursued and played with. The thought that it's not just given that we have conceptual repertoire. We do. And we might seek to alter that conceptual repertoire. We might seek to introduce new concepts. And we might seek to retire other concepts from our conceptual repertoire. This is sometimes called conceptual engineering. It's a very old idea. It's endemic to the feminist project that they want to change the way we think about what it is to be a man or a woman.

It's endemic to that project. They want to introduce new concepts like. Well, I mean, the concept of sexual harassment actually is a surprisingly recent one. And when you look at the 19th century, there's that famous picture, one of my favorite American pictures. Of the young lady on the train in America. With a man leaning over from her from behind. And she's minding her own business. She's looking at her hands and she's clearly wishing that he would go away. Everyone else in the carriage is just letting this happen. That picture might itself be an instance of conceptual engineering.

Because it might be a picture that began to teach people the concept of sexual harassment. Which we're very keen on now. And quite rightly, it's a very important concept. But to her, that concept, to the lady in that picture and to the man in that picture. The concept of sexual harassment was, I think, not there at all. Or if it was, it was quite different from what we've got the idea that a solitary woman would not expect to have men approach her and bother her, that idea was just missing in that society. Unfortunately, it's not missing in ours.

Fortunately, we have that concept and a good thing too. The concept of rape is actually another, perhaps more distressing example of the same thing. I mean, the concept of rape has now been moved away from a conception that once held disastrously, which included the thought which judges and jurists was regularly reinforced, the thought that there was no such thing as marital rape and now there is such a thing as marital rape. Our concepts have changed, and a good thing too. But you see, I'm unlike Rorty in saying that that's not just a relative change.

I think that's moral progress. I think it's good we have a conception of marital rape and disastrous if we don't. And likewise with sexual harassment. So we can change our concepts, we can change the way we think about genders. And famously, there are societies where, you know, some Native American societies have this idea that some people are, what's the word? They're spirit, gender, they're a third gender. They don't fit the normal male, female, divide. And there's lots of changes that we can make to our conceptual repertoire. And it's a pragmatist idea that you can fix your concepts in that kind of way.

But I'm not going with the relativism that often happens here.

13:32 Seth: Sure, yeah. That particular part of your book resonated very distinctly with me and I'm sure with the rest of us, because we've had that conversation numerous times, particularly around science, like how do scientific conceptual schemes evolve? And so the notion of progressive, if you will, against let's call it an objective standard, if not a transcendent standard, is, I think, unobjectionable, at least. At least amongst this crowd.

13:59 Sophie: Let me dig out a little bit more, just to put the cat among the pigeons. The kind of objectivism that I'm into. I'm a bit like Nussbaum. I'm a sort of neo Aristotelian ish kind of thinker. I think that humans by nature have probably an indefinite array of basic capacities, but some of them are very obvious and very clear in trans societal studies. So moral progress means enabling each and every member of the human community to have equal and maximal access to as much capacity, fulfilling potential as any other. That's what moral progress is. An oppression is the opposite of that.

It's when only a few people are allowed to exercise their powers, or as is actually much More probable when everybody is denied the opportunity to exercise their full powers. Because, as the slogan goes, if any of us is unfree, then all of us are unfree. I think there's a deep truth buried there. I'm waving the banner for moral objectivism today. I'm very happy to do that.

14:59 Mark: Sure, I don't want us to get caught up on defending Rorty or anything like that, but he was very explicitly for not characterizing it as objectivism. But the idea of moral progress. It's just that we don't need to refer to a transcendent standard. Is not helpful. To have the idea of something that we're shooting for that we can't actually imagine. Some ideal that it's much better to just say, to affirm with. He picked up Mill, in particular, the idea of a plurality. Romantic polytheism, he calls it. In this book that we read that of there are many different. Sort of like the move from Aristotelian virtue ethics to Nietzschean virtue ethics. You know, become who you are. And that might not be the same thing for every single person. And so, you know, promoting democracy and things means giving individuals ways to flourish in ways that make sense to them.

15:48 Sophie: Absolutely. I'm right on board for all of that. I think sometimes, you know, the thing that Rorty is against, the Platonism, that Rorty doesn't believe in is a Platonism I don't believe in either. And yet I'm a Platonist. I'd say, so I'm a trans liberationist because I'm an everyone liberationist. Everyone should have the same chances life to fulfill their nature and to be who they are, including trans people. And so if there's a transcendent absolute here, for me, it's. It's human nature. It's what we are and what we can be.

16:19 Seth: So Mark mentioned, you know, you referenced Wittgenstein a couple of times. You also talk about Nagel. I really enjoyed that section because I just love that essay. But ultimately, of the group here, I'm the continental guy, if you want. And, you know, there's a distinctly phenomenological way of taking what you're talking about. I mean, think Heideggerian, but also very much Merleau-Ponty, where, you know, we could recast essentialism as just straight up phenomenological inquiry and taking it from the respect of your particular experience. And I wanted to just return to that for a second.

Because your book is. You make a point of saying this is autobiographical, but it's not autobiographical in the sense of being so much a narrative of like, chronological narrative, as it is sort of an experiential narrative in some respects. And I just wanted to get back to that notion of if somebody said, what is it like to have the raw experience of recognition that your embodiment is not comfortable, not the same as other people's, what is the purer way of that you would describe what that experience was like for you, at least when you, you know, when you were grappling with it as a, as a young child.

17:39 Sophie: It doesn't really change. And it's an interesting question. What happens to people who go much further than I have gone in the direction of bodily modification? What happens to them and hormonal modification? What happens to their subjective experience and how it alters for them? The basic situation that you find yourself in is one where a lot of things about you, about your being in the world, about your bodily being in the world, about the way you are and the way you look and the way you move and the way you feel, they do feel wrong. Some people oppose the idea of talking about the trans experience as being, as being one, of finding that you're in the wrong body.

But to me, that talk has always resonated. And to me, the way to fix that, as far as you can, has usually been a matter of altering the way I present, altering the way I see myself, altering the way other people see me. So, yeah, I mean, it's called dysphoria for a good reason. For the reason that you find yourself on the wrong side of a bodily division or a bodily distinction that it's uncomfortable to be on the wrong side of. And the story for a lot of trans people, especially those who don't go in for large scale bodily modification, the story for a lot of trans people is the story of trying to find a way of living without so that it's comfortable and so that you don't hate yourself for not being the way you want to be and so that you don't destroy yourself for not being the way you want to be.

And I think I don't want to go big on pity or self pity, but I think being transgender is uncomfortable for those reasons. And I think that when people find that they need to do something drastic to alter that situation, I think those who are, who are not sharing in this kind of experience sometimes need to take more of an effort to understand what it might be that would drive someone to go to the extremes that some trans people do go to. And I think that's A question that very often just isn't getting asked. I mean, I don't want to talk very much about the haters.

And I use that word advisedly. Hate. This is what a lot of them are. But there are people out there who seem at one and the same time to say a trans is just a fad. It's just some kind of whim that people indulge in. And also B, these trans people do these terrible things to their own bodies. And so the word that's often used here is mutilation. Now, there's an obvious disconnect between that A and that B. And one of the things that I would like trans unsympathetic people in general to think about harder is just the question. Well, actually, if B, then it can't be A, and if A, then how come it's B?

I mean, people don't modify their bodies just on whims. And if people feel the need to do something as serious as that, then, you know, the trans unsympathetic person would be thinking, well, hold on a minute. Maybe I've got this wrong. Maybe it's not just a whim. That's one way in, I think, to think about for those who are trans unacquainted, who just don't know much about it, or those who are trans unsympathetic, maybe because they've heard scare stories or whatever. For those people, I think a useful way in is to ask what kind of a depth of feeling, of a sense of wrongness could it be that would lead me to do such drastic things to myself?

So what is it like for them? And what is it that makes them feel this seriously about?

21:23 Seth: I mean, what became clear to me in reading your account was the feeling that would drive somebody to do that is not the feeling of wrongful embodiment, which is sort of the more phenomenological, if you will experience, the more direct experience. But instead it's the social judgment about that feeling. Because you said there was no embarrassment, there was no shame until other people made me feel that way. You didn't have an inherent reaction of shame or embarrassment to this sense of wrongful embodiment. It wasn't until people told you that it was wrong. So in other words, there's kind of two stages here, two different levels. And maybe that's the transition from, you know, sex to gender or body to social construct or something like that.

22:10 Sophie: But I think it can go like that. I think with me it would have become natural for me, even if there'd been nobody imposing normal rules of gender conformity upon me, I think there would have come a time when the wrongness of my body did become more of a problem for me. I mean, in fact, there was such a time, and it was adolescence, familiarly enough, when people find that their bodies change in ways which for them in any case, can be distressing. I mean, it's not unusual for people to feel some kind of disconnect and unhappiness with their body when they reach adolescence, whether they're CIS or trans.

That can still happen. But I think for trans people, it's particularly acute and particularly distressing when you see yourself. I mean, a small child is, in appearance is quite easy when you're a small child to believe that you're the other gender. It's much harder when you get past puberty to believe that. And that, I think, is why the distress that this causes. Distress which comes from yourself, not just from others, though others, of course, often reinforce it. That's why that distress becomes more real for a lot of people around puberty.

23:19 Dylan: This way of talking about things and what your exchange with Seth reminded me of a comment that you made. I think it's in the essay that I read, but might also be in the book.

23:30 Mark: This is trans without the gender. I had referred folks to that one.

23:34 Dylan: And you are responding in part to another person. Rich Roland or Rick Rowland?

23:39 Sophie: Rach Cosker-Rowland, Yeah.

23:41 Dylan: Okay. You reject the notion of fit and the idea of fitting. And I wanted to hear more about that because this notion of being uncomfortable in a situation, or even whether it be bodily uncomfortable or just something, is not quite right to me. Both the language of fit and the experience of fit, whether it be bodily or all kinds of other things. I mean, fit to me is a really apt term for the way in which we navigate to solve all kinds of problems. We detect difference and distinction. And also not just that we detect that distinction that we want to turn away from, but we also detect that distinction that we want to move toward. And so I wanted to hear more about why you would reject fit. Because the language that you're using seems to me to really fit with that.

24:36 Mark: Can we just make sure that we understand? So I think the idea of fit here. Right. Is just, does the gender fit what you feel? Right. Well, you're assigned gender, right?

24:45 Dylan: Yeah. And also it would go towards when it feels right. That's the other thing is in particular, not just that you feel uncomfortable in your body, but also that there is that experience of this feels right.

25:00 Sophie: I was Responding in Trans without the Gender. I first gave that paper as a contribution to a work in progress seminar on Rachel Costco Rowland's gender identity. What it is and what it Matters, which I think I'm right in saying is a book that's now come out. So it's certainly a book that's forthcoming soon. So there's a sense in which I'm accepting the notion of fit, but also a sense in which I'm rejecting it. And the sense in which I'm accepting it is just this intuitive idea. I mean, what fit naturally means. And I agree with you that, Dylan, but when we're talking about the intuitive sense of fittingness, then that actually captures quite well what a lot of trans people feel.

I mean, I've read reports of friends who have been on hormones for a while, feminizing hormones or masculinizing hormones for a while. And what people who undergo hormone treatment repeatedly say is, this fits. I never felt this right before this, this makes me feel how I ought to be. This makes me. So it's, it's not just the hormones have an effect on the bodily appearance. It's also that someone who's a trans woman, let's say when they encounter feminizing hormones for the first time, their experience very often is, hey, this fits. This is me, this is who I am.

So that intuitive sense of fit I'm very happy with. The difference between me and Rowland goes more into things I say elsewhere in the book about theory. So Rach thinks she can advance the theory of gender identity and the notion of fittingness that she's using. There is one which has had a lot of currency, including in her own previous work, it's had a lot of currency in metaethics. So the idea is that there's a primitive normative notion of fittingness. And fittingness is what responses are when we have emotional responses to a situation or when we say, oh, that was a terrible thing to do, that's a response.

And the good responses are fitting and the bad responses are unfitting. And broadly speaking, the idea is that you can found an entire metaethics, an entire theory of what ethical, first order ethical statements mean upon the notion of fittingness.

27:22 Mark: So there's an article, Is that John Balguy? Is that which, which British moralist do you remember? Is this from.

27:28 Sophie: Yes, yes, I think there is something from him there. More recently, there's an article in the Philosophical Quarterly by Richard Yetter Chappell, my namesake, although in many ways he and I are not on the Same philosophical page at all. So he has an article in the PQ called Fittingness, the sole normative primitive. And that exemplifies two things that I completely disagree with. The first is the idea that there's any such thing as the single normative primitive. I think normativity is complicated and I don't believe there can be a reductive theory of it.

And if there could, I very much doubt the fittingness would be the thing to reduce it to. So this was more the kind of thing that I was backing away from in my conversation with Rach Cosker-Rowland. It was more the idea Rachel, Rachel is more sympathetic to than I am. That you can do reductive metaethical theory and that fittingness is a key part of the story when you do. I'm a kind of theoretical anarchist. I'm an anti systematician in metaethics and in ethics. I think that things are basically fairly messy and I think messy is a good way for them to be.

I'm not impressed with projects to tidy things up. And so if I was digging my heels in to any sense of fittingness in Rachel Costco Rowland's account, I think it's probably that, that kind of tidying up of things so that everything fits into fittingness. I don't, I don't think fittingness can fit everything.

28:57 Mark: We covered some moral intuitionism long ago. I see it's John Balguy and Samuel Clarke might have been anyway, these British moralists that were trying to get. And I was looking actually at your article earlier today, Ethics Beyond Moral Theory. And this is what made me think that you were some kind of pragmatist related to that. Just the, the idea that we can acknowledge, you know, as you said at the beginning here, through compassion. And I think it's entirely appropriate that even though this is a philosophy book transfigured, you have so much biography in it because in fact this is exactly what Richard Rorty recommends, right?

If you want to convince a Nazi not to be a Nazi, make him read the Diary of Anne Frank, right? Make him connect phenomenologically with these experiences of the other and then they don't become other. And you realize, okay, let me try to make my moral views consistent. I think that people should have dignity and I should extend it to this group that I didn't think belong there. But you don't need a moral theory for that. I've told this story before on the podcast when I first entered college. And they're giving us an orientation thing to try to make us get along.

And they're saying this is 1989. So things were not quite so far along as they are now in terms of tolerance for homosexuality. And I came in as budding philosopher and actually asked the question in the group. I just don't understand sort of from a teleological point of view, you know, why there would be same sex attraction. Right. It just, it doesn't seem to make sense. You know, you can see the function of the man and woman to create children. You can see evolutionarily why that would work out. That's such a wrong headed view. But it sort of comes from this Thomas Aquinas natural law sort of thing.

And if we've cut that off as far as homosexuality, people are just, you know, the answer that I was given at the time is it's a factor. Right. It doesn't matter what the scientific origins are. If you want to go study that, that's great. But I think that maybe when philosophers approach the issue of trans, they're wanting to explore, like if I don't understand why it happens where it comes from, then I don't know where to come down.

31:04 Sophie: Right.

31:05 Mark: A lot of people have cancer or other things, but clearly we recognize that as pathological. Right. It leads to discomfort, it leads to death. Is that one of the things that you're pushing against in a book like this is you're trying to. You say explicitly, like, is it the genetic fallacy? I guess. Right. We don't have to know and we. So we don't actually care for moral purposes why this happens psychologically.

31:27 Sophie: Yeah, I mean, all sorts of things happen in society, happen in the social reality that we have for which there is no evolutionary explanation of any direct sort. Because one of the things about the process of the evolution, development, appearance, emergence of the human species is that we evolve to be a species in which culture could be a determining factor and in which our own subjective psychology could be a determining factor for how things turn out in us and in the next generation and in all future generations of our society. So we have evolved to be a species that goes beyond evolution in lots of ways.

So evolution might predict, perhaps it might predict the existence of something like music in human beings, but it wouldn't predict the B minor mass or the Chopin nocturnes. It wouldn't predict that much because that is a result of forces which are beyond evolution. So there's a great deal about humanity, about us, that is like that. And actually I think there's quite a lot about other species too. And we're getting increasingly aware of that. How other species too develop and diverge in ways that evolution can only predict in principle, can only predict in the most broad brush way.

So humans are complex, and it would be a strange thing to say that the only kind of complexities that are permissible are those that pass the test of having an evolutionary explanation. Why should that be true? Why on earth should that be true? And yet that thought turns up in some bizarre context, particularly bizarre when it turns up alongside creationism or something close to it, particularly bizarre when it turns up within a new natural law framework where people who are perfectly happy with the existence of monks and nuns and vows of celibacy and eunuchs in the Bible and so on and so forth.

And also, of course, multi polyamorists like King David and King Solomon, these people at the same time are saying that nature itself tells us that the only licit sex relations are those between the man and a woman within a lifelong marriage. This is just, I think, a bizarre way to go in thinking about human beings. If you want to say that that's the only way in which people can possibly be fulfilled, that might be more hopeful and more in line with what I want to say. But you have to root, I think what you want to say about ethics, you have to root it not in evolution, not evolutionary theory, not, not in moral theory, but in experience.

And that's what I tried to do. I've written three books in three years now, and two of them are kind of applications of the first. So there's Transfigured, which applies my general ideas to the case of transgender and this friendship. The philosopher looks at friendship, which is an application of the same general ideas to the case of friendship. And behind them both is a book called Epiphanies. And the whole point of Epiphanies is that the starting point for ethics is our experience, our ethical experience. It's not ethical theory. And one of the most basic impulses behind that is again, a liberationist impulse.

It's my view that moral theory can itself become a form of oppression whereby we rope ourselves in to all kinds of stricture that don't have any basis in reality and don't have any basis in. In humanity or experience. And I would say that a lot of the things that the new natural law people tend to say about people being gay or about people being trans are strictures of just that sort. And I think we need to be liberated from them.

35:06 Mark: Just what the role of philosophy is in this. It seems like in some Ways it's to get out of the way, Right, that you talk in your book about gender ideology, right? This is when critics of transgender will say, oh, you're coming at us with your gender ideology. And you're saying, I don't have a gender ideology. I don't even have a theory of gender. And a theory is not necessary for you to do this basic ethical work of accepting people as they are and as they want to be. But there's still a role, and this. Maybe it's a Wittgenstinian role in terms of clarifying concepts, understanding that there can be cluster concepts.

Even biological sex is a cluster concept of several things. So we can evaluate any given concept and see to what extent is it socially constructed and what does social construction mean? Just because it is, as you point out in your book, you know, being convicted of a crime, that's a social construction, but it has very real results. Like, the fact that it's socially constructive doesn't mean it's fictive in any way. But if something is socially constructive, you point at, concepts have histories. And so the fact that gender was taken as a binary thing for so long does not rule out.

So it is worth getting behind a political movement to evolve the term to give honorary status. So if you want to, you know, be female, maybe by default, people thought you have to be born with certain sex organs. But you use this comparison to adoption, or another comparison is to the fact that you are a trans Scottish person, that you were. You were born in England, but you moved to Scotland, you identify as Scottish, and some of the same sort of dynamics play there. That would be very obnoxious in the case of adoption to say, oh, you're not a real parent, you're just an adoptive parent.

But at the same time, you can acknowledge the facts. If you're going to say, tell us about the medical history of your parents and the adoptive child is not going to think it's relevant or should not think it's relevant. I'm going to honor my adoptive parents by giving their medical. No, that just would not be relevant to that. So, again, it's sort of pragmatic. What is the purpose for most social purposes, you don't need to know even what sex organs people actually have, et cetera.

37:17 Sophie: Yeah, that's right. And so you mentioned Wittgenstein, and I'm perfectly happy with that. I'm very happy to be thought of as a Wittgensteinian philosopher, and in many ways I am. I have things that not in common with. With Wittgenstein. And again, the fact that I'm a moral realist and something of an Aristotelian is very Wittgensteinian, I guess. But there's a lot I take from Wittgenstein and also a lot I take from Nietzsche. I mean, I'm even further from Nietzsche on the whole than I am from Wittgenstein. But what I think Nietzsche shows us how to do, and I think is crucial work, is genealogy, the genealogy of concepts.

And when we understand where our concepts are coming from, that puts us in a better position to understand that the way our concepts are set up is not inevitable, is not the only way our concepts could possibly be. And that's why in Transfigured, I try and turn the guns right around when I'm accused of having a trans ideology. I want to turn the guns right around and point them at the people who are leveling this accusation, because they're the ones who are saying that there's only one way our gender concepts can be, that there's only one way that we can think about trans people.

We have to think of them as exceptions or weirdos or sick in some way or delusional or outside the mainstream of society. Definitely not normal. We don't have to think of them that way at all. And the concepts that say that we have to are themselves an ideology in Marx's sense, in the bad sense, in the sense of a system of ideas which is used to oppress. And here, too, I want to use something like Nietzschean genealogy for the same kind of purposes as Nietzsche professes to be following, namely the purposes of human liberation. Except that, unlike Nietzsche, I'm a realist and egalitarian, and I think liberation is for everybody, not just for the Napoleons amongst us.

39:10 Seth: You brought up this notion, Mark, just a second ago, of the cluster definition

39:16 Mark: of both sex and gender have.

39:18 Seth: Yeah, that was the question. Sophie, how would you. This is the, I guess, part of one of the most obviously straightforward philosophical sections of the book where you say, you know, okay, well, let's talk about what it would mean to say that you're female. Well, you actually make the distinction between, what is it? Femininity and.

39:38 Sophie: And femaleness.

39:39 Seth: Yeah, and femaleness. Yeah. But you kind of say, okay, well, here's seven different things you might mean, but none of them seems to be sufficient. There could be multiple ways in which you want to tell us a little bit about that?

39:53 Sophie: Yeah, sure. So I talk about feminine, female, woman, female. In this section of memoir, it's section 118. And I distinguish eight things, eight criteria which you might use to capture the concept woman. And they are being assigned female at birth, having XX chromosomes, having a female phenotype and anatomy, playing a characteristically female reproductive role, having an endocrine system full of female hormones, being routinely identified and accepted by others as female, being socialised as female and considering oneself female. So that's eight different criteria.

And there might be others. Now, for most people, most of the time, those line up giving us a large set of cases where it's unproblematic that someone is female and a woman. But there are cases where these criteria come apart. And when they do come apart, interestingly, the people who call themselves gender critical, they change their tune on this because as far as I can see, because they used to say, yes, of course, female is a cluster concept. And now a lot of them, particularly in the row over Imane Khelif, for example, have been insisting solely on a chromosomatic criterion of sexual.

They said various things, but they come pretty close to saying that Imane Khelif must be a man because she has XY chromosomes. And there's been a lot of, I think, extremely unseemly, cruel and nasty abuse of Imane Khelif on those grounds. But it's obvious that there are cases where these criteria can come apart and it begins to look more like a matter of majority voting whether someone counts as a female by these criteria or male by a corresponding set of criteria. So actually, when someone asks you, as people often do in that aggressive button holding way of theirs, how do you define a woman?

It's a standard question on Twitter, I gather. I'm not on Twitter anymore. Well, the answer to that, I think, is to say adult human female, if you like. That's broadly correct. There might be problems about the human bit of that, because after all, there might be Mars women, and if there are Mars women, then they're adult females, but they're not humans. But broadly speaking, adult human female is going to be about that. You know, before the trans exclusionaries rush off punching the air and proclaiming victory, I have a follow up question. And the follow up question is, and how do you define female?

What do you mean by female? And I think a good answer to that is given by saying it's a cluster concept. And here are the eight, maybe more, maybe fewer. Here are the eight criteria that determine whether someone fits that. But now, as soon as we admit that being female is that messy, just in humans, as we said before, in other species, you've got different chromosomatic basis. So the story is different again, just in humans, being female is not actually a very tidy category. Nor is being male. Of course, the case is where these eight criteria come apart are unusual.

Sure they are. Sure they are. But the original claim was supposed to be that it's absolutely cut and dried. It's completely black and white. There's no gray about it. There's all sorts of gray about it. And one consequence of taking a cluster concept, as I remark in the book in that section, is that as time, it actually becomes a scientific question whether it's possible to alter someone's body so that they come to fit more of these criteria than they did before. And then it becomes a scientific question, an open scientific question, an empirical question, whether it's possible for you to change the sex that you were assigned at birth.

And with enough scientific progress, even a hardcore trans exclusionary person ought to be admitting that you can change the sex you were assigned at birth because you can get a different bodily phenotype, you can certainly get different hormones, maybe you can even get different chromosomes. Who knows? And if you can, then you've changed. You might have changed in every one of these eight ways. And then the trans exclusionary should drop their slogan, which they're always insisting on repeating, that you cannot change the sex you were assigned at birth.

Well, it looks like you can, actually. It looks like that's at least in principle possible. And so maybe a little less dogmatism might be warranted here.

44:10 Seth: So I don't want to put you on the spot about feminism, but the section where you talk sort of, you talked about just in the same way that you don't want to talk about gender ideology, you don't want to talk about trans exclusionary feminism. It brought to mind reading bell hooks, you know, that feminism really hasn't ever included black women either. You know, it's not. It hasn't been particularly inclusionary. But I'm just curious, without going into great detail, what's the landscape look like right now for current state feminism with respect to trans women? Because it sounds like you, you know, are saying that there are either multiple camps or is there?

44:54 Sophie: I think the future is very bright, actually. I think that there is an increasingly old and actually exceptional cadre or cohort of trans exclusionary people. They're getting older, and the younger generation is not renewing that group. The younger generation, by and large, is overwhelmingly and in the feminist movement is overwhelmingly trans positive and trans inclusionary. And the trouble at the moment, certainly in the uk. We have a real problem with this in the UK and I think to some extent in the us. The problem at the moment is that the commanding heights of the media are controlled in a way which is utterly unrepresentative of what's actually out there.

They're controlled by the transphobes. They really are. And so if you look at the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express, the sun, the Spectator in the uk, even at times, the Guardian, supposed to be repository of liberal values. If you look at all those papers, routine, incessant, ad nauseam, transphobia is what you're fed by all those outlets. And I just have to avoid those papers because I find it so disheartening and so irritating. But actually, that doesn't represent what's really out there. And, you know, one of these days the dam is going to crack.

I'm looking forward to that.

46:11 Seth: Yeah, I live in Texas. Me too.

46:13 Sophie: Yeah. You have my heartfelt sympathies, but I gather it's a much more nuanced picture than it appears, you know, when you just paint Texas red on the map. I gather there's a great deal more nuanced than that.

46:26 Seth: Yeah. At least in Austin, where I live. Yeah.

46:28 Sophie: Yeah.

46:29 Mark: So I really like the term hermeneutic justice that you bring up in here. That, as you were describing with harassment, if there isn't a word for something. So this sort of goes hand in hand with the hetero phenomenology. You know, you want to understand the lives of other people, you read literature, you read whatever firsthand accounts. And this evolution of concepts, one of the parts I like most in this book, I thought these two analogies of transitioning between nationalities, which we'll go to more on our second half after you depart and the adoptive parents one are really helpful.

Two extreme stances strike me as overdone and unreasonable. One is for the adoptive parents to insist that all biological parents always call themselves bio parents. So comparable to. You must call yourself cisgendered. You can't just say, or a CIS male. The other is for bio parents to take offense at ever being called bio parents. Yet apparently both these stances are actually taken in discussions of CIS and trans. What I want to say is maybe we should all calm down a bit. So the fact that the trans activists seem very focused on language on that hermeneutic justice is that if you are not calling me a woman or a man or whatever the case, then you are doing me some injustice as opposed to the Wittgensteinian take on concept, which is if there's a cluster concept, we should expect that there'll be things that are just not clearly one or the other.

And so what term you use is going to depend on the social context. Blah, blah, blah. And exactly those points made. Yeah. So to what extent is this all about language? Right. Use it. It seems like you are not. You must use the right language. But that's kind of the way that both sides have been approaching this. Even though that's a stand in for some sort of moral judgment, I'm not

48:11 Sophie: convinced it's all about language. I think it goes deeper than that. I think what it often is is about benevolence and malevolence. I think a lot of the time language is used, especially in social media cesspits like Twitter, Language is used to wound and to hurt people. And I think responses to that kind of aggression, which do focus on the language, are both understandable and necessary. I mean, when someone calls me a trans identified male, for example, that's a deliberate piece of verbal hurtfulness. That's a deliberately insulting term. So trans identified male is saying first, that I can't be a woman because I was born a man, and it's saying second that I am only trans identified.

There's a movement afoot, you may have noticed it, as it's sometimes put on social media to say that trans is not a thing. There's a movement afoot to deny that transgender even exists. And this is deliberate use of language and terminology and memes and dog whistles and buzz terms to hurt, offend and exclude. So sometimes language can be very important indeed. But at other times, yes, we should just calm down. Other times, yes, we should not be too bothered by it because actually it is small change, but it's a matter of discernment which of those applies.

49:36 Mark: Well, thank you so much for your time. I really just appreciated talking to you and love, love reading your book.

49:40 Sophie: That was great fun. Yeah.

49:42 Seth: It's been like a year and a half in the making. You finally made it happen, so that's good.

49:46 Sophie: Yeah. I'm sorry I was so elusive so long.

49:49 Seth: You were.

49:49 Dylan: Well, Mark is relentless, so.

49:52 Sophie: Yeah, just as well. Thank you very much.

49:55 Seth: All right, have a great rest of great day.

49:57 Dylan: Byebye.

49:57 Seth: Bye. Bye.

49:58 Sophie: Bye.