A comienzos de 2017 Rebecca Tuvel publicó un texto intitulado In Defense of Transracialism; este texto defendía que las razones que tenemos para aceptar la transgeneridad/transexualidad deberían, llevarnos a aceptar a la transrracialidad como posibilidad dado que tanto la ontología del género como la de la raza compartían dos elementos fundamentales: la autoidentificación y el etiquetamiento por parte de terceros. En el presente trabajo se cuestiona la validez de esta extrapolación al señalar que ésta conduce a análisis metafísicos y políticos (...) que ignoran tanto la historicidad como la materialidad que caracterizan a las diversas categorías así homologadas. De allí que aquí se cuestione críticamente cierta tendencia que ha igualado diversas ontologías sociales, por un lado, mientras que, por otro, se enfatizan otros abordajes metafísicos que no incurren en estas problemáticas. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecently an acrimonious debate has emerged about transgenderism. Trans-activists defending the full spectrum of the latter have advocated a form of identity politics based upon individual self-definition. However, gender-critical feminists have disputed the legitimacy of these bids for self-determination, especially when considering men who are claiming to be women. These contrasting positions are examined and their political implications explored. The focus of the paper is on the intransitive aspects of sex and the transitive aspects of gender. The former, with (...) rare exceptions, is a binary whereas the latter is open to social negotiation and variation. The article argues that the gender-critical position is broadly aligned with critical realist philosophy, though the counter view is represented in order to clarify this point of reflection. It ends with a discussion of the ‘trans debate’ and the public policy development emerging in its wake. (shrink)

This article explores the metaphorical models English speakers employ in their understanding of transgenderism. Transgender is the term ascribed to those who have begun or completed a change in their sex characteristics from male to female or female to male. Using both qualitative and quantitative measures, I examine an archive of narrative data and a transition-specific corpus to show how spoken and written narrative support a spatially based representation of gender identity and transition. Two robust models are revealed in (...) the data, each carrying a set of suppositions consequential to how speakers understand their lived experience. I show how metaphor-evoking trigger lexemes relate to each model and can be used jointly to demonstrate conceptual salience. This investigation should be seen as part of an ever-growing body of research directed at revealing the unconscious assumptions, which organize speakers’ comprehension of complex topics with political relevance (cf. Charteris-Black, 2004; Lakoff, 2002,.. (shrink)

"I have the worst birth defect a woman can have: I was born with a penis and a pair of testicles." Thus we meet Hera, who shares her reason for starting psychoanalysis and whose statement embodies the debate over transgenderism, rigorously dissected in _Please Select Your Gender_. Is it a mental disorder, as some would claim, or a matter of sexual identity? An orientation or a life choice? Despite differing opinions, transgenderism has lost much of its stigma over (...) the past decade or so – though perhaps none of its shock value. Nevertheless, the door is open for a reformulation of the hysterical question, "Am I a man or a woman?" Utilizing rich clinical vignettes and elements of Lacanian theory, Patricia Gherovici demonstrates how the transgender discourse has both reoriented psychoanalytic practice and reframed debates about gender in American society at large. She traverses historical, theoretical, and clinical grounds to explore what has been termed the "democratizing of gender" – for what could be more democratic than the choice of one’s own gender, now able to be changed on demand? Arguing for the depathologization of transgenderism, _Please Select Your Gender_ aims to revise current notions of human sexuality in general. In doing so, it challenges the theory and practice of psychoanalysis with questions typically addressed only indirectly, but which are themselves transforming how analysis is done, advancing new ideas for the clinic that can be extrapolated to social and intellectual contexts in an effort to engage the broader dialogues of gender and sexuality. (shrink)

My goal in this short paper is to introduce a dilemma regarding the pronouns ‘ she ’, ‘ he ’, and their various declensions. This dilemma arises from the practice, common in the English speaking world and especially the USA, of letting people choose their own pronouns. And as will become apparent at the end of this paper, I want to suggest that this dilemma might be unique to the English language.

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support (...) class='Hi'>transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

[NOTE: I now disavow this essay, which was too accommodating of trans ideology.] Surprisingly, it follows from commonplaces about sex and gender that there is a widely-practiced variety of transgenderism achievable through sex/gender “exaggerating.” Recognizing exaggeration as trans---or at least its moral equivalent---has several important consequences. One is that, since most traditional cultures endorse exaggeration, trans lifestyles have often been mainstream. But more importantly, recognizing that gender exaggeration is trans (or its moral equivalent) reveals a number of sex- and (...) gender-discriminatory practices and intolerant attitudes: from pathologizing hypergender to legally restricting androgenic hormones, many people who consider themselves trans allies are less consistent in their support of transgender lifestyles than they realize. Thus, seeing exaggerators as trans not only follows from a better grasp of transgenderism, but also reveals new arguments in favor of greater gender freedom against gender-policing by both conservatives and progressives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJason Summersell responded to my article – ‘Reclaiming reality and redefining realism: the challenging case of transgenderism’ – by suggesting that I have made an inferential error about ontology. In this paper, I refute his objection and argue that his position does not take seriously the unresolved public policy threat posed by the commercially-inflected and politicized world of trans ideology. The realpolitik of trans-activism contains legal and illegal processes that now suppress a necessary debate about a number of matters: (...) from common sense notions of sex and the findings of biological science; to the rights of women and children. (shrink)

Completely updated and revised, the third edition of Catholic Health Care Ethics: A Manual for Practitioners sets the standard for Catholic bioethicists, physicians, nurses, and other health care workers. In thirty-nine chapters (many with subchapters), leading authors in their fields discuss a wide range of topics relevant to medicine and health care. The book has six parts covering foundational principles, health care ethics services, beginning-of-life issues, end-of-life issues, selected clinical issues, and institutional issues. Some highlights from the third edition include (...) new entries on the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, certitude in moral decision-making, the principle of double effect, clinical ethics consultation, natural family planning, prenatal testing and diagnosis, care of fetal remains, challenges to neurological criteria, the use of ventilators, POLST, alkaline hydrolysis, opportunistic salpingectomy, so-called lethal prenatal diagnoses, transgenderism, and new age medicine. The volume continues to provide insightful information on the topics previously covered in the second edition, but with significant updates throughout. (shrink)

On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán’s move was itself a kind of (...) assignation, an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation. -/- Drawing on Derrida’s motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán’s law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán’s placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida’s. (shrink)

A combination of uncritical interpretations of Greek art maintained since antiquity, together with Heidegger’s failed attempt to connect Being with Dasein through the Greeks, has misled the feminist agenda into dismissing both Heidegger and the Greeks. The bad blood left by Irigaray has revitalized scholarship which wants to know why the world-disclosive nullity of Being cannot be primordially transgenderous in essence prior to its worldly dispersal into the two sexes. It takes a radical, phenomenological reduction which applies suprasegmental theory to (...) re-chisel and strip the Greek statue from multiple layers of calcified presumptions deposited by millennia of realism, historicism, naturalism, and psychologism, until the inherently absent primordiality which Heidegger searched in vain in order to ground Dasein, the same which feminism would dismiss as phallocracy if it was not transgender, becomes literally visible. Two fifth century monumental works, the female Euthydikos Kore and the male Blonde Youth, are re-discovered in the reduction, and the prosody that is their faces lets the two genders reunite into something like a dark song. (shrink)

Authenticity has become one of the defining ideals of the modern world. It is the quality we are meant to demand in that which we consume; a value to be opposed to all that is ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ or ‘artificial’. Above all, it is what an individual is meant to aspire to be: true to one’s self, self-actualising and self-expressing. Authenticity today has an almost ethical force. It underpins identity politics, legitimises transgenderism and informs the ubiquitous demand for often (...) legal recognition and informal respect. But what does its elevation say about the condition of modernity? What is its historical and conceptual relationship to ideas of freedom and autonomy? And to what extent is it really possible or even desirable, as Shakespeare’s Polonius insisted it was, to be true to thine own self? (shrink)

Authenticity has become one of the defining ideals of the modern world. It is the quality we are meant to demand in that which we consume; a value to be opposed to all that is ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ or ‘artificial’. Above all, it is what an individual is meant to aspire to be: true to one’s self, self-actualising and self-expressing. Authenticity today has an almost ethical force. It underpins identity politics, legitimises transgenderism and informs the ubiquitous demand for often (...) legal recognition and informal respect. But what does its elevation say about the condition of modernity? What is its historical and conceptual relationship to ideas of freedom and autonomy? And to what extent is it really possible or even desirable, as Shakespeare’s Polonius insisted it was, to be true to thine own self? (shrink)

Developments in uterus transplant put assisted gestation within meaningful range of clinical success for women with uterine infertility who want to gestate children. Should this kind of transplantation prove routine and effective for those women, would there be any morally significant reason why men or transgender women should not be eligible for the same opportunity for gestation? Getting to the point of safe and effective uterus transplantation for those parties would require a focused line of research, over and above the (...) study of uterus transplantation for non-transgender women. Some commentators object to the idea that the state has any duty to sponsor research of this kind. They would limit all publicly-funded fertility research to sex-typical ways of having children, which they construe as the basis of reproductive rights. This objection has no force against privately-funded research, of course, and in any case not all social expenditures are responses to ‘rights’ properly speaking. Another possible objection raised against gestation by transgender women is that it could alter the social meaning of sexed bodies. This line of argument fails, however, to substantiate a meaningful objection to gestation by transgender women because social meanings of sexed bodies do not remain constant and because the change in this case would not elicit social effects significant enough to justify closing off gestation to transgender women as a class. (shrink)

As secular culture exerts pressure on Catholic health care to conform to its standards, there is need for a clear response to those who claim that the body is not constitutive of the person but can be manipulated to suit a subjective view of the self. Patients who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve our compassionate support, but "therapies" that carry out or encourage the destruction of one's natal sexuality are contrary to the Christian tradition and to the teachings of the (...) Catholic Church. This book provides the arguments, evidence, and practical advice needed for Catholic health care to resist this ideology and courageously affirm the biological reality of the person. Through careful analysis, narrative case studies, and policy language, Transgender Issues in Catholic Health Care critiques current interventions for gender dysphoria and provides practical guidance for professionals and institutions committed to providing whole-person care. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The text questions the idea of transgenderism, or more specifically, the positioning of the androgynous paradigm that is ecological , as a possible Utopian projection into the future; as a radical NO to the present that still has not, regardless of whether we like it or not, fulfilled the possibility of legal and political status for all forms of life.Naturally enough, apart from an interpretation of the androgyne as the archetype of the unity of oppossing energies , I also (...) take into account Kari Weil’s interpretation of the androgyne,according to whose unmasking the androgyne also figures as the misogynous ideal, a construct of the patriarchal ideosphere. Or, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have proposed – the alternative term gynandrous , since the very structure of the lexeme androgyny reflects the power of the male symbolic vision over the female view of the Universe.Considering the circumstances in Croatia, transgenderism is perceived in the text as an ignored state of affairs, since intersexuals are not categorised in the »Statute on the Structure and Method of Work of the Expert Opinion Component in Implementing Rights from Social Welfare and Other Rights According to Specific Regulations«, which simply means that they have no specific rights under the present social welfare system.By way of the identity of the androgyne as a third gender, which unifies the categories of masculinity and femininity, or, more specifically, by the ecological androgynous paradigm, I consider the attempt to delete the dichotomy of neglected Nature versus culture, as explicated, for example,by the feminist biologist Lynda Birke, and the attempt to achieve a bioethical encounter between the human animal and the ‘nonhuman’ animal, which I define conditionally with the term transspeciesism, which covers the ethical negation of speciesism.Namely, within the framework of eco/feminist theory, the socio-cultural anthropologist Barbara Noske was one of the first to put forward the question of the human relation towards other animals, demanding the establishment of an anthropology of animals, since – even now – only an anthropology of humans exists in relation to animals. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to highlight the peculiarities of the androgyny presentation in current visual culture, in particular in fashion and its philosophical and culturological comprehension. Determination of the leading trends associated with the offset of gender stereotypes and denial of the established separation into the feminine and masculine beginnings is due to the attention to the latest theories, such as transfeminism. Theoretical basis is the works of contemporary authors who develop such concepts as "gender", "gender identity", "androgyne" and (...) move within the limits of the theories of transfeminism and transgenderism. The leading French thinker J. Baudrillard outlines philosophical measurements related to the justification of fashion. The interaction issues of the feminist theory, aesthetics of gender and androgyny, which are manifested in visual images, are presented in the writings of P. Auslander, R. Crepax. Transformation of the androgyny idea is considered in the works of B. Řiháková, F. J. Galarte. S. Stryker, T. Bettcher and J. Halberstam also address the problem of transgenderism and transfeminism in their writings. Originality is to highlight the main aspects associated with actualization of androgyny, its visual presentations in fashion, and the connections with contemporary theoretical discourse. A number of concepts related to the transformation of gender stereotypes have been identified. It was revealed that the logical continuation of changes in society, science and technical development is the actualization of androgyny as an individual’s freedom in self-presentation and self-identification. It was emphasized that during the last century androgyny also serves as the basis for forming new trends in theoretical discourse, in particular, transfeminism, as well as it finds many visual manifestations in fashion and fashion industry. Conclusions contain the results of the study that describes the role of androgyny in the context of today’s culture as a measurement of personal freedom, aimed at avoiding gender stereotypes and the usual dichotomy of masculinity and femininity, which manifests itself in contemporary visual practices. (shrink)

REBECCA TUVEL,VINCENT DUHAMEL | : La tentative de l’ancienne cheffe d’une section de la NAACP 1 Rachel Dolezal de passer de la race blanche à la race noire a occasionné une intense controverse. Son histoire est devenue célèbre au même moment où Caitlyn Jenner2 faisait la couverture de Vanity Fair, signe d’une acceptation grandissante de l’identité trans. Pourtant, les critiques adressées à Dolezal pour avoir caché sa race natale indiquent qu’il existe une perception sociale largement répandue selon laquelle il n’est (...) ni possible ni acceptable de changer de race de la manière dont on peut changer de sexe. Les considérations qui soutiennent le transgenrisme3 semblent s’appliquer également au transracialisme. Que Dolezal représente ou non un exemple authentique de personne transraciale, son histoire et la réaction publique qu’elle a suscitée peuvent fournir un cas instructif à étudier. | : Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one’s race in the way it might be to change one’s sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

The kin selection hypothesis posits that male androphilia (male sexual attraction to adult males) evolved because androphilic males invest more in kin, thereby enhancing inclusive fitness. Increased kin-directed altruism has been repeatedly documented among a population of transgendered androphilic males, but never among androphilic males in other cultures who adopt gender identities as men. Thus, the kin selection hypothesis may be viable if male androphilia was expressed in the transgendered form in the ancestral past. Using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), (...) we examined 46 societies in which male androphilia was expressed in the transgendered form (transgendered societies) and 146 comparison societies (non-transgendered societies). We analyzed SCCS variables pertaining to ancestral sociocultural conditions, access to kin, and societal reactions to homosexuality. Our results show that ancestral sociocultural conditions and bilateral and double descent systems were more common in transgendered than in non-transgendered societies. Across the entire sample, descent systems and residence patterns that would presumably facilitate increased access to kin were associated with the presence of ancestral sociocultural conditions. Among transgendered societies, negative societal attitudes toward homosexuality were unlikely. We conclude that the ancestral human sociocultural environment was likely conducive to the expression of the transgendered form of male androphilia. Descent systems, residence patterns, and societal reactions to homosexuality likely facilitated investments in kin by transgendered males. Given that contemporary transgendered male androphiles appear to exhibit elevated kin-directed altruism, these findings further indicate the viability of the kin selection hypothesis. (shrink)