Labor of Love
Sunday, March 30, 2008 by Rachel McKinney
Fascinating article in the April issue of The Advocate about a pregnant transman and his partner. What I think is so interesting about this situation is that it contradicts some prima facie beliefs that many people seem to possess about male/female sex distinctions having their basis in differences of reproductive capacity.
There are of course major problems with all attempts to locate sex/gender differences biologically according to genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, etc. For any criterion proposed there exists a wealth of human variation such that bodies don't align into "male" and "female" categories easily or infallibly (people much smarter than me have made this argument. See Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body, for example). Further, there's evidence for thinking that our conceptual schemes for adjudicating "problem cases" (transgender and intersexed bodies) are skewed in such a way that we may be apt to distinguish bodies "one-sidedly" by tracking male-coded features at the expense of recognizing female-coded features (see Kessler and McKenna's article "Toward a Theory of Gender" in The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker).
But reproductive capacities perhaps seem to be a little more stable for tracking sex than did chromosomal or hormonal profiles or genitalia. While it's of course not true that all females are capable of giving birth or that the ability to give birth is a necessary condition of female-ness, it certainly did seem to be a pretty good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition (that is, the proposition, "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is female," seems to be true). Alternately, we could say that the reproductive capacity to give birth was a good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition for establishing non-male-ness as well (that is, the proposition "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is not male," seems to be true).
I like the situation discussed in the Advocate article because it can be interpreted as evidence that reproductive capacity as a sufficient condition for sex distinction is not uncontroversially true. To use a much-maligned word from the feminist theory canon, it problematizes our concepts of "male" and "female," which in turn problematize our concepts of "man" and "woman." Which, I think, is a good thing.
Edit: I’ve been worrying a lot lately about the (largely insensitive) press that this has been receiving and the potential for backlash here.
Stories about Beatie have been accompanied by everything from photos and personal information about him prior to transition to stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the film Junior. There’s a lot of concern within the FtM community about the potential for increased violence against transmen as a result of the increased visibility of the identity that accompanies a story like this, as well as the potential for institutional repercussions such as the requirement that FtMs receive “bottom” surgery in order to qualify for legal changes in sex-status.
There’s this tendency, I think, for philosophers to read people in interesting real-life situations as if they were characters in a thought experiment. This danger is particularly vivid for cases involving transgender individuals. I worry that my initial response to this case was quite problematic in these respects.
There are of course major problems with all attempts to locate sex/gender differences biologically according to genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, etc. For any criterion proposed there exists a wealth of human variation such that bodies don't align into "male" and "female" categories easily or infallibly (people much smarter than me have made this argument. See Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body, for example). Further, there's evidence for thinking that our conceptual schemes for adjudicating "problem cases" (transgender and intersexed bodies) are skewed in such a way that we may be apt to distinguish bodies "one-sidedly" by tracking male-coded features at the expense of recognizing female-coded features (see Kessler and McKenna's article "Toward a Theory of Gender" in The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker).
But reproductive capacities perhaps seem to be a little more stable for tracking sex than did chromosomal or hormonal profiles or genitalia. While it's of course not true that all females are capable of giving birth or that the ability to give birth is a necessary condition of female-ness, it certainly did seem to be a pretty good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition (that is, the proposition, "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is female," seems to be true). Alternately, we could say that the reproductive capacity to give birth was a good candidate for a prima facie sufficient condition for establishing non-male-ness as well (that is, the proposition "if S can become pregnant/give birth/etc, then S is not male," seems to be true).
I like the situation discussed in the Advocate article because it can be interpreted as evidence that reproductive capacity as a sufficient condition for sex distinction is not uncontroversially true. To use a much-maligned word from the feminist theory canon, it problematizes our concepts of "male" and "female," which in turn problematize our concepts of "man" and "woman." Which, I think, is a good thing.
Edit: I’ve been worrying a lot lately about the (largely insensitive) press that this has been receiving and the potential for backlash here.
Stories about Beatie have been accompanied by everything from photos and personal information about him prior to transition to stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the film Junior. There’s a lot of concern within the FtM community about the potential for increased violence against transmen as a result of the increased visibility of the identity that accompanies a story like this, as well as the potential for institutional repercussions such as the requirement that FtMs receive “bottom” surgery in order to qualify for legal changes in sex-status.
There’s this tendency, I think, for philosophers to read people in interesting real-life situations as if they were characters in a thought experiment. This danger is particularly vivid for cases involving transgender individuals. I worry that my initial response to this case was quite problematic in these respects.
