Introduction: Why Moi?
In her long-form essay “What is a Woman? Sex, Gender, and the Body in Feminist Theory,” Toril Moi proposes an account of “woman” that does not use the distinction between sex and gender (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a). Instead, she builds on Simone de Beauvoir's use of the phenomenological concept of the “body as situation” or the lived/living body (Leib Footnote 1) to describe what it means to be a woman. Roughly, being a woman amounts to finding oneself in a particular, namely female, body and living one's life in reference to this situation without being determined by it.
This position has not been discussed in the recent debate about an adequate definition of the concept of “woman” (see for example, Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012, esp. ch. 7; Díaz-León Reference Díaz-León2016; Mikkola Reference Mikkola2016; Barnes Reference Barnes2020; Mikkola Reference Mikkola2022, esp. section 4 for an overview).Footnote 2 One reason for this might be that, at first sight, this position seems to be trans exclusionary (at least regarding some trans women), since “woman” is defined in reference to a female body. I explore in detail whether this is the case and conclude that—in a certain individualistic reading of Moi—her understanding of gender identity Footnote 3 can, in fact, do justice to at least some trans identities. In short, this is because the female body in question is not viewed biologically but from the subjective perspective of the person whose body it is. The individualistic reading, however, comes with rather far-reaching implications for the general debate on the question of “What is a woman?” and the relation of “gender as identity” and “gender as class” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2016, 406). I will suggest that ultimately the utility of providing a definition of “woman” becomes doubtful for feminists. Others have previously expressed this doubt, in particular Judith Butler and more recently Mari Mikkola (Mikkola Reference Mikkola2022, 19 and 32f.; Mikkola Reference Mikkola2016). The main feminist ambitions for sticking to a general concept of woman are, on the one hand, to have a unified subject for the political project of feminism, and, on the other, to have an adequate conceptual tool for analyzing the wrongs feminism aims to combat.
Why is it worthwhile to examine Moi's account of “woman” in detail, if it ultimately leads us to question the project of finding a feminist account of “woman”? To me, it is worthwhile because her account develops out of two commitments a feminist can hardly reject: first, the ambition to avoid biological determinism and, second, skepticism about disembodied accounts of personal identity and the attendant underappreciation of bodily needs in political, legal, and moral philosophy. The first commitment needs no further justification, since it is a cornerstone of feminist critique that one's biology should not fully determine one's social role. Although the second commitment plays an important role in feminist theory at large, it seems rather neglected in the debate about an adequate concept of woman.Footnote 4 Feminist reasons for being critical of disembodied accounts of the person have many facets, but for my purposes here, it suffices to mention a crucial one: the devaluation of care work. If work directed at tending to our needs as vulnerable embodied beings is undervalued because the bodily dimension of our existence is not sufficiently appreciated, this is problematic from a feminist perspective since mainly women have carried and still carry out care work. A feminist distribution of labor must therefore build on the higher valuation of care work, and thus the bodily aspects of our being, in order to fairly recognize women's contribution and to make care work more attractive to other genders.Footnote 5
I proceed in three steps. First, I lay out my understanding of Moi's view (I). Second, I introduce the “inclusion problem” and distinguish between different variations of trans identities (II). Third, I discuss how Moi's view relates to the “inclusion problem” (III).
In the last and longest part (III), I initially formulate two claims: First, the desire of some trans persons to modify parts of their body can be adequately described with Moi's account. Second, her account has difficulties recognizing a woman's (or man's) trans identity if they do not desire any bodily modifications. Since, on the one hand, this second claim is troubling and detrimental to the trans-inclusive feminist perspective I endorse, and, on the other, I am generally sympathetic to Moi's body-centric but nonbiologistic view, I explore if and how this second claim may be falsified or relativized. I do this by articulating four open questions, most important whether, from a phenomenological perspective, it is really conceivable to distinguish between trans persons who desire to change their bodies and trans persons who don't (see open question 4). Without being able to fully address these questions, I then suggest two feminist positions for the here and now: First, there is no good prima facie reason for feminists to disregard anyone's gender self-identification. Second, for feminist and emancipatory purposes more generally, analyzing and addressing concrete contexts of oppression is usually more helpful than the general “gender as class” concept of “woman.”
I conclude that the engagement with Moi's account of “woman” in the context of the recent debate leaves us with a dual picture: It provides us with resources for an adequate and inclusive concept of individual, embodied gender identity. Since this is an individualistic perspective, it is—for the purposes of feminist and trans politics—additionally necessary to analyze concrete contexts of gender-related oppression.
This position is similar to the one Iris Marion Young developed with regard to Moi (Young Reference Young2002/2005; see also Jalušič and Pajnik Reference Jalušič, Pajnik, Ferguson and Nagel2009, 22–24; Mann Reference Mann, Ferguson and Nagel2009). Young thought that Moi provides an adequate understanding of individual embodied gender identity but that it must be complemented with an account of “gender,” which, for Young, means occupying a specific position in a social structure.Footnote 6 With regard to the recent discussion, note, first, that Young's understanding of “gender” is similar to Sally Haslanger's influential “gender as class” view, and, second, that since Young endorses Moi's account regarding individual identity but claims that it must be complemented with “gender,” in turn, Young's view is similar to Katharine Jenkins's proposal for a dual-target concept of gender (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2016). My own position differs from Young's in the sense that I don't think Moi's account of gender identity must be complemented with a concept of gender (as structural positioning or class) but rather with an analysis of more concrete contexts of oppression. Furthermore, my engagement with Moi goes beyond Young's because I address the pivotal question of whether her account is trans inclusive or may be rendered as such.
I. Moi's Account of “Woman”
Moi develops her own suggestion for an account of the concept of “woman” in contrast to an attempt to grasp “woman” as a gender concept.Footnote 7 In order to show why she is opposed to conceptualizing “woman” as a mere gender concept, she first reconstructs what the feminist use of the sex/gender distinction was meant to criticize. According to Moi, the sex/gender distinction was introduced to criticize biological determinism, which it successfully did; however, this was at the price of an implausible, disembodied account of gender identity. In summarizing her position, I will follow this narrative.
What then is biological determinism? Generally, biological determinism means the view that our biology determines or should determine our social life. In her essay, Moi reconstructs two positions of biological determinism advanced by biologists at the end of the nineteenth century: The views of the American biologist W. K. Brooks and the Scottish biologists Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. I will not repeat Moi's lucid and concise reconstruction of both views here in full (see Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 15–21), but instead illustrate what is at stake by briefly summarizing Brooks's position.
Brooks was a defender of Darwin's so-called “variability hypothesis” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 16) which states that individual (cis) men differ from one another more than individual (cis) women do from one another. To explain this thesis, Brooks assumed that in reproduction, the male cell is responsible for transmitting acquired characteristics, whereas the female ovum passes on “hereditary characteristics” (16). This different role in reproduction led Brooks to assert corresponding differences in (cis) men's and (cis) women's intellectual abilities, essentially that women cannot creatively think along new paths—unlike men—but are able merely to apply secure knowledge in everyday circumstances (16ff.). For Brooks, this entails that women are not fit for scientific endeavors, for example.
What I find particularly illuminating about Moi's reconstruction of the nineteenth-century biologists is that she makes explicit a premise that shapes their biological determinism with regard to sexual differences between humans: namely, their view that humans’ biological sex should determine their entire identity and social role. This premise is the assumption of the pervasiveness of sex (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 10ff.). Accordingly, a person's sex is not only relevant for their role in reproduction but for everything else about this person, too, including nonreproductive bodily functions as well as social roles. Forcefully, Moi writes, “[f]or these writers, a man is essentially an enormous sperm cell, a woman a giant ovum” (20) and “a woman becomes a woman to her fingertips” (12). The assumption of the pervasiveness of sex therefore makes biological determinism extremely consequential. Again, a person's sex does not just influence their role in reproduction and hence in certain social contexts directly related to it (for example, a female person's role as a patient in a hospital during childbirth rather than as a visitor); instead, a person's sex permeates the entire person: “Whatever a woman does is, as it were, an expression of the ovum in her” (20). Moi also emphasizes that the pervasive picture of sex is necessarily connected to a heterosexist view, since a person's sexual desire, on the biologistic account, is also determined by their sex (19).
Moi argues that the feminist appropriation of the distinction between sex and gender should be understood as a way to counteract biological determinism, including its pervasive view of sex. As I have mentioned, Moi thinks that the sex/gender distinction is indeed conducive to this goal, but that it is only at the cost of creating an implausible account of the role that one's (sexed) body plays for one's subjectivity. Her account therefore aims to offer a better “theory of subjectivity”Footnote 8 (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 6) that nevertheless does not succumb to biological determinism.
In section II of her essay, Moi retraces how feminists came to endorse the sex/gender distinction, which was initially identified by the psychiatrists John Money and Robert Stoller in the 1950s and 1960s. It was first taken up by the feminist Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Woman: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (Rubin Reference Rubin and Reiter1975). Since this story is well-known, let me just emphasize one element in Moi's reconstruction of Rubin's uptake of the sex/gender distinction, which will help us understand Moi's own position. Moi argues that in Rubin's account, which is informed mainly by Stoller's, sex, or more precisely the sexed body, is completely detached from “history and culture” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 30) and neatly stored in the realm of science, biology, and medicine (23). She writes: “Entirely divorced from the mind, the body is perceived as a mere object, subject to the mind's decisions, a blank slate on which gender writes its script” (27). In short, Moi criticizes that in Rubin's feminist uptake of the sex/gender distinction, the sexed body is entirely bracketed from questions about the identities of persons as women or men and, conversely, that everything related to identity becomes a matter of gender.Footnote 9
According to Moi, poststructuralist feminists’ critique of the sex/gender distinction has the same starting point as her own critique, namely that this distinction turns sex “into an ahistorical and curiously disembodied entity divorced from concrete historical and social meanings” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 30). Instead, like Moi, poststructuralists aim to provide a “fully historical and non-essentialist understanding of sex and the body” (31). I will not go into why Moi thinks that poststructuralist feminists’ project (she engages with Joan Scott, Donna Haraway, and mostly Judith Butler) ultimately fails (see section III of Moi's essay). Roughly, Moi's main points vis-à-vis Butler are, first, that her attempt to show that sex is in fact shaped by gender leads to many large metaphysical questions, especially how gender (seen as a relation of power) can create material reality, which, in turn, remove her so far from her original emancipatory project that she loses sight of it, and, second, that the expression of Butler's political view actually draws on the sex/gender distinction she aims to criticize.
So, Moi is interested in providing an account of gender identity that, first, does not leave the (sexed) body out of the picture, second, does not fall back into biological determinism, and, third, does not make the same mistakes she attributes to the poststructuralists, in particular Butler. To this end, she turns to Beauvoir.
Moi's Beauvoirian Account of “Woman”
Moi's aim is to clearly reconstruct Beauvoir's account from The Second Sex (1949) of what it means to be a woman. She emphasizes that Beauvoir's account is misunderstood if reconceptualized through the dichotomy of sex and gender. For Moi, Beauvoir's famous claim that one isn't born a woman but becomes one is often misinterpreted when translated to: One is born with a female sex and acquires the gender role woman (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 72f.).Footnote 10
Roughly, the account of “woman” Moi aims to develop, building on Beauvoir, amounts to the following idea: A woman is a person who finds herself in the situation of having a female body and lives her life in reference to this situation. Crucially, the situation of having a female body cannot be equated with the fact of having a body with certain biological features (that are determined from a biological or medical perspective). Rather, the female body in question here is understood according to the phenomenological notion of a body as situation or the body as Leib (the lived or living body)Footnote 11: the body as it is experienced subjectively.Footnote 12 A woman therefore is a person who finds herself in a body she perceives as female.
This definition provokes two crucial questions, first, what role the objectively female body (the female Körper) plays in the fact that someone perceives their body as female (the female Leib), and, second, what exact role the perception of one's body as female by others plays in one's own experience of one's body as female (and derivatively one's identification as a woman).
With regard to the first question, Moi's account could be spelled out in two different directions. Either one could try to show that certain objectively discernible bodily features always (or usually) trigger at least a thin layer of shared (bodily) experiences. One would, for example, argue that all persons who have a certain type of fat issue around the area of their chests have more similar bodily experiences in comparison to people who don't have this tissue.
The other option would be to resist the ambition to be able to (objectively) categorize bodies into female and male ones. This, however, would ultimately mean that Moi's account offers a framework only to think about individual embodied identity—rather than the identity of women. This is what I will call the “individualisticFootnote 13 reading” of Moi.
The latter option seems to me to follow through more consequently with the phenomenological view on the body.Footnote 14 This shouldn't be taken to mean that biological facts play no role for someone's body perception, but merely that for someone's embodied identity, it is their subjective bodily experience that is decisive and not what might trigger this experience. Maybe an example can make this clearer: When I feel pain, I feel pain, without even knowing what is biologically happening in my body that causes this pain; in fact, it can be pretty hard to find this out. This does not mean denying that there are biological reasons for my pain.Footnote 15
What I have just said about the role of biology for someone's lived experience of their body counts just as much for the role that perceptions of others play for it (and so for the answer to the second question): they will be crucial, but not determinative, and their exact influence hard to discern. Moi writes: “although social norms concerning sex and sexuality are of crucial importance to the formation of a given person's subjectivity, an account of such norms and regulations will not in itself explain that person's lived experience. We are continuously making something of what the world continuously makes of us . . .” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 117).
The “individualistic reading” implies that the question “What is a woman?” must be replaced by a question along the lines of: In what way does the sexed body of a person mold this person's individual life? More concretely: What does it mean for me to find myself in the situation of a female body? I agree with Moi that this will clearly have some effect on my life and my gender identity, in particular. Nevertheless, its actual effect can be radically different: It could mean, for example, repudiating certain features of my body; it could mean wearing particular clothes to emphasize, say, the shape of my breasts; it could mean wearing particular clothes to hide the shape of my breasts; and so on.Footnote 16
If we take the consequence of Moi's account to be that it ultimately cannot provide an answer to the question “What is a woman?,” this also means that it results in a gender-eliminativist position. Such a position holds that in a feminist utopia, the identity categories of “woman” and “man” would disappear. This is because these categories don't grasp anything true or worth protecting about human life—for example, about the relation of human individuals to their bodies—but are the result of patriarchal norms. For Moi, there is indeed nothing worth preserving about specific allocations of human characteristics to a certain gender, like aggressive to masculine or tender to feminine (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 103f.). I will come back to the effects of the “individualistic reading” of Moi on the debate about the question “What is a woman?” at the end of section III.
Before I go on to discuss the inclusion problem (II) and how Moi's view fares in this respect (III), let me note how her account of “woman” relates to concerns of intersectionality and individuals’ freedom first.
Regarding intersectionality, remember that for Moi, finding oneself in a sexed body is only one among many situations in which people find themselves. Other situations are their geographical location, their class, their race, their family, and so on (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 65).Footnote 17 For Moi, acknowledging the plurality of situations is crucial for counteracting the pervasive picture of sex: Even if being in the situation of having a particular sexed body has some influence on our life, it does not determine one's entire social roles. The plurality of situations is an apt starting point for analyzing the intersection of different oppressive regimes in the identity of a particular person (68, esp. fn. 99).
Concerning freedom, for Moi, finding oneself in the situation of having a female body will have some influence on a person's life, but this situation will not fully determine any life choices (including those that are closely connected to one's own sexed body). Unlike other interpreters, according to Moi, Beauvoir does not think that the female body generally provides less leeway for free action than a male body does, thereby being “inherently oppressive” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 66). Rather, Moi emphasizes the manifold possibilities of living in the situation of having a female body (66). This exemplifies the general phenomenological understanding of freedom and the body's role in it. In this understanding, freedom is necessarily embodied freedom. We realize all our free actions through our body. For us, our body therefore is—usually, at least—not perceived from a biological or medical perspective. Rather, we perceive our body as a means as well as a hindrance to realizing our goals. Even from this subjective perspective, however, my body is not something I can fully mold to match my own purposes. Despite presenting itself as a “site of my freedom” (and not an object to study scientifically), my body limits and structures the ways in which I can act—both by being a human body in general and by being a particular body with specific features (for example, height).
II. The Inclusion Problem and Varieties of Trans Identities
Two distinct arguments have been made to the effect of criticizing certain gender concepts of “woman”: the normativity and the particularity argument (Mikkola Reference Mikkola2022, 15ff. and 13ff.). The inclusion problem with regard to trans women is a version of the particularity argument. Note that the concepts that are subject to criticism here are already feminist ones that reject biological determinism. Let me briefly explain the normativity and the particularity arguments before introducing the inclusion problem. At the same time, I will distinguish between different experiences of trans identity.
The worry that is expressed under the heading of the normativity argument is that certain characteristics seen as typical for women in some gender concepts of woman devalue particular women who do not exhibit these features to a large extent. Take a psychoanalytic theory of gender identity (Mikkola Reference Mikkola2022, 9ff.).Footnote 18 In this picture, different genders emerge because female and male babies and children have a distinct relationship to their primary caregivers. Assuming that their primary caregivers are female, female babies see more similarities between themselves and their primary caregivers than do male babies. Therefore, females develop to be more empathetic and open toward others, whereas males are shaped to understand themselves as clearly distinct from others. The gender “girl” or “woman” is then associated with an empathetic personality, and the gender “boy” or “man” with independence. Unintentionally and without explaining gender differences in terms of biological differences, this account risks sharply circumscribing the gender identities of “women” and “men” and providing a normative standard against which individual women and men score differently. Manifestly, a feminist cannot endorse a gender concept that inadvertently sees empathetic men as feminine and therefore not as real men. This is the normativity argument.
The main targets of the particularity argument are socialization theories of gender (Mikkola Reference Mikkola2022, 7ff.). According to these theories, a woman is a woman roughly because she was brought up in a certain way. Say she was sent to ballet class rather than to football training and now therefore is a better ballet dancer than footballer. More to the point, girls are socialized to become good housewives, and boys are socialized to join the workforce and to be able to financially support their families. A (nonbiologically deterministic) account of gender that states that women are those who have gone through a certain type of socialization (education to be housewives) has been criticized for extrapolating what the gender “woman” is from a particular experience. In fact, not all women in the mid-twentieth century in Europe and the USFootnote 19 were educated to be housewives. This socialization experience reflects only the experience of white, non-working-class women. The particularity argument rejects certain gender concepts of “woman” that fail to include women based on their race and class. Understanding feminism as an emancipatory project, a feminist cannot be satisfied with such an account of gender.
Haslanger's influential account of “gender as class” explicitly aims to avoid both the normativity and the particularity (or commonality) argument (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012, 228). Avoiding the association with womanhood of certain features like being empathetic or being a housewife, Haslanger roughly defines “woman” head-on as being in an inferior role in a hierarchical gender system. Nevertheless, Jenkins prominently criticized Haslanger again for universalizing a particular experience; however, this time it is not the experience of a group of women privileged in terms of class and/or race but the experience of cis women (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2016). Jenkins's criticism of Haslanger's gender concept of woman is that it fails to include all trans women. This is the inclusion problem (regarding trans women).Footnote 20
Moi herself writes that “[t]o challenge the ideas in this essay, it would be useful to see if they would help to understand transsexuality” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 115, my emphasis). For obvious chronological reasons, Moi herself did not write that it would be worthwhile to see if her account has the same problem that Jenkins attributes to Haslanger's. Additionally, her formulation also does not state whether her account of womanhood could include trans women but rather how it would help to understand transsexuality. This different formulation of the philosophical problemFootnote 21 will turn out to be telling with regard to how Moi's account fares in terms of trans inclusivity.Footnote 22 I will come back to this; however, for now I will interrogate Moi's account from the somewhat external vantage point of whether it is inclusive toward trans women.
Moi uses the terms transsexuality and transsexuals, aiming to designate persons who desire a “sex-change.”Footnote 23 With this in the background, she acknowledges that her account of gender identity obscures the meanings of these terms: “[w]hen the sex/gender distinction disappears, it is no longer obvious what one desires when one desires a sex change. It does not follow, of course, that so-called sex-change operations are unjustified” (Moi Reference Moi and Moi1999a, 115). Moi is explicit that she is not aiming to in any sense discredit the experience of “transsexuals.” However, for some it might already be troubling that she seems to see it as unproblematic to view trans identities as special cases of gender identity.Footnote 24
To take on Moi's own challenge to her account, it is necessary to explicate what is meant by trans persons and trans women in particular and what different experiences may be referred to by these terms.
First, let me note that I use trans as an adjective, rather than as (part of) a noun, unlike Moi. This is because I think that it does more justice to the fact that being “trans” is only one (among other) features of a person. As Sophie-Grace Chappell writes: “I happen to be transgender. It's just a thing about me. It's by no means the most interesting thing about me. At least I hope not. I also happen to be right-handed and green-eyed” (Chappell Reference Chappell2020). With regard to Moi, I think that emphasizing that one's being trans is only one aspect of one's identity is, in fact, in line with her disapproval of nineteenth-century biologists’ idea of pervasive sex.Footnote 25
Let me distinguish between two meanings of trans: transgender and transsexual (Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014a, 3f.). Note that these are not the only available definitions of these terms (3f.). In order to introduce the distinction between transgender and transsexual, I am referring to the sex/gender distinction, which is, however, ultimately not available when working within Moi's framework.
A transgender person is a person “who live[s] full-time in the role other than the one assigned to them at birth” (3).Footnote 26 Bettcher's definition may be broadened to include those who aspire to live or are transitioning to liveFootnote 27 in a different gender roleFootnote 28 from the one they were assigned at birth (usually it will have been assigned according to someone's assumed sex).
A transsexual person is a person who desires to modify their bodily sexual features or has (partly) modified them already. Moi uses only the term transsexual, and her understanding of it aligns with the one just suggested in reference to Bettcher's work. Although Moi writes only about “sex-change” operations, I include hormone therapy within the kind of bodily modification relevant here. These definitions are neither exclusive nor do they necessarily imply each other.Footnote 29 For example, a person may be transgender without being transsexual, or a person may be transgender and transsexual. It seems more unlikely that someone is transsexual and not transgender, but I will not exclude this possibility here. Note that according to these definitions, whether someone is trans (in the sense of transgender or transsexual) is a matter of self-identification. This, in turn, is based on the presupposition that one's aspirations and desires are most authentically expressed by oneself.Footnote 30
III. Moi's Account and the Inclusion Problem
Initially, two claims seem plausible considering how Moi's view fares with regard to the inclusion problem.
Claim 1: Moi's account provides an apt framework for describing trans persons’ desire for bodily transformations (cf. Schrock, Reid, and Boyd Reference Schrock, Reid and Boyd2005; Lennon Reference Lennon2019, 28).
Differently put, this claim articulates the view that Moi's phenomenological perspective on the body is adequate, in order to describe a person's repudiation of or desire for certain sexual features. I will first make this claim more tangible by explicating its meaning with regard to the particular desire for the removal of breast tissue; second, I will show how it resonates with Julia Serano's description of her experience as a trans woman.
Applied to a particular case, namely the desire of a trans man for a mastectomy, this claim means that this desire is based on the—in some sense—negative experience of living with breasts rather than the repudiation of a particular molecular structure or specific type of tissue. For example, a negative experience of living with breasts could be others’ reactions to them: “I'm pretty fine with how my body is but it's when I, like, go in to the world and people see, like, that I have a chest and then they think that means, like, woman.”Footnote 31
The language of sex (as part of expressing the biological or medical perspective on one's body) does not seem adequate for articulating such an experience. Furthermore, it does not seem fitting for expressing what someone desires as an outcome of mastectomy. It is not simply the fact of not having certain tissue anymore but of living differently in one's body, in this case of experiencing different reactions to one's body. More generally, we simply cannot directly experience our biology and, therefore, desires for modifications of our biology are always mediated desires. Consider someone's expectation that the killing of bacteria in their body (by taking antibiotics) will mitigate their pain; the primary desire on which the action of taking antibiotics is based is to mitigate pain, whereas killing bacteria is a mediate desire.
This resonates with Serano's writing about her experiences as a trans woman. Serano sees herself as a transsexual woman in the sense I introduced in section II (Serano Reference Serano2007, 28). She distinguishes between someone's “physical sex” and their “subconscious sex” (see esp. chapter 5). The former refers to the biological or medical perspective on the body. With regard to the latter, she writes, “[p]erhaps the best way to describe how my subconscious sex feels to me is to say that it seems as if, on some level, my brain expects my body to be female” (80). She illustrates this by her first remembrance of masturbation that occurred before she had a conscious desire to be female: “[it] involved me spreading my legs, placing my hand on my crotch, and rocking my hand back and forth the way many girls instinctively do it” (81). On the level of subconscious sex—or, in phenomenological terminology, the lived experience of her body—Serano's body was then female regardless of its physical constitution. Regarding her later desire for a vagina and a clitoris instead of a penis, Serano also explicitly writes about expected experiences with these body parts rather than the desire for a certain physical body shape as such. Concretely, she writes about looking forward to being penetrated with a strap-on dildo by her partner (230). Note that for Serano, her transsexual experience is primarily related to her subconscious female sex—the lived experience of her body—that she experiences as contrasting her physical male sex, rather than about gender (or sexual orientation): “I eventually reached the conclusion that my female subconscious sex had nothing to do with gender roles, femininity, or sexual expression—it was about the personal experience I had with my body” (84f.), or “You could say that my decision to transition was primarily driven by my choosing to trust my body feelings—in this case, my subconscious sex . . .” (221). Serano also emphasizes that not only trans persons have a subconscious sex distinct from their physical sex, albeit it is a blind spot for most cis persons (87).
If it is true that the desire for changes of sexual features of one's body can be accounted for in Moi's phenomenological framework, this also implies that her account does not exclude transsexual women.Footnote 32 This is because, in my reading, her account is individualistic (see section I) and therefore ultimately most apt as a theoretical scaffolding for describing the relation of someone's individual identity and their body. With regard to Serano's experience, the question arises when a transsexual person assigned male at birth identifies as a woman. Serano writes that although having had a female subconscious sex from early on, she began to identify as a woman only when transitioning to have a physical female body: “After a couple of years living in the world as female, I eventually came to embrace the identity of ‘woman.’ Thinking of myself as a woman simply began to make sense; it resonated with my lived experiences” (223f.).
As Serano continuously emphasizes, her trans experience is only one of many. In my view, Moi's framework also allows for the scenario in which a transsexual person identifies as a woman qua having a subconscious female sex: She finds herself in the situation of having a subconscious female body. Considering how Serano introduced the notion of a subconscious female sex, however, it seems to me that it includes within it a desire to be, as it were, realized in a physical female body; it encompasses a desire for bodily modifications. The contrast of the subconscious sexed body to the physical sexed body seems intrinsic to Serano's description of her transsexual experience.
With regard to Serano's particular experience, the perception that others have of her body as female also played an important role for beginning to identify as a woman: “Of course, body feelings are not the only facet of my being that has contributed to my identity as a woman. . . . [T]he changes in my social gender—how other people relate to and interact with me—were at least as dramatic as (if not more so than) the physical changes to my body” (222). To repeat, Moi's account can, however, in principle also do justice to the experience of a trans person who identifies as a trans woman qua subconscious female sex. This is at least the case in the here and now, since in a feminist future, according to the gender-eliminativist view, no one would identify as “woman” or “man”; their identity will, however, still be shaped by the lived experience of their body and its sexual features in some way.
Claim 2: Moi's account does not seem to provide space to recognize trans women (or trans men) who do not desire bodily modifications as women (or men) nor as trans.
This is because, for Moi, one's gender identity must have something to do with one's own body perception. In what sense could a person who contently perceives their body as male, but identifies as a woman be recognized as a woman in Moi's framework? And, what, for Moi, would be trans about a person's gender identity—if trans means changing from one thing to another, or transgressing a border—if a person does not desire bodily modifications?
If this second claim is true, this is a normative problem for Moi's account: A trans woman who is transgender (but not transsexual) would be recognized neither as a woman nor as trans by the theory. Note the difference between being recognized as a (trans) woman and being recognized as trans.
Regarding the latter (recognition as trans), Moi's position seems to imply a troubling distinction between “intelligible” and “nonintelligible” trans identities. “Intelligible trans identities” would accordingly be such identities that desire modifications to their body (in reference to the sex/gender distinction: transsexual persons). This is troubling because it disrespects trans persons’ authority about their own identity. In his autobiographical book, Linus Giese vehemently asks: “Don't I know best myself if I am trans enough?” (Giese Reference Giese2020, 58, my translation).
Regarding the former (recognition as a woman), let me emphasize that I am convinced that Moi's view is that everyone—independently of their body—should freely relate to existing gender norms in whatever way they like. Yet, concerning the recognition of trans persons, this view is not sufficient, rather the recognition as “woman” or “man” is crucial. Therefore, it is correct to regard misgendering—addressing a trans person with wrong pronouns—or deadnaming—calling someone by a (gendered) name that predates (public) transition—as severe forms of contempt. Grasping why this is the case is potentially difficult from within Moi's framework if the persons involved are merely transgender (but not transsexual).
Four Open Questions
Four routes for further thinking emerge from the troubling nature of claim 2 that Moi's account appears to discredit trans persons who do not desire bodily modifications.
(1) One could question whether this problem is—at least regarding the recognition as woman—really so grave, since if Moi holds a gender-eliminativist position (as I have suggested), then the identity “woman” should ultimately become unavailable not only for exclusively transgender women but for everyone, including cis women. There is something right about this when speculating about a feminist utopia; however, it constitutes an underestimation of the wrong of misgendering and deadnaming: Here and now, it is much easier for cis women to deny the importance of the category “woman” for their identities—they never had to fight to attain it—than for trans women.
(2) Does the problematic nature of claim 2 show that, in the end, Moi's account of individual gender identity is unserviceable for a transinclusive feminism? Do we need a different account, in order to adequately address the wrong of misgendering, deadnaming, and other forms of disrespect, harm, and violence toward trans persons?
Jenkins aims to suggest a concept of gender identity that is useful for the purposes of trans activism: the so-called “Norm-Relevancy Account” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2016; Reference Jenkins2018).Footnote 33 In short, she holds that I have a particular gender if I feel that a sufficient number of the norms related to this gender—say, woman—are relevant to me. Crucially, this feeling of relevancy must not be accompanied by the feeling of wanting to act in line with these norms or acting in line with them. For example, I might identify as a woman because I feel that the norm of not forgetting to bring a present to a birthday party is (more) relevant to me (than to men); however, I might still sometimes forget to bring something (adequate) and even feel good about this because of realizing that I am thereby transgressing a gender norm for women. Although I do see the appeal of Jenkins's proposal, I am ultimately unconvinced by it for two reasons. First, although she explicitly denies this,Footnote 34 I am not sure that this account really does justice to the idea that gender identity is something existentially important for people (in particular, trans persons). This is because the account is linked to Haslanger's account of “gender as class” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2018, 730), which means that all the norms relevant to me as a woman are part of a hierarchical system. Accordingly, all woman norms are in some sense part of a system in which women are in a less privileged situation than men. Haslanger's account of “gender as class” is gender-eliminativist in the sense that in a feminist future, we wouldn't want these genders to have any relevance anymore.Footnote 35 Since “gender as identity” is in substance dependent on “gender as class,” the former would also be obsolete in a feminist utopia. Therefore, I don't see how the following is supposed to constitute a deep form of respect: “I respect you as a woman because you feel that certain patriarchal norms are relevant to you. However, at least I am—and maybe you are too—fighting for an abolishment of these norms.” The respect of a trans person's gender identity (like anyone's gender identity) is therefore limited to a patriarchal system. This is not a satisfying view and brings us back to the problem stated above (1). Nevertheless, I acknowledge that methodological questions regarding the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory and the exact understanding of an ameliorative project will be decisive here and that Jenkins makes explicit that her suggestion is supposed to serve only as a starting point for a discussion (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2018, 742).Footnote 36
(3) Is there a different way of regarding the misgendering and deadnaming of exclusively transgender women as a severe harm other than with the help of an inclusive account of “woman?”Footnote 37 To me, a possible solution would be to simply condemn misgendering and deadnaming as a form of contempt or severe disrespect of a person (see below, Here and Now I).
(4) Did I draw the distinction between transsexual and transgender too sharply? This question is particularly pertinent when working within a phenomenological framework in which the lived body is seen as crucial for all experiences and actions. If this distinction cannot be made so clearly, claims 1 and 2 couldn't be as neatly separated as presented above; this would mean that interrogating Moi's account regarding its trans inclusivity would have to start afresh. In what follows, I will spell out two considerations that place doubt on the strictness of this distinction.
First, does the desire to modify one's body really have to be focused on hormonal and/or surgical treatment? Doesn't the identity of a trans woman without a desire for such treatment still have something to do with her body, for example, with regard to how she dresses and how she grooms her body? However, it remains questionable whether stylingFootnote 38 one's body in a certain way should really count as doing something “trans.” What exactly is transformed here? Which border transgressed? Overemphasizing the trans aspect risks presupposing a normal—biologically determined?—way of styling particular bodies. Equally, asking these questions risks undermining trans persons’ authority over their own identity (recall Giese's question: “Don't I know best myself if I am trans enough?”). Ultimately, the individual's experience is decisive concerning whether they regard their styling as “trans” in the sense of standing in contrast to or transgressing a sex or gender marker they have previously been or are currently recognized as by others. Nevertheless, an individual's self-expression, of course, also contributes to a wider “gender culture.” The concern expressed above is that doing justice to trans persons should not inadvertently contribute to narrowing the possibilities of expression for cis persons: For example, a feminine cis man should not by default be recognized as a trans woman.
Second, consider desires that clearly “involve the body” and are part of trans experiences but might not be best interpreted as concerning a desire to change one's body. Take what Bettcher calls the “recoding” (Bettcher Reference Bettcher2014b, 611) of male (or female) organs as female (or male) organs in sexual intercourse. She provides the following example: “[If] a trans woman (with a ‘penis’) is receiving oral sex, it is possible for her and her partner to erotically re-understand the activity as a form of cunnilingus rather than fellatio, perhaps by eroticizing a component of her genitals as a ‘clit’” (611). Does the trans woman in question desire having a clitoris rather than a penis in this scenario?Footnote 39 Or, is it the case that the trans woman's sexual desire in this example is best fulfilled precisely by (temporarily) re-imagining her penis as a clitoris? If so, this would be a case in point for a body-focused trans experience that does not involve any desire to change one's body.
Fully addressing these questions will have to wait for another occasion, and it might not be possible to answer all of them conclusively, but it seems to me that, loosely building on Moi, a twofold feminist position for the here and now is adequate:Footnote 40 First, there is no prima facie reason to deny anyone respect for the gender they themselves identify with. There is a separable concern about the fact that trans persons who desire bodily modifications must be institutionally recognized as trans, in order to receive adequate treatment. Second, for the purposes of feminist and trans(feminist) analyses and politics, the category “woman” might be dispensable and the analysis of more concrete contexts of oppression more helpful in most cases. In the following, I will elaborate on both parts of this position.
Respecting Gender Self-Identification and Recognizing Trans Identity (Here and Now I)
Respecting Gender Self-Identification Footnote 41: From Moi's perspective, no reason can be provided for denying someone their self-identification with a certain gender. Recall that, for Moi, one's gender identity is interlinked with one's own experience of one's body, and one's body, more generally, is seen as a site of free action. Therefore, respecting someone as a free person also means respecting the way they relate to their (sexed) body. Hence, there is no prima facie reason why a person (regardless of their particular bodily situation) should not be able to take up all available categories of identity.Footnote 42 For example, I don't see how a cis woman's refusal to address a trans woman with her pronouns could be justified.
This view echoes Bettcher's reasons for “first-person authority” regarding gender (Bettcher Reference Bettcher and Shrage2009). The reasons are ethical rather than epistemic or metaphysical: It is a matter of respect for a person to recognize their gender self-identification, and it's not that we should grant “first-person authority” to someone because they will know best what genitals can be found underneath their clothes (Bettcher Reference Bettcher and Shrage2009, 105–7). Accordingly, the identity that is to be respected is “existential” rather than “metaphysical” (110f.). Having the existential identity “woman” means that the way one acts in the world and who one becomes by pursuing these actions is in some sense shaped by being a woman (110f.).
Self-identification accounts have been criticized for potentially posing a threat to cis women, because “anyone” may then access women-only spaces, like changing rooms, toilets, or domestic-violence shelters. Although this is an empirical question that I cannot settle here, this danger seems overstated to me.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, if, for example, it could be empirically shown that in a particular social context, “cis woman” is a better proxy for those who are mostly affected by domestic violence than “those who identify as woman,” this could, in my view, potentially provide a reason (which will have to be weighed with other reasons) for “strategic essentialism” (Eide Reference Eide2016) regarding access to domestic-violence shelters.Footnote 44
Beyond access to gendered spaces, the self-identification account implies, institutionally, that it should be easy to change one's civil status (from man to woman, for example),Footnote 45 and that, morally speaking, persons should be addressed by their preferred pronouns.
Recognizing Trans Identity: As I have mentioned (in the discussion of claim 2), there is a difference between being recognized as a particular gender and being recognized as trans. In the following paragraphs, I briefly want to discuss the societal recognition as trans. This recognition as trans (and not merely as belonging to the gender someone identifies with) is particularly important, if someone's trans identity involves a desire for bodily modifications: whether society should provide for a person's relevant medical treatment is at stake. The following remarks will therefore focus on trans persons with such a desire and how—from Moi's perspective—a prima facie reason can be given for why an egalitarian society owes these individuals expensive gender-confirmation treatment.Footnote 46
How can a deep desire to change parts of one's body be conceptualized and why should it be respected (in the sense of providing means to fulfill it) in Moi's framework? Recall that for Moi, our body is one situation (among others) in which we find ourselves. This situation (and other situations we find ourselves in) enables, but also structures and limits our possible ways of acting freely. If we take the embodied character of our freedom seriously, it is vital to accept that we cannot completely change the situations we find ourselves in. However, our body may also constitute a situation that not only limits and structures but also inhibits our freedom. The idea of the freedom-inhibiting character of a bodily situation is a general description and may concretely mean different things. When Chappell writes about her and other trans women's desire to be “female-bodied,” she describes it as being so forceful that it is “all-consuming” (Chappell Reference Chappell2020).Footnote 47 This all-consuming nature of a desire might be seen as freedom-inhibiting since it is detrimental to the pursuit of any life projects that do not concern attending to this desire.
If it is indeed possible to change such a freedom-inhibiting bodily situation medically,Footnote 48 then it is again a matter of respect for a person's freedom to provide the means necessary for such a change (see the section on Respecting Gender Self-Identification above).Footnote 49
One might worry that the language of freedom risks rendering trans women's desires irrational in societies where men are arguably freer than women: Why should one rationally desire to be less free? Although I do think that there is something to this concern,Footnote 50 I believe that a sufficiently subtle and context-sensitive concept of freedom that includes the value of free self-expression, and doesn't limit freedom to the quantity of external choice-sets, will be able to deal with this challenge. Serano's ambivalence about identifying as a woman is interesting in this context:
I used to fear that embracing that identity [woman] would be tantamount to cramming myself into some predetermined box, restricting my possibilities and potential. But I now realize that no matter how I act or what I do or say, I remain a woman—both in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the way that I experience myself. While I used to view the word “woman” as limiting, I now find it both empowering and limitless. (Serano Reference Serano2007, 224)
To summarize, Moi's account offers a way of conceptualizing the urgency of some trans persons to medically change parts of their bodies by regarding their bodily situation as freedom-inhibiting.
Particular Contexts of Oppression (Here and Now II)
I have suggested that Moi's account of gender identity ultimately provides a better framework for grasping an individual's embodied gender identity than for providing a unified account of “woman” (and “man”). Furthermore, this implied that Moi's account is gender-eliminativist. This leaves us with two problems, the first of which I have already touched upon: does getting rid of a unified concept of “woman” obscure the sense in which misgendering and deadnaming are severe forms of disrespect? (see claim 2 as well as open questions 2 and 3). Second, what does it mean for the political project of feminism if we stop defining “woman” as its unified subject? In short, my answer to both questions is that we have to analyze concrete contexts of oppression.
Regarding the first problem, empirical occurrences of deliberate misgendering or deadnaming are rightly understood as forms of disrespect in concrete contexts of the oppression of trans persons. If this is correct, then we don't need an inclusive concept of woman in order to criticize or make sense of such practices. We can simply say that they are wrong because people are deliberately disrespected as free persons. This suggestion of how to conceptualize the wrong of misgendering or deadnaming would have to be worked out more fully.Footnote 51 The general idea is to recognize misgendering or deadnaming as part of a particular oppressive structure that feminism (or other emancipatory movements) should work against.Footnote 52
Regarding the second problem and taking seriously the insights associated with the term intersectionality (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989), most instances in which women are oppressed are not instances where women are oppressed as women simpliciter—or not as women at all.Footnote 53 They will be oppressed as poor women, lesbian women, trans women, primary caregivers of children they gave birth to, persons with uteruses who didn't give birth to children, feminized persons of color, and so on.Footnote 54
I therefore think that Moi's account of individual gender identity must be combined with an analysis of specific contexts of oppression. As I have mentioned in the introduction, this view is similar to Young's regarding her engagement with and critique of Moi (Young Reference Young2002/2005). Young wants to supplement Moi's account of gender identity with an account of gender as a position in a social structure. However, unlike Young, I don't want to limit “that with which Moi's account of gender identity needs to be complemented” to the analysis (and critique) of the oppression of the gender “woman.” In contrast, I think that the oppression of trans women, single parents, or victims of domestic violence must (at least initially) be analyzed on its own terms, without presupposing a common structure of oppression (namely of the gender “woman”).Footnote 55 This does not exclude the possibility that after a thorough empirical analysis and theorization of several particular contexts of oppression, their intertwined character will become visible. Maybe it will turn out that we cannot conclusively understand transphobia without understanding the history and dynamics of patriarchy.Footnote 56 And maybe in order to understand patriarchy adequately, we might need a concept of “woman” again.Footnote 57 But it is surely not the case that we need a complete theory of patriarchy and a fully spelled-out metaphysical notion of “woman” in order to condemn certain social contexts as contexts of oppression for trans persons, or trans women in particular.
Conclusion: Individual Embodied Gender Identity and Specific Contexts of Oppression
In this article, I first introduced Moi's account of “woman,” which centers around the notion of “a body as situation” or a lived/living body. On this account, a woman is a person who finds herself in the situation of having a female body. I offered an individualistic reading of Moi's view. Second, I introduced the “inclusion problem” toward trans women—the problem that certain accounts of gender fail to include trans women within the concept of woman. I also distinguished between transsexual and transgender trans persons. Third, I made two claims regarding how Moi's account fares regarding the inclusion problem: the first being that Moi's account can adequately grasp the identity of transsexual persons—trans persons who desire to change some parts of their body—thereby being inclusive toward transsexual women (claim 1). The second was that trans persons who do not desire bodily changes (exclusively transgender persons) are rendered unintelligible from Moi's perspective, thus making her account exclusive toward exclusively transgender women (claim 2). Setting out from the observation that the second claim is troubling since it renders some persons’ gender identity unintelligible, I opened up four avenues for further thinking (four open questions): 1. questioning that claim 2 really is troublesome; 2. considering a rejection of Moi's account of gender identity because it is unhelpful for the emancipation of trans persons; 3. asking whether there might be other more adequate ways of combating transphobia (for example, expressed in the form of misgendering) than “finding” an inclusive concept of woman; and 4. questioning whether the premise underlying claims 1 and 2 is wrong, namely the clear-cut distinction between transsexual and transgender. Although acknowledging that these avenues for further thinking cannot be fully taken here, I suggested two concrete feminist positions for the here and now resulting from the explorations in the article. First, gender identity should be a matter of self-identification. Furthermore, trans persons desiring medical treatment should be recognized as trans socially, in order to receive financial coverage. Second, in most cases we should resist framing feminist political projects as fighting the oppression of women simpliciter but make the effort to determine more specific and potentially partly overlapping contexts of oppression, for example, the oppression of “persons with children” or “trans women.”
This leaves us with the following dual picture: On the one hand, Moi's phenomenological perspective provides helpful resources for describing individual gender identity. In short, this is because it does justice to the “truth . . . [that] our bodies are inseparable from our minds” and provides a “language to articulate ‘body feelings,’” which is largely lacking, according to Serano (Serano Reference Serano2007, 220). On the other hand, oppressions typically criticized and combated from a feminist perspective should be framed more specifically than the oppression of “women.”
From this abstract dual framework, further work can take different directions. I will articulate five desiderata for further research. First, one might be interested in painting a more detailed picture of trans experiences. This would entail, for example, a further engagement with autobiographies of trans persons.Footnote 58 Such an inquiry would help with my open question 4. To be sure, the result of such a phenomenological inquiry would be specific to a particular historical and cultural context. Second, mainly to answer open question 4, it would be necessary to develop a full phenomenological account of the body that, in particular, engages the question whether the perception of one's own body is conceptual and if so, how universally the relevant concepts are socially shared (see note 16). These first two desiderata show that I have not fully answered the question whether Moi's account is trans inclusive or not—and that this question is also amiss in a certain sense because of the phenomenological nature of Moi's perspectiveFootnote 59: Of course, Moi's account is in principle trans inclusive regarding all existent trans experiences; after all, they exist! And it is (fortunately) not the point of a phenomenological enterprise to deny someone's experience. However, it is possible that her general framework is not helpful for understanding some trans experiences, and that her theory therefore seems to dismiss them as “unintelligible” (see claim 2). To see whether this is really the case, one would have to try to phenomenologically reconstruct a self-identified (exclusively) transgender woman's experience through the lens of Moi's theory (as part of the first desideratum). In doing so, one would have to consider that both Moi's proposed account of woman and the particular experience to be phenomenologically reconstructed are part of a historically and culturally specific context. Furthermore, this reconstruction, in turn, would depend on a fuller articulation of the employed phenomenological theory of the body (second desideratum).
A third desideratum for future research would be to say more about the methodological relation between so-called ameliorative conceptual projects and ideal and nonideal theory. In my criticism of Jenkins (open question 2Footnote 60), I asked whether we really want to construct a concept of gender identity that is potentially helpful for current political projects (that is, trans activism) but one we would want to get rid of or that would automatically disappear if we achieved a feminist utopia. My hunch is that we might want to have a normative framework that is helpful for guiding our current struggles and sustainable in a more just future. This thought is also provoked by my worry that, in the current discussions about conceptual engineering and the like, too much hope is put in finding adequate concepts of, say, “woman,” although adequate concepts alone won't suffice in combating normative wrongs. Fourth, it would be worthwhile to explore how the concept of situation might serve as a bridge between the individual gender identity of a person and the concrete contexts of oppression they are implicated in.Footnote 61 Finally, it would be helpful to determine one concrete context of oppression related to a “classical” feminist topic, such as reproductive rights, and see whether it can really be adequately grasped without a unified concept of woman.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the students in my seminar Leiblichkeit in der feministischen Philosophie and my co-organizers and the participants in the workshop “What is a Woman?” both at the (digital) University of Hamburg in 2020/21. I am particularly thankful for Quill R Kukla's comment on the first version of this article at the workshop. Also, thanks for the helpful discussions in the context of the lecture series “Philosop*HER” at the (digital) University of Leipzig (2021/22) and WOGAP Berlin (2023). For their thoughtful comments on previous versions of the article and/or thought-provoking discussions on its topic, thank you to Michelle Kosch, Thomas Meyer, Johannes Sudau, Hamid Taieb, Caleb Ward, and Matthias Wirth. Finally, three anonymous reviewers for Hypatia provided invaluable feedback: thank you!
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Esther Neuhann is currently pursuing postdoctoral research in philosophy at the University of Hamburg, funded by the Walter Benjamin Programme of the DFG (German Research Foundation). Soon she will take up a position at the Free University Berlin. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University Frankfurt and an MPhil in political theory from the University of Oxford. Her research lies in those areas of practical philosophy with a social focus (political, legal, and social philosophy, and critical theory), Fichte's philosophy, and feminist philosophy.
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