Philosophy and Gender

  The results of a 2016-2017 Siena Student Climate Survey reported that 100% of Siena transgender students expressed that they had personally experienced bias/harassment/discrimination at our college.  Knowing this, I feel terrible. How can we turn this around so that not only are our transgender students not harassed, but embraced? There are infrastructure and policy issues that we can and should change. These changes go far beyond changing the signs on our restrooms (although I think we should do that too). For instance, as far as I know Siena is not among the colleges that cover transition-related medical expenses under student health insurance, nor among the colleges that have gender inclusive housing in which students can have a roommate of any gender (cf. Siena's Transgender Student Housing Policy ). Of course, I would be happy to be corrected on that if others know otherwise!  There are aspects of classroom norms, curriculum, and campus climate that can be more tr...

  Buck v. Bell is a US Supreme Court decision from 1927 regarding the constitutional permissibility of forced sterilization. Patricia Hill Collins refers to the majority opinion that Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for this decision, in her 1998 article "Its All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation". The citation that Collins gives for the disturbing passage she quotes from Holmes' opinion is Mark Haller's (1984/1963) book Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought.  As Haller, and thus Collins, render it, the passage is as follows:  "It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting for their imbecility , society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains co...

 This morning I had the great pleasure of speaking with Shannon Dea , the author of the course textbook that we have been reading for Philosophy and Gender ( Beyond the Binary: Thinking about Sex and Gender ), and Professor and Dean of Arts at University of Regina. Our conversation took us from talking about possibilities afforded by viewing gender as socially constructed, how Dea's pragmatist thinking shows up in thinking about gender, the so-called "TERF wars", the potential for coalition and solidarity among survivors of gender-based violence, a new edition of the textbook that Dea is working on, and 21st century Indigenous gender identities. You can find the recording of our conversation here . Check out Dean Dea's Welcome to the Dean of Arts Office letter that we mention in connection with Treaty 4 in the video. Thank you so much, Dean Dea, for the wonderful conversation! Some questions suggested by my Philosophy and Gender students that we did not get to in thi...

The Damietta Student Lounge  Siena College recently invited Dr. Bettina Love to speak to our community about how to be a co-conspirator in anti-racist work, especially at a predominantly white college. During the Q&A period, Dr. Love was asked about Black-only spaces and the feelings of exclusion that white people may feel in being denied access to those spaces. Her response was memorable (although I hope you'll forgive me for not recording it verbatim, and correct me if you remember otherwise)--she said something along the following lines: this is exactly what we are talking about, this is the issue--"Exhibit A"--whiteness is always trying to center itself. Black people have been excluded from spaces for hundreds of years, and now we can't have 35 minutes to talk to each other? This answer resonated with me. Why do white folks feel upset--threatened even--when excluded from spaces? Why do white folks want to be in such spaces in the first place? A little over a ...

  Can you imagine trying to conduct biological research in the mid-300s BC? Without the use of gene sequencing, computational models, or even a microscope? Before Galen, Linnaeus, and Darwin? How would you go about trying to answer biological questions like: what causes offspring to be male or female? Aristotle's deep and far-reaching philosophy of nature tried to account for this very sort of phenomenon, using evidence from observations that he could make without our powerful modern technologies and leveraging the richness of his theoretical framework.  In Book IV of the Generation of Animals , Aristotle presents his causal explanation for the sex of embryos. Roughly, on his view, animal bodies "concoct" the nutrients from food into blood, and then even further (in the case of male bodies) into semen. In Aristotle's terminology, the process of concoction is something like distillation, or ripening, and requires sufficient heat to achieve successfully. Aristotle belie...

In other courses that I have taught, I have intentionally made space at the beginning of the semester for students to express their pronoun preferences to me and the class and made a point of sharing mine. My reasoning was that I wanted to avoid unintentionally misgendering students myself, having students misgender each other, and to acknowledge (although I wonder if I was ever successful at this, without saying it explicitly) that trans and non-binary folks are welcome members of our community who deserve respect. Reading  Dembroff and Wodak's (2018) article "He/She/They/Ze"  has generated some questions for me about the wisdom of this practice. In this article, the authors defend what they label as the  Radical Claim , that "We have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity" (372). I found the arguments the authors make in section 4.2 regarding privacy particularly compelling. By using gender-specific...