Jenkins

Katharine Jenkins in “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman*”, argues that Sally Haslanger’s proposal of a set of requirements a person must meet in order to be classified as a woman fails to include a severely marginalized group of people, trans people (Jenkins 396). She goes on to talk about all the ways trans people are discriminated against and how failing to address their oppression is a serious injustice. I agree with Jenkins that ignoring the oppression of trans people is an injustice to them and the rest of society, however I do not agree that their oppression should have been addressed by Haslanger when she proposed the “guidelines” for being considered a woman.

I agree with Jenkins that trans people face oppression as much as women and all other groups that are oppressed. However, I personally believe that trans people’s oppression, in this case specifically trans women’s oppression, should be addressed separately from Haslanger’s proposal to define women who are oppressed. Several authors we have analyzed in this class have written about a specific type of conditioning women face from early age, contributing to the oppression they face. Keeping that in mind, someone who was assigned male at birth and then reassigned themselves as women but did not undergo any medical treatments or personal changes in order to be viewed as women by society, do not face the same kind of oppression as a woman who has always identified as a woman and society identifies as a woman. Typically, trans women have spent some portion of their lives identifying as the gender they were assigned at birth, therefore they have not experienced the full scale or same kind of oppression that women who were identified as such at birth and continue to identify have. While I may not agree with all of the points made by Haslanger in how women are “defined”, I still believe that her view should remain separate from a response to help define trans oppression.

Jenkins may respond by saying that it is not anyone’s place to decide whether or not someone else is facing oppression. I would refute that by saying that Haslanger is not actively denying that trans people are not oppressed, she is merely defining a “standard” for women, in her view, that encompasses women who have identified as so since birth, and have been oppressed due to such. I believe that Haslanger would acknowledge that trans people are oppressed but that they face a kind of oppression that is different from women who have always identified as female and are identified by society as female. She would be open to trans people defining their own oppression separate from feminism in order to not distract from the goals of feminism.