Jenkins

Gender concepts have been up for discussion for many years in hopes to put a definitive label on what makes a woman. Sally Haslanger's 'Ameliorative' makes the attempt in doing so but with many objections. In Katherine Jenkin's Amelioration and Inclusion, Jenkins touches on Haslanger's approach with her own opinions on the matter. Haslanger believed that her account of being a woman only "excludes females who are not observed or imagined to be females and so are not viewed and treated as members of a subordinate gender class". Jenkin's objection to this is that it does not "solve the inclusion problem because it does not include trans people with their identified genders." (396). Although it seems both Haslanger and Jenkins can agree that women who appear as women face oppression because external intimidation, however, Jenkins likes to shed light on the fact that a large part of the oppression comes from internal sources too. For example, a woman who just starts a job in a new office might aim for a lower promotion than a man because the CEO is a man and the woman has internally reinforced that only a man can attain such position. Therefore, anyone who identifies as a woman, regardless whether they appear as such, still faces the same internal struggles as any other woman.
I believe that Haslanger is wrong to leave out the trans community because by saying that they do not count as women means that anyone who does not have the physical appearance of a woman does not deserve to identify as such. I think this puts too much emphasis on what a woman should appear to look like while it should really be of more focus on the identity of an individual. People of the trans community already face many different types of oppression and struggles as it is, and to not accept them for the gender they identify with would be cruel. Although I could see how a person would argue how it is not the same for a female who has looked like a "woman" her whole life and therefore been oppressed because of it to be places in the same category as someone who was born a male and benefitted from those privileges for a part of his life and then just decides to become a woman. However, when identifying as a female you then take on the oppression of a woman as an internal mindset. This what Jenkins meant when gender also becomes a class.
The exclusion within genders is very unsettling to me. Does Haslanger believe that the people of the trans community should forever feel like an "other"? Haslanger seems to believe that there are no positives of being a woman because for every positive you could point out a negative, which you could say the same for any trans person. Because of this, I believe that any person who identifies with being a female and lives by that deserves to be considered a woman.