Katharine Jenkins

Up to now, many feminists have tried to define woman, either as a social identity, a social class, or a social status. However, since every woman is different from each other, it seems impossible to come up with a clear classification of women yet. In Katharine Jenkins’s Amelioration and inclusion, she discussed Haslanger’s article and made several improvements as for the definition of being a woman. In the article, Katharine Jenkins agreed with Haslanger that gender is an imposed social class, and she also suggested the idea of gender as a lived identity.

Katharine Jenkins questioned Haslanger’s definition for gender because it cannot classify all kinds of woman. A good example in this case Katharine Jenkins mentioned was transgender, and both the ones transformed from male to female, and the ones transformed from female to male. Out of all five scenarios in the article, I am most interested in the first one: Scenario 1: A trans woman does not publicly present as a woman and is perceived as a man by people around her. (Ethics, 400) According to Haslanger, being a woman mean function as a woman for the majority of the time, and the kind of trans women in scenario one does not count as women because they do not function as women in front of public. In my opinion, these trans women are just the same as all other people that born women. Most of those woman trans people choose to be a woman themselves, and they went thought series of surgeries to become one. They see themselves as a woman, and even though they born as male, they decide to be a woman. It is possible they does not present as a woman in public because they are ashamed of the fact that they are transgender, or maybe they are simply need time to adjust being a woman. How people present themselves is their own decision, and it is nothing wrong with having lifestyles and present differently from others. Some women may choose to dress and behavior like a man because they feel more conformable doing that. This kind of women does not function as a woman in public just like the trans people in scenario one, but this does not make them a man rather than a woman.

Many people do not include trans women as part of the woman social group. One possible reason is a trans woman does not experience all oppression a person who born woman does. For example, for people who transformed from male to female, they usually do not have the experiences of being part of the oppression and subordinate gender class before their transformation processes, so they do not classified as women. However, since transgender is also a subordinate social group, they are also the victims of oppression. As far as I am concerned, although they may experience different kinds of oppression, trans people may experience even more oppression than women.