katherine Jenkins

In Katharine Jenkins writing, “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman” a very crucial point is brought up and it is one that needs to be addressed especially in our ever so changing society. We are becoming a society in which it is okay to be who you want to be, even if that means changing the gender in which you are born with. Our society is one that embraces the changes and accepts individuals for who they are instead of treating them as if they are lesser. Now that is a bold statement to make, however I feel that while there is still some backlash for those individuals, things are looking brighter for them everyday. Jenkins brought up a crucial point regarding Sally Haslanger’s writing which is: that she seeks to define gender in reference to subordination (women as subordinate to the man who is socially privileged based on the fact that he is a male) the problem with this, is while she claims that this avoids the inclusion problem because everyone is included the harsh reality it does not solve the inclusion problem.

In order to fully examine Haslanger’s definition of women, Jenkins came up with four different scenarios involving trans women. Out of those four scenarios, there was only one in which a trans women would be able to be defined as a woman when using Haslanger’s definition. The problem is, is that not every trans women will be able to find herself in scenario 3 which is:  that she publicly presents herself as a woman, and it is accepted by all individuals surrounding her. Trans women are an extremely oppressed group and a lot of that oppression comes from the fact that some individuals are in denial of the legitimacy of their genders (Jenkins, 401). The definition of women needs to be adjusted to make sure that all trans women can be defined under the gender that they identify with. Jenkins proposed the idea that feminism needs both senses of gender (gender as class and gender as identity) in order to truly reach inclusive ameliorative inquiry into the concept of woman. Being classed as a woman and having female gender identity are crucial to feminism, and in return by using this trans women will be able to be classified as women by taking the definition into consideration. However, we need to focus more on the idea of having a female gender identity more than that of being classed as a woman. It is very important that Jenkins pointed out that Haslangers definition of women was in fact leaving out trans women. Just because they were not born a woman, does not make them any less of a woman and therefore should not be marginalized due to this. We need to adapt our definition of woman in order to include these individuals, because as Jenkins pointed out they have had just as much of an impact as individuals who were born females.