Women are Women

Carol Hay (UMass Lowell)

Thursday, April 28, 6:30 p.m. (ET)
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5382
And online via Zoom

This week, we are excited to welcome feminist philosopher Carol Hay as our fourth and final colloquium speaker of Spring 2022.

This is an in-person event that will allow for virtual participation via Zoom. The in-person talk will be followed by a reception with wine and light snacks.

In-person attendance is restricted to members of the Graduate Center community. Members of the public are encouraged to participate virtually via Zoom. If you plan to attend virtually, please register in advance for this meeting. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining.

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Abstract
Who counts as a woman? Is there some set of core experiences distinctive of womanhood, some shared set of adventures and exploits that every woman will encounter on her journey from diapers to the grave? The relatively recent visibility of and sensitivity to the experiences of trans people gives us new reason to return to questions that feminists and other gender theorists have been grappling with for decades. These questions take on new urgency in light of the increasing violence and discrimination trans people face across the world—in one of the most recent instances of this discrimination, for example, Ukrainian trans women are reportedly being denied passage out of the country, despite their legal status as women and the imminent danger they face at the hands of Russia’s transphobic policies, because they are being misgendered as men.
According to the account I defend, womanhood is best understood as a family resemblance concept. I propose a normative reading of this view that recognizes that decisions about which features are taken to make up paradigmatic cases of womanhood are fundamentally political. This makes possible a conception of womanhood that does not continue to center the experiences of traditionally femme, non-disabled, straight cis white women, while simultaneously making sense of actual historical failures in this regard.
I’ll argue that when a TERF complains that trans women haven’t had the same experiences as “real” women who were assigned female at birth, what she’s really saying is, “Trans women haven’t had the same experiences as women like me.” If 30-plus years of intersectional feminism has taught us anything, it’s that this is precisely the move that feminists need to stop making.

Speaker Bio
Dr. Carol Hay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her most recent book Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution (W.W. Norton & Co., 2020, 2022) has been called “a crisp, well-informed primer on feminist theory” by Publisher’s Weekly and “a winning mix of scholarship and irreverence” by Kirkus Reviews. Dr. Hay’s academic work focuses primarily on issues in analytic feminism, liberal social and political philosophy, oppression studies, Kantian ethics, and the philosophy of sex and love. Her 2013 book Kantianism, Liberalism, & Feminism: Resisting Oppression received the American Philosophical Association’s Gregory Kavka/UCI Prize in Political Philosophy. Her 2019 op-ed “Who Counts as a Woman?” received the American Philosophical Association’s Public Philosophy Op-Ed Prize. Dr. Hay’s public philosophy has appeared in venues such as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Aeon magazine, and IAI News.

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CGEP Director: Carol C. Gould. Distinguished Professor, Philosophy and Political Science,
The Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY

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