The Social Meaning of Sex

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Sally Kohn: The fact that men are on top and women are on the bottom is an integral part of what we mean in the socially constructed language of men and women. When it comes to a gender or race, now we have a situation where there's a group that is benefiting from the scially constructed categories, and another group that is being disadvantaged,. And that's a harder thing to change, maybe. It was part of my project to think about, well, what would the feminist? What can a feminist movement really focus on when they're casing on the rights of women?, she asks.

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it’s because those ways provide elegant predictive descriptions or because they serve a more subtle political purpose. To get at the true nature of reality, therefore, it’s important to think about which aspects of it are socially constructed, and why. I talk with Sally Haslanger about these issues, and the techniques we can use to understand the world and make it a better place.

Update (22 March): Our discussion here could have (and did) leave some listeners with the wrong impression of how Sally and I feel about trans rights -- we are entirely for them! My fault for not making things more clear during the conversation. So I have added a brief note during the podcast intro to make our position perfectly explicit. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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Sally Haslanger received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Ford Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among her awards are the Carus Lectureship, the Distinguished Woman Philosopher award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several books, including Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique.

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