Trapped in the Trans Experience: What Mary Couldn’t Know
1 The Open University, Department of Philosophy, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
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Received: 19 Aug 2023 / Revised: 17 Sep 2024 / Accepted: 19 Sep 2024 / Published: 30 Oct 2024
Abstract
Trans women make claims about their sex and/or gender membership, but they also make various claims about their inner life: that they feel like a woman or that they are a woman inside. I will consider the hypothetical case of Marty, who is a scientist studying the embodied experience of women. After years of research Marty realises that he is trans and transitions to become ‘Mary’. Does Mary know what it is like to be a woman? Mary has all the scientific knowledge, but can only imagine what it is like to be a woman. After transitioning, she learns nothing new about being a woman, only about being a trans woman. In the second part I will assess Talia Mae Bettcher’s ‘first-person authority’ account of gender avowals and the ‘liberatory project’; this constitutes the strongest defence available for trans claims such as I feel like a woman or I am a woman inside.
Keywords: female embodiment; trans women; phenomenal experience; Talia Mae Bettcher; first person authority; trans liberation
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
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CITE
Imbrišević, M. Trapped in the Trans Experience: What Mary Couldn’t Know. Controversial_Ideas 2024, 4, 16.
Imbrišević M. Trapped in the Trans Experience: What Mary Couldn’t Know. Journal of Controversial Ideas. 2024; 4(2):16.
Imbrišević, Miroslav. 2024. "Trapped in the Trans Experience: What Mary Couldn’t Know." Controversial_Ideas 4, no. 2: 16.
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