Developments in Feminist Philosophy, Clare Chambers

Over the last 100 years the condition of women in society has changed and so has feminist philosophy. Professor Clare Chambers will reflect on the philosophy, politics, and practice of sex discrimination as it has developed over the past century.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_11 0:10

Good evening, everybody. Thank you all very much for coming, and welcome to another in this series of centenary lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. It's a great pleasure to have with us this evening Claire Chambers. Claire is Professor of Political Philosophy at Cambridge University, where she's also a Fellow of Jesus College. She's the author of a number of books and collections of essays, including Intact, A Defence of the Unmodified Body, and Against Marriage, an egalitarian defence of the marriage-free state. And most recently, I think, Freedom and Equality essays on liberalism and feminism. She's also a former member of the Notfield Council of Bioethics and a regular on the BBC and in the press. Her talk this evening is called Inclusion and Exclusion: A Hundred Years of Sex Discrimination in Philosophy. And the word philosophy is in Italic, so she means the journal published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Claire.

SPEAKER_06 1:14

Thank you so much. Thank you for the introduction and thank you for coming, and some of you for cueing outside at the back room, that's very kind. So when I was invited to deliver this lecture, I was asked if I could cover the centenary year and talk about feminist philosophy over the last hundred years and make a contribution of my own, and that's a really big ask. So I had to constrain it somewhat. And so to make this rather extensive brief more focused, my topic is sex discrimination. And sex discrimination is an appropriate issue for our purposes because there have been some really significant changes in the legal position on sex discrimination over that last century. And in fact, they align rather nicely with the Institute's history. So there have been key moments of legal change exactly 100 years ago and 50 years ago and today. So 100 years ago in the 1920s, sex discrimination was fully accepted, I would say. Although the first shoots of legal change were emerging, philosophers didn't really seem to be noticing them very much. 50 years ago in the 1970s, women's exclusion was still entrenched, but was being actively disputed. I'm going to move the slide on to my start line. Here we go. So 70 years ago women were fighting back against sex discrimination, women were fighting to get into male-only spaces, and I think largely that fight was won. By the end of the 1970s, sex discrimination was unlawful. Today, in the 2020s, the political and philosophical issue is not so much the exclusion of women, but I'm going to argue the exclusion of men. So the controversial legal and political question now is the status of women-only spaces and the question of whether men should be excluded from them and if so on what basis? On the basis of sex or gender. Now, these questions are smaller questions than feminist philosophy over the last hundred years, but they're still quite large questions. So, as Edward noted, I'm going to, in the first part of these remarks, pay homage to the Royal Institute of Philosophy and devote the first half of my remarks to consideration of how these issues have been treated in the pages of Philosophy, the Institute's journal. So let's start with the 1920s, which were all about excluding women. So when the Royal Institute, or TRIP, when TRIP was founded on the 6th of April 1925, most women did not have the vote. Women were legally subordinated to their husbands, with husband and wife considered as one person for the purpose of property law. The woman's property became that of her husband's on marriage. Children, too, were also considered to belong to the father, meaning that a woman who wished to leave her husband would have no legal rights to custody of her children. And this situation is something that many of you will know. John Stuart Mill described in 1869 as the primitive state of slavery lasting on. Now on 9th of April 1925, which is just three days after the founding of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Law of Property Act was passed. Part eight of that act, entitled Married Women and Lunatics, that's the title of that bit, allowed women to hold property separately from their husbands and to apply for child custody. So there's this huge legal change coming at almost exactly the same moment that the Institute is being founded. It was a monumental change. But it did not seem to register at all, I'm afraid to say, in the published deliberations of the Institute's philosophers. So the very first edition of the Institute's Journal, which was at that point called the Journal of Philosophical Studies, was published in January 1926. This is nine months after the passing of that Law of Property Act. And in that first issue, John S. Mackenzie published this article. So John S. McKenzie was the first official president of what is now called Humanists UK and was then called the Union of Ethical Societies. He'd held professorships at both Cardiff and Cambridge before retiring at the age of 55 in 1915. So, well into retirement, this article published in 1926 sets out what he calls 12 conceptions and special problems in social philosophy, which he said may be singled out as still retaining a certain degree of vitality. Here they are. Now you might notice as a quick skim that not one of these 12 special problems is about the condition of women. You can see that number 11 on the list is problems of the family. So when I saw this and first read his article, I felt sure that problems of the family would cover married women's brand new legal rights to own property and to have custody of their children. But it did not, I'm afraid to say. The family is a group based primarily on natural affection and community of interest, wrote Mackenzie, ignoring the crushing inequality of rights within marriage that was only just beginning to be reformed. He continued, the economic aspect does not call for any special attention here, since it is not essentially different from the same element as it affects individuals. Now let's just pause for a moment to really acknowledge what an astonishing statement that is. For women, it was by no means true that the economic aspect of the family was, quote, not essentially different from the same element as it affects individuals. Marriage had totally removed women's ability to own property in their own right until a few months prior to the publication of the article, and yet Mackenzie didn't see fit to mention that at all. So this omission made me wonder about Mackenzie's own family life. I did a little bit of research, and what I found was quite striking. So McKenzie did not have any children. He had a very tragic story actually. He had been orphaned at the age of eight when both of his parents died of cholera just weeks after moving the family to Buenos Aires. So imagine you're an eight-year-old boy, your family moves to Buenos Aires, and both of your parents die of cholera in the weeks after that. He and his brother were sent back to Scotland to be cared for by an aunt. So he didn't have any children, but he was married. He was married to Millicent Hughes Mackenzie. Millicent Hughes Mackenzie was extraordinary. She was the first female professor in Wales, and in fact, the first female professor in any chartered university in the United Kingdom. She was also the first female candidate in Wales in the 1918 general election. She was an important figure in the philosophy and practice of education. And she was also the co-founder of the Cardiff Suffragist branch. So, in short, she was a remarkable woman, actively engaged in pioneering women's equality. So I, you know, why then did her husband, John Mackenzie, not think that the condition of women was anywhere in the top 12 issues in social philosophy in 1926, a time when women didn't have the equal right to vote, could not own property, had no rights to custody of their children, had no legal right to refuse sex with her husbands, and could legally be discriminated against in all walks of life. So this was issue one of the Journal of the Institute. The next time that the journal considered issues or social issues was issue three of its first volume, published in July 1926. This is 15 months after the Law of Property Act. C. Delisle Burns, another atheist, wrote about practical issues and social philosophy. So Burns had been educated in Cambridge and then travelled to Rome to train for the priesthood. However, he renounced his faith in favour of philosophy. Burns did a little bit better than Mackenzie in thinking about the condition of women. He felt that it was, quote, worthwhile to review our present knowledge of social philosophy with respect to the vast amount of new social experience which is to be found in the practical issues of political, economic, and cultural life. So he was explicitly trying to think about these new emerging experiences. And Burns recognized that part of this new social experience was that the relation between the sexes in many parts of the world has changed. So this sounds really promising. He notes here that the uh the freer and nobler position of women in society, of course, does not mean that sex is less important. In fact, it is more important than it was. So we're kind of gearing up to learn something new. But I'm afraid that's the end. He just drops it at the end of that cryptic remark, and sex and women's equality is never mentioned again. Now, I could tell you similar stories about all the papers published in the journal in the 1920s. I looked at all of them that had any relevance to anything to do with social or political philosophy. For example, this paper written by John McMurray, the Jarrett lecturer in Balliol College at Oxford. I mean, this one uses the terms the electorate and the people interchangeably, as if they were one and the same thing. But of course, the electorate is not the same as the people when large chunks of the electorate, uh large chunks of the people do not have the right to vote. And when McMurray published this article, um, only some women had that right, many fewer than men. Um, and yet this was a live political issue. So just one year later, after the publication of this uh article, the Equal Franchise Act gave women equal voting rights for the first time. Here's a commemorative photograph of that. So at in these first decades, there's huge amounts of political change going on, but none of it makes its way to the pages of philosophy. In fact, no paper published in philosophy in the 1920s actually engaged with the position of women. So the 1920s were about the exclusion of women from philosophy. Let's move on 50 years to the 1970s, when the issue is including women. So, like the 1920s, the 1970s were a decade of enormous political change in women's position. And the key feminist issue here was sex discrimination. So, until the Equal Pay Act of 1970, um, it was lawful and common for employers to discriminate between men and women in pay and conditions. So the Equal Pay Act of 1970 uh was introduced by Labour Employment Minister Barbara Castle, whose statue you have on the left there. And it was introduced in response to a strike at the Ford factory in Dagenham. So in 1968, Ford had downgraded the job titles of female but not male sewing machinists, meaning that the women would now be paid less than men for the same work, uh, 15% less than the men. And in response, 850 workers initiated industrial action that lasted for three years. So again, huge significant political activity going on. Um, and after intervention from Castle, Ford increased the women machinists' pay, but not to full equality. They wouldn't get full equality in pay for another 16 years, even after the Equal Pay Act. So the 1970s was marked by prominent political and social discussion about sex equality, difference, and discrimination. And unlike in the 1920s, this debate did make it to the pages of philosophy, which was then under the editorship of John Renford Bambra. Now I'm going to tell you two different stories about feminism in philosophy in the 1970s. Okay, so here's the first story. I call it the saga of J.R. Lucas. Now, given the political climate of the 1970s, it's not surprising that the word feminism first appeared in a research article in philosophy in this decade. And the moment was in 1973, in J.R. Lucas's paper. Here he is, and the paper is called Because You Are a Woman. There it is. So educated at Winchester and then Baliol, John Lucas spent 36 years as a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, and he'd served on various Church of England commissions, one on doctrine, another on marriage and divorce. And his obituary in the Church Times described him as a lifelong Anglican, cheerfully orthodox in his beliefs, and someone who saw himself as a typical Englishman. Okay? So in this paper, we've got the views of a typical Englishman, albeit in philosopher form. So we just have to bear in mind that they may not be entirely the same. So what did he think of sex discrimination in the decade in which it became illegal? Well, as you can see on the slide that the article opens, Plato was the first feminist in the Republic. He puts forward the view that women are just the same as men, only not quite as good. Lucas then set out what I think contemporary feminist philosophers would call difference feminism, right? The idea that women are different from men but equal to them. He goes on to say he doesn't think they're not quite as good, he thinks women are different. But I think Lucas's version was more difference than feminism. So after some discussion of the intractability of the evidence on sex difference, Lucas turns to what he calls the more substantial question, which is quote, whether it can ever be right to treat a woman differently from a man on account of her sex. So at this point, when this article was published in 1973, the Equal Pay Act had been passed but not fully implemented, and other forms of discrimination outside of pay were still lawful. So again, this is a live political issue being discussed here at this moment. Now Lucas seems, I think, quite convinced by what feminists now might call the sex-gender distinction. So he says, I could hardly complain if I was not given the part of desdemona or a job as an ob hair boy on account of my sex. The implication here is that sex is sometimes relevant to one's ability to perform a role. But he continues, if I had very feminine features and had grown my hair long and golden, or if I were particularly deft at changing nappies, I might feel a little aggrieved. Now I think that like the specifics here are kind of standard 70s sexism. This is the typical Englishman coming through. But I think the core idea that what matters is not biological sex, but rather skills and behaviours, gender presentation, you know, seems kind of plausible from a contemporary perspective that there's a sex-gender distinction going on here. Lucas insisted in this paper that sex equality had its limits. He writes, we are reluctant to impose severe legal disqualifications, but we equally would hesitate to impose upon employers an obligation not to prefer women to play female parts or be nurses or join a family in an au pair capacity. For we recognize that a person's sex can reasonably be regarded as relevant to his or her suitability for particular posts, and that many institutions will operate on this basis and are entitled to. I am justified in refusing to employ a male au pair girl or a female foreman. So ultimately, Lucas is defending the at the time the legal status quo. Sex discrimination ought not to be legally mandated, but it ought to be legally permitted. Lucas's general principle was that while employers should be permitted to discriminate, such discrimination would often not be justifiable. Selection on merit, he thought, would usually suffice, but he offered an evocative exception. Here it is. To deny people the fruits of their examination success or to deprive them of their liberty on any grounds irrelevant to their own dessert is wrong, he argued. But it is not so evidently wrong to frustrate Miss Amazon's hopes of a military career in the Grenadier Guards on the grounds not that she would make a bad soldier, but that she would be a disturbing influence in the mess room. Okay. So this is the first mention of anything to do with women's equality in the journal. Rajlukshmi Debi Bhtacharya of Nawashi Wadiya College in India did not agree. I apologize, that's not a photograph of her. I couldn't find one, so that's a photograph of Nawashi Wadiya College in Pune. In a one-page letter to the journal, she wrote that Lucas's argument was chauvinism of little logical value. And she satirizes Lucas's purple prose. So she quipped, it would then be equally reasonable to bar all good-looking, rose-petaled complexioned, downy moustached men from entering the Grenadier Guards for fear they might arouse homosexual tendencies. After all, if Lucas thought that gender presentation was what mattered for actors playing the part of Desdemona, right, why should the same not be true for soldiers? And it might even be true, Battucheria added, quote, that with Miss Universe and her sisters in the Grenadier Guards, the soldiers would fight better. In that same issue of the journal, Susan Hack of the University of Warwick joined the critique. So Hack dismissed Lucas's paper in the strongest terms. It was, she wrote, evident prejudice, in which remarkably little substance survives when the rhetoric is disregarded. So, immediate response from women. Two years after Lucas defended the right to discriminate, the law ruled him wrong. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against women on grounds of sex when hiring or determining pay and promotion. Except where, in the words of the Act, being a man is a genuine occupational qualification for a job, which, according to the act, did not include employer preference of the sort that Lucas defended. Okay, so so far, the point of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, excuse me, the only paper in philosophy to use the word feminism or actively to discuss the issue of sex equality had been proved multiply wrong, or multiply wanting, let's put it that way, by Batticheria, by Hack, and by Parliament as well. But neither Lucas nor the editor were deterred. So despite the excoriating critiques Because You Are a Woman had received from its peers as quite wrong, of little logical value, and containing remarkably little of substance, Lucas was given space in philosophy to publish two more articles on the subject of sex equality, sex inequality. He was obviously a religious man, but these were not articles of repentance. His next paper, published in 1977, was called Against Equality Again. His third one was called Vive la Difference, which began Some of my best friends are women, but I I would not want my sister to marry one of them. And it ended. I find myself very much alive to the differences between the sexes. In speech, in writing, in every social setting, I respond to a woman quite differently from the way I respond to a man. And this difference of response colours my whole understanding of the situation and the parts that men and women play in it. I asked my colleague James Warren for help with the Latin phrase at the end. And he told me that it's a play on a famous quotation from a play by Terence, and that the original quotation is usually translated as, I am a human, I think nothing that is human is alien to me. And in this version, Lucas has made various changes of kind of questionable linguistic accuracy. And James Warren says to me, I think they're perhaps trying for I'm heterosexual, I think no woman is alien to me. So there we are. Now, of course, it is perfectly acceptable for any journal, including the journal Philosophy, to publish papers critical of equality and to publish papers critical of sex equality. But it's just really striking, striking to me that the journal's preferred philosopher of sex equality throughout the 1970s, the decade of women's liberation, was Lucas. And responding to Lucas in 1980, in this paper, Andrew and Catherine Belsky wrote: It is difficult to be certain whether J.R. Lucas's plea for the perpetuation of male dominance is naive or knowing, platitude or parody. And yet a reader, I cannot help but get the impression that Lucas's is like the journal's official line because he just publishes so much in it and no one else publishes anything of equivalent status and length on the topic. Lucas gets 48 pages in the 1970s on this topic, another 12 in 1965. And the only presentation of the opposing view is those two really short responses that I showed you. So perhaps the editor, Renfred Bramborough, was worried about this. And I'll tell you now the second story from the 1970s. I call this the 1978 issue. Okay, three years after the Sex Discrimination Act, something remarkable happened. The April 1978 issue of Philosophy contained only articles written by women. Here they are. Not listed on that page is a whole list of book reviews, also all written by women, although all the books being reviewed were by men. But nevertheless, a woman-only issue. Now the journal did not call attention to the fact that all the contributors were women. Bambra's editorial made no mention of that fact. It's rather amusing. The editorial is all about how when Americans send work to the journal, they don't use the correct postage stamps. And it also wasn't advertised on the cover, right? So this is just so happens that they're all by women. Nevertheless, the women-only issue was remarkable, and I can say that with certainty because it was remarked upon in a series of remarks in form of letters to the editor. So in the next edition of the journal, two women's letters were published about the women-only issue, and both were written by contributors to the all-women issue, but neither was happy about it. So here's the first one. Kathleen V. Wilkes of the University of Oxford was particularly clear. There should be no issue about women in philosophy. There should have been no issue for women in philosophy, she wrote. Sorry, a priori and pragmatic arguments. Her a priori argument was a sort of straightforward equality feminism. If women and men should be are to be considered equal, they must be treated equally. And if they're to be treated equally, it must be because they are empirically alike. And if they're empirically alike, there is no basis for giving special treatment to women. And as Wilkes put it, in a claim that I think rather underestimates the ability of philosophers to make outlandish arguments, she says, it's impossible to argue that the sex of an individual is relevant to his or her ability to teach or write philosophy. Hence, in academic establishments, generally in philosophy, not italicized, and one would hope in philosophy, the journal, the sex of a professor, of an applicant, or of an author must be considered to be irrelevant, as irrelevant as is his or her size in socks. And empirically, Wilkes noted either one thinks that women as such get an unfair deal from the academic establishment, or one does not. And even if women were being treated unfairly for Wilkes, the all-women issue of philosophy would not have been justified. She writes, reverse discrimination is in the late 1970s a thoroughly regressive step because it underlines the significance of sex rather than undermining it or minimizing it. In any case, Wilkes notes parenthetically, I think myself that women are doing all right, but that is a personal opinion that does not affect the argument. I think it's quite striking that Wilkes felt that women were doing all right, given the situation in the pages of the journal, but also in the lecture halls of her own university. So in 1979, when this is written, the vast majority of Oxford colleges did not admit women. Wilkes was a fellow of St Hilda's College, one of seven women-only colleges at the time. The first admittance of women to a previously all-male college had occurred just five years before in 1974. In 1978, the date of this article, there were a total of 12 colleges in Oxford where Wilkes was that admitted women, whereas 23 admitted men. There was a significant inequality. The other person who was unimpressed by the all-women issue of philosophy was Amelie Rorty. She was writing from Douglas College in Rutgers, which now describes itself as the only historically women's college in the nation situated within a world-class public research university. Now Rorty saw the whole thing as a bit of a joke. You can see that on the slide there if you can read it. Dear editor, she writes, it has taken me some time to sort out my reaction to the April 1978 issue of philosophy. My first reaction was, I must confess, entirely frivolous. I thought you had declared Women's Day at the zoo, and that the contributors might expect to get party hats and favours. And she goes on in this jocular way. Towards the end of the slide, my friends told me that I should take more serious and responsible views of these matters. This I found rather difficult to do, but I have finally lumbered around to some set of conflicted reactions. And these reactions were essentially the same as Wilkes's. She felt an issue containing only women was patronizing, that it implied that women were not proper philosophers. And she wrote, it is taken for granted in most of the civilised parts of the world that there are competent women philosophers. There is no necessity of welcoming us to a world where we are ordinary citizens. Of course, she continues, there are some dim regions of the world, Timbuktu, Saudi Arabia, and a few backwater circles in Oxbridge where this is not recognised. But we are not talking about that. The problem is, of course, that the backwater circles in Oxbridge were very much in play. Not least, because Lucas was philosophy's, you know, official philosopher of sex discrimination in this period. The all-women issue of 1978 had not increased the number of papers defending feminist accounts of sex discrimination. In fact, it had just added these two papers by women, saying they didn't think it was appropriate to have an all-women issue. At this point, enter, thank goddess, uh, Mary Midgley. Here she is. So a couple of issues later, she writes in, Your correspondence protesting in April 1979 against the all-female issue of philosophy, um, mystify me somewhat, first by making such a fuss about it, and second by their unrealistic attitude to the force of prejudice. Um, so in the 1970s, Midgley, she was not from the backwater circles of Oxbridge, she was at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Although she had been an undergraduate in Somerville College, which was all women at the time, and in Midgley's autobiography, she notes that the university as a whole became more female dominated while she was there during World War II as the male students left to fight. And in her autobiography, she says, I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth Anscombe and I, and Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foote and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy. I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn't get heard. So I think Mary Midgley did recognise the particular value of women-only space in the context of sex inequality. So in this article on the slide, she continues, there should be more of us. It is quite true that to erode prejudice, the first thing needed is simply to do one's job properly. But prejudice is a tough weed. And this policy has to be supplemented by an occasional yank with a spade. Okay, so that yank with a spade takes us to the present day. I hope I've somewhat fulfilled my brief to talk a bit about the last hundred years of feminist philosophy. Now I'm going to move to the present day and try and make a kind of philosophical contribution that is not historical. So let's talk now about the 2020s and excluding men. So the question raised by the 1978 issue was whether it was appropriate to have spaces reserved just for women. I mean, it's not just journals that raise this question. More broadly, we might have all kinds of things just for women, women-only prizes, clubs, colleges, services, and physical spaces. I think in the 1920s, this basic question of whether we should have women only, I'll call it spaces just to encompass all of those kinds of things. That basic question seems less controversial than it did to Wilkes and Rorty. I think feminist practice and also UK law recognises the force of Mary Midgley's argument that you know having some spaces or some things just for women in the context of sex inequality is a progressive step. And so I think it's essential, it's currently considered essential to feminist practice that it should be lawful to have women-only spaces. Even though women-only spaces mean discriminating against men by excluding them and therefore treating them unfavourably. So there's lots of kinds of examples of justifiably women-only spaces. I'm not going to read the slide out, it is a bit small. It's just some examples of the kinds of spaces that we would commonly think of as being justifiably women-only. Perhaps surprisingly, I think it is actually Lucas's question which is closer to current concerns. Not the question of whether there should be justifiable exclusion of men, but the question of on what basis that should be. So Lucas asked whether it can ever be right to treat a woman differently from a man on account of her sex. And he wondered, remember, whether that was about sex, you know, namely the biological factor of being female or gender, namely presentation, behaviour, or what we might in contemporary contexts call gender identity. Now, of course, in 2026, this question has become profoundly contentious once again, albeit in a changed context. So I think it's really helpful to think about this shift. So in the 1920s, men-only spaces were multiple in default. And the question was, could we ever get women in? In the 1970s, the issue was how to let women into those spaces and the conditions of equality that would allow that. And I think now that the life political question is who should be allowed into women's spaces? Given that it's sometimes appropriate to exclude men, who counts as a man? Now I think the legal status quo can be described as pro-single sex spaces and anti-single gender spaces. And although this is the legal status quo, it's actually quite a complex position. And in the full version of this paper, I spend a really long time explaining it. I'm not going to do that now, I'm going to give you the headline features, but I'm happy to take questions on it in the question period. So the sex discrimination legislation currently enforces the UK Qualty Act 2010, and it makes it unlawful to discriminate on any of the protected characteristics which are listed on the slide. Now, some protected characteristics only apply to some people. So for example, only disabled people have the protected characteristic of disability, and only trans people have the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. But other protected characteristics apply to everybody. So we all have an age, we all have a race, we all have a sex. Since both women and men have the protected characteristic of sex, since we all have that characteristic, both women and men are protected from sex discrimination. And that's an equal protection that applies to both. However, the law recognises that there are times when it is appropriate to treat to exclude someone or treat them unfavourably on the grounds of sex. And it explicitly permits favourable treatment of women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or receiving maternity rights, the provision of single-sex spaces such as changing rooms and sex discrimination in sports. So the Equality Act has explicit considerations for those things, and it explicitly states that these single-sex provisions do not unlawfully discriminate on grounds of gender reassignment. So that again is explicit in the Act. There's also a general provision in the Equality Act allowing private associations to restrict membership to people who share a protective characteristic. So it's lawful to have a private association, a club that's just for women, or one just for men, or one for people who share another characteristic. And beyond these explicit provisions, the law allows for sex discrimination against men or against women when that discrimination is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. So that's the Equality Act 2010. But despite these really clear provisions allowing sort of single-sex spaces in various situations, this issue has been hugely contentious, leading to the recent Supreme Court case for Women Scotland versus the Scottish ministers. And I'm sure you may have seen about this in the news. So in its ruling on that case, the UK Supreme Court found that the meaning of the word woman in the Equality Act is what it calls biological woman. And the court noted that the Equality Act defines sex as the binary division into male and female, and argues, quote, the ordinary meaning of these plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman. These are assumed to be self-explanatory and require no further explanation. So it's a sort of layperson's language. And the court concluded that Parliament, quote, intended that sex-based rights and protections under the Equality Act 2010 should apply to the distinct group of biological women and girls or men and boys with their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group. Okay, so the Supreme Court doesn't exist to evaluate or approve legislation. Its purpose is not to advocate but to interpret. And in these terms, you know, the ruling is procedurally impeccable, the law simply is what the Supreme Court says it is. But nevertheless, the ruling has been very controversial and controversial for in ways that are of interest to philosophers. So first, by clarifying that a case of justified discrimination against men is also a case of justified discrimination against trans women. That's the focus of this case. Second, even more radically, the Supreme Court has clarified that the Equality Act 2010 means that if it is justified to discriminate against men by exclusion, then it's not only justifiable but also necessary to exclude trans women. And I'll kind of set that argument out now and then make some comments about it. So here's the Supreme Court's argument. Women-only spaces must exclude trans women. On the slide there, I've just put some quotations from the court with the language that it uses, and I'm just going to use the language of the court in referring to biological women, biological men, and trans women, trans man. I'm going to follow the court's language for ease to understand. So the argument is as follows. If Women in the Equality Act means biological women, then it's justifiable to exclude trans women from women-only spaces because, by definition, they are not biological women. And when I say by definition, I mean according to the Supreme Court's definition. I'm not talking about any other kind of broader philosophical or political context. So since trans women are biological men in the sense defined by the Supreme Court, they can be excluded from single-sex services reserved for biological women by simple exclusion. But the ruling goes further. So it is necessary to exclude trans women from places which exclude men, according to the court, because excluding men at all is justifiable only under the strict conditions set out by the Equality Act. And according to the Supreme Court, quote, these gateway conditions cannot be coherently applied if sex does not carry its biological meaning, end quote. Because otherwise it would be hard to see why single sex services are justified at all. And if single sex services are not needed, if they're not a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, then they are unjustified and therefore they would be unlawful cases of sex discrimination against men. And that's the key thing here. It's discrimination against men that is the issue. So to see this, consider some examples. The justification for a women-only cervical cancer screening service is that only women have a cervix, and using the phrases from the Equality Act, since quote, only persons of the female sex have need of the service, it's lawful not to offer it to men. Similarly, the justification for women-only sporting competition is that, in the words of the Equality Act, the physical strength, stamina, or physique of average persons of one sex would put them at a disadvantage compared to average persons of the other sex. And therefore, it is law not to allow men to enter those competitions. And the justification for women only changing room in the words of the Equality Act is quote, a person of one sex might reasonably object to the presence of a person of the opposite sex. And again, therefore, it is lawful to exclude a man from those spaces. But there is no justification in law for these services to exclude men if they include some people who don't have a cervix or who have male sporting advantage or who are observably physiologically male and so on. So the justification for these exclusions depends on them being single sex. So the conclusion then of the Supreme Court is that any places and opportunities from which biological men can lawfully be excluded are places or opportunities from which trans women not only can but must by law be excluded, because if they are not excluded, then the justification for those spaces in the first place fails to meet the bar set by equality law because it would then be unjustified discrimination against men. And that I think is the bit that is not very easy to understand. It's taking me a long time to fully understand it with reading the ruling, right? That it's discrimination against men which risks being unfair and unlawful in the eyes of the Equality Act. Okay, so that's the ruling. Many people, including many feminist groups, and have praised this result, but many others have opposed it. And in particular, trans theorists and advocates and others who endorse the slogan trans women are women argue that women-only spaces should include trans women. And another way of saying this, I think, is to say that sex discrimination against men is justified, when it is justified, on grounds of gender, not on grounds of sex. And I think this objection can take one of two forms. One form I call no single-sex spaces. So no single-sex spaces says all women-only spaces and opportunities should include trans women. And any cases of justified discrimination against men are never cases of justified discrimination against trans women. Men should always be excluded on the basis of gender, not the basis of sex. I think it's evident this is a really radical claim. The claim that there is never any grounds for exclusion on the basis of sex, even in contexts like biology, like healthcare and other things that are directly about sort of biology, you know, places involving nudity and so on, is extremely radical. It has been the demand of many lobbying organizations, but I think it's I regard it as sort of implausible for the purposes of our philosophical discussion here, because we can really get the same arguments by thinking about a more moderate position, which I call pluralism. Pluralism says it is sometimes appropriate to exclude male people on the basis of sex. And so some cases of justified discrimination against men are cases of justified discrimination against trans women. However, it is sometimes justified to exclude men on the basis of gender rather than sex, and in those cases, women-only spaces or opportunities should include trans women. So a defender of pluralism can say, well, there are some contexts, perhaps healthcare, places of all the nudity, whatever it might be, or sports where sex is relevant, but there are other cases where it's gender. And so examples of appropriate exclusion on the basis of gender rather than sex might be groups which aim to form coalitions between those who identify as women, such as student groups, which exclude cis men but welcome biological females, trans women, non-binary people. Or groups which aim to alleviate historical injustice against all those who are not perceived as or do not identify as masculine. Or spaces where there's a threat of violence against anyone who presents as feminism, as feminine, an argument which is justified, used to justify allowing trans women to use women's bathrooms or men's, uh placing them in uh women's prisons. Okay, so pluralism I think is easier to justify than no single-sex spaces because it can remain uh flexible on that question. But there is a philosophical and legal challenge to it, and that is because any exclusion of men, whether on the basis of sex or gender, um, is a prima facie case of sex discrimination which needs careful justification if it is to be permissible. So, in the language of the Equality Act, it must be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. And the arguments for excluding men on the basis of sex are kind of well rehearsed in theory and practice. They go back to the 1970s, well, in fact, they go back prior to that, right? They go back to the long history of sex discrimination, why sex is significant. But the arguments for exclusion on the basis of gender are more tricky. And to see this, uh note first that there can be different kinds of women-only space. Okay, so so far I've been talking about single-sex space, the top line. But there are at least two further alternatives. Um so I'm gonna call a woman-only space based on gender identity and not biological sex a feminine-only space. So the feminine-only space admits anyone who identifies as a woman. So the feminine-only space welcomes what are sometimes called cis women, women who are not trans, as well as trans women. And it excludes everybody else. So anyone without a gender identity of woman. So those who have the gender identity man, or those who have alternate gender identities, or those who have no gender identity. Now, maybe the feminine only space would appeal to Lucas, right? This is in a way what he was um joking about or kind of imagining when he appealed to the significance of exclusion on the basis of gender, when he wrote that he might feel aggrieved not to be cast as desdemona if he had very feminine features. Um, but unfortunately for Lucas, the feminine only space involves unlawful discrimination, and that is because gender reassignment is a protected characteristic that protects anyone who is trans. Women's single-sex spaces and services are lawfully permitted and required to exclude trans women because trans women are not biological women as per the Supreme Court ruling. That's what we talked about a moment ago, and because the Equality Act explicitly allows for single-sex services. But women's single-sex services and spaces are not permitted to exclude trans men, and that's not permitted because it would be an example of discrimination on the basis of gender reassignment, because the exclusion of trans men is the exclusion of a biological female person, in the court's terminology, being excluded because they are trans. So, therefore, single-sex spaces must include trans men if they are to be permissible cases of sex discrimination against men in general. So you have this very complicated thing. In order to permissibly exclude men, you must include trans men. Therefore, the feminine only space which excludes trans men is a case of unlawful discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment. It excludes trans men just because they are trans, and it does not do so as a necessary means of providing a single sex space. Okay, so next one. You might think, well, this is not a great problem because most trans advocates and trans allies do not advocate the feminine only space. Much more common is a defense of what I call the gender-inclusive women-only space. This is the bottom row of the table. So a gender-inclusive women-only space is open to all biological women, however they identify as women, as trans, as non-binary, as well as trans women. That I think is the more common request. It's the model advocated by Stonewall and by many women's colleges in Oxford and Cambridge have gone towards that. So on this version of the woman-only space, the relevant exclusion is people who are both biologically male and have either a masculine or a non-binary gender identity. Now, this way of excluding men then might seem to avoid both sex and gender reassignment discrimination. Because no one is excluded on the basis of gender reassignment, because both male and female trans people are included. So that looks safe. There's no discrimination of that kind. Moreover, no one is excluded just because they are male, biologically male, as the Supreme Court defines it, because trans women are included. So this might look like an option. However, the gender inclusive space does discriminate against males because the inclusion rules for males are different from the inclusion rules for females. So females are admitted into the gender inclusive space regardless of gender identity, whereas males are admitted only if they have um, only if they are trans or have a feminine gender identity. And so this inequality of treatment is an example of direct discrimination against men on the grounds of sex. It's because of their because of his sex that a man, a biological man with a man masculine gender identity is not admitted. And again, it's a case of unequal treatment that is not required to create a single sex service because it's not a single sex space. Moreover, this is also an example of indirect discrimination against men. Indirect discrimination is defined in the Equality Act as a policy that applies in the same way for everybody but disadvantages a group of people who share a protected characteristic. A paradigmatic example of indirect discrimination is where an employer will only hire people who are six foot or taller, right? And that's not a case of direct discrimination because both men and women have to meet that same standard, but it is indirect discrimination because it's much more common for men to be six foot or taller than women, and therefore it's indirect discrimination on grounds of sex. Um, this I think is the is true of both the gender-inclusive and the feminine-only versions of women-only space. Both indirectly discriminate against males because it will be much harder for males to fulfil the requirement of having a feminine gender identity as compared to females. Um, partly with as a result of the uh the gender binary, the gender binary which works by normatively prescribing femininity for females and proscribing it for males. So it's much harder for a biological male to have a female, a feminine gender identity than a biological female. So indirect discrimination against men is there in both cases as well. So I think we can uh see that these versions of the women-only space fail on the grounds of anti-discrimination law, not because of anything to do with women, but because they are forms of unjust or unlawful discrimination against men who are not trans. So excluding men turns out to be the problem. All right, so what do we do? This is the final slide, nearly at the end. We've got four options, I think. The first is we can get back to the 1960s, right? Let's just abandon all sex discrimination legislation and say you can have any kind of sex discrimination that you like. That is going to allow all these different kinds of space. If sex discrimination is lawful, any of these different kinds of space are lawful too. Um, I don't think that's a good option. Maybe you do. Tell them tell us about it if you think it is. The second option is uh slightly mischievously, I put Kathleen Wilkes's picture here. No women-only spaces, uh, let men in always. Um it's mischievous because, of course, Kathleen Wilkes didn't in any way argue against any women-only spaces, she only talked about journals. Um, but that's extreme in the other direction, right? So that says sex discrimination principles are so strong that it must never be permissible to exclude on the basis of sex. Um, I mean, like Mary Midgley, I don't think this is a good option either. I think these two extremes are not going to work. So we need one of two remaining options. The third option is to say, well, we've got the Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court ruling says that women-only spaces can exist only if women are defined on the basis of sex, not gender, and be content with that. So we could say this has got not only the right ruling in law, but also, you know, philosophically, this is the right way of going about it, and be content with that. Uh, the fourth option, start all over again and rewrite the Equality Act, and say we need to allow some forms of sex and gender discrimination, but forbid others. Um, now this may be possible. I've done the last hundred years of philosophy, I can't do that now. Um, maybe we can do that going on. However, I do think that the considerations that I've offered here show that this is going to be very, very complicated. Because what is very, very difficult given the way that sex and gender reassignment interplay and interlock, it will be very complicated to develop a position that allows for gender-inclusive spaces while also protecting against discrimination on the grounds of both sex and gender reassignment. It's a very complicated puzzle, and working out whether it can be solved must be for another day. Thank you.

SPEAKER_11 58:52

Women in sport. So this you touched on this quite a bit. If we have exclusion criteria, which I think we do in the international sport, sporting authorities based on hormone levels, why do we need exclusion criteria based on biological sex? Wouldn't that be something that they might take into account in a rewrite of the sex of the uh of the Equality Act?

SPEAKER_06 59:18

So I think this is a question for sports scientists. The question of which biological features act so as to give the average person of one sex an advantage over another. I'm not a sports scientist, um, but as I understand it, the relevant features are not only hormones but also things such as you know a skeleton, muscle type and size, and that sort of going through male puberty offers a significant sporting advantage. So that question of which biological characteristics matter, I think, is a question for sports scientists. The question of whether biological features matter at all for equality of opportunity is a good question for philosophers, and I have a paper on that in the essay collection that you mentioned. Um, and it's it's it's a complicated argument, but there are many different facets of equality of opportunity as they apply to sport. And fair competition is the one that is really being responded to by biological criteria, um, but there are other considerations as well, such as anti-sexism and inclusion. So, philosophers have it, again, a complicated, always a complicated uh set of issues to untangle.

SPEAKER_11 1:00:28

Thank you. Um I'm thinking now about the comparison between race and biological sex. So the judges insisted that biological sex was a simple notion. Of course, it sits alongside race in the Equality Act, and many people have thought that race is a metaphysically rather shaky notion. What do you think of? I mean, does that what thoughts does that prompt in you about the robustness of the notion of biological sex? Some people think the notion of biological self sex itself is a little bit like that of race, a kind of social construction of some kind.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:06

Well, very interestingly, race is one of the protected characteristics which is treated quite differently and is given its own special considerations. So there are various forms of permissible discrimination which the Equality Act allows, which it does not allow for race, and specifically skin colour. Discrimination on grounds of skin colour is never permitted in the Equality Act. So it even gives the example that you know I mentioned that we are permitted to form clubs for members that share a protective characteristic, and the example that the guidance gives is that you can have, therefore, a club for people that share a race as long as that race is not defined by skin colour. And the example that is given is I think it's something like um an African women's club, but it but that all African women must be permitted to attend, not just black women or white women. So the Equality Act treats race and specifically skin colour as never being legitimate grounds for discrimination. And so that's very interesting, isn't it? That we tend to think that race is uh socially suspect and yet it's clearly socially highly salient, has been and continues to be the grounds for you know significant amounts of discrimination. And so that's really the reason that we need to regulate and prevent discrimination on grounds of race, not whether race is a real thing biologically, but whether it is a salient issue socially. And I think we can make similar arguments for most of sex discrimination legislation, and this is really the 1978 issue question, right? It's not whether women are biologically worse philosophers, it's are women treated as worse philosophers and therefore is anti-discrimination legislation and anti-discrimination measures necessary to rectify that issue.

SPEAKER_11 1:02:52

Thank you, and that segues neatly into my last question, which is I would never suggest that women are worse philosophers than men, but do you think there is, some people think there is a distinctive style of doing philosophy, which is characteristic of women, or do you think that's nonsense?

SPEAKER_06 1:03:10

I'm sure some people think it. Um I think that there are women and men who have different styles from each other. I have not done. I want to do a proper you know analysis of the data to discern whether it was a feature, but I've got no evidence to think it would be.

SPEAKER_11 1:03:27

Thank you very much, Claire. Over to you. There is a roving mic for those of you who have a question. Yes, here and on the aisle.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:42

Thank you very much. That was great. Um I have a fifth option, um, which is to reinterpret the Equality Act. Right? Just deny that the Supreme Court interpreted it correctly, or you don't even have to deny that they interpret it correctly. You can just say that's just a bad way of interpreting it, even if that was the original intention. Right? Because a lot of the issue just comes from taking gender and sex to not always coincide to right to get rid of sex. Just treat women, the term, as a gender. Forget biological sex. The grid I think and will work, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:04:37

Well, thank you. I mean that's precisely the question of the Supreme Court is should we treat women as sex or as gender? That's the issue that it's questioning. And so this this the ruling, which is 60, 80 pages long, you know, goes through in very excruciating detail the reasons that does not work as an interpretation of the Equality Act. Um, so for example, one of the issues that is discussed is um the fact that the Equality Act talks about women being protected from discrimination on grounds of maternity and breastfeeding. And the Supreme Court states that if we interpret women as being gender, a gender term, that would mean that trans men would not be protected from discrimination if they are breastfeeding. Because if women is gender, then trans men are not women, and so if they breastfeed, they are not protected from sex discrimination. So that's one of the many examples, so it's a really long ruling, where this the Supreme Court says that the only way that the Equality Act can work in doing what it intended to do is if women and men are sex terms. Now, of course, we can rewrite the Equality Act so that women and men are not sex terms, but that's option four. That's yeah, that's the issue. And as to whether the Supreme Court interpreted it wrongly, I mean, procedurally, that's not possible, right? When the Supreme Court says it's law, it's law. Um of course as philosophers, but we don't have to agree with that.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:15

Um my name is Martin Loet. Um I just wanted to explore a little bit further on the idea of proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, um, when it comes to the concept of positive discrimination and look looking through the lens of of sort of time and the speed it takes to get to a uh an equal position. So if you arrive at a situation where you've got no female chemistry students at a university or no female philosophers writing in a journal, and you say, Well, that's that's not good, we mustn't discriminate against women going forward. But I'd like to draw further to what extent should there be positive discrimination to get to that legitimate aim, because if you just let organic non-discrimination take its course, it could be a generation before female scientists or philosophers are recognised. So I I would lean towards acceleration. I know some people would say that's then discrimination against uh men in some cases, but it's getting to the legitimate aim. So I wonder what your thoughts were on that.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:16

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that I think is essentially what is at stake in the 1978 issue discussion, right? Is is having a woman-only issue in full in the journal philosophy is that you know, reverse discrimination, as I think it was how uh Wilkes described it, um, you know, is this a regressive step or is it a positive step? I think the answer in terms of strategy is likely going to be context-dependent. That in some situations having positive discrimination, affirmative action is going to advance the cause of equality, and in others it's it's not. And that's largely going to be a question of context rather than principle. I mean, one example I think of is sort of women-only competitions in area in areas where biology isn't even hypothesized to be an explanation for difference. So think of a girls-only chess competition. Right now, a girls-only chess competition might be a really good thing to have if girls don't play chess very much because for whatever reason they think chess is not for them. Not because girls are biologically inferior at chess, but because they are not for social reasons encouraged to play it. So that might be a justification for a girls-only chess competition. Whether a girls-only chess competition succeeds in breaking down sex discrimination in society broadly, or whether it entrenches it, I think will be a matter of context that we can't decide in advance. Um, so clearly in the 1978 issue of philosophy, uh, Wilkes and Warty thought that that was an entrenching issue, which is interesting to be precisely given that the editor didn't draw any attention to it, didn't say anything about it. And it's it's an interesting question whether drawing no attention is better than drawing attention. Um, so yeah, those are my thoughts on that. I think that measures to take to undo historical sex inequality are necessary, but precisely what they are will vary by context.

SPEAKER_11 1:09:16

Let's work our way. Okay, go go on.

SPEAKER_09 1:09:19

Yeah, isn't this thing about legitimate and proportionate aims just a bit of a get out of jail free card? Because in your difficult group, let's just call each of those instances where we want to discriminate against some uh portion of the population a, you know, maybe they're all legitimate and proportionate.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:34

That's a really great question. So the um the Equality Act explicitly states that for something to be um a legitimate aim, the aim cannot in itself be discriminatory. So you can't say um, you know, my women-only club is needed because it's good to have a club just for women, right? I've got to give some other non-discriminatory justification, and that actually is, I think, what will be a problem for some of the lines on the grid, right? So we have a kind of really established philosophical and political set of justifications for women-only spaces in a single-sex sense. We just had decades of arguing for those, so we kind of know how the arguments go. What we don't have a long history of is robust arguments for sort of gender-inclusive women-only spaces, which are not themselves discriminatory in terms of the Equality Act. So the claim it's good to have a club or a space or a prize or a college for people who identify as women or as feminine. We don't have a you know a really strong argument for that that we are as familiar with, let's say. So that would have to be developed.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:49

And maybe some of them aren't legitimate, maybe some of those are fine to do without. But maybe some of the things like access to single-sex bathrooms, for example, I think that you can make arguments around dignity and rights and safety, probably there, and you know, probably some of those will be legitimate, and maybe some of them we can do with.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:03

Yeah, and the problem, of course, then is when you have a clash of perspectives on on exactly those questions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11 1:11:10

Okay, by the war. Um, a couple of rows back.

SPEAKER_12 1:11:16

Thank you very much. Um I I feel like you could argue to some extent that the notions of gender have been developed to almost justify or entrench certain unjustifiable discrimination on the basis of sex? That makes sense. Um so, in a world where there's less discrimination that's unjustified on the basis of sex, what happens to gender over time, in your view? And what's the kind of end game for gender?

SPEAKER_06 1:11:44

That's a fantastic question and very, very sort of large. I mean, the sex gender distinction was for many years and still by some feminists thought to be absolutely crucial to feminism, precisely for the reasons that you allude to. That the original purpose of the sex-gender distinction is to enable feminists to say there are biological differences between male and female people, but they do not justify cultural or social or political differences, that gender is, as it were, the suspect cultural overlay which puts inequality on top of difference. That's the that's the sort of um the absolute standard use of the sex-gender distinction in feminism. You know, from Mill and in more recent in 20th century feminism. The current moment is really feminism is battling with that question of the sex-gender distinction and whether it is still appropriate to do that. So some feminists think actually, no, gender now is much more important than sex. That's the sort of trans-inclusive view that I've been talking about. Some feminists think no, we have to retain and go back to that sex-gender distinction and say we want to really resist gender as a as a salient category, and that what we want is a gender-free sort of situation. I think what is clear is that when while we have um inequality between women and men, let's put it that way, both sex and gender remain salient, and we just have to theorize them both at this moment.

SPEAKER_11 1:13:21

And then come forward a row or two. There's one person who had their hand up a little while ago, yes, I think so.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:29

And then you thanks. Um yeah, thanks so much for the talk. Uh I was just wondering, what if uh we accept that it is possible to some extent to change your biological sex? And as technologies, you know, when I when I take painkillers, I change my biology, and you know, if I take exogenous almost to some extent, I'm changing my biology. Um and in the future, maybe that will become much, much easier. And and maybe, you know, with gene therapies and stuff like that, we can imagine a future where we actually can change our biological sex in in all the meaningful ways. Um yeah. What what updates would you have to make to the Equalities Act in in that world, or or does that solve any of the problems?

SPEAKER_06 1:14:08

Interesting. Well, in the part of the talk where I sort of gave some examples of why single sex spaces might be justified, um, like I talked about cervical cancer screenings and um changing rooms and sports, you know, you might say, well, in the world you're envisaging, those different sorts of things would come apart. And I was talking in the Equality Act talks as if biological sex is one thing with the same features cohering all together, so that the so that the same people have have a cervix and female sporting um prowess and female physiology in a change of room situation. And I suppose your question is really asking us to imagine what if those things are different, and then we might want to have not you know female only provision, but provision for people with a cervix, and this is where we have this language that's discussed again very often. Should it be about people with a cervix or should it be about women and how should it be? Um, I suppose I think that a bit like my answer to the question previously, a lot of this is going to be context-dependent. That there are, we are still in the situation where biological changes are sufficiently sort of limited and unusual that in many, many cases, it certainly even things like healthcare provision, it is sort of vastly more effective to just speak about about women, to speak about women's healthcare, than it is to speak about people with different body parts and so on. This may change in the world you imagine where we all have a much greater impact on how our bodies shift. Um, but I think at the moment we are still pretty much in a more um divided situation.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:50

What about what about a less clear one than health, like like change moments, for example, where you know maybe you could argue that that I don't know, things like genitals or the visual occurrence of the articles which which can be changed now are what's the is the other saying you can think that.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:08

Yeah, well that's very interesting, isn't it? Because the way the law is phrased is that um something like a person might have a reasonable a reasonable objection to seeing somebody of the other sex, or something like that. Um, and of course, that question of what is reasonable is something which may change and may shift. Um, additionally, some of these questions depend on how we are configuring public space. So this is why we have debates about, you know, well, maybe if changing rooms are as many changing rooms are, sort of relatively communal and open, these questions of privacy and dignity are different than if changing rooms are single, single user, lockable, and so on. So again, it comes down to the to the context in many cases, and this question of reasonableness is necessarily reasonableness is relative to a set of reasons. Um, and as our collective sense of reasonableness changes, these things change.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:04

Hi, um when talking about rewriting the Equality Act, how important do you think is kind of intertwining protective characteristics together? So, for example, race and sex, we talk about like feminist philosophy, but feminism is different for white women compared to women of colour. Um, and we talk about lawful kind of discrimination if it's an associated protective characteristic, for example, a gender-only space or women-only space, but there could be a woman-only space for women of colour to kind of attain a legitimate goal, for example, sexual mobility. So, when we're writing that Equality Act, do you think the protective characteristics should be considered separately or together?

SPEAKER_06 1:17:45

Thank you for that question. It's a great question. This is a sort of broader implication of the complexities that come when we have what I call intertwining or intersectionality. Because whenever you have a space which is more specific, then again you're engaging in more discrimination and more exclusion. Like just by necessity, that's what you're doing. So the ultimate question here is when if at all is exclusion justified? When if at all is discrimination justified? And the the method of solving this, which the Equality Act says, which is, you know, well, you can have a you know a club if it's just for people that share a protective characteristic. I suppose the best way of justifying that is to say, well, the protective characteristics exist precisely to protect. They are trying to pick out people who share some experience of um either either just experience of life or experience of discrimination or inequality, and therefore having provision just for people of that kind is you know a proportionate means of achieving equality, something of that kind. The more you engage in a real proper understanding of intersectionality, the more it becomes difficult to actually say when discrimination is not permissible. So there's a there's a complicated interaction, I think, here, between understanding the reality of intersectionality in people's lives and having robust anti-discrimination law. How do these these work? And that's why you know you you know, I'm not saying you personally, but you in the audience might think, well, actually, options one and two are the ones we should look at. Either we get rid of all discrimination law or we don't allow any discrimination. Um I think we are in the moment now where neither of those is apt, but an intersectionality sort of shows us that the complexity of our current situation.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:37

Yes. Well, I I put that back and say successful for what?

SPEAKER_08 1:20:03

Well, what you said, you know, when you talk about the sex, there is a commonly understood what that means. When people start talking about gender, it is enormously more fuzzy and different people mean quite different things about it, and people can get very heck up in their argument about what it means and what it should mean. And I refer to your comment about you know some very traditional uh feminist concerns that what a lot of uh um uh current agenda kind of models are doing are actually eroding some of the things a feminist works so hard at in the whole oh just because you like these things or are interested in those things, it has nothing to do with your in those days of sex. And when you have people who are one of the physical sex who say, Oh, I must be that other gender because actually these are my interest concerns preferences, etc. It becomes problematic for the people who fought so hard against the interests, abilities, etc., are gender or sex correlated.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:34

I'm sorry that was so No, that was that was very good, thank you. So I think what I would answer is yes, we have a coherent understanding of gender in some contexts, but in many we do not. So I think the original feminist idea of the sex-gender distinction is sort of nice and clear. You know, sex is biology, gender is not biology, cultural societal. Using that in that original feminist sense, I think is fairly straightforward. Once you get philosophy going, though, nothing is straightforward. So sort of the philosophy of what that means, where the boundaries lie and what it is to have one gender other than another. I mean, certainly within feminist philosophy in the academic context, that is in no way settled. I have multiple students every year writing really good, complicated, difficult work on precisely this question of what is gender, what is gender identity, what is it to have a gender identity? These are really difficult philosophical questions, um, which are not in any way solved. And those philosophers who have worked on this have radically different views about what gender is. At the political level, which is sort of in between, um my view is that one of the difficulties we would encounter if we attempted to take option four and rewrite the Equality Act so as to have sort of gender as a more enshrined concept in it as opposed to gender reassignment, is precisely that we are not going to have any kind of robust agreement about what genders there are and what it is to be in one gender or another gender. I mean, the table that I showed you is deliberately very simplistic. You know, what is your sex, what is your gender? But of course, there are all kinds of issues when we're thinking about justifying discrimination, all kinds of boundary questions about who counts as being a member of one gender or another. Should that be on the basis of purely self-identification? Should it be on the basis of listed characteristics? Should there be some success or failure criteria? All these things are, once you get into thought thinking about legislation and law and politics, really intractable. Um, so my own view, and I've I've defended this in a different paper, is that really this the state and the law cannot get into defining gender in any kind of robust way and saying this is what it means to be this gender or that gender, um, precisely because it's going to be impossible to do so in a way that garners sufficient agreement and is sufficiently clear to a sufficient number of you know the electorate or the people if they want the same thing. So, yeah, I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_11 1:24:24

Okay, let's go over here.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:29

Or is it about sex specifically that attracts this distinction over time that doesn't exist for other protective classes? Like, why do we not have the equivalent of agenda for race, for example?

SPEAKER_06 1:24:42

Well, that's very interesting. I think we do have the equivalent for some of them. Um, so for example, in disability uh rights theory and disability philosophy, it's quite common to make a somewhat similar distinction between um impairment and disability, which Tom Shakespeare, wonderful theorist of disability, says, well, that's kind of like the sex-gender distinction, where impairment is about what the body can do, and disability is about what society does to bodies, how it treats bodies, and that's like the sex-gender distinction. Um I think the issue of race is one in which we don't have a very distinct terminology. I mean, race and ethnicity doesn't distinctly, doesn't carefully map onto sex-gender, but we also have debates about well, is race biologically real or is it just social, is it just cultural? You know, given that we can observe what look like differences in bodies, do they map on to differences in cultural categories? So I think we actually do have something like a sex-gender distinction in many of these protected characteristics. Um, even with the question of gender reassignment, of course, there's a significant debate within trans theory about whether being trans is a like a as it were a biological feature, like gender dysphoria, and whether that's a sort of innate characteristic or whether it's an identity which is not rooted in biology. So I think this question of what is the body and what is culture, what is identity, is actually common to many of these characteristics.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:10

Yeah. A few rows back on this side.

SPEAKER_10 1:26:22

We we already have to make some fairly arbitrary uh distinctions when we have um uh Olympic Games and Paralympics, for example. So the categorizations there that kind of don't mean anything to us, but probably do mean quite a lot in terms of the um sports scientists, and a great deal of work no doubt has gone into those those kinds of uh categorizations, who's going to compete with who? Because what you see is that people's disabilities uh look very different to us, yet they're in the same they're in the same race. Yeah. And it's is are we going to end up with something in the Equality Act which takes a sort of contextual view of gender in order to come at something better than we've got now?

SPEAKER_06 1:27:12

So are you thinking of something a bit like, well, you know, there might be some almost like a cluster concept or something where you know, to be a member of a certain gender, you might have to have some features from a list, but not everything, or something like that?

SPEAKER_10 1:27:25

It could be something like that. It could be something like that. I mean, I'm I'm I'm interested in the fact that in boxing, for example, forever and a day, there have been different categories where people have been in competition with others based on certain characteristics to do with weight and musculature and so on. Now, why why can't we end up with a situation in which we say, well, if it's good for men doing boxing, we could be comparing this across the board. So that for example, Serena Williams is com is competing with people of similar kind. Of sport scientist agreed criteria. So, you know, I I simplistically, I think the issues around sport are not as complex as we all think they are because we've got examples of those already in in the Paralympics and in boxing, for example. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:17

Yeah, so the the really interesting question with sport is if we're just thinking about fair competition, that's the only question. I mean, some uh people who object to the concept of women women's sport will say, well, why should the fact that the average woman is different from the average man be salient when the people who are engaging in sport aren't average, when Serena Williams could beat almost any man at tennis who isn't you know a professional tennis player? And so therefore, why shouldn't we simply have um open categories perhaps divided in different ways, like by weight, in the case of boxing or age or whatever it might be? And I think the answer to that is there's there's a kind of sports science answer and there's a political-philosophical answer. So I think the sports science answer is that the sports scientists do tell us that the categories male and female are sort of profoundly significant in the case of many sports, and that if we didn't have male and female sports, we would have pretty much no female um champion athletes in many sports, because running and swimming and so on. So, but then the question is well, maybe that doesn't matter, right? Maybe if they're not the best, they're not the best. And that's where the political philosophical issue comes in, which is to say, in the world we live in and have always lived in, women and men are extraordinarily salient social categories, not just biological clusters, we are extraordinarily salient social categories, and we have extraordinarily long history and present of sex inequality at the social level. And so for those reasons, it matters if women cannot succeed in sports, women cannot succeed in other areas. So we have it that need for representation as well as the need for the fair competition side.

SPEAKER_10 1:30:05

Sure, surely they would, but they would be in the equivalent of the boxing man's flyweight. They they they would not be unsuccessful, they would simply be successful or unsuccessful within a ground a body of um criteria that we've designated a right for that particular group. And that could be just as interesting as watching larger people with greater musculature in competition themselves, but you know, so so it's a it's a radical position, but I think it's kind of it's probably where we're getting to in sport if we're really thinking these things through. It just although it may give too much power to the sports scientists, you know, because because you know, how how do we know that that is going to be um a valued judgment and not politically or culturally informed?

SPEAKER_06 1:30:57

Sure, but it's this is I think partly a lot of these different categories are going to correspond pretty closely to male and female if we're actually taking seriously performance differences. So then we have women's sport, and that's where we have where we are.

SPEAKER_11 1:31:14

I think we need to leave it there. Thank you all very much for your questions, and thank you for a