Chris Hedges discusses gender identity with Kathleen Stock, professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. There are few cultural debates as contentious as the one raging around gender identity. Do we have an inner state called a gender identity? Is it possible that this gender identity does not match our biological sex, male or female, originally assigned to us at birth? Does gender identity, not biological sex, make us a man, a woman, or neither? Is gender a purely social construct, without foundation in biological generalizations about men and women?
Are our sexual identities, personalities, behavior, and life options determined primarily by what society projects onto us? In short, as the cultural critic Judith Butler writes, is anatomy destiny? Is gender a conditioned social performance? Are sexual orientations identities? Is sex defined by nature and gender by culture? Or are sex and gender indistinguishable from nature and culture? Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex who studied French and philosophy at the University of Oxford and received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Leeds, explores these questions in her new book ‘Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism’.
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