Trans Identity with Talia Mae Bettcher

How should we make sense of the Trump administration’s assault on Trans rights? In episode 125 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk to philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher about her new book Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, where she discusses everything from “genderphoria” to her notion of “reality enforcement” (a mechanism of transphobic oppression). In the interview, Dr. Bettcher expresses concerns about certain received views about trans identity, such as the “the wrong body” and “beyond the binary” views, which don’t capture the complexity of trans experiences. How can we move toward a more inclusive culture when it comes to trans identity? And, do we need to reject fundamental philosophical notions such as “person,” “self,” and “subject” in order to understand trans phoria? In the bonus, Ellie and David dive deeper into the idea of the interpersonal object and question whether or not the notion of the self is too far plagued by philosophical baggage and needs to be discarded.

Works Discussed:

Talia Mae Bettcher, Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy

Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion”

Jennifer Finney Boylan, “I’m a Transgender Woman. This Is Not the Metamorphosis I Was Expecting”

Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law

Perry Zurn, Andrea J. Pitts, Talia Mae Bettcher and PJ DiPietro, Trans Philosophy 

Transcript

David: 0:08

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:10

The podcast where two professors relate philosophy to everyday life and current issues.

David: 0:16

I am Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:18

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. David, as soon as Trump took office this January, trans rights have been under attack in a way that we have not seen in this century. Now, this isn't to say that there hasn't been long standing oppression of trans people, but certainly the explicit and vitriolic nature of a lot of these attacks have been building up for some time and have really culminated in now the president using his bully pulpit to attack basic rights for trans people nationwide.

David: 0:51

And it's scary that Trump has wielded the office of the executive branch to do so, really leaning into the power of the executive order to try to push an anti trans agenda. If we think about some of the executive orders that have gone into effect since taking office, what we see is a concerted attempt to make trans lives unlivable. Consider some of these orders. From January 20th 2025, defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.

Ellie: 1:28

David, can we just stop on that title for a second? Defending women from gender ideology and extremism. I mean the way that a narrative of supposedly protecting non trans women from trans people is leveraged is just so revolting to me.

David: 1:44

Yeah, and the notion of restoring biological truth to the

Ellie: 1:48

federal government. Oh my god.

David: 1:49

As if the federal government, through its current recognition of sexual diversity, is somehow clouded in illusion or delusion or hallucination and lies.

Ellie: 1:59

Yeah, and there was that thing where Trump said that we need to identify people's gender from conception. But like, that literally doesn't even make any sense

David: 2:08

Yeah, well, I mean, that's this executive order that seeks to erase trans people from federal policy by claiming that the federal government will, from here on out, only recognize two genders which are determined exactly at conception.

Ellie: 2:22

Okay, I didn't, I wasn't sure if the language of conception was explicit in the executive order. What?

David: 2:28

Yeah, and, I mean, it gets not worse, but just as bad in other domains. Think about the one that came out in January 27th, prioritizing military excellence and readiness, which paves the way for banning trans individuals from the military, presenting the U. S. military as afflicted with radical gender ideology and presenting that affliction as somehow detrimental to military excellence. So the notion that gender ideology, whatever that is, is an affliction or a sickness that has contaminated the body of the military.

Ellie: 3:04

And these are not the only transphobic executive orders that Trump has signed in, in just like the first weeks of his presidency alone. There's also that one about keeping men out of women's sports. And there was that photo of all of these little non trans girls surrounding him as he signed this as though the biggest threat to their well being was like, boy's pretending to be girls playing their sports and causing them to lose. Like, are you kidding me?

David: 3:32

Yeah, no, that's horrifying, the picture I think speaks volumes to the gender ideology that Republicans are actually trying to reinstate, and that image in particular reminds me of an argument that Sarah McBride, who is the first openly transgender member of Congress, a remark that she made at a podium at an HRC event also in February. Which is that the irony in a lot of this rhetoric, of course, is that even though non trans women are being used as pawns for transphobia, the policies that are being passed in their name actually opens them up to harassment and potentially really gross and invasive inspection. So it's those same young women who are surrounding Trump who suddenly become vulnerable and susceptible to really awful forms of gender inspection if they decide to pursue sports.

Ellie: 4:28

The idea that the administration is interested in protecting any women's rights is completely absurd and that extends to girls as well. And yeah, I mean, you're right. That there is. It's, we have to have an intersectional analysis between the kind of transphobia that we're seeing and the misogyny writ large that is also part of this, right? Those are sometimes intersecting, sometimes separate. You know, one way that I think it's valuable to be thinking about these assaults on trans rights right now is in terms of a framework that the author and trans activist Dean Spade talks about. And this is the four pillars model for social justice. The four pillars of social justice are policy. So that's like legislative and institutional change. We're absolutely seeing straightforward attacks on that all over the place. I mean, this is what we've just been talking about. The second pillar is the pillar of consciousness, which has to do with shifting paradigms and public opinion. And I feel like now we're seeing. more and more polarization of this pillar of consciousness than we ever have before. We've had on the one hand in recent decades a left that has been increasingly vocal about trans rights and especially a lot of young trans people coming of age and speaking about their experiences and then on the other hand increasingly overt attacks against the very humanity of trans people from the right. There was an article that came out recently from the professor and trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who writes about how she went through her transition back in 2000 and quote, no one had yet been issued formal instructions on why to hate me. But nowadays they basically have, right? Like the discourse on the right has given people formal instructions for how to hate trans people. And so this pillar of consciousness is in horrible shape. Then third, you have the pillar of service, which has to do with direct support for survival needs. We're also very much seeing that under attack. And finally is the pillar of power, which is building autonomous community power and leadership. And I think that's where a lot of the trans activists I've seen respond to the current assaults on their rights have really been directing folks, both other trans people and allies, is thinking about building community power and leadership that is outside of the White House and, like, everything that the administration has its hands in.

David: 6:42

Yeah, no, outside of traditional systems of power, and actually I really like the pillar of service that you mentioned is about direct support for survival needs, and I think we also see that under attack. In one of the executive orders that came out in January, which is the protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation, which a the term mutilation for gender affirming care is flabbergasting, but also the actual legal content of this order, which aims to restrict access to that care for young people, especially those under the age of 19. So when we talk about literally the survival needs of trans people being on the line, I think we need to underscore that we mean that in the most literal sense possible. And only by drawing attention to that literality, that lives are at stake with these executive orders, can we get a sense of the urgency of the problem.

Ellie: 7:37

And the urgency of this issue, I think, is coming at a time when philosophy as a discipline has been increasingly interested in explorations of trans identity and trans rights in recent decades. We've really seen the burgeoning of this new field of trans philosophy. There's a great new edited volume that came out this year called Trans Philosophy, co-edited by some excellent folks, including Perry Zurn, whom we've had on the podcast before, and Talia Mae Bettcher, whom we're going to be speaking to very shortly. There may be a kind of sense of, well, philosophy is interested in all of these ethical, epistemological, ontological questions of what it means to be trans, and what it means to overcome transphobia. And I think we should resist the temptation to assume that that kind of theorizing that is happening in trans philosophy is at a remove from the actual on the ground questions and concerns that we're seeing in our political sphere, right? I think, David, you and I both think that theory and praxis are deeply interwoven, and so, although we have limited resources, I really think Thinking about trans identity from a philosophical perspective, trans rights from a philosophical perspective, overcoming transphobia, and also thinking about these pillars, I would say maybe that first one has to do with the pillar of consciousness, but these other pillars, the pillars of policy, service, and power, can all be emphasized as well, even as we as philosophers think about some of the more theoretical questions. Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at Cal State Los Angeles. One of the founders of the field of trans philosophy, Dr. Bettcher has written multiple articles on the subject and is the author of the new book, Beyond Personhood, An Essay in Trans Philosophy. Welcome Talia, we're so happy to have you here with us.

Talia : 9:40

I'm so happy to be here, Ellie and David. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

David: 9:45

So are we, because it's not only a philosophically very intriguing conversation that we're about to have but it's also politically pressing. And Talia, I want to begin by asking you to reflect on our current political moment, because we are witnessing constant threats to trans people's basic rights. In particular, appeals are frequently being made to restoring a gender binary based on the sex that one is assigned at birth. And your work has so much to say about this. As I look at the news and at what's happening with the Trump administration, I couldn't help but think of your concept of reality enforcement, especially when I was reading about the recent executive order that claims to restore biological truth to the federal government. Can you tell us what you mean by reality enforcement and why it's so important for all of us to resist?

Talia : 10:40

Thanks for that question, David. And I want to get to that question, but I kind of want to back up a little bit. And I just really want to stress right now what a scary time it is for trans people. I mean, the ferocity of these executive actions, their targeted nature, their cruelty. Every trans person I know is terrified and so many trans people I know are like thinking like how can I get out of here like I knew that it was going to be bad but I guess somehow I didn't know that it was going to be that bad that fast and I don't know what else is in store. But I worry about things for example one of the executive orders is protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation when we use that language chemical and surgical mutilation as a way of talking about gender affirming care, if that's what gender affirming care is that you're protecting children from, well then by that logic should anyone be allowed to be mutilated? You see where this is going. The ideology behind it is extremely, extremely concerning. When I was writing this book, for me, it was the culmination of work that I've been doing for like 20 years, work that had started off being about sort of me thinking about my life as a trans person and interacting with other people as trans people trying to figure out what was going on, you know, so it started off a lived life. But this book is like deeply theoretical. It was me as a philosopher trying to get down deep. And I don't know if sometimes I wonder it's a moment I wasn't expecting the anti trans Nazis to take over so fast, you know. But I do think that it's relevant. because for me, one, you know, I've always been distrustful of progress and I've always sort of had this sense that what seemed like progress for us was only skin deep, and it's not surprising to me that people we thought were allies are peeling away quickly. I feel ready now to do battle with these views because I feel like I've thought through things so deeply, you know, certainly not to the bottom, but pretty down there that I have those resources now that I've thought through things on their own terms in my own way. So for me, the starting point has always been about thinking through what I call reality enforcement. It does, I think, connect to what the Trump administration is talking about when they're talking about restoring, like, biological truths to the federal government. So, reality enforcement, It's a kind of form of misgendering, so it does involve identity and validation of trans people. But it involves more than that. It's got these other features going on. It's got this appearance reality contrast. So it's not just that a trans woman is being called a man. It's that a trans woman is being called really a man, who appears to be a woman. Well, of course, as a philosopher, I was interested immediately because philosophers are very interested in appearance and reality. We have been for a very, very long time, but this appearance in reality has real life consequences. And what it sets up for trans people is a double bind between deception and pretense. So if you are a trans person and you can pass as non trans, at least for a moment, then you run the risk of being exposed as a deceiver. On the other hand, if you are out as trans, then you'll be viewed as pretending, playing make believe. Either way, you're subject to reality enforcement. So I was interested in what was at the basis of this appearance reality contrast. What was the appearance? What was the reality? Well, the thing that really got me thinking is this other feature of reality enforcement, and you really see it in sort of violent cases of reality enforcement, typically involving a great deal of violence or homicide. In which what happens is, in order to determine what a trans person is really, their attacker reaches down between their legs and grabs their crotch, or pulls their pants down, to figure it out, right? Now, that's a boundary violation, that's abusive, to expose somebody like that, or to touch somebody like that. I'll call that genital verification. Sometimes it happens in a less brutal way. It can happen, like, verbally, euphemistically. So someone can say to a trans person, Have you had this surgery yet? And of course, while there are many surgeries, they mean the surgery, they mean bottom surgery. And this is, you know, a polite way of asking, Do you have a penis or a vagina? But now let's think about it. Is it really polite to ask people about their penis and their vagina? Would you sit down even with your friend and say, so how is your penis today? And the answer is like, none of your fucking business. Why, like, why are you doing this? Right? Because it's invasive. And the fact that the question is asked euphemistically doesn't make it any less invasive. So this is what got me really thinking about boundaries and private parts. So what is the reality? The reality, genitalia, but not just genitalia, morally bounded genitalia, private parts. And so then I got to thinking, well, what explains this allegation of deception? If trans people are deceivers, how do they deceive and what do they deceive about? Well, we deceive through our public gender presentation and we must be deceiving about our private parts. So it must be that public gender presentation communicates private parts, represents them. But now here's the funny conclusion. If that's true, then it would seem to follow that everybody's communicating what's between their legs all the time. And if you don't do it, you get punished. But note that we already said that's abusive, that's invasive at least. So we're kind of all stuck in an invasive system where we're disclosing our private parts on a systematic basis. Ew. I don't want to know that. I want to bring it back to biological truth. What is biological truth? What is the reality? Right? What is truth that is disclosed in this situation? Right? You can talk about chromosomes. You can talk about gonads. You can talk about all these things. But what I believe that people are ultimately interested in are genitals. Moralized genitals. Moralized genitals. That's the truth they're going for. And know that moralized genitals are not biological. Because boundaries are not biological. But we pretend that they're biological because after all exposed genitalia, oh, right? No culture. Strip bare of culture, just naked genitals. But cultural the whole time.

Ellie: 18:03

And I want to probe a little bit more, probe seems like the wrong word after talking about genitals just now. You have continually, in various publications, both in this book and in your previous work, argued against what you call the wrong body account, which is a very common conception of trans identity that suggests that to be trans is to be born in the wrong body and then to have gender affirmation surgery is to have your, the right body confirmed, right? What are some of the main problems that you see with that wrong body theory and how it's shaped our public discourse?

Talia : 18:38

Before I dive into that, I just want to say that I think that there are two main theories or paradigms that are positive that trans people use to sort of orient ourselves to the world, and this is one of them. I think that the other one is what I like to call the beyond the binary account. And this is the view that trans people are oppressed by a binary between male and female, man and woman, masculinity and femininity and by the enforced alignment between those. And I just want to be clear that I dislike both of these views. And so, I think that it's almost become tautological to say that trans people are oppressed by a binary. And while I do think that's partially true, I don't think that that tells the whole story. So, writing this book and my explorations as a philosopher have been about dissatisfaction with these leading views and wanting to tell a different story. So the wrong body account, as I see it, consists in a couple of claims. I mean, there are really different versions of the account, but the first part endorses what I like to call this sort of incongruence thesis, and it posits an incongruence between an internal sort of representation, one's sense of self as a woman or a man, and an external material reality, typically the body. And the second thesis, or the second part of it says that that internal sense of self is innate. And then the third part, and this is a bit more controversial, but I think often when used by trans people, that the innateness of this internal sense of self as a man or a woman is used to validate claims to belong to this or that gender category. Okay, so what are some of the worries about this? Well, one of the things that I worry about is with the innateness claim, and I'm worried about that. Certainly, if you think that your self identity as a woman or as a man is innate, and part of that self identity includes things that are cultural and maybe problematic, say, from a feminist perspective, then we could be going down a bad path. Perhaps it's part of my identity as a woman that women should be subordinated. We don't want to say that that's innate. So that's one thing. If something is going to be innate, if it's a sense of oneself that it's innate, it's going to have to be transcultural, cross cultures. And really the only thing that can be, I think, survive across cultures is going to be something like the body, hence the wrong body. And so you get this thing where it's focused sort of exclusively on the body. When I first transitioned in Los Angeles, I met a lot of trans women, who in the subcultures were uninfluenced by these theories. And so there were like many trans women had no interest in bottom surgery and some had implants and some had it and some wanted hormones and some didn't. All had socially transitioned. All were women. All were trans women. And in my interactions with them, there was no difference at all. And so one of my concerns is that if you have this account that it focuses on the body, you get this theoretical and political split between those trans people who change their bodies, who want to change their bodies and those who don't. It just seemed to me not to contradict my actual experience of like what I was coming across in my interactions with trans people in Los Angeles. So I think it's politically problematic. I think it's phenomenologically problematic for a couple of reasons. In my experience, right? If you're having like dysphoric issues around your body, it's not that you have exclusively dysphoric issues around your body, you have dysphoric issues around other stuff too. I do, right? I mean, like I have dysphoric issues around like sort of ways you interact with people. Interpersonal modes of interaction can induce dysphoria. Heck, the way that I look in an outfit can induce dysphoria. Like, oh my God, I look like a man. Hearing my old name can induce dysphoria, right? And these are cultural phenomena. So You got the body, but you got this other stuff, and that's got to be included. So then if it's included in the case of like the folk who maybe don't have a lot of bodily dysphoria, and it's included in the case of the folk who do, why are we forcing this into different theories of dysphoria? You see what I'm saying? And then finally, I think that often, not often, but at least in some cases, for trans people who have, you know, negative phoria investments in their body. can sometimes be mitigated through cultural intervention, right? And I'm thinking of, like, for example, recoding practices. So, for example, in a sexual erotic arena, what might, in the dominant world, constitute a vagina is, in this context, a boyhole, or what might be an anus in the dominant world is a pussy in the subcultural realm. And it's not just a renaming, it sort of circulates differently in terms of sort of like the erotic practices, right, and the intimacy practices that are going down there. If that's alleviating dysphoria, then it's not just about the body, it's about the cultural significance and the moral significance about the body, right, which places it more in the realm of the other stuff that I mentioned. And I'll wrap up this question with this. This is why I moved towards a different model that didn't focus just on the body. I've introduced this idea of what I call the physical person. You can intuitively get a sense of the physical person. We talk about it like a physical, a person is something one has also, like his physical person was searched. He was carrying a knife upon his person. But what I mean is, I think about it in terms of like different appearances, so I think about it in terms of clothed appearance and naked appearance. Right, I call the clothed appearance proper appearance, and I call naked appearance intimate appearance. And of course there's a bunch of stuff in between. Now I've already suggested that private parts are cultural. And I'll expand that and say that nakedness in general is cultural because it's all about moral boundaries, right? It's a socio moral possibility. And so now what we have is this complex where you have both proper and intimate appearance together constituting a physical person. And now you have room for dysphoria, but all this stuff, and you don't have to have a big division between people who are having negative phoric investments in the body and those who aren't. It's the same entity, the physical person. It's just some people are going to have more, maybe on the proper side and some more on the intimate side, or it's going to like play differently, but it's the same theory. So it accommodates, in my view, everybody. So it's a better theory.

David: 26:04

In your work, you also call for new ways of making sense, not just of trans experience and trans identity, but of transphobia. And one of the arguments in your book that really stuck with me was your argument that often when we think about various forms of discrimination like homophobia, racism, ableism, we use what you call the category based account of discrimination, where we put somebody in a category and then we behave in hostile and abusive ways towards them by virtue of them being members of that category. So we put them in a box and then we launch an attack. But you argue that if we use a category based approach to transphobia, we actually miss a lot of the mechanisms through which transphobia works. And so I just want to hear your account of how we have to think about transphobia in a new way.

Talia : 27:01

That's a really helpful question, David, and there's a couple of different things that I can say about it. So I want to go back to sort of when I was talking about reality enforcement and misgendering. You could think about just misgendering, so you're not using the right pronouns, but what you're missing are the underlying, I would call them extra discursive social practices, right? You're missing out on the work that public gender presentation is doing. And you're missing out on the importance of private parts in the social world, even though they're invisible. And you're not understanding sort of like, you know, the role that they actually play in reality enforcement, but it does come out, for example, in cases of genital verification quite clearly. If you're just focusing on words, you can't explain that. Here's another thing that I think sort of where this really sort of creeps in. If you just focus on getting the words right, there's this phenomenon, and it's, it's part of the deceiver pretender bind. Sometimes what can happen is a person goes, Oh, that person is really, you know, and they just, you know, make fun of you and they think that you're just like, you know, delusional and pretending, et cetera. But sometimes, particularly, you know, when you might be close to the person, this is phenomenon of playing along with this person. Like they'll treat you like a woman and they'll, they'll get the pronouns. Right. And you'll think that you're, you've been accepted and this can go on for a long time. And you think like you're friends. And then suddenly at some sort of weird moment, and it will, I call these calamities of intimacy. Usually it will be an intimate moment comes up. You'll get a weird question, like, wait, you're going to go into the women's locker room? Or if it's a guy friend, right? You'll realize that you are never a candidate for sexual interest. And it's only because you're trans i. e. because in the end, this person ultimately views you as really a man. The thing is, there's a way in which we can play along if we keep these calamities of intimacy out of sight and don't think about them because mostly in life we can keep the boundaries and the intimacy at bay. And so it seems like everything's great, but in these moments of intimacy they give the lie to what you thought had been acceptance was in fact just playing along. And that's one of the things in the books that I'm really trying to understand. I'm really sort of going down deep to try to understand make believing and the phenomenon of playing along. But what it shows is just merely getting the words right or the pronouns right is insufficient. Because there's something deeper going on in terms of the way that we do intimacy and don't do intimacy. Nowadays, we do have words like trans that are used, right? But it's not like, when you're categorized as trans, what the word even means is up for grabs. The meaning is not stable. So I had, I had this person in my life many years ago and it was hilarious. Like, she knew that I was a trans woman. She was like, yeah, I get you're a trans woman. But to her, that meant that I was a man living as a woman. That's what trans woman meant to her, man living as a woman. And no amount of explanation could change that. So that's what trans woman means to you. It was like we were speaking different languages. Yeah. It's equivocal, the category. It's not even the same category. And back on the day, like half the time, you weren't even being categorized as trans. You were just being categorized as a dude who looked like a woman who would dress like a woman. I mean, it wasn't about a category. It was about a dissonance between your public gender presentation and your imagined genital status or private parts. So it didn't have to do with a category at all, but rather this dissonance. So these are some of the reasons why I sort of don't think that the categorical model is adequate when it comes to trans stuff.

Ellie: 31:19

And I think that can then lead us back to this question of how trans people are experiencing their own relationship to their identity following what you said about like these other factors of people kind of maybe not being on the same page at all with how they're experiencing things. And you mentioned in your response to an earlier question, the notion of phoria and dysphoria. Oftentimes people conceive of dysphoria and euphoria as pertaining to an incongruence between one's attributed gender and one's gender identity. In this case, a trans man's dysphoria would be feeling bad as a woman and euphoria would be feeling good as a man. But you suggest in your book that the incongruence account isn't quite the right way to be thinking about phoria. You suggest that genderphoria doesn't concern the body as much as it concerns one's awareness of oneself as an object for others, and that seems really related to some of the stuff that you were just saying about kind of our weird focus on the body as opposed to the forms of presentation and boundary structures and so on. Why do you prefer this account of phoria to our existing account, and what does that look like?

Talia : 32:31

So let me explain what I mean by awareness of oneself as an object. So let's go back to what I talked about as a physical person, which is comprised of two appearances, proper appearance and intimate appearance. These are appearances, appearances for others, right? They're determined in terms of boundaries. So certainly if you think about intimate appearance, right, when you're aware of yourself as intimately available to another person, right, there's a certain kind of awareness attending to that. So, awareness of oneself in terms of one's physical person is a very good example of what I mean by awareness of oneself as an object. Now, I think that this awareness of oneself as an object has various different affective valences. Positive, negative, complicated, dimensionalities, in betweennesses, stuff like that. But I'll give you a little bit of a sense of it here. So let's just start with vulnerability and vulnerability is a classic example of being aware of oneself as an object for others. Suppose I were to spill spaghetti all over myself and everyone's sitting at the table and they start looking at me, right? I'm going to feel very vulnerable and be aware of myself as an object. And in that case, it's going to feel embarrassing and bad. Now, in another situation, say an intimate, erotic moment with a partner, I might display myself to this person. I make myself vulnerable, but that might feel good. Or to a friend, I might share some intimate details of my life, and that might feel good. So vulnerability and the awareness of oneself as an object for another, it needn't be bad and it needn't be good. It can be any of those things. It's got different valences. It can come in different intensities. And then sometimes we experience it as a gentle, Like the case I just gave you, like when you open yourself to another is a gentle, like you do it on purpose. Other times, it's not a gentle, like when someone makes us vulnerable on purpose, or it happens by accident. And sometimes there's this experience I like to call intimate hemorrhaging where you just feel like your guts are splattering all over the place and everything is just flowing out and it feels horrible and you can't stop it and everyone can see inside of you that's a form of this sort of awareness. And there's a converse to it too, right? There's a sense, I don't like the word dignity because it's so laden with stuff, right? But there's an awareness you can have of yourself as having pulled inward. Of being almost invulnerable or having closed off and sometimes that's good, right? I don't think there's anything bad about that. Like we need that to that separateness, you know, I often put on big black boots to feel that way. Other times though, it's not a gentle, you feel like you're trapped and you're dead inside and you can't open up and you can throw in all sorts of stuff. There's temporality. You're anticipating vulnerable. You kind of already feel vulnerable. I think a lot of this sort of these effective investments. The concern, these boundaries,, all of this is going to be gendered in a gendered society. Certainly the physical person is structured by these differentiated boundaries. You have female nakedness and male nakedness. You have female proper appearance and male proper appearance. And you're going to have these different effective investments in it. And then I think that for trans people, you have these investments that go against the grain. I wanna go back to the incongruence model and what I mean by it, because I think that there's more to the incongruence account. It's not just that a trans guy feels bad as a woman and feels good as a man. I think that's just an explanation of dysphoria and euphoria in a sense. But the thing is what underlies it, and I think that the Incongruence account posits a source of this dysphoria and euphoria, namely an incongruence because there is a sense of oneself already as being a man and that internal sense of already being a man conflicts with one's material reality or how one is perceived to be materially. And then the trick is to achieve this congruence between those two things by changing the outside so that it matches the inside. And so what you get in that is a before and after picture. You get before unhappy because the external doesn't match the internal. We change the external to match the internal and now we're happy. So one of my, one of my many complaints with this account is that many trans people after the transition still experience dysphoria. There shouldn't be any dysphoria anymore once you've gotten rid of the incongruence.

David: 37:25

Talia, I cannot let this interview end without asking you about what I take to be the most radical dimension of your work. Because your book calls for nothing short of a complete overhaul of some of the concepts that have grounded the history of philosophy when it comes to thinking about experience and identity. In particular, the concepts person and self. Now, instead of persons and selves, you call for a theory of what you call interpersonal spatiality that is related to us being interpersonal objects for one another in a kind of public space. So the question that I have for you here as we come to the end of our interview is, why do these traditional concepts of person and self need to be overcome in favor of this interpersonal spatiality theory?

Talia : 38:25

Here's why. Because in order to make sense, properly speaking, all the way down of trans oppression and trans experiences of phoria, we can only do it with interpersonal spatiality theory. We can only do it by rejecting the concepts that we have now in philosophy. That is to say, the concepts that we have now are wholly inadequate to the task. So that's the short answer. Let me give you a longer answer. By explaining what Interpersonal Spatiality Theory is, I've been talking a lot about boundaries, private parts, nakedness, intimate appearance, things like that. And I've been talking about interpersonal sentiments, these affective investments, things like vulnerability and dignity and stuff like that. Interpersonal spatiality is the idea that all of our sensory encounters and all of our discursive encounters admit of closeness and distance. And this is to be explained by appealing to boundaries on sensory access, on discursive access. These boundaries on sensory access, I'm just going to drop discursive access now because that's a trickier thing, sensory access, are not like the boundaries that you might have on an artifact in a museum. That's to protect the artifact in the museum and it's just don't cross the fucking boundary, that's it, period. These boundaries are meant to be crossed under certain circumstances. They are what make intimacy possible. They're there so that they can be traversed under certain conditions. But in order for intimacy to be possible, under standard circumstances, they need not to be crossed. They need to be observed. However, when you do cross them, when they're supposed to be observed, you violate them. And what you're doing is you're undermining the possibility of intimacy. Now, the theory is more complicated because I do think that what's important are these notions of gestures, ways in which we enter into a dialogical play to actually negotiate intimacy with each other or to negotiate distance with each other. But I'm just going to put that to the side for now. Here's the basic idea, right? You're going to need more than one boundary. You're going to need kind of like a boundary system. And people don't often think about this, but boundaries on sensory access govern our lives, right? Like don't stare at strangers, right? We take that for granted. We just do it. We've been trained into it, but just like, don't do it. And when you're talking to a colleague for God's sakes, don't stare at their crotch. We don't have to even be told that. And also I don't talk about their crotch. These are just boundaries we take for granted. They're implicit and they regulate the way that we negotiate the world. Taken for granted, but there, and they pop into salience when they're violated or traversed in intimate moments. So I say these boundaries are necessary in order for interpersonal spatiality, to be so much as possible, we need them. But which boundary system you have, well that's contingent. Because think about it, you know, you can just go to a different country, like just, you know, go to a different continent, and people might stand closer. It might be a social practice to kiss each other, you know, hello and goodbye everyone, and it's completely fine. And this is where it gets really interesting. The first thing that Columbus noticed in his journals, when he met indigenous folks was precisely what he took to be their lack of attire, their lack of clothing, or their lack of a proper appearance. So they didn't appear to have anything in our system that we would call our proper appearance and our intimate appearance, right? They may have had a whole other different system. But we have a particular system that I like to call the folk system that we take for granted. So what I'm suggesting is this is the framework that we need to understand things like reality enforcement and to really properly understand transphoria. And now I'm suggesting that it contests or requires us to reject fundamental philosophical notions like person, self, and subject. Why? So you'll, here's my metaphilosophical approach to this. You look at philosophical discourse, you see these words floating around that are used. And you'll notice the words like person, self, and subject don't start getting used until modern philosophy around the time of Locke. Certainly person and self used in the way that we use them now. Subject's a little bit trickier. It's got a more ancient use and then it's got a more contemporary use where it contrasts with object. Sort of starts getting funneled a little bit through Kant. You see it a little bit earlier. Okay, so these words are being used, why are they being used, and my question becomes what are the underlying assumptions that sustain their usage, that make them pertinent, that make them usable. The idea then is that interpersonal spatiality theory, the theory I'm advancing in the book, requires that we give up those assumptions that sustain the deployment of those concepts. This is where the book gets really, really opaque in parts. But I'm going to give you one assumption that I think is not that opaque, right? And they're actually twin assumptions. One of the things that Locke does is he separates species membership and human morphology from moral status. It's no longer relevant. And before Locke, we're focusing on the notion of man or human, right? This is the kind. In Aristotle, for instance, that's the locus of moral responsibility and moral value, man, the human. With Locke, no. Right, because what Locke is going to show us, or try to show us, is the locus of human value, is a self conscious being of some suitable sophistication, independent of species membership, and independent of morphology. So that's part of it. So you get two moves. You get species and morphology irrelevance, and you get also with Locke the centrality of self awareness for delivering some kind of moral status. So for Locke you get person equals self, roughly speaking itself with the delivers personhood. Now some people have worried about this, particularly if you set the bar high for self awareness, right, that it's going to like, you know, leave out human beings that we would want to include. Alright, what if they don't meet the high bar? Alright, you can always like lower the bar, you can play with the bar. But what about, say, a family member who's now in a permanent vegetative state? You might think, well, wouldn't it still be wrong for like, I'm going to be really graphic here, so trigger warning, wouldn't it be wrong for like, you know, an intern to have sex with them? But wait, they're in a permanent vegetative state. Now, you can play some games with self consciousness and the other people involved and do a lot of ad hoc moves. But there's something funny going wrong here, in my opinion. But this is part and parcel of the core sort of modern assumption that is going to tell you that the key thing is self consciousness. And my move is to say, no, it's boundaries. And in a particular system, morphology is going to be relevant. Like in the folk system, when we determine when something's an interpersonal object, we do it on the basis of cues, and we select into those things. So it is precisely in this case of sort of like our relative, who is now in a permanent vegetative state, has been selected into cues, has been selected into boundaries, that regardless of their mental state, are still subject to boundaries, regardless of how relational you want to make yourself. The concept self, and I know there are a lot of moves to talk about the relational self, the social self, you still start with a self. It's still like self, right? It's your fundamental unit. I start with the relation. The relation is primary given in the boundary because the boundary is going to always presuppose at least two.

Ellie: 47:05

Well Talia , there is so much more to talk about in this book. I have a lot of thoughts on the relationality question here that you just ended us with. We're so grateful for your time here. We really recommend your work, including your new book, Beyond Personhood. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us today.

Talia : 47:24

Thank you very much for having me. I've loved the conversation. Thank you both David and Ellie.

David: 47:32

Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time, tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistants a fair wage. Ellie, that was a rich conversation about trans philosophy. Tell me your initial reactions to this.

Ellie: 48:05

I mean I've literally wanted to have Talia on the podcast since we started it. And then when I found out that her new book was being published, I was like, Yes. So I've been so excited to talk to her. I love the way she thinks. I love, yeah, I just like find her such an amazing thinker. And I would love for us to reflect a little bit now on how some of the, as she put it, like dense or sometimes even opaque ideas in the book, you know, like this is a challenging book in a lot of ways can help us think about our current political. moment. I mean, I know we have like literally three minutes here at the end of the episode or something, but what do you think, going back to maybe those four pillars that Dean Spade mentions that we talked about at the beginning, are there any ideas from Talia's book that you feel like are particularly helpful for us reframing or strengthening any of those pillars? Reframing a pillar is bad.

David: 48:54

Yeah.

Ellie: 48:55

Over to you, David.

David: 48:56

Yeah. Do we bolster a pillar? Who knows? So if I were to choose a pillar, I would focus on the one about consciousness, about our social imaginary around questions of

Ellie: 49:07

Yeah. of consciousness.

David: 49:08

Gender and sexuality. Yes. And two ideas that I think are really good from the book for that, and that helped me actually clarify some of my thinking around this issue are. One, her account of transphobia as something that happens through the portrayal of trans individuals as pretenders and deceivers. This notion that there's something about trans individuals that makes them epistemically unreliable because they're trying to manipulate appearance in order to trick others into believing something that is false. And so if you think about the relevance of a lot of those terms, deceiving, belief, false belief in a philosophical register, it almost seems as if trans individuals appear as the nemesis of philosophical thinking itself. And so understanding how this portrayal of transness guides our thinking collectively really helped me think about what it would mean to bolster that pillar of consciousness. And the second concept that I also found very illuminating is her concept of moral sex, that this obsession with the genitals has nothing to do with biology as we are led to believe by our political leaders and by other transphobes. Rather, the kind of sex that they are interested in is moral sex. It's about boundaries, and it's about violating those boundaries as an expression of power.

Ellie: 50:40

Yeah. I mean, it's in that vein that we can understand the obsession over bathrooms and obsession over purity.

David: 50:46

Gender verification.

Ellie: 50:48

Yeah, gender verification. Yeah, all those things. And I think that speaks directly to the pillar of policy as well. Our legislation, our institutions should reflect not so much of an obsession with people's genitals. I mean, you mentioned how creepy it was earlier, that executive order banning trans women from women's sports earlier, and like how there are these girls who might be subject to gender verification. At a young age, like, what, what are we doing here, right? Not to mention the pillar of power, this idea of building autonomous community power and leadership. It's so important that we see trans philosophers like Talia encouraging us to rethink our conceptions of gender and identity in order to better reflect the inclusion of trans people. in those frameworks.

David: 51:31

Yes, and for those of our listeners who maybe don't want to jump into the depths, the technical philosophical depths of beyond personhood, she has written a number of other articles that are much more accessible and maybe less philosophically demanding. But for those of you who really want to like dig your heels, sit down and work through some really difficult, but also very rewarding philosophical analyses of gender, sex, identity, and sexuality. We cannot recommend beyond personhood more.

Ellie: 52:05

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our Overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, Zoom meetings, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 52:15

To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast. com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel, as well as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at overthink_ pod.

Ellie: 52:30

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.