The existential “Who Am I?” question is taking on a radical new meaning in light of the gender bathroom subject. Yet this issue is a lineal descendant of certain quarters of radical feminism which has always wanted to eliminate male/female characteristics. As quoted in Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Alison Jaggar, a leading feminist philosopher of the 1990s, asserted that “the family structure [is] a cornerstone of women’s oppression: it enforces women’s dependence on men, it enforces heterosexuality and it imposes the prevailing masculine and feminine character structures on the next generation.” Thus, “the sexual division of labor must be eliminated in every area of life… so men must participate fully in childrearing and, so far as possible, in childbearing” [emphasis mine].
On the other hand, according to Nandhini Narayanan, radical feminists also believe that “transgender women were perceived to be men encroaching upon women’s safe spaces and claiming to understand the feminine experience. It began to be perceived as a form of male entitlement.”
In 2014 “Wellesley was one of the only colleges in the country that would allow transmen to continue their education despite being an all-girls’ school. Consequently, “terms like ‘sisterhood’ need to be readjusted to ‘sibling-hood.’ Administrators need to account for growing resentment among the student body when leadership roles meant for women are held by men. Infrastructure needs to accommodate gender neutral restrooms. There is also a need to reevaluate the school’s identity — is it a women’s school but with gender non-conforming students?” Critics argue that the transgender movement reinforces conventional and traditional gender roles; if trans women were initially ‘men’ who ‘felt female’ irrespective of social conditioning and growth environment, then it implies that the differences between the male and the female are biological alone. They argued that transgenderism perpetuates the notion that ‘female brains need to stay female, and will not be happy in conventionally male pursuits.’”
N.Y.C. Admin. Code 8-102(23) maintains that “gender is defined as one’s ‘actual or perceived sex and shall also include a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression, whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.'”
Thus, the Administrative Code explains that “Cisgender is an adjective denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity conforms with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex.” On the other hand, “Gender Identity”… may be male, female, neither or both while “Gender Expression” is “expressed through one’s name, choice of pronouns, clothing, haircut, behavior, voice or body characteristics.”
