It’s not exactly philosophy, but at least NPR’s website considers the changes in gender as an organizing category of human social life. The coverage reminds me of my gender-studies students’ intrigued but puzzled reactions to reading Anne Fausto-Sterling’s arguments, in Sexing the Body, that gender tyranny can be reduced by public conversation, social activism, and the organized efforts of the “gender lobby.” “Are we in the lobby?” a young woman asked me. Maybe not yet, but they were certainly part of a public conversation.
As Fausto-Sterling says, “my vision is utopian, but I believe in its possibility” (114)! And note, before you post a comment that we cannot get rid of gender, that neither NPR nor Fausto-Sterling call for the disappearance of difference; they note the reduction of tyrannical rigidity, which is surely something else.