Keynote Speakers
Talia Mae Bettcher has been involved in the transgender community, grassroots organizing and creative activities for many years. She served as vice-chair of the Transgender Advisory Council for the City of Los Angeles’ Human Relations Commission and was a member of a working group to develop policies for the Los Angeles Police Department’s interaction with transgender individuals.
An expert on feminist philosophy, transgender studies and philosophy of personhood, Bettcher is currently completing a book Person as Intimacy: A Trans Feminism Philosophy forthcoming from Univ. of Minnesota Press. She serves on the editorial board of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and on the founding editorial board of Transgender Studies Quarterly. At Cal State LA, Bettcher chairs the Department of Philosophy. |
Chastity Bowick is an award-winning activist, civil rights leader, and transgender health advocate.She previously served as the Executive Director of the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts, Inc., which is the leading crisis agency for transgender communities in Massachusetts. Prior to her work with TEF and Trans Resistance, Chastity served as a board member of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition from 2014 to 2018. MTPC is an organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression. She has also led transgender health programming at AIDS Project Worcester. Many of the support groups and transgender-focused health navigation models she founded in Worcester were the first of its kind in the city. Currently, she is the Community Engagement Director at Massachusetts General Hospital’s CARE Research center.
With her personal knowledge and education Chastity has provided trainings for Bridgewater State Corrections officers, Rosie's Places Shelter, Boston Medical Center, Regis College and many more. |
Keynote Abstracts
Chastity Bowick - "From Homelessness to being a part of Social Change!"
Civil Rights Leader Chastity Bowick will share some of her story of being a part of the cycle of oppression placed upon Transgender communities and how she was able to break out of that. She will then explain social change, how she got involved and where that has taken her. Ending with the current situation concerning Transgender communities and how allies play a big part in the current movement.
Talia Bettcher - "Between Appearance and Reality: On Trans Oppression and the Calamities of Intimacy"
Reality enforcement is a kind of misgendering that involves the representation of trans people as either deceptive about who we are or else as pretending to be something we are not. The latter is typically accompanied by the phenomenon of “playing along” When this occurs, the apparent recognition of a trans person’s identity by a nontrans person will give way to accusations of pretense, particularly when the possibilities of what I call “the calamities of intimacy” arise. The first calamity is the fear that a trans woman – viewed as really a man – will occupy sex-segregated female space. The second calamity is the fear that one will have sex with the “wrong gender.”
Drawing on my own experiences doing trans advocacy work in Los Angeles, I illuminate “reality enforcement,” “playing along” and “the calamities of intimacy” through my theory of intimacy and distance (“interpersonal spatiality”) and I show how this has implications for how we understand transphobic violence, policies, and rhetoric and therefore and how we respond to them. In this way, I illustrate how (trans) philosophy can come from real-world experiences in trying to change oppressive practices and then provide illumination in further efforts towards change.