Lava Schadde

While feminist philosophers concerned with the category ‘woman’ have focused mainly on the concepts of sex and gender, little attention has been paid to alternative ways of framing women’s subjectivity, such as through the phenomenological concept of the ‘lived body.’ In _What is a Woman?_ (1999), Toril Moi argues in favor of returning to the lived body as an alternative ‘picture’ that should render theorizing through sex and gender obsolete. I argue that the conception of ‘woman’ arising out of Moi’s framework is trans-exclusionary and can therefore, at best, be viewed as a complementary framework to the concepts of sex and gender. Finally, I suggest a route for understanding the facticity of sex that does not assume the facticity of femaleness/maleness, as to offer a conception of the lived body more responsive to trans experience and productive for trans theorizing.