In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring away from (...) questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in early twenty-first-century New York, but what they have in common, indeed what radical lesbian theory from the 1970s shares with contemporary theorising by trans women, is the insight that identifying with men is expected. It is in identifying with women that we are most at risk. (shrink)

In "Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman," Katharine Jenkins argues that Sally Haslanger's focal analysis of gender problematically excludes nonpassing trans women from the category "woman." However, Jenkins does not explain why this exclusion contradicts the feminist aims of Haslanger's account. In this paper, I advance two arguments that suggest that a trans-inclusive account of "woman" is crucial to the aims of feminism. I claim that the aims of feminism are to understand and combat women's oppression. (...) First, I argue that denial of trans identities reinforces cultural ideas that perpetuate both transphobic violence and sexual violence against women. Consequently, a feminist account of "woman" that fails to respect trans identities indirectly contributes to the oppression of women. Second, I prove that nonpassing trans women are oppressed as women through the internalization of sexual objectification. I then conclude that an account of "woman" that excludes nonpassing trans women cannot successfully advance a complete understanding of women's oppression. (shrink)

Resumen Como resultado de las luchas de las disidencias sexogenéricas se han aprobado leyes en todo el mundo que garantizan el reconocimiento de las identidades generizadas. La Ley de Identidad de Género argentina ofrece una definición de “identidad de género” opuesta a los enfoques biológicos y a la patologización y que respeta la voluntad individual y niega todo lugar a los refrendos de terceros “autorizados”. Esta ley regula el acceso a prácticas médicas para intervenir libremente los cuerpos. Ahora bien, los (...) principios científicos del dimorfismo sexual sobre los cuales descansan esos procedimientos suelen denunciarse por reprimir, normativizar y patologizar en especial los cuerpos intersex. Analizaré la cuestión de las identidades de género a la luz de esta tensión; por último, argumentaré que la identidad es transformativa, relacional y biotecnológicamente producida.As a result of the struggles of sex and gender dissidents, laws that guarantee the recognition of gender-identities have been passed all around the world. The Argentinian Gender Identity Law offers a definition of “gender identity” as opposed to biological anchorages and pathologization, respecting personal will and leaving no room for endorsement by “authorised” third parties. This law regulates the access to medical practices to freely intervene bodies. However, the theoretical scientific principles of sexual dimorphism on which these procedures are based on are usually denounced for repressing, normalizing and pathologizing especially intersex bodies. I will analyse the issue of gender identities in the light of this tension and, finally, I will argue that identity is transformative, relational and biotechnologically produced. (shrink)

Both the approach taken by World Rugby to address the question of trans women participation in women’s rugby and the paper by Jon Pike that explains the ethical justification for the exclusion of trans women players from world rugby are compelling when understood within the dominant rugby/sport narrative. However, in this article, I suggest that what is absent is a radical feminist understanding that engages with the political purposes of separate sport spaces for women in producing feminist counternarratives that challenge (...) men’s power in/over sport. Decisions about the inclusion of trans women in women’s sporting competitions should be made on a sport context-by-sport context basis oriented by broader feminist political goals. (shrink)

Most people have a clear sense of what they mean by disability, and have little trouble identifying conditions they consider disabling. Yet providing a clear and consistent definition of disability is far from straightforward. Standardly, disability is understood as the restriction in our abilities to perform tasks, as a result of an impairment of normal physical or cognitive human functioning. However, which inabilities matter? We are all restricted by our bodies, and are all incapable of performing some tasks, but most (...) of these inabilities are not considered disabilities. If, then, we are to avoid the category of disability becoming overly broad—and thus politically and practically useless—we need some way of picking out the specific inabilities that are disabling. I argue that our answer should be informed by an account of the opportunities individuals are entitled to be able to perform as a matter of justice. Thus, to be disabled is to have these opportunities restricted, and not to deviate from the species norm or lack any ability that might improve our well-being. (shrink)

How ought we socially to categorize individuals with respect to sexual orientation? In this paper, I engage with philosophical work on the foundations of political solidarity as well as public health research on the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in order to develop a categorization scheme conducive to the normatively important aims of LGBTQIA+ social movements.

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a (...) dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions. In chapter two, I begin by considering the harms suffered by transgender persons through “misgendering”, the deployment of gender terms which inflict psychological harms upon transgender persons, place them in situations of injustice, or diminish their self-respect. Such deployments are morally contestable: they can be challenged on ethical grounds. Several characterisations of the term ‘woman’ proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. In chapter three, I elaborate a broadly liberal approach to gender pluralism. The approach involves: i) the public toleration of gender practices and beliefs which contest prevalent gender norms; and ii) state-gender neutrality. Public toleration allows gender non-conforming practices and beliefs within public space. State gender-neutrality consists mainly in the removal from law and government policy of provisions which assume compliance with prevalent conceptions of gender. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through “misgendering,” that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender persons’ selfrespect, limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is, they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of “woman” proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what would happen to transgender (...) women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations within transgender women’s social context, we discover that they suffer from two defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I claim that the moral contestability of gender-term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term “woman.”. (shrink)

Here, I first analyze gender identity qua gender self-ascription and offer a theory of the psychological states underpinning gender self-ascriptions, which I call a form of ‘self-identification’. I hold gender self-identification consists of a gender self-concept, which itself consists of a belief or assumption in a context, and sometimes involves a gender role ideal, which consists of an individual’s expectations and standards for how to perform a gender role. Second, I defend my view from an objection to similar views like (...) it, which amounts to the claim that they cannot explain nonbinary gender identities, by showing how my account explains various nonbinary gender identities in psychological terms. Finally, I show how my view can begin stabilizing the construct of gender identity in neuroscience by helping researchers foster agreement on how to define gender identity and what methods are best to study it. (shrink)

Many feminists (e.g. T. Bettcher and B. R. George) argue for a principle of first person authority (FPA) about gender, i.e. that we should (at least) not disavow people's gender self-categorisations. However, there is a feminist tradition resistant to FPA about gender, which I call "radical feminism”. Feminists in this tradition define gender-categories via biological sex, thus denying non-binary and trans self-identifications. Using a taxonomy by B. R. George, I begin to demystify the concept of gender. We are also able (...) to use the taxonomy to model various feminist approaches. It becomes easier to see how conceptualisations ofgender which allow for FPA often do not allow for understanding female subjugation as being rooted in reproductive biology. I put forward a conceptual scheme: radical FPA feminism. If we accept FPA, but also radical feminist concerns, radical FPA feminism is an attractive way of conceptualising gender. (shrink)