Gender classifications often are controversial. These controversies typically focus on whether gender classifications align with facts about gender kind membership: Could someone really be nonbinary? Is Chris Mosier really a man? I think this is a bad approach. Consider the possibility of ontological oppression, which arises when social kinds operating in a context unjustly constrain the behaviors, concepts, or affect of certain groups. Gender kinds operating in dominant contexts, I argue, oppress trans and nonbinary persons in this way: they marginalize (...) trans men and women, and exclude nonbinary persons. As a result, facts about membership in dominant gender kinds should not settle gender classification practices. (shrink)

Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This paper argues that they are wrong. The orthodox view is that the category *woman* is a social category, like the categories *widow* and *police officer*, although exactly what this social category consists in is a matter of considerable disagreement. In any event, orthodoxy has it that *woman* is definitely not a biological category, like the categories *amphibian* or (...) *adult human female*. -/- In the first part, a number of arguments are given for the view that women are adult human females; the second part turns to rebutting the main objections. Finally, a couple of morals are briefly noted: one for activist sloganeering, and one for ameliorative projects that seek to change the meaning of ‘woman’. (shrink)

This paper develops and articulates a metaphysics of intersectionality, the idea that multiple axes of social oppression cross-cut each other. Though intersectionality is often described through metaphor, theories of intersectionality can be formulated using the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. A central tenet of intersectionality theory, that intersectional identities are inseparable, can be framed in terms of explanatory unity. Further, intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, akin to metaphysical priority of (...) the whole over its parts. (shrink)

Alex Byrne’s article, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne’s answer is, ‘clearly, yes’. Moreover, Byrne claims, 'woman' is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne’s argument, but mostly because it is paradigmatic of a wider phenomenon. The slogan “women are adult human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans (...) online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne’s argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments (...) for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man. (shrink)

There are important similarities between moral thought and talk and thought and talk about gender: disagreements about gender, like disagreements about morality, seem to be intractable and to outstrip descriptive agreement; and it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be a woman in terms of particular social, biological, or other descriptive features, just as it seems coherent to reject any definition of what it is to be good or right in terms of any set of (...) descriptive properties. These similarities give us reason to investigate the idea that, like moral thought and talk, gender thought and talk is inherently normative. This paper proposes a normative account of gender thought and talk in terms of fitting treatment. On this fitting treatment account, to judge that A is gender G is just to judge that it is fitting to treat A as a G. This account is a descriptive or hermeneutical account of our gender thought and talk rather than an ameliorative account of our gender concepts or a metaphysical account of gender properties in social metaphysics. This paper argues that other descriptive accounts of gender thought and talk face problems that the fitting treatment account overcomes. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

With increased visibility of trans people comes increased philosophical interest in gendered language. This chapter aims to look at the research on gendered language in analytic philosophy of language so far, which has focused on two concerns: (1) determining how to define gender terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that they are trans inclusive and (2) if, or to what extent, we should use gendered language at all. We argue that the literature has focused too heavily on how gendered language (...) can harm trans people, and has not considered how trans people use gendered language to create meaning and joy for ourselves. Pulling from the literature in sociolinguistics, we look at examples of how trans people use language to make their lives better by gaining recognition, playing with gendered language, finding joy in gendered language, and taking control of definitional power, concluding that debates about gendered language need to consider not only how such language harms trans people but also how trans people use it for our own liberation. (shrink)

Reclamation of a slur involves the creation of a new, positively-valenced meaning that gradually replaces the old pejorative meaning. This means that at a critical stage, the slur is ambiguous. It has been claimed that this ambiguity is polysemy. However, it is far from clear whether the view can explain why the introduction of the new meaning forces the old one out of existence. I argue that this datapoint can be explained by invoking the mechanism of homonymic conflict, and, therefore, (...) that the ambiguity involved in reclamation is homonymy. One generalization that follows from my account is that conventionalized verbal irony, unlike conventionalized metonymy and metaphor, begets homonymy. Along the way, I criticize the standard ways of drawing the distinction between polysemy and homonymy in terms of semantic and etymological relatedness. If the notions of polysemy and homonymy are to be invoked in explanations, they should be understood in terms of how meanings are stored in the mental lexicon. My account also provides an elegant way of conceptualizing the difference between two types of conceptual engineering, namely reclamation and amelioration. (shrink)

I provide a new way of thinking of questions using an expanded space of FDE worlds. This allows both for non-exclusive and non-exhaustive answers to questions concerning one’s gender identity. Further, and most crucially for the purposes of this paper, it allows for a new, more general definition of question-inclusion that makes it possible to identify a new form of hermeneutical injustice. This form of injustice, I argue, affects trans people by keeping them in a prolonged state of gender questioning (...) and confusion in which they only grasp the part of the question Am I a member of gender G? that corresponds to the question Do I want to be a member of gender G?. (shrink)

Feminism has long grappled with its own demarcation problem—exactly what is it to be a woman?—and the rise of trans-inclusive feminism has made this problem more urgent. I will first consider Sally Haslanger’s “social and hierarchical” account of woman, resulting from “Ameliorative Inquiry”: she balances ordinary use of the term against the instrumental value of novel definitions in advancing the cause of feminism. Then, I will turn to Katharine Jenkins’ charge that Haslanger’s view suffers from an “Inclusion Problem”: it fails (...) to class many trans women as women. Jenkins offers a novel norm-relevancy account of woman to avoid the Inclusion Problem. Unfortunately, Jenkins’ account has serious internal problems, i.e. problems by Jenkins’ own lights: it is unintelligible, or it suffers from an Inclusion Problem of its own. After that, I will develop novel arguments for the conclusion that the project of Ameliorative Inquiry is both incoherent and also impossible to complete—at least, impossible to complete in a trans-inclusive way. Trans-inclusive feminism, therefore, would do well to move beyond Ameliorative Inquiry. Insofar as that’s not possible, trans-inclusive feminism inherits the incoherence of Ameliorative Inquiry. (shrink)

Are words like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ sex terms that we use to talk about biological features of individuals? Are they gender terms that we use to talk about non-biological features e.g. social roles? Contextualists answer both questions affirmatively, arguing that these terms concern biological or non-biological features depending on context. I argue that a recent version of contextualism from Jennifer Saul that Esa Diaz-Leon develops doesn't exhibit the right kind of flexibility to capture our theoretical intuitions or moral and political (...) practices concerning our uses of these words. I then float the view that terms like 'woman' or 'man' are polysemous, arguing that it makes better sense of the significance of some forms of criticisms of mainstream gender ideology. (shrink)

We live in a world saturated in both racial and gendered divisions. Our focus is on one place where attitudes about these divisions diverge: language. We suspect most everyone would be horrified at the idea of adding race-specific pronouns, honorifics, generic terms, and so on to English. And yet gender-specific terms of the same sort are widely accepted and endorsed. We think this asymmetry cannot withstand scrutiny. We provide three considerations against incorporating additional race-specific terms into English, and argue that (...) these considerations also support eliminating the analogous gender-specific terms. With respect to these parts of speech, English should be no more gender-specific than it already is race-specific. (shrink)

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...) the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)

Our gender identity is our sense of ourselves as a woman, a man, as genderqueer, or as another gender. Our gender is the property we have of being a woman, being a man, being non-binary, or being another gender. What is the relationship between our gender identity and our gender? Recently, much work has been done on ameliorative accounts of the gender concepts that we should accept and on the metaphysics of gender properties. From this work 4 views of the (...) relationship between having gender identity G (e.g. having a female gender identity) and being a gender G (e.g. being a woman) have emerged. A first, the no connection view, says that gender identity and gender are entirely distinct; Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative account of gender, as well as Theodore Bach’s account of gender properties, are instances of this view. A second, the gender-identity-first view, says that all there is to our gender is our gender identity; this view is at least similar to views that Talia Bettcher and R.A. Briggs and B.R. George have argued for. A third, contextualist view, says that in some contexts and relative to certain standards, our gender identity determines our gender, and that in others it does not; Ásta and Robin Dembroff have proposed and defended views along these lines. A fourth view, the two gender properties view, says that there are two properties that can make it the case that one is gender G (in any context), one’s having gender identity G and one’s being socially classed as a G; Katharine Jenkins and Elizabeth Barnes have proposed views along these lines. This article explains these 4 different views and spells out their prospects, and the problems they face, as both ameliorative and as metaphysical views. (shrink)

Dembroff’s “Escaping the natural attitude about gender” replies to my “Are women adult human females?”. This paper responds to Dembroff’s many criticisms of my arguments, as well as to the charge that “Are women...” “fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons”. I argue that Dembroff’s criticisms fail without exception, and explain why the claims about my motives are baseless.

I argue for a deflationary answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?” Prior attempts by feminist theorists to provide a metaphysical account of what all and only women have in common have all failed for the same reason: there is nothing women have in common beyond being women. Although the social kinds man and woman are primitive, their existence can be explained. I say that human sex difference is the material ground of systems of gender; gender (...) systems serve to enable male control of female reproductive capacities. This explains the fact that most women are female, but it does not entail that all women are female or that all females are women. To clarify my position, I draw an analogy between the kind woman and the kind parent. While it is difficult to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for being a parent, it is clear that the social institution or practice of parenting has its material ground in the biological facts about human reproduction together with facts about infantile dependency. Saying this does not entail that all and only biological progenitors are parents. (shrink)

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...) substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new account of gender identity on which for A to have gender G as part of their gender identity is for A to not take G not to fit them (or to positively take G to fit them). It argues that this subjective fit account of gender identity fits well with trans people’s testimony and both trans and cis people’s experiences of their genders. The subjective fit account also avoids the problems that existing accounts of gender (...) identity face. Existing accounts face broadly two types of problems. First, they seem to imply that trans people have gender identities different from those that they in fact have. For instance, they seem to imply that some trans women do not have a female gender identity or have not always had that gender identity, contrary to their testimony and experiences. I argue that the subjective fit account avoids this problem. Second, many existing accounts of gender identity seem to conflict with the idea that our gender identities merit respect. I argue that the subjective fit account avoids this problem because it understands gender identities to consist in normative experiences and judgments and normative experiences and judgments merit respect. (shrink)

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)

Contextualist accounts of “woman,” including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), and Ichikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and do justice to the rights of trans women. I argue that (i) there is an internal tension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, and that (ii) we should recognize and tackle the broader and deeper theoretical and practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them all into semantics. Moving on, (...) I sketch three strategies to help us advance feminist philosophical endeavors, including how attending to contextual matters can lead us to further reflect on the meta-contextual, such as our role in shaping contexts and whether the working of language is indicative of a larger oppressive social structure. (shrink)

In recent years, avowal has become increasingly central to the trans practice of gender. In this paper, I argue such avowal-based practices represent an attempt to escape the limitations and vulnerabilities of our bodies. But I also argue that this strategy is costly. For in draining the body of any relation to gender, we risk depriving ourselves of what is most valuable about our lives with gender in the first place.

Trans existence has recently been plagued by two different explanations: a natural, “born this way,” necessity and a social, often-thought perverted, choice. These contrasting explanations of necessity and choice create an explanatory false dichotomy and political double-bind. This talk constructs an alternative explanation for why people transition, one that centralizes the role of desire while recognizing the necessity of choice that arises from that desire. Toward this end, I present a moral psychology of desire. An explanation that recognizes the role (...) desire plays, not just in our actions, but in our perception. This desire is made apparent when one perceives the option to transition as a salient possibility. Once this desire is recognized, it functions as what Bernard Williams calls a categorical desire, a desire that partly constitutes one’s ethical identity and thus makes following through on that desire a matter of practical necessity that adds meaning to our lives. I argue that this explanation eschews the explanatory false dichotomy and evades the political double-bind. (shrink)

Alex Byrne contends that women are (simply) adult human females, claiming that this thesis has considerably greater initial appeal than the justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. This paper refutes Byrne’s thesis in the same way the JTB theory of knowledge is widely thought to have been refuted: through simple counterexamples. Lessons are drawn. One lesson is that women need not be human. A second lesson is that biology and physical phenotypes are both irrelevant to whether someone is a (...) woman, and indeed, female in a gendered sense. A third lesson is that trans women, cis women, alien women, and robot women are all women because to be a woman is to be an adult gendered female. This paper does not purport to settle complex normative questions of ethics or justice, including whether the ordinary meaning of “woman” ought to be retained or changed—though I do note plausible implications for these debates. This paper does purport to settle what the ordinary meaning of “woman” is, and in that regard contribute to important conceptual ground-clearing regarding what constitutes an ameliorative or revisionary definition of “woman.”. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

In this chapter, I critically examine issues relevant to the construction and reality of social categories, focusing on issues concerning conceptual schemes and conventionalism. Conceptual schemes (‘paradigms,’ ‘linguistic frameworks,’ ‘forms of life’) are systems of concepts that organize and give (intersubjective) meaning to empirical experience. In discussions about the construction of social categories, a common assumption is that social categories and kinds (e.g., ‘money,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘liberal’) require the presupposition of a conceptual scheme that gives meaning to those terms. One prominent (...) position in social ontology (Lewis, 1969, Gilbert 1989, 2014, Searle 1995) holds that the reality of social categories is grounded in a conventionalist conceptual scheme: social categories are conventionally accepted categories that reflect explicit or implicit agreements within a community. According to this view, the reality of social categories and kinds is established (and maintained) by contingent and arbitrary conventional decisions about social categories (e.g., laws about legal tender, marriage laws, the one-drop rule). Conventions can be understood as social customs (e.g., rules governing traffic, marriage laws, institutionalized rules about sex and gender) that serve some human purpose or interest. They are important for the establishment and maintenance of social norms (see Bicchieri 2006, 2017). -/- The chapter proceeds as follows. In section 2, I examine the general idea of conceptual schemes, focusing on Kuhn’s influential theory of paradigms. While Kuhn’s position implies a conceptual relativity and anti-realism (or instrumentalism) about scientific concepts, Davidson and Popper challenge the Kuhnian orthodoxy that the presence of conceptual schemes implies conceptual relativity or ‘incommensurability’ of competing conceptual schemes. I argue that a key difference between scientific and social conceptual schemes is that the former are oriented towards describing nature, whereas the latter are oriented towards social utility or usefulness. In section 3, I examine some foundational works in social ontology—focusing on the accounts of Lewis, Gilbert, and Searle—that hold that social categories are grounded by a conventionalist conceptual scheme. These accounts of social categories imply that the reality of social categories is constituted by (or grounded in) social conventions, which ultimately reflect (or are anchored by) explicit or implicit community-level agreements. In section 4, I survey some prominent accounts of social human categories, focusing on the views of Hacking, Khalidi, Mallon, Haslanger, and Ásta. A common tendency in these accounts is the portrayal of social categories as social to the extent that they are conventionally determined. This suggests that the proper contrast class for social categories is natural categories (as opposed to individual categories or innate categories). (shrink)

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender, which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s (...) gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured approach to gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language. (shrink)

This paper assesses the first-person authority account (FPA) of gender, according to which X's self-identification of what X's gender is, is the final say on what X's gender is, such that if others disagree, they are mistaken. One main reason in support of FPA is respecting X's autonomy—that is, overriding X's self-identification amounts to denying X's autonomy. Ozturk criticizes this view using analogies of religious and patriotic self-identifications, such that there are cases in which someone can permissibly claim that another (...) is not, say, a true Muslim or a true patriot. This implies that there might also be cases of permissible rejections of gender self-identification. Ozturk offers instead the negotiative theory of identity, according to which it is permissible to reject a self identification as long as three constraints are satisfied: no harm is done to the self-identifier, and their privacy and dignity are not violated. (This essay is a slightly revised version of that found in the 7th edition of The Philosophy of Sex.). (shrink)

There are two aims of this paper: (1) to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and how it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society, but also, more specifically; (2) to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant “world” normatively defines you out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale’s recent work on moral shock, arguing that moral shock needs to be contextualized to “worlds” of sense to (...) understand how marginalized people affectively experience shocking events. My focus is the trans experience of moral shock due to the way trans people are positioned outside of dominant society, creating the conditions to experience cyclical, chronic shock. These affective conditions point to a collective responsibility to ease the affective stress that the most marginalized experience. (shrink)

What does it take for a property to be a social property? This question is different from questions about what it takes for a property to be socially constructed. That is: it is one thing to be social, it is another to be socially constructed. Compared to questions about social construction, this question about sociality has received relatively little attention in social metaphysics. Here, I work from a very specific set of observations which arise from the social metaphysics literature to (...) uncover a sufficient condition on sociality for properties, a condition which I argue all non-social properties fail to satisfy. (shrink)

From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes (...) to gender? In this paper, I’ll compare four ‘transitional pathways’, with a view to considering how each relates to the ultimate end of ending sex-based oppression. Should we open the doors to the cages, so that people can move freely between them, but leave the cages themselves in place?. Should we add more cages?. Should we make the cages bigger, so that people have a lot more room to move around inside them? Or should we dismantle the cages, so there are no more genders at all?. Some of these options are ‘gender revisionist’, others are gender abolitionist. I’ll argue in favour of a gender abolitionist pathway. (shrink)

Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).

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)

According to the dispositional account of gender, to have a gender is to have some set of behavioral dispositions. Robin Dembroff (2020) levels a strong objection to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) dispositional view of gender, arguing that it can neither capture the extension of genderqueer identities nor treat them with the respect that they warrant. In this paper, I offer a defense of the dispositional view against these charges. I argue that accounts of dispositions tailored to deal with masks and finks—phenomena (...) that would prevent a disposition from manifesting or change a disposition if it were about to manifest—can avoid Dembroff’s extensional worry without reducing nonbinary identities to a matter of mere linguistic convention. I offer a revision to the dispositional account of genderqueer that incorporates Dembroff’s insights about the nature of destabilizing gender binaries. (shrink)

Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...) accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics. (shrink)

How should we make sense of pregnancy discrimination as an issue of gender equality? In a striking 1974 decision, Geduldig v. Aiello, the U.S. Supreme Court has answered that we simply cannot. Pregnancy discrimination does not constitute a form of sex discrimination prohibited by law, the 6–3 decision claims, because differential treatment based on pregnancy draws only a gender-neutral line between “pregnant women” and “nonpregnant persons,” not the gender line between women and men. While courts have since invoked Geduldig to (...) curtail both reproductive and transgender rights, the prevailing feminist response to this line of cases is still to double down on an awkwardly cissexist conception of gender, finding the sex discrimination in the “direct” way that pregnancy is thought to connect to womanhood. The failure of that prevailing feminist response, legitimizing rather than challenging biological essentialism in legal analysis and public discourse, epitomizes a broader failure of feminist analysis and intersectional solidarity: it fails to confront the political and social problem that is pregnancy discrimination for either cis or trans people. This essay offers a trans feminist alternative. I argue that pregnancy discrimination is discrimination on the basis of sex, within the legally relevant meaning of that phrase, not because pregnancy is in one way or another distinctive to women as a gender category but because pregnant persons make up a gender category of their own. On my analysis, pregnancy discrimination comes out as a form of sex discrimination directly and immediately, not by way of womanhood. (shrink)

What is gender and on what should gender classification be based? Dembroff (2018) has recently claimed that, for reasons of social justice, gender classification should not track extant gender kinds. They further argue for ontological pluralism—the existence of many gender kinds, and recommend that we combat oppression by imitating the gender kinds and classification practices in non-oppressive communities. Contra Dembroff, I argue that the analysis is subject to a number of internal problems, including a misguided self-characterization and a tension between (...) ontological pluralism and imitation. In addition, I sketch a different perspective on the relation between gender kinds and gender classification practices that upholds Dembroff’s intended goal but ameliorates the unintended complications. (shrink)

I discuss issues with what I see as a gender-neutral, cis-centric conception of gender equality that has come to dominate U.S. law, focusing on the law’s systematic failure to protect incarcerated trans women’s health and bodily integrity.