Conceptions of Gender

This paper argues that there exists a general problem of authority in theorizing about gender. Starting from two general approaches to how one may attempt to define gender, we find two problems of authority emerge. Very roughly, these approaches can be described as the ‘societal’ and ‘identity’ approaches to gender; each of these approaches seem to come with significant tradeoffs to one another; however, both approaches are integral to current understandings of gender. The proposed solution to these clashing approaches is (...) a constitutive conception of gender. This working theory proposes that normative standards, when endorsed at the level of an individual, work to give authority to the ‘practical identity’ of gender. Further, an account of gender in everyday life is given by using the Heideggerian term of ‘thrownness’. With ‘thrownness’ and an argument for gender’s everyday constitution being achievable with practical understanding by an individual, the constitutive model of gender accounts for the role gender plays in everyday implicit judgments and even identity claims without rejecting the existent picture of social construction or gender being understood as a class distinction. With this, one can claim gender as authoritative for guiding action without denying its oppressive social structures. (shrink)

This article engages with the psychoanalytic works of Julia Kristeva in order to demonstrate how trans and queer experiences are shaped and mobilized by a psychic life of revolt. Reorienting the question of resistance toward the threshold of psychical and social life, the author claims that “intimate revolt,” as conceived in Kristeva’s later writings, is what mobilizes trans and queer subjectivities in a movement of endless regeneration. The article begins with an overview of the theme of revolt in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic (...) thought and stresses three interrelated movements—return, rupture, and rebirth—that together shape and sustain psychical life. Uncovering the exchanges between psychical and social life, the author identifies how inner experiences of revolt mobilize not only a resuscitation of meaning and subjectivity but also a reframing of resistance within Kristeva’s intimate politics. The author then illustrates how this internal logic of revolt unfolds within trans and queer experiences of identity and embodiment. In doing so, the author examines conditions of precarity that threaten the survivability of trans and queer populations, particularly with respect to the psychic life of revolt that makes possible our psychical and corporeal capacities for resistance and renewal. Transitioning from the landscape of precarity to the language of liminality, the author contends that the intimate evolutions of revolt constitute a passage of perpetual rebirth in which meaning and subjectivity may be infinitely refashioned. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that predominant gendering practices support a proof ideal similar to the one operative in mathematics, contributing to the erasure and assimilation of countercultural practices. After fleshing out the analogy, I argue it can be productive: in gender as in mathematics, there is room for rethinking what we mean by—and want from—proof. The proposal is to think of gender in terms of an agent’s gender grounds, i.e., the set of first-person gender proofs accepted or rejected by (...) said agent. This framework avoids common worries about deflationary and essentialized notions of gender identity, provides many of the usual epistemic benefits of proof, is compatible with first-person authority over one’s gender, and fruitfully complements an ameliorative semantic pluralism for gender terms. (shrink)

This paper develops a taxonomy of "essentialist self-statements" — declarations of the form "I am X" — and applies it to the contested discourse surrounding sex, gender, and transgender identity. Part I distinguishes four classes of such statements: conventionally measurable (e.g., "I am six feet tall"), subjective (e.g., "I am lazy"), declarative (e.g., "I am Catholic"), and performative (e.g., "I am sorry"), further dividing declarative essentialist self-statements into contingent and necessary forms. Part II applies this taxonomy to the central point (...) of contention in gender discourse: the declaration, "I am a woman." The paper argues that this sentence is typically offered, by a transgender speaker, as a necessary declarative self-statement — a desire for affiliation that is definitive of selfhood — while received, by a cisgender interlocutor, as a conventionally measurable claim. This mismatch of registers, rather than any disagreement about facts, is diagnosed as the primary source of confusion and talking-past in public debate on the topic. The paper further argues that gender itself is best understood as a statistical bundle of expectations attached to sex, which ought to be stripped of normative force without being abolished altogether, and that the same distinction between statistical and normative expectation can be extended to group labels and identity categories generally. The paper concludes that the task facing public discourse is not to settle a question of fact but to rethink the premises from which the confusion arises. (shrink)

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. While I contend that Moi's critique of sex, gender, and the (...) sex/gender distinction must be taken seriously, 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. 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. (shrink)

Trans philosophy of disability describes a growing set of approaches to theorizing trans and disability from the emerging subfields of trans philosophy and philosophy of disability. While the discipline of philosophy rarely addresses either trans or disability, trans philosophy of disability offers a space for examining how trans and disability can be theorized together, as well as the productive potentials of this theorizing for other areas of philosophical inquiry. At present, both ableist and cisgenderist views are gaining traction in philosophy (...) and beyond; the emerging works of trans philosophy of disability offer critical and necessary contributions grounded in trans and disabled life. -/- Among these emerging sites of inquiry, recent work in trans philosophy of disability examines existing trans disavowals of disability in philosophy, as well as how trans and disability appear entangled together in history, lived practice, and theory. Beyond exploring the ways that disability and trans operate as categories, some scholarship excavates the racial underpinnings of both trans and disability and their continued expressions across strategies of transition and passing. Other scholarship builds on theories and experiences of crip time to examine broader trans-crip potentialities and potentials for navigating and learning from negative affects and affective norms. Others still examine multiplicity and silence as responses to dominant practices of signification, the politics of identity categorization, and the limits of these approaches. Ongoing work in trans philosophy of disability continues to examine the entangled relationships and future potentials of trans and disability. (shrink)

Rebecca Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” argues that many of the reasons commonly offered for accepting transgender self-identification also support (at least some) forms of transracial self-identification (Tuvel, 2017). The paper provoked intense backlash, but the philosophical question it raised has not gone away: If we accept transgender identity claims, what principled grounds remain for rejecting transracial ones? In this article I defend the structural stability of Tuvel’s analogy by examining prominent responses to her paper, especially those by Dembroff and (...) Payton, Sealey, and Botts, and by asking a consistency question: Do the premises of each objection apply to race but not gender, or to gender but not race? I argue that they typically do not. Appeals to intergenerational inheritance, to having lived the relevant oppression, to entrenched social meanings, to collective harms, and to privileged crossing can be made with equal coherence against transgender identities. This does not show that transracial identity claims are always legitimate or should always receive social uptake. It shows that the familiar objections, as stated, do not secure a non-question-begging asymmetry between the two cases. If we want to deny transracial claims while affirming transgender ones, we need a better account of the difference. (shrink)

A defense of the biological view of gender—that women are adult human females, boys are juvenile human males, etc. Written for undergraduates, and paired with a rival piece by Lenny Clapp and Laura Girola.

The division of labor is gendered: women and men specialize in different types of work. Jobs themselves display a division of labor between women and men, with certain professions being (highly) dominated by members of one group or the other. There is much disagreement when it comes to the factors explaining this phenomenon and its evaluation: Is the gendered division of labor desirable, and are its consequences fair? Most of this chapter provides a general overview of the questions that bear (...) on the potential resolution of these debates. It then turns to the disagreement about what to do about the gendered division of labor and about justifications for policies aimed at changing it. (shrink)

Feminism has always been a diverse intellectual tradition and activist movement, difficult to define as such. Today that difficulty is compounded by the deep disagreements about the concept of “woman.” An ecumenical understanding of feminism seeks to avoid the disagreement about “woman.” Any attempt to define “woman” (and, implicitly, “man”) that is rooted in metaphysical disagreements and undergirded by apparently irreconcilable ethical commitments is essentially contested. A better understanding of feminism avoids any appeal to “woman,” thus bypassing the metaphysical trouble (...) and capturing the deepest normative aspirations of traditional feminism. Feminism can be defined as an attempt to abolish unjustified gender norms. These are social or legal requirements that specify people’s virtues, rights, and duties as ultimately grounded in their sexual characteristics; these norms can be explicit or implicit and are backed up by sanctions for noncompliance. This definition should be acceptable to the most prominent contemporary strands in both academic and activist feminism: transinclusive feminists and gender critical feminists. (shrink)

Transgender Philosophy: The Basics is an introduction to the exciting and rapidly growing world of trans philosophy. -/- The book covers a wide range of central themes in transgender philosophy, bringing the reader up to speed with both foundational texts and new ideas from this increasingly global tradition. It addresses key questions, including: -/- • What is gender? How is it related to gender identity? -/- • Why are we justified in believing someone when they identify as a member of (...) a gender? -/- • Why do trans people transition, and how should we think about the desire to transition? -/- • What is the relationship between transness and colonialism, and how is it related to race? -/- • Should we get rid of gender? What would we look like if we didn’t have genders? -/- • How should society be changed to improve the lives of trans people? -/- Accessibly written, this book offers a rigorous overview of the arguments in transgender philosophy, from abstract concerns of philosophical method to grounded and applied political issues. -/- Transgender Philosophy is designed for beginners with no prior knowledge of philosophy, but it also serves a source of new insights and perspectives for students and scholars of philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

Plant sex is complicated. Compared to more familiar animals, including ourselves, plants reproduce so differently and with such bewildering variation, that botanists spent centuries debating whether plants sexually reproduce at all. Camerarius' (1694) revolutionary concept that plants may be "male," "female," and "hermaphrodite" anticipated the modern evolutionary hypothesis that sex, as defined by meiosis and fertilization, is shared by all eukaryotes. Yet, the word "gender," which botanists often use to describe plant reproductive systems, has a confused history within the field, (...) isolated from a broader scholarly discussion that has profoundly influenced culture. In this essay, we identify the use of "gender" as a current issue worthy of consideration, suggesting that clarifying what we mean by "gender" in our scholarship and teaching may better serve the field and promote more inclusive classrooms. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This paper examines gender in embodied artificial intelligences (eAIs), proposing that technogender may emerge independently of human sex-based frameworks. Drawing on structural, functional, and relational factors, eAI identities could span multiple axes, reconfigure in real time, and redefine sensuality and social interaction. By situating eAIs within the biosynthetic continuum, I explore how these emergent forms challenge human assumptions about sex, gender, and identity.

Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters is the first book in philosophy focusing on gender identity and transgender rights. To be trans is to have a gender identity different from the gender you were assigned at birth. But what is it to have a gender identity? The first part of the book develops a new account of our gender identity as the gender that seems to us to fit us. This subjective fit account of gender identity fits (...) with trans people’s testimony, explains why gender identities deserve respect, explains how we can discover our gender identity, explains why gender identities are practically important, and provides a good account of cis and trans and non-binary and binary gender identities. The second part of the book develops a new understanding of trans rights to gender marker change, legal gender recognition, gender-affirming healthcare, and sporting participation and accommodation. It develops an integrity-based account of trans rights on which these trans rights arise from basic liberal rights to live with integrity, to live in line with your judgements of how you ought to live, and what a good or meaningful life for you involves. Rights to live with integrity ground basic liberal rights to freedom of religious belief and expression. This book argues that they also ground trans rights. The second part of the book also addresses a wide range of gender critical feminist philosophers’ arguments against trans rights and shows that these arguments fail. (shrink)

Este livro reúne reflexões, relatos e análises situadas nas margens da pandemia de COVID-19, trazendo à tona experiências queer, trans, sapatonas, faveladas e dissidentes que escapam ao enquadramento normativo das narrativas oficiais. A partir de múltiplas vozes e perspectivas, a obra evidencia como a crise sanitária acentuou desigualdades de gênero, sexualidade, classe e raça, ao mesmo tempo em que abriu espaços de resistência, cuidado coletivo e invenção política. O conceito de “queerentena” emerge como chave crítica para pensar práticas de sobrevivência, (...) boicote e reinvenção dos vínculos, em diálogo com corpos e territórios historicamente vulnerabilizados. Em vez de centrar-se em uma narrativa hegemônica da pandemia, o livro propõe uma cartografia das margens — onde a precariedade convive com a potência e onde se reinventam modos de habitar, resistir e imaginar futuros possíveis. (shrink)

Because my students are always telling me I'm too subtle, and (to quote the Brazilian liberation pedagogue Paolo Freire) I "love and trust" my students - please (re)watch the oldest Star Wars film (Episode IV - A New Hope) in light of the following analysis, whose conclusion is as follows: since (1) Star Wars is pro-Viet Cong, (2) today’s closest analogy to the Viet Cong is Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, (3) Star Wars is also pro-Asian religious philosophy (East Asian Daosim), (4) (...) Palestinian liberation theology is a (West) Asian (Christian) religious philosophy, and (e) Star Wars is implicitly pro-genderfluid; thus (5) Star Wars logically affirms the Palestinian right to genderfluid armed resistance, whose (6) Jedi Knights = Daoist sage/knights = Viet Cong = Al-Qassam Brigades. In sum, Star Wars (1977) logically affirms the Palestinian right to genderfluid armed resistance. (shrink)

Talk of gender identity is at the core of heated current philosophical and political debates. Yet, it is unclear what it means to have one. I examine several ways of understanding this concept in light of core aims of trans writers and activists. Most importantly, the concept should make good trans people's understanding of their own gender identities and help understand why misgendering is a serious harm and why it is permissible to require information about people's gender identities in public (...) life. I conclude that none of the available accounts meets these essential criteria, on the assumption that the gender norms of femininity and masculinity are unjustified. But we can, and should, pursue the feminist project without “gender identity”. Such feminism can include trans people because it is possible to account for the specific harm of misgendering without assuming a claim to the recognition of our gender identities. I conclude that we should eliminate the concept of “gender identity.” To understand the phenomena that are putatively captured by “gender identity,” we are better off employing other concepts, such as “sexual dysphoria,” (assigned or aspirational) “gender roles,” and (internalised or endorsed) “gender norms”. These concepts can usefully replace “gender identity” in an individual evaluation of each of the trans people's claims to inclusion into particular spaces. (shrink)

Recent work in analytic feminist metaphysics seeking to engage with queer and especially trans identities has led to the development of contextualist accounts of social identities. These accounts claim that what it is to be a trans woman, or demigender, or gay, is dependent on context. This chapter looks at the history of contextualist accounts of social identity, before offering a survey of contemporary scholarship in the field, developing work on the semantics and social ontology of social identities by Jennifer (...) Saul, Talia Mae Bettcher, María Lugones, and Ásta. The chapter will suggest that contextually variable accounts of social identities are philosophically robust, but that contextualist and closely related pluralist views still have questions to answer, and room for development. (shrink)

A generation of feminist theory following Time magazine’s 2014 proclamation of a “Transgender Tipping Point” has tried and failed to defend trans people’s “inclusion” in existing social institutions and philosophical conceptions of gender embodiment. This half-comic, fully-serious essay takes a sideways crack at centering trans people by centering cis people in the metaphysics of gender, by turning cis people into the object of our intellectual debate and scrutiny. Instead of granting cis people’s genders simply as a matter of course, I (...) problematize, interrogate, and complicate them. Instead of allowing trans subcultural intuitions and experiences merely to count, I privilege them epistemically and metaphysically. And instead of scratching our heads all day over why and how trans people are trans, I ask why and how cis people believe they are not. (shrink)

The vast changes in family life-the rise of single, same-sex, and two-paycheck parents-have often been blamed for declining morality and unhappy children. Drawing upon pioneering research with the children of the gender revolution, Kathleen Gerson reveals that it is not a lack of family values, but rigid social and economic forces that make it difficult to live out those values. The Unfinished Revolution makes clear recommendations for a new flexibility at work and at home that benefits families, encourages a thriving (...) economy, and helps women and men integrate love and work. (shrink)

Recent frontier research in biology has demonstrated that the concept of “sex,” which we commonly refer to in our daily lives, comprises a collection of traits that are either developmentally or evolutionarily unrelated or only weakly related. There is no fixed standard for determining whether a trait qualifies as “sex” or whether it falls under the category of “gender.” Therefore, the concepts of sex/gender, as well as the binary division between biological and social concepts, are not scientific facts but rather (...) models constructed by humans. This reasoning similarly applies to concepts such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and transgenders, as their definitions rely on the distinctions between sex and gender. This insight prompts us to consider the feasibility and necessity of further deconstructing the sex-gender continuum. Additionally, we further analysed the inherent tensions within the current mainstream frameworks surrounding gender and sex, highlighting significant issues regarding their lack of inclusivity. This analysis reveals that the existing framework often fails to account for the diverse and multifaceted experiences of individuals, thereby marginalising many identities and expressions. Instead, we propose replacing these constructs with a more inclusive framework that acknowledges and embraces the complexities of human identity. (shrink)

Social ontology is the study of the nature of the social world. This Element aims to provide an overview of this burgeoning field, and also to map the questions that theories in social ontology address. When we encounter a theory of some social thing – groups, law, gender, and so on –how are we to read it? What classes of theories have been explored and abandoned, and what classes are new and promising? The Element distinguishes theories of social construction from (...) theories that characterize the products of social construction. For each, the Element works through a 'toy' theory and then discusses features that more realistic theories ought to include. Three running examples are discussed throughout the Element: (1) property, or ownership; (2) race, or racialized kinds; (3) collective attitudes (i.e., beliefs, desires, knowledge, intentions, etc., of groups and organizations). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (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.

This paper explores evolving gender identity definitions in both social and legal contexts. Traditionally, gender was defined based on visible anatomical features. However, contemporary perceptions acknowledge the significance of gender identity, which may not align with sex assigned at birth. Many legal systems, including the Polish one, still rely on binary gender classifications based on anatomy, while the legal concept of gender identity remains underdefined. The ambiguity regarding legal gender identity calls for a solution that draws from extensive non-legal literature (...) on the topic, to offer a more informed legal understanding. The redefined legal concept of gender should fulfil three key criteria: it should be clear, align with current scientific knowledge, and advance trans rights as well as gender equality. In the paper, three non-legal approaches to defining gender identity – materialist, externalist, and internalist – will be examined; and their potential application in the legal context based on the above-mentioned criteria will be assessed. (shrink)

This paper critically addresses the logics of exceptionality inherent to emerging regulations of the gender field, with a focus on Spain’s recent self-determination-based regulation of gender. To achieve this, it offers a biopolitical analysis of the concept of “public order” and its influence on gender governance, drawing parallels to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception and exploring the connections between contemporary regulations and the gendered public order of nineteenth-century France. Finally, it analyzes the exclusions and restrictions that the Spanish (...) trans law reserves for migrants, non-binary people, and minors, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the limitations to gender autonomy in contemporary Western societies. (shrink)

This essay looks at the history of confrontations between trans people and non-trans philosophers. It argues that trans contentions within philosophy should be considered alongside the intersection of transness with social class, patterns of anti-trans employment discrimination, affective injustice against trans employees, and the discipline of philosophy as an exclusive prestige-driven workplace. It concludes that philosophy should better study cis philosophers and the ways that they encounter trans people in the world, as colleagues, and as objects of inquiry.

While intimately familiar, gender eludes theorizing. We argue that well-known challenges to gender’s analysis originate in a subtle ambiguity: questions about gender sometimes express questions about gender categories themselves (e.g., womanhood, manhood, and so on), while at other times expressing questions about what makes someone a member of these categories. Distinguishing these questions accentuates gender’s connections to morality, making a novel “antirealist” view of gender, or as we call it, “unrealist” view, especially natural. Gender’s relations to identity, sex, and social (...) position are illuminated along the way. Taking cues from both historical and contemporary debates in metaethics about the roles that attitudes can play in metaphysical and semantic analysis, we introduce and begin developing a comprehensive non-ameliorative framework for explicating gender’s nature and our thought and talk about it. In a slogan, on the view we defend, you belong to the gender category to which you intrinsically desire to belong. (shrink)

We want to know what gender is. But metaphysical approaches to this question solely have focused on the binary gender kinds men and women. By overlooking those who identify outside of the binary–the group I call ‘genderqueer’–we are left without tools for understanding these new and quickly growing gender identifications. This metaphysical gap in turn creates a conceptual lacuna that contributes to systematic misunderstanding of genderqueer persons. In this paper, I argue that to better understand genderqueer identities, we must recognize (...) a new type of gender kind: critical gender kinds, or kinds whose members collectively destabilize one or more pieces of dominant gender ideology. After developing a model of critical gender kinds, I suggest that genderqueer is best modeled as a critical gender kind that destabilizes the ‘binary axis’, or the piece of dominant gender ideology that says that the only possible genders are the binary, discrete, exclusive, and exhaustive kinds men and women. (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)

Our gender identity is our sense of ourselves as a woman, a man, as genderqueer or as another gender. Trans people have a gender identity that is different.

Gender seems to be everywhere in the norms governing our social world: from how to be a good friend and how to walk, to children’s clothes. It is not surprising then that a difficulty in identifying someone’s gender is often a source of discomfort and even anxiety. Numerous theorists, including Judith Butler and Charlotte Witt, have noted that gender is unlike other important social differences, such as professional occupation or religious affiliation. It has a special centrality, ubiquity and importance in (...) social practices. This observation moves us away from the classic philosophical question ‘what is gender?’ towards a more underappreciated one: ‘what is the role of gender’? To answer this question, I introduce the notion of social standing, which refers to our ability to enter into social relations. Social standing distinctions are an important feature of human societies. However, our existing philosophical tools do not adequately capture this notion: it is neither a moral distinction, nor is it reducible to hierarchy. I offer a conception of our entry into social relations as always conditioned by various shared representational assumptions about social subjects. When individuals are anomalous with respect to those assumptions, their social standing is in doubt. This explains important forms of uncommon and peculiar treatment across societies. I argue that forms of social devaluation on the basis of severe and visible disability in our society are central examples of diminished social standing. In our social context, being hard to recognize through the matrix of gender makes one representationally anomalous and imperils one’s social standing. Gender plays a fundamental role because gender legibility is a precondition for full social standing. Gender norms parallel ‘ability norms’ in this respect, linking notions of normalcy in scholarship on gender and in scholarship on disability. Social standing also explains two key phenomena about gender. Firstly, it tells us why our social practices and norms are pervasively gendered. Given the performative and relational nature of gendered positions, this is necessary for constant gender legibility. Secondly, social standing recognition accounts for social anxiety phenomena around gender ambiguity. These phenomena are reactions to anomaly as a threat to our social systems of meaning. In the final part of my dissertation, I consider some political consequences of my view. Understanding this special role of gender allows us to identify a distinct type of backlash to feminist social change that is particularly insidious. It is not driven by the hierarchical investments of the most gender-privileged, but rather by our collective investment in gender as a system of social coordination. I explore 2000s ‘raunch feminism’ to argue for this hypothesis. Gender’s role as a conditioning parameter of social standing puts systematic pressure on all would-be social subjects to be gender legible. This requires that individuals position themselves in recognizably gendered ways within social practices. But when gender differentiation is eroded, this positioning becomes tricky. This gives rise to a disorientation I call ‘meaning vertigo’. Meaning vertigo prompts attempts at reinstating a clear gendered system. In the process, gender equality suffers a serious set-back. To make substantial feminist progress, we must unseat gender from its central position in social domains like sexuality. I suggest that the best way to do this may be by foregrounding other aspects of social identity as systems of social coordination, instead of working on gender directly. (shrink)

Åsa Burman has recently introduced the important notion of telic power and differentiated it from deontic power in an attempt to build a bridge between ideal and non-ideal social ontology. We find Burman’s project promising but we argue that more is to be done to make it entirely successful. First, there is a palpable tension between Burman’s claim that telic power can be ontologically independent of deontic power and her examples, which suggests that these forms of power share the same (...) basis. Second, it is not completely clear how telic power specifically helps non-ideal social ontologists explain oppression. We offer solutions to both problems. First, we argue that Burman’s arguments for the conclusion that telic power can exist without deontic power are unsuccessful. Burman contends that this is possible because some social roles involving telic power can exist independently of institutions as sets of constitutive rules, which are––in her opinion––the source of deontic power. Burman’s arguments are not persuasive because she disregards the plausible view that all social roles involve deontic power, whether or not they are institutional. Second, we argue that while the exercise of deontic power requires a collective recognition of the social roles of the interacting agents and, therefore, a recognition of the associated norms, the exercise of telic power does not require recognition of the relevant norms. This is why invoking telic power is particularly useful in explaining how oppression and injustice can arise. Lastly, we suggest that the relation between teleological normativity and the forms of telic power has not been fully clarified by Burman and requires a deeper analysis. (shrink)

In Nietzsche and Friendship, Willow Verkerk provides a new and provocative account of Nietzsche's philosophy which identifies him as an agonistic thinker concerned with the topics of love and friendship. She argues that Nietzsche's challenges to the received principles of friendship from Aristotle to Kant offer resources for reinvigorating our thinking about friendship today. Through an examination of his free spirit texts, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science together with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, (...) Verkerk unlocks key aspects of Nietzsche's thinking on friendship, love, 'woman', the self, self-overcoming, virtue, and character. She questions Nietzsche's misogyny, but also considers the emancipatory potential of his writing by brining him into dialogue with postmodern, feminist, and transgender thinkers. This book revives interest in the ethical, therapeutic, and political dimensions of Nietzsche's philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

Trans people often prioritize self-identification and self-determination when it comes to gender. We think people have a right to tell us who they are, rather than to be told who they are. But what does this really mean? And what should we do when someone self-identifies in bad faith--such as when the Club Q mass shooter (briefly) identified as nonbinary? I discuss these questions in a short blog post.

Robin Dembroff (Real Talk about the Metaphysics of Gender, 2018) believes that ‘non-binary’ is a social kind. I have my doubts about this, but if it is a social kind, then it is a very special one. The membership conditions of the social kind ‘non-binary’ are only accessible to non-binary persons. They establish and police their own membership conditions (Dembroff 2018: 36f.): ‘Individuals are granted authority over their gender kind membership.’ So, if this is indeed a ‘social kind’, then it (...) is a highly unusual one. (shrink)

Taking up a recent critique of Nancy Fraser by Sally Haslanger, this paper defends the primary thesis of Marxist-Feminist unitarytheory that the systematic reproduction of modern forms of racial and gendered oppression is due to their co-articulation with thereproduction of capitalist social relations against three criticisms offered by Haslanger. It develops its defense of Fraser’s articulation of unitary theory by acknowledging a social ontological deficit in that theory insofar as it does not contain a theory of thesocial construction of human (...) kinds and amending this deficit by drawing on revised aspects of Haslanger’s own work. It arguesthat the global reproduction of race and gender as hierarchical social relations is a consequence of the reproduction of capitalism although local gender and race kinds are asymmetrically co-constituted by non-capitalist social practices. (shrink)

One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...) connected to the problem of explaining how the social properties are sufficiently stable so as to be taken seriously, both in theoretical endeavors as well as in practical matters of how we relate to each other. In this light, I identify stability constraints for an adequate account of social categories. I argue that certain distinctive aspects of Ásta's conferralist view of social categories, such as the radical contextualism in her account of gender, undermine the stability of categories and are at odds with taking social categories seriously. I end with the suggestion that a distinctive “sheltered” form of normativity might help us do justice to Ásta's insights while avoiding some of the destabilizing elements of conferralism. (shrink)

[[Scroll down on this page for links to chapter PDFs]].............................................................................................. ........... -/- Sex Matters addresses a cluster of related questions that arise from the conflict of interests between rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity. Some of these questions are theoretical, including: who has the more ambitious vision for women's liberation, gender-critical feminists or proponents of gender identity? How does each understand what gender is? What are the arguments for the refrain that 'trans women are women!', and do (...) they succeed? Other questions taken up in the book are more applied to specific issues in law and policy including: should there be a right to exclude people who are biologically male from women-only spaces? How do the interests of all stakeholders to bathrooms, in particular, trade off when it comes to moving from sex to gender identity as the basis for self-inclusion? If we think about types of transition, or gatekeeping requirements on transition, as providing assurance to women who are asked to accept the opening up of women-only spaces to transwomen, are any such assurances sufficient? Is 'TERF' a slur, as some radical and gender-critical feminists have claimed? And finally, is gender-critical speech 'hate speech', as it has been classified by some social media platforms, or at least harmful speech? -/- Holly Lawford-Smith discusses these issues in a series of essays, all but one of them previously unpublished. She takes an analytic philosophical approach to these issues, drawing on ideas from political philosophy, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of language, as well as second-wave feminist theory and empirical literature, to defend a gender-critical position in response to all of these questions. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of intersectional feminist theory by critically examining the notion of identity implicitly assumed in major critiques of intersectionality. Critics take intersectionality to fragment women along the lines of identity categories such as race, class, and sexuality. Underlying this interpretation, I argue, is the metaphysical assumption that identity is a fixed entity. This is a misunderstanding of identity that neglects how identity is actually lived. By exploring how Asian American women experience their “Asian” identity in their (...) everyday lives (e.g., the “Asian-as-patriarchal vs. White-as-gender-progressive” stereotype, growing anti-Asian racism amid COVID-19, and Asian-Black feminist solidarities), I demonstrate that Asian identity is not fixed but changing according to how it is related to power. I identify and discuss three characteristic types of the identity-power relationship: manifestation of power-as-oppression through the construction of identity, reproduction of power-as- oppression, and creation of new forms of power, namely resistance and solidarity, through the reconstruction of identity. The lives of multiply-oppressed women (e.g., Asian women) can be understood as the locus at which the identity-power relationship is worked out, that is, the power dynamics of oppression are manifested, reproduced, and resisted through the (re)construction of identity. Building on this analysis and engaging discussions on non-ideal theory in social/political philosophy, I argue that intersectional feminist theory can be best explained as a non-ideal theory in a strong sense: a theory that, by focusing on the lives of the multiply oppressed, presents the intersecting dynamics of oppression as central and theory-guiding. (shrink)

The idea of gender is one of this century’s fiercest intellectual battlegrounds. In this paper, I seek to narrow down my focus towards one major debate surrounding gender: the debate between gender objectivism and gender constructivism. My contention is this: gender objectivism is a more reasonable view than gender constructivism. Moreover, gender constructivism has unjust and dangerous implications, especially towards biological women, a result to which gender objectivism is generally immune. I begin by noting how transgenderism as a product of (...) gender constructivism leads to absurd consequences, is viciously circular and lacks conceptual clarity in defining what a woman is. Then, I assessed the real-life consequences of transgenderism in three areas: women’s spheres for recognition such as women’s beauty pageants, women’s spaces, and women’s sports. I argue that evaluating the cogency or lack thereof of transgenderism while also seeing its harmful and dangerous consequences to women provide us with good reasons to prefer gender objectivism over gender constructivism. (shrink)

This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of children from being a reasonable method of chastisement to one that is harmful to children and troubling to families. In addition, the article suggests shifts in thinking about physical punishment were originally pioneered as part and parcel of the dismantling of national laws granting fathers’ specific rights to admonish children under conventions of patria potestas. A comparative historical framework of analysis involving two case studies of Ireland and (...) Ghana illustrates non-unilinear pathways of international convergence towards the prohibition of physical punishment. The comparative historical analysis highlights the 1930s and 1940s as an era when Ireland began to reject patria potestas and religious or judicial rulings which allowed for children to be given ‘a good beating’ in family and school settings. However, from the same period, Ghana is seen to experience Christian remonstrations not to ‘spare the rod’ leading to the ‘conventional’ tradition of ‘this is how we do it here’. Two case studies serve to illustrate that banning physical punishment was less controversial in Ireland where allied traditions of patria potestas and disciplinarian Christian beliefs had lost their moral hegemony than in Ghana where such beliefs still held influence. The article concludes overall that normative campaigns against physical punishment of children emanate from a coherent paradigm of family policy where childcare, education, and well-being of children are embedded as everyday societal responsibilities rather than privatised or patriarchal familial obligations. The coherent model offers an alternative moral hegemony to neo-liberal and Janus-faced conceptualisations of good or ‘intact’ families versus ‘broken’ or ‘troubled’ families. (shrink)

Do men and women perceive cybercrime types differently? This article draws on the distinction between socio-economic and psychosocial cybercrime proposed by Lazarus (2019) to investigate whether men and women hold different perceptions of digital crimes across these two dimensions. Informed by the synergy between feminist theory and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF), our survey examined respondents’ differential perceptions of socio-economic cybercrime (online fraud) and psychosocial cybercrime (cyberbullying, revenge porn, cyberstalking, online harassment) among men and women in the United Kingdom. The (...) results revealed that women considered psychosocial cybercrime worse than men. Conversely, we found no differences between men and women with regard to socio-economic cybercrime. The article concludes that psychosocial cybercrimes are more gendered than socio-economic cybercrime, suggesting problems with the meaning of ‘cyber-enabled crimes’, and substantiating the synergy between the TCF and feminist perspectives. (shrink)

The paper aims at connecting the concepts of beauty and possession, traditionally coupled with the male gaze, with eros as felt by women, by homosexuals, and by those who do not identify with a defined gender. First, I will outline the concepts of beauty and possession according to “male thinking”, well formulated by Freud, Plato, Levinas, and Sartre. I will show that, in Western tradition, beauty is seen from a masculine perspective, as a set of charms arousing the subject and (...) stimulating his will to possess. The erotic relationship is consequently considered in a dualistic way: the subject is masculine and active, and desires his “object”, who can be either a man or a woman. However, the mentioned authors also highlight a crucial point: desire is doomed to be unfulfilled, because the transcendence of the other person is ungraspable. I will argue that, despite the latter point, such authors bring forward a reductionist view of eros and relationships between genders. I will suggest a solution to this reductionism, taking inspiration from the concepts of gender performativity, theorized by Butler, and queer orientation, developed by Ahmed. I will also propose to rely on Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh, especially as it concerns its features of reversibility and divergence, in order to give account of every gender identity, including non-binary ones. The concepts of beauty and possession, together with the impossibility to grasp the transcendence of the other person, will not be rejected, but reconfigured through a different way of conceiving subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends the view that gender is an identity that we confer upon ourselves. The claim that gender is a self-conferred identity is not novel; but its metaphysics is obscure at best. What exactly is an identity, and how do we manage to confer identities upon ourselves? Furthermore, how does the claim that gender is a self-conferred identity comport with the widely accepted notion that gender is also a social identity, and that social identities are (at least (...) partly) either conferred upon us by others or constituted by the social positions we occupy? This paper articulates a metaphysics for the self-conferred-identity account that addresses these questions. The most important advantage of the view is that, in contrast to other realist theories about the metaphysics of gender, this one transparently offers a basis for assigning first-person authority to people’s judgments about their own gender. (shrink)

There are two conceptions of ‘inclusion’ in play in this debate. 1. The traditional conception in sport: How does sport provide inclusion/exclusion? Through eligibility criteria. 2. The social justice conception: trans people must be included in all social endeavours/institutions, one of these being sport. In the latter ‘inclusion’ facilitates affirmation and validation of their gender identity. The question is: should sport take on this ‘social justice’ task?

The expectation used to be that men would be masculine and women would be feminine, and this was assumed to come naturally to them in virtue of their biology. That orthodoxy persists today in many parts of society. On this view, sex is gender and gender is sex. -/- A new view of gender has emerged in recent years, a view on which gender is an 'identity', a way that people feel about themselves in terms of masculinity or femininity, regardless (...) of their sex. On this view, sex is dismissed as unimportant, and gender is made paramount. -/- In the rush to celebrate this new view of gender, we have lost sight of a more powerful challenge to the traditional orthodoxy, namely the feminist sex/gender distinction according to which sex is biological and gender is social. On this view, gender is something done to people on the basis of sex. Women are socialised to conform to norms of femininity (and sanctioned for failure), and masculinity and femininity exist in a hierarchy in which femininity is devalued. This view helps us to understand injustice against women, and what we can do about it. -/- Holly Lawford-Smith introduces and defends gender-critical feminism, a theory and movement that reclaims the sex/gender distinction, insists upon the reality and importance of sex, and continues to understand gender as a way that men and women are made to be, rather than a way they really are. (shrink)

This paper responds to an essay by Elena Ferrante on male literary figures acknowledging the influence of female ones. She poses a question about her reception by males which I address.