August 12th, 2020 schedule version, UTC

THE ABSTRACT BOOK WHAT IS AND WHAT DO WE WANT IT TO BE? SEPTEMBER 8–11, 2020, MANCEPT Workshops of Political Theory Convenor: Jaana Virta, Tampere University

1st WORKSHOP DAY, September 8th: of Gender

14.00–15.00 Keynote: Ásta - Descriptivism about Gender 15.30–16.30 Phillip Yoon - A Step Towards Achieving Gender Justice: The Consideration of Gender Self- Identification 16.45–17.45 Jade Fletcher - Defending the Nonseparability Argument for Gender Nominalism 18.00–19.00 Gabrielle Bussell - , Gender , and Liberation from Patriarchal Power: An Argument for an Ascriptive Account of Gender

Keynote: ÁSTA: DESCRIPTIVISM ABOUT GENDER

What do we want an account of gender for? At a when ameliorative approaches to gender and other phenomena is popular I want to advocate a different approach, namely descriptivism. In this talk I lay out how I use the of gender and what its theoretical use is. I use the concept to capture a certain phenomenon in the world, which may or may not be unjust. The point, as I see it, is not to use a concept of gender that makes the application of a certain gender to a person already just, but to use a concept that picks out phenomena in that may be unjust and need to be changed. In Categories We Live By I offer a radically contextual account of gender which is conferralist. It is a descriptive account of gender, not ameliorative. For example, in some contexts, trans women do not have the status of a . This is a feature of the account, not a bug. Some parts of social reality are unjust and need to be changed. Activism should be directed towards changing our world such that everyone can have a gender status that they identify with and which resonates with them.

PHILLIP YOON: A STEP TOWARDS ACHIEVING GENDER JUSTICE: THE CONSIDERATION OF GENDER SELF- IDENTIFICATION

Recently, philosophers of gender have been providing different accounts of meta-physics of gender in an attempt to help the feminists’ fight in achieving gender jus-tice. has provided an account of gender that is purely social. She defines gender as a social class, and she claims that her aim is to create an effective tool in combating gender injustice. Mari Mikkola claims that Haslanger’s project is unhelpful and unnecessary for feminists’ goal of combating gender injustice: it is unhelpful because there will be a linguistic confusion between feminists and ordinary language users about the revised definition that Haslanger provides, and it is unnecessary because the extensional intuitions about ‘woman’ can still be used for feminists’ goal of gender justice which does not cause any confusion among ordinary language users. Overall, for Mikkola, there is no need for us (or feminist philosophers) to define ‘woman.’ Katharine Jenkins puts forth a new analysis of Haslanger’s definitions by defining two different senses of gender to address the problem that Haslanger’s definition has regarding the gender identification of trans people. In this paper, to address the problems from previous definitions and analysis of ‘woman,’ I put forth a suggestion for future projects of feminist philosophers: one’s gender self-identification should be prioritized when considering the concept of ‘woman’ or articulating the definition of ‘woman.’ First, I contend that a part of Mikkola’s critique, namely her critique that Haslanger’s project is unnecessary due to the existing extensional intuitions about ‘woman,’ is flawed by two considerations: 1) there are actually some confusions regarding the ordinary language users’ extensional intuition about the term ‘woman’; 2) just relying on the ordinary language users’ extensional intuition of ‘woman’ can lead to disrespecting an individual’s self-identified gender. Then, I conclude that it is necessary to appeal to the concept of ‘woman’ and that appealing to extensional intuitions about ‘woman’ is perilous. Second, I maintain that although Haslanger’s project is a good start at capturing the concept of ‘woman,’ there are nonetheless some problems that arise for Haslanger’s definition, which is that it disregards one’s identificatory aspect of gender. I then explore Jenkins’ proposed solution to this problem and claim that Jenkins’ model is also to a problem, which is that there can arise a linguistic confusion among ordinary language users regarding the term ‘woman.’ Third, I suggest that to resolve both the original problem from Haslanger’s project and the problem from Jenkins’ model, it is necessary for us to prioritize individuals’ gender self- identification and explain briefly how this can be done.

JADE FLETCHER: DEFENDING THE NONSEPARABILITY ARGUMENT FOR GENDER NOMINALISM

In Natalie Stoljar’s paper, ‘Different Women. Gender and the Realism-Nominalism Debate’, she presents a multifaceted argument for gender nominalism. Nominalism, in Stoljar’s sense, doesn’t consist in denying that gender categories exist; rather, it is the view that there is not a womanness which explains how the class of women is unified. Stoljar’s paper proceeds by evaluating five different arguments for nominalism and in this paper I aim to defend one of the arguments that she thinks is unsuccessful: the argument from nonseparability. I argue both that feminist metaphysicians should hold that realism does require that womanness is separable from other identity features and that an adequate, non-additive account of requires that gender is not separable from other social identities.

The argument from nonseparability, which is originally due to Elizabeth Spelman, holds that the of gender identity is impacted by “the circumstances of oppression in which particular women find themselves.” (Stoljar 2011, 37) The argument aims to establish the falsity of gender realism from the following two claims. First, that gender realism requires that the universal womanness has a separate and thus we should be able to ‘abstract away’ this womanness from the other aspects of individual identity. Second, that we cannot abstract womanness away from the other aspects of individual identity, because we cannot imagine gender identity in isolation from, e.g., racial identity. Mari Mikkola and Stoljar apply pressure to both premises of the argument. First, that the characterisation of the requirements of gender realism rests on an old-fashioned conception of the metaphysics of universals. Second, that the upshot of the argument is epistemic not metaphysical – because it only shows something about our imaginative capabilities, rather than anything about the nature of gender.

I offer a line of response to each of these objections, and thus contend that the argument from nonseparability can provide motivation for gender nominalism. First, I argue that whilst it is open to the gender realist to adopt a less demanding metaphysics of universals, they nonetheless need a view of universals according to which womanness is separable from other identity features, even if womanness does not exist as a wholly separate entity. Thus, even if we have a view of universals where they are always instantiated in particulars, it still needs to be the case that we can isolate the universal under discussion from other identity features. There is an important methodological constraint here: this feature that all and only the women share needs to be such that it can be deployed for the purposes of feminist theorising and activism, and thus it needs to be separable so it can be effectively utilised in gender realist feminist analyses. Thus, the motivation for separability comes not from an outmoded view of the metaphysics of universals but rather from reflection on the required theoretical role of the particular universal in question.

Second, on the claim that the argument has only epistemic rather than metaphysical import, I argue that gender is not merely imaginatively entangled with other identity features such as race and class, but that these features mutually construct each other. I show that this follows from adopting an intersectional analysis of oppression. This argument is theoretically significant outside of the particular details of the debate between realism and nominalism because it demonstrates the importance of political considerations to do with gender oppression to the metaphysics of gender. Intersectional feminists have stressed for decades that intersectionality is not an additive phenomenon: it isn’t the case that the identity, , and oppression of a black working class woman is simply an aggregate of adding black oppression, woman oppression, and working class oppression together. Rather, paying due attention to identities which exist at the intersection of different axes of oppression results in a highly textured conception of social categories. Thus, I contend that paying attention to the nature of intersectionality provides an explanation the unimaginability of separating gender from race or class, and this explanation shows that the unimaginability is anchored in facts about the nature of the social world.

GABRIELLE BUSSELL: FEMINIST THEORY, GENDER IDENTITY, AND LIBERATION FROM PATRIARCHAL POWER: AN ARGUMENT FOR AN ASCRIPTIVE ACCOUNT OF GENDER

Sally Haslanger offers the following concept of “woman”: If one is perceived as biologically female and in that context one is subordinated owing to the background ideology, then one “functions” as a woman (Haslanger 2012). While there are many ways of inquiring about gender, Haslanger’s project is distinctly analytical in nature: It aims to consider more fully the pragmatics of utilizing the terms in question for political and theoretical purposes (Haslanger 2012). One implication of this account is that if someone does not “pass” as their self-identified gender, they do not function as that gender socially. Therefore, one could to this ascriptive account of gender by arguing that it wrongly undermines the gender identities of some trans people. In this paper, I will argue that Haslanger’s definition can be defended against this objection and that her account inevitably aids in liberatory efforts not only for women, but for all sexual and gender minorities.

Katherine Jenkins offers a dual account of gender—gender as class and gender as identity—to rectify this objection (Jenkins 2016). While her concept of gender as class is based on Haslanger’s proposed target of “woman” and “man”, her concept of gender as identity is as follows: “S has a gender identity of X iff S’s internal ‘map’ is formed to guide someone classed as a member of X gender through the social material that are, in that context, characteristic of Xs as a class” (Jenkins 2016: 410). I argue that her concept of the “internal map” is problematic in that a) Its existence presumably results from environmental or biological factors—both of which have troubling implications, and b) It is not inclusive of the experiences of all trans people (in fact, I argue, no account can be fully inclusive unless it is wholly subjective). Additionally, despite her objection, I argue that her account ultimately has the same implication as Haslanger’s: that we ought to eliminate the categories “woman” and “man”.

Finally, I argue that Haslanger’s account is meant to show how gender functions in the social world to produce injustice. She is describing the current reality of gender as a system that crudely forces people into two categories where one group dominates the other. One lamentable fact about this system is that not everyone functions as their self-identified gender in the social world. The fact that this system does not categorize some people in accordance with their self-identified gender, however, is not a flaw in Haslanger’s account. If anything, the fact that her conception of gender recognizes this ought to be regarded as a virtue of her account: it more accurately tracks the ways in which gender is currently an unjust social institution. Thus, her account shows how our current system of gender not only oppresses cisgender women, but many trans people as well.

Works Cited

Haslanger, Sally, 2012, “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?”, Resisting Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 221-247. Jenkins, Katharine, 2016, “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman”, Ethics, 126: 394-421.

2nd WORKSHOP DAY, September 9th: Conceptual Approaches to Metaphysics of Gender

13.00–14.00 Keynote: Esa Diaz-Leon - A contextualist response to gender-critical views 14.15–15.15 Matthew Cull - For an Ameliorative Semantic Pluralism 15.45–16.45 Madhavi Mohan - Descriptive and Normative Grounds for Understanding as Essentially Contested 17.00–18.00 Claudia Mazzuca and Matteo Santarelli - Politicized concepts as abstract concepts: the case of gender

Keynote: ESA DIAZ-LEON: A CONTEXTUALIST RESPONSE TO GENDER-CRITICAL VIEWS

According to so-called gender-critical views, the of “woman” is such that many (or even all) trans women are not women. Advocates of this view sometimes argue that the political of their of “woman” justifies their view. In response, I will argue that if we focus on the political import of different semantic views about “woman”, it turns out that a trans-inclusive meaning is the most politically useful in most contexts.

MATTHEW J. CULL: FOR AN AMELIORATIVE SEMANTIC PLURALISM

With the publication of Saul (2012), semantic pluralism and contexualism about gender terms has seen a (renewed (see Spelman 1989)) interest. Following Bettcher (2013), I suggest that we ought to adopt ameliorative semantic pluralism about gender. That is, I will suggest that is, given transfeminist political concerns, gender terms ought to have multiple meanings.

I’ll motivate and spell out the account, giving two novel arguments to show that no account which is monist about the meanings of gender terms is amelioratively satisfactory: the double-counting and discrete/continuous problems. Given that we suggest that some gender term X has a proposed meaning y, we can say that the proposed meaning will either misgender demigender people by giving X discrete application conditions, or gender marginalise trans people who are members of X by giving X continuous application conditions. Moreover, we can say that y either excludes trans people from the extension of X, being too exclusive, or includes too many trans people in the extension of X. The first of these problems is especially pernicious, as it appears that the existence of a variety of trans identities poses a structural problem that rules out any monist account of a gender term, on the basis that it is trans-exclusive.

I will suggest that the only way to avoid these problems is to adopt a pluralist account of gender. Here I will put a semantic spin on pluralism. At a first blush, the is this: suppose we propose multiple meanings for X, y1…yn, such that some y in y1…yn have discrete membership conditions, and some y in y1…yn have continuous membership conditions. I’ll then explore the pluralist and related contextualist accounts currently available, arguing that the political differences between the two positions are minimal.

Next, I’ll develop my ameliorative version of semantic pluralism, showing how the problems given by Saul for semantic pluralism and contextualism fail to apply. However, I will then consider a more challenging problem which I will call Saul’s Revenge: Among our plural senses for ‘woman’ there ought to be at least one (call this woman1) which has discrete conditions, such that demigirls are not misgendered. Similarly, there ought to be at least one sense for ‘woman’ (call this woman2) such that trans women are not gender marginalised. So far so good - demigirls are not misgendered by woman1, and trans women are not gender marginalised by woman2.

However, note that we face an issue. Demigirls are misgendered by woman1, and trans women are gender marginalised by woman2. Unless we can find a way to restrict woman1 such that it does not apply to trans women, and restrict woman2 such that it does not apply to demigirls, we find ourselves endorsing target concepts of gender that misgender or gender marginalise. Building on the work of Díaz-León, I’ll argue that a version of subject contextualism or subject pluralism gets us around Saul’s Revenge.

In the rest of the talk I’ll consider other potential challenges for ameliorative semantic pluralism.

MAHDAVI MOHAN: DESCRIPTIVE AND NORMATIVE GROUNDS FOR UNDERSTANDING GENDERS AS ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED

W.B. Gallie’s “essentially contested concept” is defined by three core features: it’s evaluative; it’s internally complex; and it’s variously describable. I argue that different genders, such as woman, man, nonbinary, and so on, exhibit these features and, accordingly, should be considered essentially contested. Moreover, I also identify normative reasons to consider such concepts essentially contested. Accordingly, rather than understanding gender as exclusively a social kind, an identity, a political category, or so on, the concept can and should be understood as some of these competing conceptions, simultaneously.

Initially, the notion that genders are evaluative concepts might seem counterintuitive: unlike standard evaluative concepts, such as freedom or democracy, it’s not obvious that being, for instance, a woman is inherently good or bad. However, I argue that the practice of “misgendering” illuminates the evaluativeness of particular genders, including woman. In particular, in order to preserve the intuition that misgendering individuals harms them in some way, we must understand individuals as having particular, subjective investments in being identified in a particular way: while objectively, being a woman might not be good or bad, subjectively being identified as such is good or bad. Moreover, the reason an individual may find being categorized as a woman good or bad might vary: they may or may not identify as such; they may or may not relate to the kinds of discrimination women face; they may seek certain legal rights and benefits associated with being identified as a woman; and so on. Accordingly, woman meets Gallie’s internal complexity constraint, such that a variety of descriptive features of woman determine its overall evaluative content. Finally, it’s entirely plausible that some individuals find one feature of woman particularly salient (e.g. its status as an identity), while others find another particularly salient (e.g. its relationship to unique kinds of discrimination); while, for example, one individual may want to be considered a woman largely because they identify as such, another may want to be considered a woman largely because they relate to the kinds of discrimination women face. In this sense, woman meets Gallie’s final condition of various describability. Accordingly, the concepts of woman and, by extension, other genders descriptively meet Gallie’s core conditions of essential contestability.

It’s also worth noting that particular accounts of what women are give rise to particular sociopolitical consequences, as well. This connection between conceptual understanding and social aims motivates a recently proposed method of engineering concepts, termed “strategic conceptual engineering”. Under this view, we have good reason to understand different accounts of a concept as legitimately constituting that concept if they are each conducive to meeting various desired social aims. Returning to the example of woman, understanding woman as an identity might be personally empowering for those who identify as such, while understanding woman as a category defined by certain kinds of discrimination can allow us to better understand gender-based discrimination. If we take these aims to be generally unrelated, yet still legitimate, then we have additional normative grounds to consider genders essentially contested.

CLAUDIA MAZZUCA & MATTEO SANTARELLI: POLITICIZED CONCEPTS AS ABSTRACT CONCEPTS: THE CASE OF GENDER

Gender has consistently been the remit of political debates: depending on where and how a social community draws its conceptual boundaries, issues related to gender identity, social rights and health measures are normed and disciplined. It is, so to say, a political concept.

Political concepts have been a relevant topic of inquiry in political theory, sociology, philosophy, and history of philosophy. Bellamy and Mason (2003), for instance, defined political concepts as something we employ to construct a case for or against a political position. To put it briefly, political concepts are something by means of which we perform social actions, e.g., giving political reasons, constructing political arguments, taking a stand for or against political position: they are “social tools” (Borghi, Binkofski 2014).

But how does a concept become a political concept? We address this question by adopting a pragmatic and interdisciplinary approach. Drawing resources from philosophy and history of philosophy we will introduce some key features of political–or more aptly: politicized–concepts. We will contend that politicized concepts are interpretable (Dworkin, 2011), contestable (Gallie,1955), vague (Peirce, 1902), conflictual and general (Koselleck, 1979). In keeping with this reconstruction, we will suggest that politicizing a concept means making these features relevant in a certain context.

This is further supported by recent developments in cognitive science, suggesting that contextual constraints play a pivotal role in flexibly shaping conceptual representations (e.g., Yee & Thompson-Schill, 2016). Specifically, abstract concepts are greatly influenced by social and cultural settings (Borghi et al., 2019), and gender makes no exception (Oyèwùmí, 1997).

Interestingly, some scholars are starting to question the dichotomy opposing concepts, showing how depending on specific situations concrete and abstract features of a given concept might be more relevant (Barsalou, Scheepers & Dutriaux, 2018). Along these lines, recent perspectives on gender stress the entwinement of biological and social factors in the constitution of gendered identities (Fausto-Sterling, 2019; van Anders, 2015), and propose the label gender/sex.

Delving deeper into the abstract nature of politicized concepts we will suggest that they cannot be considered either strictly abstract, nor strictly concrete. Rather, politicized concepts seem to be the result of a process of gradual abstraction in which the abstract features of a concept are made more relevant, without necessarily dismissing their concrete components.

The concept of gender/sex constitutes a paradigmatic example of this process. We will present experimental evidence and theoretical arguments with the aim of analysing how gender/sex, being a politicized concept, bares a strong abstract valence (related to language and cultural norms), yet maintaining its grounding into concrete features (e.g., physical and corporeal referents). This compresence of abstract and concrete components in political concepts –we argue–is deeply intertwined with another essential feature of political concepts, i.e. contestability.

Those considerations, taking into account both political philosophy and cognitive science, can shed light on the processes underlying the conceptual construction of gender/sex and its implication at a social and political level.

3rd WORKSHOP DAY, September 10th: Metaphysics of Gender Identity / Metaphysics of Gender II

13.00–14.00 Keynote: Katharine Jenkins - Gender Pluralism and the Constraints and Enablements Framework 14.15–15.15 Matthew Turyn - The need for epistemic first-person authority 16.00–17.00 Joshua Petersen - Who (gets to be) a lesbian? Identity gatekeeping and the relevance of metaphysics to political praxis

Keynote: KATHARINE JENKINS: GENDER PLURALISM AND THE CONSTRAINTS AND ENABLEMENTS FRAMEWORK

There are a lot of attractive accounts of gender kinds on offer (Haslanger 2012, Asta 2018) as well as accounts of the of human social kinds (or social groups) more broadly (Mallon 2016, Ritchie 2020) that are much more conducive to feminist aims than a lot of previous work in social ontology. As metaphysicians of gender, we are spoilt for ! In this talk, I argue that we do not have to choose a single account of gender kinds, but can adopt a principled pluralism about gender kinds: there are many different varieties of social kinds that can be understood as gender kinds, and which ones we need to use in our theorising and practices depend on our explanatory and practical goals. I offer a framework for systematising these different gender kinds, the ‘Constraints and Enablements Framework’, explain some of its benefits, and offer a brief sketch of when and why we might want to reach for certain gender kinds in our emancipatory efforts.

MATTHEW TURYN: THE NEED FOR EPISTEMIC FIRST-PERSON AUTHORITY

Talia Mae Bettcher (2009) argues that first-person authority (FPA) should be understood as an ethical , not an epistemic principle. In this paper, I argue that an ameliorative inquiry of gender identity should aim towards an epistemic version of FPA. Without an epistemic version of FPA, we cannot draw substantive conclusions from the phenomenological reports of trans and nonbinary individuals. Further, abandoning the epistemic FPA seems to suggest that accepting others’ gender identities is merely a of politely going along with what others have said, regardless of the .

I begin by arguing that the ethical version of FPA is not an adequate target for a concept of gender. The ethical version of FPA states that we have an unqualified obligation to accept others’ sincere self- ascriptions of mental states so as not to violate their individual autonomy. A man who believes that his date does not want to be out with him has a moral obligation to refrain from saying ‘You want to go home’ (Bettcher 2009). Though this position seems unproblematic in such contexts, a metaphysics of gender that respects trans and nonbinary identities requires a firmer stance. When we accept others’ sincere self- ascriptions of their gender identities, we take these to, in some way, constitute their gender identities. Further, the kinds of conclusions that philosophers such as Robin Dembroff (2020) draw about nonbinary identities on the basis of testimony from nonbinary individuals requires that we adopt something much closer to the epistemic conception of FPA.

I then argue that the epistemic version of FPA requires a form of internalism about gender. According to externalist views of gender such as Haslanger’s (2000), one’s gender is determined by the social role that one occupies and by the manner in which one is perceived by others. Should we accept a form of externalism, we cannot rely on the sincere assertions of trans and nonbinary persons to determine their gender identities. Recognizing epistemic FPA requires that we reject this view, which leaves us with the internalist position, according to which one’s gender is determined by one’s psychological states.

I conclude by defending one form of internalism--according to which to be a member of a gender class is to have a complex set of dispositions--from several objections that Dembroff (2020) levels against the position. Dembroff’s most effective argument against a dispositional view is an appeal to the imperfect social conditions that surround us. Nonbinary and trans persons might never act in a way that accords with their felt gender identities because of the social pressures against doing so. I argue that a close examination of ‘masked’ dispositions (Johnston 1992) can allow us to circumvent these problems. Some disposition is masked when its causal base remains intact and it is exposed to its stimulus conditions, yet the disposition does not manifest. By explaining social pressures as masks, we can avoid the problems that appealing to ideal conditions might raise.

Works cited:

Dembroff, Robin (forthcoming). Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind. Philosophers' Imprint. Bettcher, Talia Mae (2009). Trans Identities and First-Person Authority. In Laurie Shrage (ed.), You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford University Press. Haslanger, Sally (2000). Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs 34 (1):31–55. Jenkins, Katharine (2016). Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman. Ethics 126 (2):394-421. -- (2018). Toward an Account of Gender Identity. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5. Johnston, Mark (1992). How to speak of the colors. Philosophical Studies 68 (3):221-263. Lewis, David K. (1997). Finkish dispositions. Philosophical Quarterly 47 (187):143-158. Martin, C. B. (1994). Dispositions and conditionals. Philosophical Quarterly 44 (174):1-8. McKitrick, Jennifer (2015). A dispositional account of gender. Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2575-2589.

JOSHUA PETERSEN: WHO (GETS TO BE) A LESBIAN? IDENTITY GATEKEEPING AND THE RELEVANCE OF METAPHYSICS TO POLITICAL PRAXIS.

Feminism aims to liberate people from patriarchal domination (e.g. hooks 1989). It is of central importance to intersectional feminists to discover how subcategories of women, such as women of color, are uniquely oppressed by patriarchal domination (Crenshaw 1989). I understand the metaphysics of gender (MoG) as a project of conceptual engineering that attempts to answer not only “what gender is,” but also “how we might revise what we mean” by gender (Haslanger 2000). In this paper, I defend the view that MoG must provide guidance to intersectional feminist praxis. In particular, I argue that until MoG answers fundamental questions, certain intersectional feminists cannot know whether they are engaging in a form of identity gatekeeping that is antithetical to their political aims. First, I define ‘identity gatekeeping.’ I argue that only the metaphysics of gender can answer the question: are certain feminists engaging in identity gatekeeping? I then argue that, if they are, their actions are antithetical to the goals of intersectional feminist praxis.

Let ‘identity gatekeeping’ refer to the process by which a person excludes, without warrant, another from claiming membership in a community to which they rightfully belong. To illustrate, let’s assume the label ‘parent’ applies to anyone who raises a child. Now imagine that a particular community of parents excludes guardians of adopted children from claiming the label ‘parent.’ By hypothesis, this is an example of identity gatekeeping. Certain feminists deploy the following, which I call the “exclusion principle.” Certain individuals (e.g. trans women), in virtue of being trans, are excluded from the community are women. The exclusion principle, as I argue, excludes trans women not only from the community of women, but also from irreducible subgroups of that community, like the community of lesbians. My reasoning is simple. A person P is a lesbian only if P is a woman (Hale 1996). By the exclusion principle, P is not a woman in virtue of being trans. Thus, by modus tollens, P is not a lesbian in virtue of being trans. This argument holds ceteris paribus for other subgroups of women, like Black women or poor women.

If the exclusion principle is correct, then this argument is sound, and nothing is the matter. If, however, the exclusion principle is false, then proponents of such arguments would be engaging in identity gatekeeping — not only of the community of women, but also the lesbian community. I then argue that such identity gatekeeping is antithetical to the tenets of intersectional . By engaging in identity gatekeeping, proponents of the exclusion principle will exclude lesbians from rightfully enjoying certain radical, liberatory, and counter-patriarchal acts. Moreover, these proponents will fail to recognize the particular injustices faced by those whom they exclude. Both of these results are antithetical to the aims of intersectional feminism. Thus, it is of central importance to the feminist project if the exclusion principle is true — a fact determined by the metaphysics of gender. Therefore, the metaphysics of gender should centrally guide intersectional feminist praxis.

References Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Iss. 1 Article 8 Hale, Jacob (1996) “Are Lesbians Women?,” 11(2): 94-121) Haslanger, Sally (2000) “Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?,” Nous 34(1): 31-55 hooks, bell (1989) Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Boston, MA: South End Press

LAST WORKSHOP DAY, September 11th: Future of Gender

13.00–14.00 Keynote: Robin Dembroff - Problems with 14.15–15.15 Danny Weltman - Gender Abolitionism: Not Now, But Later 16.00–17.00 Giuseppe Vicinanza - The trans-gender society. for a future manifesto

Keynote: ROBIN DEMBROFF: PROBLEMS WITH PATRIARCHY

The term ‘patriarchy’ is part of the common lexicon, and appears everywhere from Ani DiFranco lyrics, to references on The Simpsons, to academic tomes only accessible behind paywalls. On the most common understanding of patriarchy, patriarchy is a social system with a binary hierarchy: men are dominant, and women are subordinated. This binary picture has shaped not only how feminists understand patriarchy, but also how we understand , , gender, and feminism itself. Despite -- and because -- of its explanatory importance, I think we need a new understanding of patriarchy. In this talk, I'll motivate a new model of patriarchy, and outline its metaphysical and epistemological upshots.

DANNY WELTMAN: GENDER ABOLITIONISM: NOT NOW, BUT LATER

I defend gender abolitionism (also known as gender eliminativism), which is the view that we ought not to have genders (Rubin 1975, 204; Mikkola 2011, 74–75). I defend it chiefly by suggesting that many objections to the view can be defused if we argue that gender abolition should happen in the future. First, I briefly characterize gender abolitionism by describing a world without gender, in which we do not use gender terms, sort people along gender lines, invest systemic differences between the sexes (to the extent any such differences exist) with any particular social meanings, pass laws that discriminate on the basis of gender, or carry out other behaviors that depend on and help constitute gender.

Second, I provide one main argument for thinking we should abolish gender: gender is necessarily oppressive. Gender, both as it exists today and as a concept generally, entails oppression, because gender requires us to have systemic (albeit potentially defeasible) expectations about how people will behave, and it requires us to treat these expectation as normative, such that deviation from these expectations licenses at the very least a judgment that one has deviated (Rhode 2010). (Of course, most deviations from gender norms trigger much more dire consequences, including ostracism and violence.) Because systems of oppression like this are bad, we have a reason to eliminate gender.

Third, I suggest that most objections against gender abolitionism can be defused if we realize that we should postpone abolition to some point in the future. For instance, gender is important to the identities of many people, including many marginalized people (Jenkins 2016). But, this is just an argument for delaying the abolition of gender until this marginalization has been largely rectified. Eliminating gender may require certain resources or technologies, like widespread access to birth control or even artificial wombs, so we should not eliminate gender until we have these things (Firestone 1971; Takala 2009).

Fourth, I respond to the objection that gender abolitionism is an unrealistically utopian and objectionably unpragmatic project by suggesting ways in which using gender abolition as a goal can help us make more practical decisions about how to act right now (Mikkola 2011, 75).

Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. : The Case for the Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam Books. Jenkins, Katharine. 2016. “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman.” Ethics 126 (2): 394–421. Mikkola, Mari. 2011. “Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender.” In Feminist Metaphysics, edited by Charlotte Witt, 67–83. Springer Netherlands. Rhode, Deborah L. 2010. The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward and Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. Takala, Tuija. 2009. “Human Before Sex? Ectogenesis as a Way to Equality.” In Reprogen-Ethics and the Future of Gender, edited by Frida Simonstein, 187–95. Dordrecht: Springer.

GIUSEPPE VICINANZA: THE TRANS-GENDER SOCIETY. THOUGHTS FOR A FUTURE MANIFESTO

This essay is about what we think when we think about gender and why I think we should stop thinking about it. I will argue that the society of the future, ‘the more perfect society’, as Greek poet Cavafy would have called it, should be a trans-gender society, understood as a society that transcends gender, that goes beyond it and leaves it behind.

As I way of explaining empirical data I collected on people’s openness (or rather, as the results showed, ‘closedness’) to having sexual intercourse with individuals, I will deconstruct a misunderstanding of gender, which in turn, is grounded in a misunderstanding of what it is to be a human being, in particular, in a belief in some form of -body dualism. The idea that humans are a dualistic compound of mind and body, the former being the seat of our identity, and the latter being a mere appendix to that immaterial subject, produces the view that, by nature, we (viz. our self/mind) are born male or female and that whether we are one or the other will be shown by what genitalia (body) we have, so to speak, epiphenomenally. This being so, a surgical operation, as well as hormonal treatment, that changed our genitalia and our appearance would have no bearing whatsoever on our original identity; the mind/self, being immaterial, would remain untouched by a bodily intervention. Interestingly, I will show, this is not too dissimilar to what many transgender individuals themselves, victims of the same misconstructions and misconceptions of our heteronormative patriarchal society, often believe; think, for instance, of Caitlyn Jenner’s claim that “all along she had a ‘female brain’.”

However, as I will argue, rather than thinking of the transgender as representing the movement from one absurd essential to the other (male to female, or vice versa), and in line with the idea that we don’t have a body but we are a body – that, as Butler puts it, we do our body1 – the transgender experience should be inscribed, at the material level, in the wider phenomenon of technological transformations of the human body that is common far beyond the case of GRS, and, at the psychological level, in the never ending “possibilities of gender transformation” that are made possible by gender’s nature as a series of acts.2

If we think of gender and of the transgender experience in this way, we can imagine a society that transcends gender, that goes beyond it and leaves it behind. A society where there are no expectations from any individual in virtue of ‘who they are’ (or rather who we think they are), no expectation about what they should say or what they should wear, who they should love or how they should love them, what they should like or what they should look like. Gender might be the last obstacle to a truly existentialist society, where the individual is radically free, as de Beauvoir understood.3

1 , “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no.4 (December 1998), 521. 2 Butler, “Performative Acts,” 520. 3 See , (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), “Introduction”.