Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Though she goes on to reject it, Bettcher (2009, 105) says of this definition: “On the face of it, the definition ‘female, adult, human being’ really does seem right. Indeed, it seems as perfect a definition as one might have ever wanted.” To say that this is the traditional concept of womanhood is not to deny conceptual connections between this concept and other concepts of norms, identity, expression, or social status. It’s only to say that, when exercising this traditional concept of womanhood—when using the “dominant manifest meaning” of the term “woman”—to think of, for example, norms about women or acceptable modes of expression for women, is to think of norms about adult human females, and acceptable modes of expression for adult human females.
See Haslanger 2000, p.39 and p. 42. She offers a similar definition of manhood, though in terms of privilege rather than subordination.
You might think it easy to sidestep this counterexample by erasing “or imagined” from Haslanger’s definition. But this comes at a serious cost: womanhood would then require the actual observation of bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction. And then, again, we could easily think of cases to show that this conception of womanhood departs from the non-revisionary conception, e.g. by imagining a woman who never undergoes the required inspection.
Perhaps you’re of a mind that even the Queen is in fact systematically subordinated (economically, politically, legally, socially, etc.) on sex-marked grounds, maybe because she’s still judged or constrained by gender norms. If so, just move to a nearby possibility where Her Majesty suffers no such subordination. Insofar as you judge it to be possible that she nevertheless remains a woman, Mikkola’s point stands: oppression is not essential to the traditional conception of womanhood. But perhaps you doubt it’s possible that even the Queen could escape subordination. As a last resort, then, attend to the intuitive possibility that a woman might be the last person on Earth, facing no systematic subordination, but remaining a woman nonetheless. Of course, Haslanger may bite the bullet here, and say that these cases are impossible. But the question is what you, the reader, judge to be possible, exercising the traditional conception of womanhood.
I’d say that being female also explains the targeting and oppression. Of course, the non-revisionary sense of “woman” accommodates that. But the point here is that, on Haslanger’s account, being a woman does not explain the targeting and oppression. Rather, only being female explains the targeting and oppression, and then it’s this targeting and oppression which explains why the victim is a woman. If you find this infelicitous, you have here evidence that Haslanger’s account departs from our ordinary use of the term “woman.”
At least, oppressed in a particular sort of way. On this, Haslanger echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s (1973, 301) famous dictum that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Less well known are de Beauvoir’s problematic trans-exclusive dicta, for example (ibid., 18) that “…there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology,” and also (ibid., 59) “…woman is of all mammalian females at once the one who is most profoundly alienated…, and the one who most violently resists this alienation.”
Also, as we learned from Socrates’ encounter with Euthyphro, to the degree that there is any order of explanation between Haslanger’s definiens and her proposed definiendum, we should conclude that we don’t have here a genuine analysis of the traditional concept of womanhood. An order of explanation shows that the definiens and the definiendum pick out two qualities, one of which explains the other, and so the analysis fails.
Of the cases given above of apparently paradigmatic women who don’t meet her proposed definition, Haslanger (ibid., 239) says: “I believe it is part of the project of feminism to bring about a day when there are no more women (though, of course, we should not aim to do away with females!).” Meditate on that statement—“part of the project of feminism is to bring about a day when there are no more women”—in order to appreciate how far Haslanger’s definition departs from our ordinary conception.
Haslanger says (ibid., 239): “I’m happy to admit that there could be females who aren’t women in the sense I’ve defined, but these individuals (or possible individuals) are not counterexamples to the analysis. The analysis is intended to capture a meaningful political category for critical feminist efforts, and non-oppressed females do not fall within that category…”
In a similar way, Bettcher (2009, 107) gives purely moral reasons in favor of revising our traditional gender concepts: she believes that the traditional gender concepts perpetuate a system of forced disclosure of genital status, which she says is invasive and sexually abusive.
For a sketch of those goals and values, see Resisting Reality, 226–7.
My Marxist and post-Marxist colleagues might prefer the term “immanent critique.” As Titus Stahl (2019) defines it, we’re engaged in “a critique which derives the standards it employs from the object criticized… rather than approaching that [object] with independently justified standards.”
I do not mean to endorse or deny Jenkins’ foundational premise here. Since Jenkins takes it as foundational, I believe more progress could be made by raising an internal problem for Jenkins, a problem by her own lights, a problem that arises even if we grant this foundational premise.
True, Jenkins proposes two distinct senses of “gender”: gender-as-class and gender-by-identity. But she’s quite clear (2016, 417) that she supports “using the term [‘woman’] to refer to people with a female gender identity and not, in general, using it to refer to people classed as women.”
Of course, gender norms vary widely by cultural context. If you don’t like Jenkins’ example here, please replace it with one you prefer.
These points provide Jenkins with a handy and satisfying response to a recent objection from Matthew Salett Andler (2017). Andler argues that Jenkins’ account will not be fully trans-inclusive, since “gender maps characteristic of people socially positioned as either women or men only allow a body to be experienced as unified if its features ‘match’ along the axis of a single sex,” and some trans people experience bodily unification without such “matching.” This is possible, Andler says, “[o]nly by adopting a radical gender map—distinct from the gender maps characteristic of people socially positioned as either women or men…” And therefore these trans persons wouldn’t, on Jenkins’ view, count as women or men. But Jenkins has two possible replies. First, even if Andler has correctly located some relevant gender norms (concerning the experience of bodily unification and “matching”), they are by no means the only gender norms, and trans people who don’t take these norms to apply to them may still well take many other gender norms to apply to them, sufficiently many to meet Jenkins’ definition. Also, Jenkins may take this occasion to remind us that taking a gender norm to be relevant to oneself does not require that one abide by that norm. (Recall Jenkins’ example of the woman who knows that, according to society, she’s “supposed” to shave her legs, and yet she doesn’t.) And so, even if there is an experience-of-bodily-unification-requires-‘matching’ gender norm, and even if trans people don’t conform to it, that’s no barrier to their taking the norm to be relevant to them, and for that to count in favor of their being classified appropriately by Jenkins’ lights.
This proposal, though, departs quite radically from our ordinary concept of womanhood. Jenkins is well aware of this, and is quite explicit that she’s engaged in a revisionary project of Ameliorative Inquiry. But it’s worth reflecting on the divergence between this proposal and our ordinary concept of womanhood. An anonymous referee helpfully points out intuitively possible cases like this: a woman, raised perhaps by radical feminists, who has not internalized enough of the right sort of gender norms to meet Jenkins’ definition; a woman who, perhaps due to cognitive impairment, is unable to internalize enough of the right sort of norms to meet Jenkins’ definition; a woman who, due to difficult relocation or immigration, has not internalized enough of the right sort of norms to count as a woman in her new culture. Jenkins’ definition, then, seems to marginalize women with non-normative backgrounds, cognitive impairments, or difficult immigration experiences. (See also Elizabeth Barnes (forthcoming, 7–8) for similar points.) Insofar as you think this is a cost, you may want to balance it against the purported benefits of Jenkins’ proposal in advancing the cause of feminism.
This problem remains even if we don’t interpret Jenkins’ proposed definition as requiring a belief that a sufficient number of the right kind of gender norms are directed at oneself. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for proposing to me a reading on which taking these norms to be relevant to oneself is to have a sense of the norms being things one needs to consider, respond to, and relative to which one experiences her behavior as either transgressive or not. And perhaps it’s possible to have this experience even if one knows that the norm is not directed at oneself. However, I think the problem remains. To see how, consider that, as a man, there is some minimal degree to which I have a sense of gender norms about women as things I need to consider, respond to, and things that I knowingly transgress with my behavior. Yet this is not sufficient to make me a woman So, we’ll have to read this proposal in a thicker, more substantial way in order to exclude people like me from the category “woman.” For a woman, these norms are things one must consider, respond to, and things that one transgresses in the right way because these norms are about oneself. But then my concern remains: this thicker, more substantial reading will marginalize trans women, by requiring a kind of delusion, or mistake, or irrationality of them in order to meet the definition of womanhood. For if these norms are in fact not directed at or about oneself, then it is irrational, or mistaken, or delusional to have the sense that these norms are things one must consider, respond to, and things that one transgresses in the right way because these norms are about oneself. Trans individuals would be victims of something like an illusion or a hallucination, on this option.
Another anonymous referee helpfully points out that an alternative direction for Ameliorative Inquiry might be to say that a woman is someone who desires enough of the right kind of gender norms to be about her, or who believes that enough of the right kind of gender norms should apply to her, even if they don’t in her current cultural context. This sort of desire-based account of womanhood would avoid the present objection, and seems to accord with the testimony of trans individuals. Julia Serano (2007), for example, describes her experience in terms of a “subconscious desire to be female.” Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin (2011, 54) recount the responses of two transgender women who participated in a survey of theirs, both of whom described their experiences in terms of wanting to be female. Arnold Grossman et al. (2005, 9) report that “Of the MTF youth, only 1 reported never wishing to be born of the sex other than her birth sex, while 26 always wished to be born of the sex other than their birth sex, with the other 4 using the sometimes points of the scale.” More recently, trans writer Andrea Long Chu (2018) described her experience as follows: “I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period.” Though a desire-based account along these lines will be subject to further objections that I lay out in this paper (and others that the reader may supply), it is, I believe, worth exploring for the Ameliorative Inquirist.
John Corvino (2000, 178) comes close to putting his finger on this difficulty, saying “The paradox of analysis is that an analysans is unhelpful if it exactly synonymous with the analysandum; unsuccessful if it is not. The analysis of gender in terms of self-conception exhibits the former difficulty…” Yet, contra Corvino, the problem here is not unhelpful synonymy, but rather unintelligibility due to vicious circularity. Bettcher (2009, 109) comes a bit closer, attributing to Jacob Hale the worry that if being a woman is merely a matter of believing that one is a woman, then “we seem to have some problem of circularity or regress. In practice this means that the criterion is virtually unintelligible.” This passage suggests that Bettcher thinks the regress may not be vicious, and that the problem is merely one of practicality. The concern I’m expressing in this section is graver: the regress is indeed vicious, and in principle, not merely in practice.
There’s an emerging trend in some pockets of feminist philosophy to revise our ordinary notions of biological sex, and to say that biological sex itself is a matter of self-identification, or norm-relevancy, or the like. To be female is to identify as female, for example. (Observe how, for example, Jenkins slides between “woman” and “female gender identity” in her 2016 work, especially p. 409, note 33.) That proposal would avoid the problems of this paragraph. But problems similar to those besetting “the fourth option” below would emerge for this proposal. See this by asking yourself just what exactly those who identify as female are identifying as. The traditional conception of biological sex had an answer in terms of chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, etc., but what does this revisionary conception offer? It’s hard to see how this revisionary proposal will avoid vicious circularity without plunging headfirst into unintelligibility.
Plausibly, one’s biological sex is determined by one’s hormone levels, one’s primary and secondary sex characteristics, and one’s genetics. And we likely weight these features according to how central or crucial we take them to be to membership in a biological sex category. Current medical technology can do quite a bit to modulate one’s hormone levels, significantly less to transform one’s primary and secondary sex characteristics, and nothing at all to alter one’s underlying genome. Depending on how one weights these features, then, one may well conclude that current medical technology cannot really move a person from one biological sex category to another. If so, the Inclusion Problem for Jenkins’ view is quite substantial indeed.
The concerns in this section apply also, mutatis mutandis, to Bettcher’s (2013, 241) admittedly rough definition of “trans woman.” She says: S is woman if and only if S is a trans woman or a non-trans woman. And S is a non-trans woman if and only if S is a woman and not a trans woman. And S is a trans woman if and only if S was assigned to the male sex at birth, currently lives as a woman, and self-identifies as a trans woman (or as a woman). As you can see, “woman” is eventually used on both sides of that initial, disjunctive definition of womanhood. (And “trans woman” is used in the definition of trans womanhood.) So the circularity concerns of this section apply to Bettcher’s definition of “trans woman.” The concerns of this section also apply, mutatis mutandis, to “self-identification” views of manhood and womanhood. It’s clear how they apply to obviously circular definitions of the kind one finds in Bettcher (2017, 396): to be a woman is to sincerely self-identify as a woman. But these concerns also apply to more complicated analyses, for example that of Jennifer McKitrick (2015), who says that to be a woman (in a particular context) is to have a cluster of behavioral dispositions coded as feminine in that context. Just as a circularity threat arises for Jenkins with regard to “norms of femininity,” for McKitrick the circularity threat arises when we wonder what it is for a behavioral disposition to be coded as feminine. Presumably that means something like: the disposition is widely considered normative for women. And in that case the circularity concern becomes salient.
Of course, one might have a justified false belief that one is a member of a group, e.g. as a result of a mistake or a delusion. But presumably Jenkins and others don’t want to say that trans women can be bona fide women only as a result of a mistake or a delusion. That’s a kind of marginalization.
Perhaps one might successfully excise norms from their cultural context, and give them a new target by going through a little ceremony like so: “I hereby declare that the following norms are about me!” And then one lists the norms, which were about a group one doesn’t belong to, but which perhaps are now about oneself. However, if someone declares that, according to her, the norm “Do X!” applies, then her performance implies that she thinks she ought to do X. If she undertakes this performance with no intention of doing X, then she has acted in bad faith. And yet, as Jenkins herself points out, many women (and men) flout gender norms. They know the gender norms apply to them, and yet have no intention of abiding by them. And surely many trans women are the same. But then, this proposal we’re now considering would entail that these trans women are acting in bad faith when they identify as women. Surely this is a bad result, by the proposal’s own standards.
It’s clear that by “terms” here she doesn’t mean words in the thin sense, i.e. those sound- and inscription-types. She’s not interested in the syntax or etymology of our gender words. She’s interested, rather, in gender itself, and our corresponding concepts.
And Haslanger characterizes Ameliorative Inquiry like so (2012, 376): “Ameliorative analyses elucidate ‘our’ legitimate purposes and what concept of F- ness (if any) would serve them best (the target concept). Normative input is needed.”
Notice the crucial role of deference in cases that are meant to pump semantic externalist intuitions. For example, in Tyler Burge’s (1979) famous case, we consider a man who mistakenly thinks he has arthritis in his thigh. This is impossible, since arthritis is an ailment of the joints. But why do we suppose that he falsely believes he has arthritis in his thigh, rather than that he truly believes he has tharthritis in his thigh, where tharthritis is an idiosyncratic concept of an ailment that manifests like arthritis, but which may also be in the thigh? The answer is deference. When Burge imagines the patient is informed by his doctor that arthritis is an inflammation of the joints, “[t]he patient is surprised, but relinquishes his view and goes on to ask what might be wrong with his thigh.” This response manifests his disposition to defer, and fuels our externalist intuitions in Burge’s case, i.e. that he’s not using an idiosyncratic concept (defined by the conception inside his skull), but rather that he has an incomplete grasp of a concept shared by the larger communal linguistic practice to which he defers. Ameliorative Inquiry lacks this disposition to defer to the larger communal linguistic practice, and is explicit about its revisionary intentions.
An anonymous referee helpfully pointed out that deference comes in degrees, and so perhaps it is hasty to think that ameliorative inquirists exhibit no deference to the larger communal linguistic practice. I agree that deference comes in degrees. However, if one intentionally departs from the communal use of a word, and if one persists in this use knowing full well that it is revisionary, then, no matter what else is going on, one does not defer enough to the communal linguistic practice to join it. And this is how things are in the “Anscombe” case above, how things would have been with Burge’s Arthritis Man had he resisted correction, and how things are with Ameliorative Inquiry.
This is so even if we take Haslanger and Jenkins to be engaged in what has become known, following Burgess and Plunkett (2013) as “conceptual ethics.” Even Burgess and Plunkett take Haslanger to be introducing new concepts and then attaching old words to them (ibid., 1094): “[Haslanger] introduces concepts to pick out the relevant properties and proposes we lexicalize them with extant terms: ‘race’ and ‘gender’. Her project therefore involves conceptual innovation, which is often a crucial part of conceptual ethics.” This origination of new concepts produces ambiguity. And while that conceptual innovation, if it catches on, may well accomplish valuable social and political ends, the point here is simply that it does so at the cost of changing the subject. Consider also David Plunkett’s (2015, 841) recent work on “metalinguistic negotiation,” which he characterizes thusly: “If we think of the meanings of terms as the concepts that they express, then we can put this thought as follows: each speaker has a preferred concept for using in the context in hand, and they are advocating for that view.” Just so. The Ameliorative Inquirist appropriates existing terms (“man,” and “woman”) to express her favored concepts. Insofar as these concepts are intentionally revisionary, they are new concepts, and she has introduced ambiguity, and changed the subject. Plunkett (ibid., 864) compares Haslanger’s project of ameliorative inquiry to a compatibilist’s project of replacing the obviously incompatibilist folk concept of free will with another, new concept that is compatible with determinism, and admits that this process “will involve a change of subject from the original pre-theoretical one that we were talking about when we originally used the term ‘free will’.” I’m arguing for the analogous point here, about gender terms.
For a related, more recent discussion, see Haslanger (2005), especially where she says, in note 11: “It might be useful to see this by analogy with other terminological developments in science. Although our understanding of and even our definition of ‘atom’ has changed over time, it is plausible that there is something worthwhile we have been and continue to be talking about.” I believe that she intends to apply the same Staying on Topic criterion in this case as well. Also see Joshua Glasgow’s (2009, especially 126ff) discussions of what he calls “revisionism” versus “substitutionism” in the philosophy of race.
The account of concept individuation from Tye and Sainsbury above gives a nice explanation of why there are two concepts here, of why our use of “germ” originated a new concept, rather than modifying the conception associated with the concept of miasma: lack of deference to the prior “miasma”-using practice. The germ theorist contradicts, and does not defer to, the miasma theorist. This is the same lack of deference to previous linguistic practice that characterizes revisionary gender concepts.
And this is how Jennifer Saul (2006, 126) reads Haslanger, concluding “The (legitimate) point of gender concepts, then, is to help us to fight oppression on the basis of sex” (emphasis mine).
Recently, Robin Dembroff (forthcoming) proposes this method of Ameliorative Inquiry: “On this different approach—the ‘imitation’ approach—classification practices can be revised based upon those that already exist within other communities. Given that operative gender kinds vary across contexts, looking at other communities will reveal alternative gender kinds and corresponding classification practices. From here, those in one context can attempt to revise their operative gender kinds by mirroring or otherwise imitating the structures and practices that already exist in other contexts.” There are two problems with this “imitation approach.” First, if I’m really meant to set aside or bracket off my concept of “woman” that I wish to revise, then I won’t be in a position to know which communities are using that concept and which aren’t, in which case I won’t know which communities are candidates for imitation. (Of course, I could easily tell which communities are using the word “woman,” but that’s not enough to know whether they’re using the selfsame concept that I wish to revise.) Second, even if I could identify communities that are using the same concept as I am, if I really do bracket off my concept of womanhood that I wish to revise, then, when it comes time to evaluate how well the uses of that concept in these communities accomplish the goals of feminism (cashed out in terms of womanhood), I will face the same problems I just discussed in the paper. So even Dembroff’s “imitation approach” to Ameliorative Inquiry will be impossible to complete, at least in a trans-inclusive way.
Does the project of trans-inclusive feminism require Ameliorative Inquiry? Well, that depends on whether the project of trans-inclusive feminism requires that “woman” (or “female”) apply in an unqualified way to trans women and “man” (or “male”) apply in an unqualified way to trans men. Given that this usage intentionally departs from the traditional definitions of those terms, and requires conceptual engineering motivated by normative inputs, the project of trans-inclusive feminism would require Ameliorative Inquiry. It would therefore be incoherent. But if trans-inclusive feminism can find a way to advance its cause without conceptual revision, it may avoid the incoherence noted in this paper.
Exploring that possibility is beyond the scope of this paper, though the reader may be interested in a recent project from Barnes (forthcoming) and another from Robin Dembroff (forthcoming). Both of these projects will be attractive only to those who are willing to reject what Dembroff calls “the Real Gender assumption”: that gender classifications should track the gender kind membership facts. According to Dembroff, gender kinds are social kinds, and not features of mind- or language-independent reality. Barnes agrees, saying (ibid., 17) “There aren’t any context or language-independent facts about what it really is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, etc.” So, if you, like me, think that some people really are men, or women, or neither, independent of our minds and language, then these projects aren’t for you. But despite throwing overboard the reality of gender, these projects don’t escape the problems discussed in this paper. And that’s because both projects require or propose some understanding of gender terms. And this understanding leads to a familiar dilemma. For example, Barnes says (ibid., 3) “giving a metaphysics of gender should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is—if anything—about the social world that ultimately explains gender. But that project might come apart from the project of defining or giving application conditions for our natural language gender terms like ‘woman’.” Even if this is true, giving a metaphysics of gender cannot “come apart” from understanding what “woman” means, since it would be impossible to determine what explains womanhood if we have no idea what womanhood even is. (Could we determine what explains blarghood, having no idea what it is to be a blarg? I can’t see how.) But, there’s a dilemma: this understanding of womanhood will be either traditional or revisionary. The former is trans exclusive, and the latter has the internal problems we’ve seen in this paper. Similarly, when Dembroff argues that we should modify the membership conditions of social kinds for the sake of social justice, the social kind concepts advocated for will be either traditional or revisionary. And, so, the same dilemma that confronts Barnes also arises for Dembroff: either trans exclusion, or some internal problems with revisionary gender concepts.
References
Andler, M. S. (2017). Gender identity and exclusion: A reply to Jenkins. Ethics, 127(4), 883–895.
Barnes, E. (2019). Gender and gender terms. Nous. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12279.
Beeman, B., & Rankin, S. (2011). The lives of transgender people. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Bettcher, T. M. (2009). Trans identities and first-person authority. In L. Shrage (Ed.), You've changed: Sex reassignment and personal identity (pp. 98–120). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bettcher, T. M. (2013). Trans women and the meaning of ‘woman. In A. Soble, N. Power, & R. Halwani (Eds.), Philosophy of sex: Contemporary readings (6th ed., pp. 233–250). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.
Bettcher, T. M. (2017). Through the looking glass. In A. Garry, S. J. Khader, & A. Stone (Eds.), The Routledge companion to feminist philosophy (pp. 393–404). New York, NY: Routledge.
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T. Uehling, & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Midwest studies in philosophy, IV (pp. 73–121). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Burgess, A., & Plunkett, D. (2013). Conceptual ethics I. Philosophy Compass, 8(12), 1091–1101.
Chu, Andrea Long (2018). “On Liking Women,” n+1 Magazine 30.
Corvino, J. (2000). Analyzing Gender. Southwest Philosophy Review, 17(1), 173–180.
de Beauvoir, S. (1973). The second sex. New York: Vintage Books.
Dembroff, R. (2019). Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender. Philosophical Topics. Forthcoming.
Glasgow, J. (2009). A theory of race. New York, NY: Routledge.
Grossman, A., et al. (2005). Parents' reactions to transgender Youths' gender Nonconfonning expression and identity. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, 18(1), 3–16.
Haslanger, S. (2000). Gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be? Noûs, 34(1), 31–55.
Haslanger, S. (2005). What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds. Hypatia, 20(4), 10–26.
Haslanger, S. (2008). A social constructionist analysis of race. In B. Koenig, S. Lee, & S. Richardson (Eds.), Revisiting race in the genomic age (pp. 56–69). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, K. (2016). Amelioration and inclusion: Gender identity and the concept of Woman. Ethics, 126, 394–421.
McKitrick, J. (2015). A dispositional account of gender. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2575–2589.
Mikkola, M. (2009). Gender concepts and intuitions. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 39(4), 559–583.
Moi, T. (1999). What is a woman? New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Plunkett, D. (2015). Which concepts should we use?: Metalinguistic negotiations and the methodology of philosophy. Inquiry, 58, 828–874.
Sainsbury, R. M., & Tye, M. (2012). Seven puzzles of thought and how to solve them: An originalist theory of concepts. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Saul, Jennifer (2006). “Gender and Race,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80: 119–143.
Serano, J. (2007). Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.
Stahl, T. (2019). What is Immanent Critique? https://philarchive.org/archive/STAWII-3. Accessed 23 Jan 2018.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bogardus, T. Some Internal Problems with Revisionary Gender Concepts. Philosophia 48, 55–75 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00107-2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00107-2