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

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Alex Byrne's article, "Are Women Adult Human Females?", asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne's answer is, 'clearly, yes'. Moreover, Byrne claims, woman is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne's argument, but mostly because it is paradigmatic of a wider phenomenon. The slogan "women are adult human females" is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne's argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology. 1. 1 (Foucault 1972), p. 181. Cited in (Brison 2019). 2 Throughout this paper, I use 'they' as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. See (Dembroff and Wodak 2018) for a philosophical criticism of gender-specific pronouns. political slogan. Moreover, it is a slogan that has been championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans online forums. It is 3 important to respond to Byrne's argument, but mostly because Byrne's argument is a paradigmatic instance of a wider phenomenon. So while I directly address Byrne in what follows, many of my arguments apply also to others who make the same or similar arguments. 4 My reconstruction of Byrne's argument is as follows: Premise 1: There is one meaning of 'woman' relevant for philosophical inquiry into the meaning of the term 'woman'. 5 Premise 2: That meaning is the "standard" (or "dominant") meaning. 6 Premise 3: On the "standard" meaning of 'woman', 'woman' refers to the category adult human female. 7 Premise 4: Adult human female is a biological and not social category. 8 Premise 5: Therefore, the single philosophically relevant meaning of the term 'woman' refers to a biological and not social category-namely, adult human female. [1, 2, 3, 4] 3 See also (Corredor 2019) for discussion of far-right political groups' exploitation of anti-trans rhetoric. 4 For this reason, most references to 'Byrne' can be read as shorthand for 'Byrne and those who make similar arguments'. 5 Byrne (2020) frequently refers to "the meaning" of 'woman'. See also p. 19, footnote 29: "If AHF has two interpretations-corresponding to the dominant and resistant meanings of 'woman'-the one clearly at play in the relevant literature is the first." Byrne also refers to resistant meanings as "non-standard" and dominant meanings as "ordinary". 6 See pp. 18-19, footnote 29. It is also worth noting that although Byrne acknowledges that people use gender terms in a variety of ways and that the meanings of these terms are "disputed", they interpret anecdotal data as showing that some people "systematically misapply" gender terms. Byrne does not consider their own uses of gender terms as potential instances of such misapplication. 7 The entirety (or near entirety) of Byrne's section 2 defends Premise 3. While some of the arguments in this section are presented under the guise of epistemological argument...

What's important about 'coming out'? Why do we wear business suits or Star Trek pins? Part of the answer, we think, has to do with what we call agential identity. Social metaphysics has given us tools for understanding what it is to be socially positioned as a member of a particular group and what it means to self-identify with a group. But there is little exploration of the general relationship between selfidentity and social position. We take up this exploration, developing an account of agential identity-the self-identities we make available to others. Agential identities are the bridge between what we take ourselves to be and what others take us to be. Understanding agential identity not only fills an important gap in the literature, but also helps us explain politically important phenomena concerning discrimination, malicious identities, passing, and code-switching. These phenomena, we argue, cannot be understood solely in terms of self-identity or social position.I n April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres officially 'came out' in Time magazine, the cover boldly stating, with characteristic nonchalance, "Yep, I'm Gay". In one sense, DeGeneres's coming out was not informative: it was widely known that DeGeneres was gay. But in another sense, it was hugely informative. It communicated to the world that DeGeneres wanted this knowledge to move outside people's heads and beyond closed doors, and to impact how she was treated in her public life.

Analytic philosophy has transgender trouble. In this article, the author explores potential explanations for this trouble, focusing on the notion of “cisgender commonsense” and its place in philosophical methodology.