Toward an Account of Gender Identity

Jenkins, Katharine

doi:10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.027

Cited by 22 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The second approach is internalist; gender is a matter of self-identification. The weakness of the second approach is the difficulty of defining the internally felt sense of gender identity (it is dependent on social norms and is embodied [Jenkins 2018]); some people (with aphasia or Alzheimer's) cannot self-determine their gender (Barnes 2019). On the one hand, expressed gender identity has priority over how a person is classed externally; it is an assumption based on knowledge of the experience of transgender people (Beemyn and Rankin 2011) and about the importance of gender identity in social life for all persons (Witt 2011).…”

Section: Legal Gender Femalementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Table Of Counterexamples As a Nonbinary Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Toward a Nonbinary Model of Gender/Sex Traits

Ziemińska

2022

Hypatia

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I argue against the exclusive female/male divide, referring to the phenomenon of epistemic injustice in the cases of people with nonbinary gender identities and people with intersex traits. Such people have traits that are counterexamples to the binary female/male model. I have separated female and male traits into nine basic layers, five of which belong to sex (chromosomes, gonads, internal sex organs, external genitals, and secondary sex characteristics) and four to gender (gender identity, legal gender, external gender presentation, and gender pronouns). In every layer, I have found traits that are neither female nor male, and the application of the model to individuals provides examples of clusters of traits for which one layer is male and another female. Such traits and clusters of traits create the category of the nonbinary. Table 1 provides a sketch of a nonbinary model. The nonbinary category takes its name from the existing category of nonbinary gender identity; however, in the current model, it is a third category of traits, not of people. Under the nonbinary model, the basic gender concepts do not disappear. S is a woman if S is a human being with enough female traits, and the trait of having self-determined female gender identity is sufficient but not necessary.

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Section: Legal Gender Femalementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Table Of Counterexamples As a Nonbinary Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Nonbinary Model of Gender/Sex Traits

Ziemińska

2022

Hypatia

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“…The second argument, in turn, simply ignores the existing literature on gender identity, which provides substantive and non-circular accounts of what it means to "identify as a woman". (Jenkins 2018) and (Bettcher 2009), for example, directly address the circularity worry. 18 Byrne, p. 19, fn.…”

Section: Problem 2: Cherry-picked Data and Question Beggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Escaping the natural attitude about gender

Dembroff

2020

Philos Stud

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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...

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“…Norm-relevancy builds from this sense of group membership. Borrowing from Katharine Jenkins's view of gender self-identity, we can understand normrelevancy as experiencing a substantial subset of the norms associated with a particular group (in one's social context) as applicable to oneself (Jenkins 2018).…”

Section: Self-identificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

'Yep, I'm Gay': Understanding Agential Identity

Dembroff¹,

Saint-Croix²

2019

Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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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.

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Toward an Account of Gender Identity

Cited by 22 publications

References 10 publications

Toward a Nonbinary Model of Gender/Sex Traits

Toward a Nonbinary Model of Gender/Sex Traits

Escaping the natural attitude about gender

'Yep, I'm Gay': Understanding Agential Identity

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