Gender norms can guide our sense of what we feel like we ought to do, even when we don't want them to. Understanding this norm responsiveness is an important part of understanding how oppressive gender systems are sustained. According to a social constructionist position, gender norm responsiveness happens as a result of social training, or socialization. It's often assumed that this training depends on our gender categories—that, for example, those who occupy the category “man” will be responsive to masculine norms, (...) and so on. Call this a category-based view. But trans and gender-nonconforming people are often responsive to gender norms that don't match our gender categories. This is sometimes taken as evidence for the conclusion that normative masculinity and femininity are somehow innate or presocialized. I reject this inference. I argue that we should instead dispense with a category-based view, and instead adopt a traits-based view. Gender norms apply to individuals on the basis of the gender-coded traits that they express. A traits-based view represents a social constructionist account of gender norms that leaves room for trans and GNC experiences of normative gender, and thus represents an important step towards creating inclusive theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the implications that the often-used slogan of disability rights, “Nothing about us without us,” has for our understanding of disability identity. I argue that externally labeling a person as disabled violates the principle of self-representation that is at the core of commitment to disability justice. But this concept of self-representation is complicated when we consider those deemed disabled who are incapable of communicating or perhaps even forming a disability identity. With these individuals in mind, I (...) ask, How can self-representation be violated when a person is incapable of forming their own identity? What if external labeling is necessary for caregivers to provide care to their charges? In raising these questions, I seek to highlight how cases of noncommunicative individuals challenge us to rearticulate the meaning of self-identification and recognize the injustice of violating it, even when other obligations to them demand that we do so. (shrink)

There is a significant body of literature that explores epistemic injustice as ignorance. Most germane to the present essay are explorations of white ignorance—particularly at the intersection of epistemic interdependence and relationality—and its necessity in the maintenance of white supremacy. Most conceptual discussions of white ignorance are concerned with what white people refuse to know, and the implications of that unknowing on nonwhite peoples. In this essay, I consider what white people refuse to say—how they story situations or renarrate as (...) a process by which to sustain power. What information are white people willing to recognize but simultaneously unwilling to allow to be acknowledged in the context of a specific racist situation? How do white people use the feigned absence or irrelevance of information—concealment—as power? (shrink)

Anger-eliminativism, the view that we should, as much as possible, reduce the role anger plays in our moral lives and theories, fails in ways predictable of anti-intersectional methodologies. In failing to adopt intersectionality as a maxim of inquiry, anger-eliminativism ignores, dismisses, and misrepresents the angers of those who have clear and pressing moral reason to be angry—namely, those who face oppression. It is also problematically a priori at various levels of inquiry, insensitive to counterexamples, and begs the question of anger’s (...) moral justification. An adequate intersectional methodology, which begins from centering anti-oppression anger, reveals significant first-order lessons about the nature and normativity of anger. One is that we can make good sense of the normative relation of “basic desert,” even though anti-oppression anger is not retributive. Centering anti-oppression anger reveals further insights about our responses to anger, including important roles for agency and moral character in the ways we face and take up anger. There is, moreover, an ethics to being wrong that must be factored into our theories of emotions like anger. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender has largely focused on examples of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. Cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another. In light of these cases, metaphysicians of gender have devoted substantial attention to defining gender kinds and concepts. In this paper, I consider a different set of examples. I discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence, patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gender-nonconforming people. (...) Specifically, I argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. I claim that metaphysicians of gender need to give a real definition of the gender binary, and I present my own preliminary account. The methodological upshot of this paper is that the metaphysics of gender is not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind. (shrink)