## 1. The sex/gender distinction.



The terms 'sex' and 'gender' mean different
things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or
straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history
of the terms provides a helpful starting point.


### 1.1 Biological determinism



Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are
coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many
feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/
gender distinction. Provisionally: 'sex' denotes human
females and males depending on *biological* features
(chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features);
'gender' denotes women and men depending on
*social* factors (social role, position, behaviour or
identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction
was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is
destiny.



A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes
and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and
behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly
conserve energy (being 'anabolic') and this makes them
passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics.
Men expend their surplus energy (being 'katabolic') and
this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby,
interested in political and social matters. These biological
'facts' about metabolic states were used not only to
explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to
justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More
specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women
political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and
Thompson) "what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa
cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament" (quoted from Moi 1999,
18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as
they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be
futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be
interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind
of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and
psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes.
For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not
born, but rather *becomes* a woman, and that "social
discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so
profound that they appear to be caused by nature" (Beauvoir 1972
[original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on
 Simone de Beauvoir).
 Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men,
then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are
culturally learned or acquired.



Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and
Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and
psychological differences between women and men have biological causes
has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue
that women should not become airline pilots since they will be
hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform
their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently,
differences in male and female brains have been said to explain
behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus
callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral
hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological
and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a *Time*
magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of
differences between women and men claiming that women's thicker
corpus callosums could explain what 'women's
intuition' is based on and impair women's ability to
perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps
(Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that
differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological
differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of
anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and
thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with
caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not
found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences
actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given
that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by
practice, even if women and men's corpus callosums differ, this
does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable.
(Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).


### 1.2 Gender terminology



In order to distinguish biological differences from
social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists
appropriated the term 'gender'. Psychologists writing on
transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this
sense. Until the 1960s, 'gender' was often used to refer
to masculine and feminine words, like *le* and *la* in
French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they
were 'trapped in the wrong bodies', the psychologist
Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms 'sex' to pick
out biological traits and 'gender' to pick out the amount
of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and
large) a person's sex and gender complemented each other,
separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing
Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality:
transsexuals' sex and gender simply don't match.



Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to
distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many
differences between women and men were socially produced and,
therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase
'sex/gender system' in order to describe "a set of
arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and
procreation is shaped by human, social intervention" (1975,
165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that "part of
social life which is the locus of the oppression of women"
(1975, 159) describing gender as the "socially imposed division
of the sexes" (1975, 179). Rubin's thought was that
although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the
oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and
men should behave. Women are oppressed *as women* and "by
having to *be* women" (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since
gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by
political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to
women's subordination. Feminism should aim to create a
"genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one's
sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with
whom one makes love" (Rubin 1975, 204).



In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin's, sex and gender
were thought to complement one another. The slogan 'Gender is
the social interpretation of sex' captures this view. Nicholson
calls this 'the coat-rack view' of gender: our sexed
bodies are like coat racks and "provide the site upon which
gender [is] constructed" (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as
masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the
'coat-rack' of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies
their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave.
This socially constructs gender differences - or the amount of
femininity/masculinity of a person - upon our sexed bodies. That
is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or
female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies
differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby
creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and
gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are
separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman,
or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).



So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism
suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and
social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by
saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders
(women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or
ambitious) are the "intended or unintended product[s] of a
social practice" (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social
practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being
of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There
is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on
 intersections between analytic and continental feminism
 for more on different ways to understand gender.)


## 2. Gender as socially constructed


### 2.1 Gender socialisation



One way to interpret Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but
rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender
socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they
acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and
femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals
are brought up. They are *causally constructed* (Haslanger
1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing
gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense)
shape the way we are *qua* women and men. And the mechanism of
construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes
gender differences to have "essentially cultural, rather than
biological bases" that result from differential treatment (1971,
28-9). For her, gender is "the sum total of the
parents', the peers', and the culture's notions of
what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character,
interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression" (Millett
1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are
problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and
reinforces women's subordination so that women are socialised
into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant,
docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since
these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by
'unlearning' social roles. That is, feminists should aim
to diminish the influence of socialisation.



Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different
influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is
extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance,
parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children
differently. When parents have been asked to describe their
24-*hour* old infants, they have done so using
gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and
coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents'
treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether
they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some
socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender
stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in
pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical
toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain
'appropriate' behaviours. While the precise form of gender
socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism,
even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or
from playing 'rough and tumble' games and are more likely
than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are
told not to 'cry like a baby' and are more likely to be
given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000,
 122-126).[1]



According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced
by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes
countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children's
books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical
ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as
helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in
children's books has been to portray females in independent
roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran
1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by
making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or
genderless imaginary creatures (like TV's Teletubbies). However,
parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters
often undermine the publishers' efforts by reading them to their
children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or
masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the
overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas
those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance,
by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35).
Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit
messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected
to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.


### 2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality



Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as
too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux &
Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter
of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early
infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular,
gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary
caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or
other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and
female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter
relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers
are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This
unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to
psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to
develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother
unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself
thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego
boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and
reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally
producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202-206). This
perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although
Chodorow's approach differs in many ways from Freud's.



Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender
stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are
stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others
around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own
interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their
children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and
(somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish
their own needs from the needs of those around them because they
cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them.
By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring
a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These
traits are said to result from men's well-defined ego boundaries
that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes
at the expense of others' needs and interests.



Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be
changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in
women's oppression since they make females overly attentive to
the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to
correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally
involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in
ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of
selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to
eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.


### 2.3 Gender as feminine and masculine sexuality



Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of
sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created
by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and
treated as objects *for* satisfying men's desires
(MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance,
femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are "created
through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman
difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other.
This is the social meaning of sex" (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For
MacKinnon, gender is *constitutively constructed*: in defining
genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to
social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make
reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised
dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant
position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are
*by definition* hierarchical and this hierarchy is
fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of
'gender equality', then, does not make sense to MacKinnon.
If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical
genders (that are defined *in terms of* sexuality) would cease
to exist.



So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a
particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather,
it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal
societies. This is not to say that men are *naturally* disposed
to sexually objectify women or that women are *naturally*
submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially
conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women's
subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a
particular male version of female sexuality as erotic - one in
which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both
female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view
that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7).
Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of 'what women
want' suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be
submissive. This conditions men's sexuality so that they view
women's submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this
male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force.
MacKinnon's thought is not that male dominance is a result of
social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of
power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine
traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power
inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised
differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As
MacKinnon puts it, 'dominance' (power relations) is prior
to 'difference' (traits, behaviour and roles) (see,
MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions
on pornography as paramount to ending women's subordinate status
that stems from their gender.


## 3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction


### 3.1 Is gender uniform?



The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical
perspective on gender: *gender
 realism*.[2]
 That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic
feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their
gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as
opposed to, say, men). *All* women are thought to differ from
*all* men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon
thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common
condition that defines women's gender and what women *as
women* share. All women differ from all men in this respect.
Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does
not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon's view. Being sexually
objectified is *constitutive of* being a woman; a female who
escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.



One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the
particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988,
chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow's view.) A
more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general
metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these
positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first,
that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class
differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it
posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).


#### 3.1.1 Particularity argument



Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender
realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists
mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race,
class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for
example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience
womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance,
Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon's view, that
sexual objectification is the common condition that defines
women's gender, for failing to take into account differences in
women's backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of
racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were
'hypersexualised' and thought to be always sexually
available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually
virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be
impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual
objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood
since it varies considerably depending on one's race and
 class.[3]



For Spelman, the perspective of 'white solipsism'
underlies gender realists' mistake. They assumed that all women
share some "golden nugget of womanness" (Spelman 1988,
159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same
for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds.
Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared
features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition
*their* gender as women thus supposing that "the
womanness underneath the Black woman's skin is a white
woman's, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman
waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud" (Spelman
1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western
feminists passed off their particular view of gender as "a
metaphysical truth" (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women
while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race
and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists
conflated "the condition of one group of women with the
condition of all" (Spelman 1988, 3).



Betty Friedan's (1963) well-known work is a case in point of
white
 solipsism.[4]
 Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and
called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she
failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often
poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their
families. Friedan's suggestion, then, was applicable only to a
particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives).
But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women's lives
-- a mistake that was generated by Friedan's failure to
take women's racial and class differences into account (hooks
2000, 1-3).



Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates
femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ
from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in
different societies. For her, "females become not simply women
but particular kinds of women" (Spelman 1988, 113): white
working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women,
wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.



This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist
philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has
*definitively* shown that gender realism is untenable (1997,
13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn't so. The arguments
Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some
characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that
defines women's gender; they simply point out that some
particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided.
So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely
take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western
feminists' gender to condition women's gender in general,
this leaves open the possibility that women *qua* women do
share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a]
for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable,
and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola's critique of
Spelman.)


#### 3.1.2 Normativity argument



Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds.
They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999
[original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender
distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section
3.3.). Butler's normativity argument is not straightforwardly
directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather
at its *political* counterpart: identity politics. This is a
form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g.
racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to
be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that
define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on
 Identity Politics).
 Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that
feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or
category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition,
experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines
their gender.



Butler's normativity argument makes two claims. The first is
akin to Spelman's particularity argument: unitary gender notions
fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to
recognise "the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political
intersections in which the concrete array of 'women' are
constructed" (Butler 1999, 19-20). In their attempt to
undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to
be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed
accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler's second claim
is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in
their attempt to fix feminism's subject matter, feminists
unwittingly defined the term 'woman' in a way that implies
there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5).
That the definition of the term 'woman' is fixed
supposedly "operates as a policing force which generates and
legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and
delegitimizes others" (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line
of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow's view of
gender suggests that 'real' women have feminine
personalities and that *these* are the women feminism should be
concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine
personality, the implication is that one is not 'really' a
member of women's category nor does one properly qualify for
feminist political representation.



Butler's second claim is based on their view
that"[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely
descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary"
(Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler
critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of
'woman'. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to
attempt to define the term 'woman' at all. Butler's
view is that 'woman' can never be defined in a way that
does not prescribe some "unspoken normative requirements"
(like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to
(Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like
'woman' that purport to pick out (what they call)
'identity categories'. They seem to assume that
'woman' can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi
1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not
satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this
comes from Butler's view that all processes of drawing
categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments;
these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions
of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).



In order to better understand Butler's critique, consider their
account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts
take gendered individuals to have some essential properties
*qua* gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which
one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men,
*qua* women and men, are bearers of various essential and
accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons'
persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this
view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii)
gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First,
feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in
that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24):
women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being
heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with
masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is
directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered
individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through
time *as* women and men. Individuals have "intelligible
genders" (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of
traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual
orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours
thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem
individuals who exhibit *in*coherent gender sequences (like
lesbians) to be doing their gender 'wrong' and they
actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via
name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what
was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like
that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class,
heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those
who do not fit this conception.



These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are
nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek
to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that
heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999,
42). Gender cores are constructed *as if* they somehow
naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism
or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine
female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order
by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is
natural to sexually desire the *opposite* sex or gender.



Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly
assumed to be expressions of one's gender as a woman. Butler
denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not
"a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts
follow; rather, gender is ... instituted ... through a
*stylized repetition of* [habitual] *acts*"
(Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing,
walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one's
hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is,
it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather
than a being. And repeatedly engaging in 'feminising' and
'masculinising' acts congeals gender thereby making people
falsely think of gender as something they naturally *are*.
Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female
who has sex with men does not *express* her gender as a woman.
This activity (amongst others) *makes* her gendered a
woman.



The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as
"compelling illusion[s]" (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered
classification scheme is a *strong pragmatic construction*:
social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme
fails to represent accurately any 'facts of the matter'
(Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real
genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender 'wrong'
are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to
the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278-9). It does
not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that
s/he is *really* a man who only *appears* to be a woman.
Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with
femininity "show that [as Butler suggests] 'being'
feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities" (Stone
2007, 64). As a result, the trans person's gender is just as
real or true as anyone else's who is a
'traditionally' feminine female or masculine male (Butler
1990,
 278).[5]
 Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain
gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately
the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these
gendering ways.



For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate
response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First,
feminists should understand 'woman' as open-ended and
"a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot
rightfully be said to originate or end ... it is open to
intervention and resignification" (Butler 1999, 43). That is,
feminists should not try to define 'woman' at all. Second,
the category of women "ought not to be the foundation of
feminist politics" (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should
focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our
understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also
within the feminist movement.


### 3.2 Is sex classification solely a matter of biology?



Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex
ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or
cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two
sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly
unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex
classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a
matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to
distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for
more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects
(e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas
(e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of
sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and
biological features commonly associated with males and females, are
affected by social practices. In some societies, females' lower
social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack
of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar
1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex
categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends
heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed
the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise,
it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling
1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like
osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations
about gender, women's diet and their exercise opportunities
(Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological
features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and
cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social
conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.



Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of
*sex* is said to be a product of social forces in the sense
that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly,
those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells,
female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of 'female'
hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small
body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with
XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia,
a relatively high proportion of 'male' hormones and other
secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts
of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The
prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late
18th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be
distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a 'one-sex
model' held that males and females were members of the same sex
category. Females' genitals were thought to be the same as
males' but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes
(for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term
referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context
(Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists
began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different
moving away from the 'one-sex model' of a single sex
spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) 'two-sex model' of
sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)



Fausto-Sterling has argued that this 'two-sex model'
isn't straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a
meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of
population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications
possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics
(Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that
intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes:
'herms' who possess one testis and one ovary;
'merms' who possess testes, some aspects of female
genitalia but no ovaries; and 'ferms' who have ovaries,
some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b,
21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put
forward tongue-in-cheek.) Recognition of intersex people
suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that
humans are either female or male.



To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case
of the athlete Maria Patino. Patino has female
genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was
considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY
chromosomes and was barred from competing in women's sports
(Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1-3). Patino's genitalia
were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to
determine her sex. Patino successfully fought to be recognised
as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not
sufficient to *not* make her female. Intersex people, like
Patino, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and
suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex
amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is
involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social
factors.



Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex,
feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and
rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More
specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated
with females and males need not always go together and that
individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to
Stone that *sex* is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to
satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in
order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy
*all* of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly
*necessary* sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44).
This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take
place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is
no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along
with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and
in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).



More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive
and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to
extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes),
other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily
boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as
sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other
anatomical features. In a different vein, Asta (2018) argues
that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general
conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties
that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that
consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on
individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is
as follows (Asta 2018, 8):



> 
> 
> **Conferred property:** what property is conferred.
> 
> 
> 
> **Who:** who the subjects are.
> 
> 
> 
> **What:** what attitude, state, or action of the subjects
> matter.
> 
> 
> 
> **When:** under what conditions the conferral takes
> place.
> 
> 
> 
> **Base property:** what the subjects are attempting to
> track (consciously or not), if anything.
> 
> 
> 



With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Asta
holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track
physical features. Hence sex is a social - or in fact, an
institutional - property rather than a natural one. The schema
for sex goes as follows (72):



> 
> 
> **Conferred property:** being female, male.
> 
> 
> 
> **Who:** legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion
> of doctors, other medical personnel.
> 
> 
> 
> **What:** "the recording of a sex in official
> documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex
> role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics
> present."
> 
> 
> 
> **When:** at birth or after surgery/ hormonal
> treatment.
> 
> 
> 
> **Base property:** "the aim is to track as many
> sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform
> surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical
> characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and
> female."
> 
> 
> 



This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may
appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is
better understood as a conferred legal status. Asta holds that
gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the
following section, she does not think that this collapses the
distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently
conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above.
Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and
gender is the idea of social construction as social significance:
sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant
context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex
onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and
enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and
idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different
general framework to analyse the matter at hand.


### 3.3 Are sex and gender distinct?



In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender
performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing *biological*
sex from *social* gender is unintelligible. For them, both are
socially constructed:



> 
> If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct
> called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender;
> indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence
> that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no
> distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10-11)
> 



(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable
distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and
sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik
1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that
sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their
view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a
social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed
bodies are also performative and, so, they have "no ontological
status apart from the various acts which constitute [their]
reality" (1999, 173). *Prima facie*, this implausibly
implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence
and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies.
This is not Butler's claim; rather, their position is that
bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is
constructed, are themselves constructed *as if* they provide
such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about
gender figure in "the very apparatus of production whereby sexes
themselves are established" (Butler 1999, 11).



For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how
we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed
bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex
categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of
the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves *discursively
constructed*: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial
extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are
classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex
assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993,
 1).[6]
 When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is
not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the
doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on
 Speech Acts).
 In effect, the doctor's utterance makes infants into girls or
boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes
naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective
feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain
constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this
is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist
outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially
constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist.
But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a
*product* of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the
existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively
constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a
helpful introduction to Butler's views, see Salih 2002.)



For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again,
this appears to be because of Butler's general suspicion of
classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but
always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those
who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or
examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and
male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993,
28-9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social
construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our
understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire
and which practices and illocutionary speech acts 'make'
our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how
sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such
construction.



However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we
should make of Butler's claim that sex "was always already
gender" (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex
*is* gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social
construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to
gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to
say that claims about sex *imply* gender norms. That is, many
claims about sex traits (like 'females are physically weaker
than males') actually carry implications about how women and men
are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain
facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much
heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So,
claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather,
they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).


### 3.4 Is the sex/gender distinction useful?



Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For
a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic
thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to
reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance)
mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to
justify women's oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999).
The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always
superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated
with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency
are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified
with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The
opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other
distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature,
rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued
(one's bodily features are usually valued less that one's
mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women
are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer
to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional
and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job
interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked
whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By
contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are
associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with
procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and
body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and
women.



Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender
distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender
maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing
this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan 'Gender is
between the ears, sex is between the legs': the implication is
that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have
control over - it is something we can alter and change through
individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely
associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side
of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral
persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that
"man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice,
freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman
equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction,
'natural' rhythms and the private realm" (Prokhovnik
1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction
inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for
emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women,
it "actually functions to reinforce their association with body,
sex, and involuntary 'natural' rhythms" (Prokhovnik
1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the
sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that
dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive
features.



Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless
given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say
that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender
distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent
biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction
does no useful work "when it comes to producing a good theory of
subjectivity" (1999, 6) and "a concrete, historical
understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given
society" (1999, 4-5). That is, the 1960s distinction
understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical
dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and
embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex
from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter.
Rather, embodiment must be included in one's theory that tries
to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).



Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies
views like Rubin's and MacKinnon's, has certain
unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the
distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is
socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a
mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women
and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or
conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However,
ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily)
sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is
a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with
women and men should be feminism's political goal. But this
harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary
social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So,
feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be
done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in
ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues
that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political
grounds.



Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against
the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist
philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction
exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction.
In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good
reasons to think that 'woman' does *not* simply
pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar
vein: the term 'woman' does not pick out a social kind as
feminist philosophers have "assumed". Instead,
"women are adult human females-nothing more, and nothing
less" (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground
this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.


1. It reproduces the dictionary definition of
'woman'.
2. One would expect English to have a word that picks out the
category adult human female, and 'woman' is the only
candidate.
3. AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman,
despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact
that she is an adult human female.
4. AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can
be supported independently.
5. AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role
reversal.
6. AHF is supported by the fact that 'woman' and
'female' are often appropriately used as stylistic
variants of each other, even in
 hyperintensional
 contexts.



Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various
problems with Byrne's argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes
from the start that gender terms like 'woman' have a
single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of
terms like 'woman' having multiple meanings -
something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from
various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes
without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman
- again, something that has been extensively discussed and
critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second,
Byrne's conception of *the* 'dominant'
meaning of *woman* is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a
wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law)
where 'woman' has a meaning other than *AHF*.
Third, Byrne's own distinction between biological and social
categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely,
that 'woman' picks out a biological rather than a social
kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne's case fails by its own
lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff's critique.



Others such as 'gender critical feminists' also hold views
about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and
Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent
sex/gender distinction, where 'female'/'male'
are used as sex terms and 'woman'/'man' as
gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be
sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer
to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical
feminists' discussion that philosophers have engaged in has
taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside
academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these
discussions.


## 4. Women as a group



The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into
question the viability of the category *women*. Feminism is the
movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should
the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above
arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp
distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at
least) not useful, and that various features associated with women
play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are
individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of
social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and
experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social
differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely
inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask
important ways in which women *qua* women differ. These
concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda
Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in
the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a
unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the
category *women* are successful, then what (if anything) binds
women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands
can feminists make on behalf of women?



Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic
for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992;
Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007;
Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For
instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman's reduce the
category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with
nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from
white women but members of both groups also differ from one another
with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and
economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from
working-class white women due to their economic and class positions.
These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some
working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided
along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman's position, we
risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them
together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression
of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in
some sense. Young writes that without doing so "it is not
possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured,
institutional process" (1997, 17). Some, then, take the
articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite
for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that
aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff
2006; Asta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000;
Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this
category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist
-- positions that deny there is something women *qua*
women share and that seek to unify women's social kind by
appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist
-- positions that take there to be something women *qua*
women share (although these realist positions differ significantly
from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some
influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before
doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that
attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or
that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being
resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely
on overcoming (what she calls) the 'gender controversy':
that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and
articulate a way to ground women's social kind membership. As
she sees it, disputes about 'what it is to be a woman'
have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has
generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead,
Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view
poses no serious political obstacles.



Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive
conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the
need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes
holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an
account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where
such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient
conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms'
extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of
gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers 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" (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to
one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application
conditions for natural language gender terms though.


### 4.1 Gender nominalism


#### 4.1.1 Gendered social series



Iris Young argues that unless there is "some sense in which
'woman' is the name of a social collective [that feminism
represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics"
(1997, 13). In order to make the category *women* intelligible,
she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social
collective "whose members are unified passively by the objects
their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of
the material effects of the actions of the other" (Young 1997,
23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of
groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects,
traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own
individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common.
Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or
experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes
Spelman's particularity argument to have established definitely
that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes
2000). Instead, women's category is unified by certain
practico-inert realities or the ways in which women's lives and
their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday
realities (Young 1997, 23-4). For example, bus commuters make up
a series unified through their individual actions being organised
around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of
public transport. Women make up a series unified through women's
lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert
objects and realities that position them *as women*.



Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and
realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical
facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies
(menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with
these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for
instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns,
verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts
and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women
make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around
female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound
together passively and the unity is "not one that arises from
the individuals called women" (Young 1997, 32).



Although Young's proposal purports to be a response to
Spelman's worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after
all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on
Young's view, something women as women share (their
practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).


#### 4.1.2 Resemblance nominalism



Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified,
feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282).
Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women *qua* women
do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for
resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of
resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for
more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39-58).
Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make
sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually
appealing to Wittgenstein's 'family resemblance'
relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000;
Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price's resemblance
nominalism whereby *x* is a member of some type *F* only
if *x* resembles some paradigm or exemplar of *F*
sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red
entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those
entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The
type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman
paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms
count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).



Semantic considerations about the concept *woman* suggest to
Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000,
28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of
some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast,
*woman* is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood
pick out "different arrangements of features in different
individuals" (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick
out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b)
Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience,
child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night
or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing,
being oppressed on the basis of one's sex or undertaking
care-work; (d) Gender attribution: "calling oneself a woman,
being called a woman" (Stoljar 1995, 283-4). For Stoljar,
attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and
experiences: those that feminists have historically termed
'gender traits' (like social, behavioural, psychological
traits) *and* those termed 'sex traits'.
Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept *woman* applies
to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being
female (Stoljar 1995, 282).



The cluster concept *woman* does not, however,
straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category
of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks
out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the
category of women. First, *any* individual who possesses a
feature from *at least* three of the four clusters mentioned
will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an
African-American with primary and secondary female sex
characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on
the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite
brought up 'as a girl', who engages in female roles and
has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex
characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995,
 284).[7]
 Second, any individual who resembles "any of the paradigms
sufficiently closely (on Price's account, as closely as [the
paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance
class 'woman'" (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what
delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles
sufficiently a woman paradigm.



### 4.2 Neo-gender realism


#### 4.2.1 Social subordination and gender



In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger
argues for a way to define the concept *woman* that is
politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against
sexism, and that shows *woman* to be a social (not a
biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is
a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social
position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary
analysis of the concept *woman* (2000b; 2003a; 2003b).
Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary
after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first.
Haslanger's analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to
elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their
legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists
*should* be using (Haslanger 2000b,
 33).[8]
 Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist
injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender
terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent *social*
inequalities between males and females. Haslanger's analysis of
gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in
two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in
general tend to "privilege individuals with male bodies"
(Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently
occupy are better than the social positions of those with female
bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in
mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:



> 
> *S* *is a woman* iff [by definition] *S* is
> systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political,
> legal, social, etc.), and *S* is 'marked' as a
> target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features
> presumed to be evidence of a female's biological role in
> reproduction.
> 



> 
> *S* *is a man* iff [by definition] *S* is
> systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political,
> legal, social, etc.), and *S* is 'marked' as a
> target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features
> presumed to be evidence of a male's biological role in
> reproduction. (2003a, 6-7)
> 



These are *constitutive* *of* being a woman and a man:
what makes calling *S* a woman apt, is that *S* is
oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling *S* a man
apt, is that *S* is privileged on sex-marked grounds.



Haslanger's ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that
females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women.
At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked
grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger's
definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not
count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger's analysis
should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users
have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues
that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes
to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender
terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary
analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger's, are both
politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.



Note also that Haslanger's proposal is eliminativist: gender
justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist
social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege.
If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer
exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all
feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that
Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is
to be a woman: since Haslanger defines *woman* in terms of
subordination,



> 
> any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be
> challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to
> ... positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid
> of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)
> 



But according to Stone this is not only undesirable - one should
be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge
one's status as a woman. It is also false: "because norms
of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be
women without thereby being subordinate" (Stone 2007, 162;
Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger's eliminativism is
troublesome).



Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger's eliminativism is
undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger's position
faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following
worries (among others):



> 
> 
> *Representation problem*: "if there is no real group of
> 'women', then it is incoherent to make moral claims and
> advance political policies on behalf of women" (Bach 2012,
> 234).
> 
> 
> 
> *Commonality problems*: (1) There is no feature that all women
> cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting
> women's social kind with the help of some essential property
> privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not
> (Bach 2012, 235).
> 
> 
> 



According to Bach, Haslanger's strategy to resolve these
problems appeals to 'social objectivism'. First, we define
women "according to a suitably abstract relational
property" (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality
problems. Second, Haslanger employs "an ontologically thin
notion of 'objectivity'" (Bach 2012, 236) that
answers the representation problem. Haslanger's solution (Bach
holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type
because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply
classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach
claims though that Haslanger's account is not objective enough,
and we *should* on political grounds "provide a stronger
ontological characterization of the genders *men* and
*women* according to which they are natural kinds with
explanatory essences" (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that
women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:



> 
> The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a
> member of the kind 'women,' is participation in a lineage
> of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an
> individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case
> she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a
> historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)
> 



In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with
other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather,
one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone
the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking
about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity
than Haslanger's that simply appeals to shared surface
properties.



Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach's
metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and
that Bach's metaphysics does not provide good responses to the
commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist
view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have
not undergone female gender socialization won't count as women
on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in
more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary
to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016)
consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues
that there is more than one 'correct' way to understand
womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the
resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of
Bach's tend to erase trans people's experiences and to
marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans
women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims
should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher
holds, "in analyzing the meaning of terms such as
'woman,' it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways
in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such
usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the
analysis" (2013, 235).



Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins
(2016) discusses how Haslanger's revisionary approach unduly
excludes some trans women from women's social kind. On
Jenkins's view, Haslanger's ameliorative methodology in
fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that
"corresponds to Haslanger's proposed concept and captures
the sense of gender as an imposed social class"; another that
"captures the sense of gender as a lived identity"
(Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans
women into women's social kind, who on Haslanger's social
class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded.
(See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins's purportedly
inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins
2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender
identity still further.)



In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that
her ameliorative analysis of *woman* may not be as revisionary
as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference
fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they
are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive
ideologies that can "mislead us about the content of our own
thoughts" (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology
is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies
mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender
terminology might mean something utterly different from what we
*think* it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this.
Perhaps Haslanger's analysis, then, has captured our everyday
gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ:
we may be applying 'woman' in our everyday language on the
basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be
doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger's gender terminology
is not radically revisionist.



Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly
apply 'woman' on the basis of social subordination, it is
extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require
showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ *is*
Haslanger's proposed gender terminology. But discovering the
grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult
precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways
(Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show
that her analysis is non-revisionary.


#### 4.2.2 Gender uniessentialism



Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender
essentialism, which Witt terms 'uniessentialism'. Her
motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social
agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would
be a different person were they of a different sex/gender.
Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However,
Witt's work departs in important respects from the earlier
(so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in
Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of
the kind discussed above, which failed to take women's
differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs
significantly from those position developed in response to the problem
of how we should conceive of women's social kind. It is not
about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and
gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property
that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for
feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make
good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we
 are.[9]



Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally
philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms:
the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do
all members of some kind have in common *qua* members of that
kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual *the*
individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual
essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian
uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual
*that* individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly
different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What
explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total
of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender
nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind
essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt's
uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.)
From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian
one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role:
these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts
constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a
collection of particles. Witt's example is of a house: the
essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its
purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that
there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting
particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a
similar fashion and provides "the principle of normative
unity" that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of
social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a
uniessential property of social individuals.



It is important to clarify the notions of *gender* and
*social individuality* that Witt employs. First, gender is a
social position that "cluster[s] around the engendering function
... women conceive and bear ... men beget" (Witt
2011a, 40). These are women and men's socially mediated
reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the
biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex
on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: "to be a
woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in
engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different
function in engendering" (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes
*persons* (those who possess self-consciousness), *human
beings* (those who are biologically human) and *social
individuals* (those who occupy social positions synchronically and
diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in
that they possess different persistence and identity conditions.
Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by
biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects:
first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas
biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social
normativity requires "the recognition by others that an agent is
both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm" (Witt
2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being
a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms
of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and
self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms
of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends
for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent:
personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist
without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially
about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social
world.



Witt's gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to
*social individuals*, not to persons or human beings: saying
that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake.
But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social
individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further,
"social positions have norms or social roles associated with
them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social
position is responsive to and evaluable under" (Witt 2011a, 59).
However, *qua* social individuals, we occupy multiple social
positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants,
sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches
synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what
unifies these positions so that a social *individual* is
constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does
not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like
*being white*, *cube-shaped* and *sweet* do not
make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by
gender (being a woman or a man): it is



> 
> a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and
> determines all other social positions both synchronically and
> diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a
> principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19-20)
> 



By 'normative unity', Witt means the following: given our
social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to
various sets of social norms. These norms are "complex patterns
of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a
situation given one's social position(s) and one's social
context" (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the
norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an
academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist,
the norms must be binding on a *single* social individual.
Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social
individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is
gender.



Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt
takes it to be *the* social role -- as she puts it, it is
*the mega social role* that unifies social agents. First,
gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt
claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic
and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and
defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the
first in usually being a life-long social position: a social
individual persists just as long as their gendered social position
persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not
counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old
social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into
being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and
undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender
satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles,
like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to
these social roles differ depending on the agent's gender, since
gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the
further social roles. Now, gender -- as opposed to some other
social category, like race -- is not just a mega social role; it
is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical
considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a
social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation
varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not
a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim
to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals.
This account of gender essentialism not only explains social
agents' connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a
helpful way to conceive of women's agency -- something that
is central to feminist politics.


#### 4.2.3 Gender as positionality



Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the
category of women is feminism's starting point, but various
critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not
clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006,
chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as
*positionality* whereby "gender is, among other things, a
position one occupies and from which one can act politically"
(2006, 148). In particular, she takes one's social position to
foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or
self-conceptions): "The very subjectivity (or subjective
experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are
constituted by women's position" (Alcoff 2006, 148).
Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing
individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive
roles:



> 
> *Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different
> relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with
> biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and
> breast-feeding, involving one's body*. (Alcoff 2006, 172,
> italics in original)
> 



The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically
female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will
encounter "a different set of practices, expectations, and
feelings in regard to reproduction" than those standardly
classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential
relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for
many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can
be



> 
> the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the
> development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout
> life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from
> pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having
> successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)
> 



Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing
individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions
women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has,
one's lived experience will differ. And this fosters the
construction of gendered social identities: one's role in
reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this
conditions the development of specifically gendered social
identities.



Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts,
"there is no gender essence all women share" (Alcoff 2006,
147-8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is
akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex
difference (understood in terms of the objective division of
reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural
arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But,
with the benefit of hindsight



> 
> we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective
> category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent
> practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the
> old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006,
> 175)
> 



That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively
to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on
the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the
sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social
segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance,
technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating
that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women's specifically
gendered social identities that are constituted by their context
dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist
politics.


## 5. Beyond the Binary



Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical
accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This
generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like
the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing
those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either
men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as
explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes
beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender
identities contributes to a form of
 epistemic injustice
 called 'hermeneutical injustice': it feeds into a
collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices
that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on
one's ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these
problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call
'critical gender kind':



> 
> a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of
> dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a
> category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or
> the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and
> exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)
> 



Note that Dembroff's position is not to be confused with
'gender critical feminist' positions like those noted
above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender,
as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender
kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of
gender.



Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary:
principled and existential. Principled destabilising "stems from
or otherwise expresses individuals' social or political
commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures",
while existential destabilising "stems from or otherwise
expresses individuals' felt or desired gender roles, embodiment,
and/or categorization" (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually
exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between
allies and members of genderqueer kinds: "While both resist
dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at
least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that
deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions"
(2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate
an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary
understandings of women and men's kinds exemplify. Dembroff
defines these kinds as follows:



> 
> For a given kind *X*, *X* is a *non-critical gender
> kind* relative to a given society iff *X*'s members
> collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender
> ideology in that society. (2020, 14)
> 



Dembroff's understanding of critical and non-critical gender
kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and
other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively
destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and
ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states -
resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In
so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to
two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer
McKitrick's (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a
context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be
taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a
woman's gender identity. Second, to Jenkin's (2016, 2018)
position that takes an individual's gender identity to be
dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as
being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person
experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person
in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these
positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which
motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender
kinds.



As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary
gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to
note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender
metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.


## 6. Conclusion



This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological
determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next,
it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender
and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns,
the entry looked at how a unified women's category could be
articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that
gender metaphysics -- or *what it is to be* a woman or a
man or a genderqueer person -- is still very much a live issue.
And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have
questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s
sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is
about *social* factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct
from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most
useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.