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In a recent influential paper, Katherine Jenkins argues for a pluralism about gender. Jenkins holds that gender concepts such as ‘Woman’ have no single meaning. Rather, they track different features in different contexts, according to our different goals and projects. Thus there is no question of a unified definition of ‘Woman’ (or other gender terms) that covers all cases. Jenkins thus deflates the so-called ‘inclusion problem’ of finding definitions for gender terms that correctly categorise everybody, by showing that the question of a unified definition for gender concepts is misconceived.Against this, I argue that gender pluralism is unstable and undesirable. It is unstable because there is no clear unifying glue binding together all the ways we use gender terms - that is, there is no reason all of these things should be taken to refer to the same phenomenon, gender. It is undesirable because it creates an ambiguity for gender terms that directly and indirectly causes harms to trans people, who “fall through the cracks”, e.g.: when procuring and producing identity documents, and when being provided with routine medical care. Rather than describing a stable, pluralistic conception of gender, I argue that gender pluralism represents an unstable ‘open-texture’ conception of gender that stands in need of being refined. I demonstrate a way of refining gender concepts to track gender identity, combining Jenkins’ other work with the work of Rach Cosker-Rowland, and with my own.
Ed Willems (she/her)
I am a philosophy researcher currently working in the metaphysics of gender. I did my PhD at the University of York, where I also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre. My research at that time focused on deflationary approaches to semantics and metaphysics, which I then began to apply to questions regarding gender concepts. In December last year I published a paper titled ‘Solving the inclusion problem: Gender without representationalism’ in the journal Synthese. I am currently teaching at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of York.
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