Verbal disputes, social totality, and trans politics

Abstract

A puzzling feature about the dispute over whether transwomen are women is its apparent verbality: gender-critical theorists assert a biological fact about transwomen, and trans-inclusionary theorists respond byasserting a social/psychological fact about trans women.But plausibly, both theorists’ assertions are compatible,and so there is no real disagreement. In this paper, Iargue that the two theorists are not talking past eachother. But I also argue that extant accounts of the dis-pute fail to adequately explain why the dispute is notmerely verbal. Indeed, clarifying the dispute requires usto ask what it is for something to be a gender concept,as opposed to a merely biological or social/psychologicalconcept. After developing a questions-based account ofconcepts and conceptual roles, I suggest that a neces-sary feature of gender concepts is that we use them toconstruct unified and portable narratives about how wewill stand in relation to one another as social individu-als, regardless of the particular social context we are in.This allows us to understand the trans woman disputeas a dispute about whether we should prioritize biolog-ical or social/psychological facts when interpreting ourrelations to one another.