-- Conference Postponed --

Sara Bernstein, "What Is Misgendering?"

Typical instances of misgendering are easy to identify, and come with moral harms. But what counts more broadly as correctly gendering a person, or misgendering a person, is unclear apart from the canonical sorts of cases. Consider the following example:

Deviant Gendering. Harden believes that gender pronouns are grounded only in biological sex, and that people should not be allowed to pick their own pronouns. He also believes that “he/ him” applies to anyone wearing a trucker hat. Harden uses “he/ him” for Joey, a trans man wearing a trucker hat who Harden sees from a distance.

Something doesn't sit quite right about calling this a straightforward case of correct gendering: it makes us uneasy somehow, even though Joey's pronoun is correct in an important sense. What explains the uneasiness, I suggest, is that Harden has correctly gendered Joey but for the wrong reason. I use this case and other puzzling cases to show that the concepts of gendering and misgendering are underspecified. In order to fully specify them, we must appeal to the reasons involved in the gendering and misgendering. I argue that when someone uses a gendered pronoun to refer to an individual, they are in part taking on a commitment about the reasons they have for using that pronoun for that individual. These reasons are often rooted in both descriptive content (for example, how a person “presents”) and normative content (for example, the fact that a person has self-declared gender pronouns, and the fact that there are good moral reasons to respect a person’s self-declared gender pronouns). A fully fleshed out account of correct gendering and misgendering must include an account of what counts as "the right sort of reason." It should also include an account of which reasons are overriding in cases where reasons compete or conflict. Reasons, together with multiple standards of correctness, provide a fuller understanding of gendering and misgendering.

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Rowan Bell, "The (Dis)Functions of Gender Identity"

Gender identity is nearly ubiquitous in public discourse when it comes to explaining trans people and our genders. But what does this concept do for us? Is it the best concept for that job? In this talk, I'll investigate some contemporary functions of gender identity, and their metaphysical upshots. The concept certainly has its uses, such as in anti-discrimination policy. It can be a helpful shorthand in situations where a more nuanced explanation is not possible, or unlikely to be well received. Beyond this, however, I'll argue that the concept's uses are, or ought to be, limited. Gender identity is both historically and metaphysically problematic: historically, because it is grounded in trans-antagonistic sexology; metaphysically, because it assumes an individualism about trans existence that is in contrast with the social nature of gender. I argue that these flaws make gender identity a prime target for anti-trans rhetoric and activism. Thus, it is insufficient to do the work we ask it to do. Fortunately, however, it is also not necessary. Trans people's genders exist because of the social meanings we make together. I argue that focusing on this is a better strategy than leaning on individualistic conceptions. In place of gender identity, I defend a metaphysics and politics focused on trans community; what we build together, how trans-antagonistic forces try to tear it down, and how we can stop them.
 

Matthew Cull, "Feminist Deflationism: Metametaphysics, Subject Matter, and Method"

Recent work in first-order feminist metaphysics, especially in the metaphysics of gender, has appealed to deflationist metametaphysical underpinnings. Esa Díaz-León’s (forthcoming) recent work has explicitly developed Amie Thomasson’s ‘easy ontology’ in theorising gender, whilst Matthew J Cull’s work (Cull 2024) has drawn on a Carnapian approach to metametaphysical issues. Both theorists aim to produce inclusive, feminist approaches to the metaphysics of gender, that are useful in liberatory praxis. However, it is unclear whether these philosophers can appeal to deflationist metametaphysics in doing their respective projects in feminist metaphysics, given the sorts of critiques of metametaphysics that have been offered by other feminists, especially Elizabeth Barnes and Mari Mikkola. This paper extends the Barnes-Mikkola challenge to deflationists, but argues that whilst the feminist deflationist should take such a challenge seriously, both Thomassonian and Carnapian deflationist positions can be defended against it.

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Talia Mae Bettcher, "Metaphysics on the Fly: Trans Philosophy and Ontological Pluralism"

By “the ontological pluralist thesis” I mean the position that I have advanced over many years and in several papers – namely, that in dominant worlds of sense, trans people are largely not the gender we say we are, while in resistant worlds of sense – trans worlds of sense – we are.  In this talk, I elaborate what I mean by this, why I affirm it, and what I take its import to be. A significant portion of what I have to say will be devoted to explaining why my account ought not be confused with two other positions that I reject – namely, semantic contextualism and ameliorationism. My expectation is that this discussion will shed broader light on what it is to do social ontology – and in particular, what it is to answer questions of the form “What is a so-and-so?” (w-questions)

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Sahar Heydari Fard, "Toward a Dynamic Ontology of Gender: Stability, Fluidity, and Social Change"

The study of gender in social ontology faces a pressing question: how can we conceptualize gender categories as both stable enough to organize social life and fluid enough to reflect their ever-changing nature?  This paper argues that gender categories are best understood as complex, self-organizing systems that emerge and evolve through ongoing social interactions. Drawing on computational simulations and insights from complexity theory, the paper shows how gender categories can maintain stable patterns of social coordination while remaining open to transformation. This dynamic framework resolves longstanding tensions in the metaphysics of gender and offers a robust tool for analyzing the interplay between gender categories and social practices. By incorporating computational methods into the study of social ontology, this work underscores the importance of modeling gender as a dynamic phenomenon and lays the groundwork for interdisciplinary research on the ontology of social categories.

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Dana Goswick, "Protecting Our Daughters: Harvey Weinstein, Stanley Milgram, and the Cult of Compliance"

The 2022 film She Said includes a 2-minute wire tape recording in which you hear the actual voices of Harvey Weinstein and Ambra Gutierrez.  Weinstein is trying to persuade Gutierrez to come up to his room; she is resisting.  When I heard this wire tap, I immediately thought of three things: (1) Look how similar the language Weinstein uses to persuade/force Guiteirrez to his bed is to the language Stanley Milgram used sixty years ago in his obedience to authority experiments to persuade/force men to electrically shock other men.  (2) Look how similar the language Weinstein uses is to the language I use to persuade/force my daughter to get her immunization shots.  (3) Is the way we raise our daughters -- particularly e.g., when we force them to do things with their bodies they don’t want to do (such as getting shots, taking baths, combing their hair) inadvertently making them more vulnerable to predators like Weinstein by teaching them resistance is futile?  In this talk I examine (i) the ways in which we persuade others to do things that, reflectively, they don’t really want to do, (ii) why people generally comply so readily, (iii) the after-effects of complying, and (iv) how we -- as individuals and as a society -- can inure ourselves from complying with commands we don’t really want to obey.

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Lily Hu, "Sex Discrimination, Normativity, and Begging the Causal Question"

Recent years have seen growing philosophical and legal interest in theorizing discrimination as a causal notion: roughly, an action discriminates on the basis of X (e.g., race, sex) if X causes (in the right way) the adverse outcome. This article explores the prospects for this causal account, which lurks behind several leading philosophical theories of discrimination. Focusing my attention on the case of sex discrimination, I argue that the dialectic that emerges out of struggles to settle the causal question regresses to question-begging. This argument calls into question not just whether the causal account can handle sophisticated cases, which have recently been conceived of (by some) as discriminatory but even classic cases of sex discrimination. This negative argument in turn brings to light an alternative positive view: a normative-causal account of discrimination, which I sketch and suggest is promising indeed.

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Dee Payton, "Normative Social Ontology"

The Direction of Explanation Objection has presented a challenge for metaphysical deflationists working in social ontology. In this talk, I offer a reply to that objection. Then I reconsider the problem: is this a challenge which exclusively affects deflationists in this literature? I argue no, on at least two counts. First, I argue that a version of the Direction of Explanation Objection faces realist projects in social ontology as well. Then, I argue that this objection turns out to be a specific version of a more general problem facing deflationists and realists alike across all of metaphysics—this problem is intractable for everyone, but it has an especially sharp edge for metaphysical projects which involve some form of ideology critique.

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