Philosophy of Gender

What it asks

The standard starting point is a distinction: sex as biological, gender as social. It was made to argue that facts about bodies do not settle what roles people should occupy, and it did that work well.

Almost everything since has complicated it. If gender is social, what kind of social thing - a role, a class position, a set of norms one is held to, something a person does rather than has? And the biological side turned out to be less binary than the original distinction assumed, which raised the question of whether sex is itself partly a classification rather than a simple reading of nature.

These questions are genuinely disputed, in philosophy and in public argument, and the disputes are not merely verbal. What follows describes the main positions and the reasons offered for them; it is not the Atlas taking one.

The recurring problems

The common feature problem. Any definition of a gender category has to cover people whose situations differ enormously across cultures, classes and periods. Definitions general enough to include everyone tend to say very little, and definitions with content tend to exclude someone.

Whether gender is done or had. Performative accounts hold that gender is constituted by repeated acts and norms rather than expressing something prior. Critics argue this makes it harder to explain the felt depth and stability of gender identity.

What the category is for. Ameliorative approaches ask not what gender IS but what a definition should do - if the point of the concept is to identify and end injustice, that shapes how it should be drawn. Critics object that this settles by stipulation what should be settled by enquiry.

Sex as well. Whether biological sex is itself a classification with conventional elements, or a natural division the social account is layered on, is disputed by both philosophers and biologists.

How it developed

Beauvoir's claim in 1949 that one becomes a woman is the field's origin, though the sex-gender terminology came later, from mid-century psychology and medicine and then into feminist theory in the 1970s.

Second-wave theory used the distinction to argue that women's social position was not determined by biology. That was its purpose and it is still the reason the distinction is defended.

Butler's Gender Trouble in 1990 argued that gender is performative - constituted by repeated acts within a regulatory framework rather than expressing an inner essence - and that the sex-gender distinction itself presupposes a stable natural sex that is also produced. It is among the most cited and most contested works in the field.

Haslanger's ameliorative approach from around 2000 took a different route, defining gender categories in terms of social position and subordination, on the grounds that this is what the concept is needed FOR.

Since the 2010s the field has been substantially occupied with questions about trans identity, and the disagreements are sharp, are conducted publicly, and involve people with a great deal at stake in the answers.

The positions within it

Gender realism in various forms; performativity accounts; ameliorative and social position accounts; gender eliminativism; gender-critical positions, which hold that sex is the socially and politically salient category; trans-inclusive accounts that ground membership in identification. All are covered in the Schools section, where the arguments for each are set out.

The Atlas records these positions and the reasoning behind them. It does not rank them.

Where it stands now

This is the most publicly contested area in current philosophy, and the philosophical literature is more careful and more varied than the public argument suggests.

Substantial work continues on the metaphysics of social kinds, on what grounds category membership generally, and on how much of the dispute is about the concept and how much about what should follow from it - which are separable questions that are almost never separated in practice.