My research addresses the role of self-identity in ontological accounts of gender, and in particular explores how people’s identities can be sites of resistance to the oppressive effects of gender.
My work fills a gap in the class-based view of gender, a central component of feminist theory and politics, which focuses on an ontology of material and social or “structural” causes that people are subjected to on the basis of their (real or assumed) sex, and analyzes gender in terms of the oppressive effects of these causes.

This tradition has largely ignored self-identity, and when it has been discussed it has been as a site of sexist oppression. The binary categories of man and woman provide a limited range of options with which people can identify themselves, and when people identify themselves as men and women they act in ways that conform with the norms associated with those categories, and consequently reproduce their oppressive effects.
This analysis has proved invaluable for feminism’s political project and has assisted in feminist organizing and has enabled feminists to challenge sexist gender oppression from a number of angles, to debunk the dominant biological and essentialist view of gender, and to identify where in society changes must be made if sexism is to be overcome.
However trans people and transfeminist have shown that the class-based view of gender also works to obscure, obfuscate, and erase other important questions. In particular transfeminists have argued that the class-analysis’s treatment of identity leaves it unequipped to address questions like “why are trans identities legitimate and worthy of respect?” and “why is the delegitimization of trans identities a form of gender oppression?”, as well as more specific questions like “are trans people just reproducing harmful stereotypes?” and “do trans women have male privilege?”

My work picks up from this critique. I contend that in addition to a class-based analysis of gender feminists and transfeminists need an identity-based analysis of gender that accounts for how gender norms are lived and experienced in individual people’s lives, and my research develops this analysis and situates it in connection with the class-based view.
In my doctoral thesis I develop a view of gender identity that shows how identifying as a gender can be a site of resistance to oppression, and can make a substantial difference to a person’s relationship to the structural causes they are subjected to and the powers they exert (see details).
With this account of gender identity as ‘more than a feeling’ and as a substantial factor in the power dynamics of social systems my work now turns to addressing the questions class-based views fail to adequately tackle, and to further developing the resistant possibilities of identity.

My work is informed by an explicit concern in issues of equity, diversity, and inclusivity in philosophy and beyond and hopes to contribute to addressing (some of) them, both by addressing the dynamics that give rise to them, and by including perspectives that are excluded by them.