Doctoral Thesis
Resisting Unreality: An Account of Gender Identity as an Ameliorative Analysis of Gender for Transfeminist Political Goals

Abstract
In this dissertation I develop an account of gender identity as the basis for a transfeminist analysis of gender. This account extends contemporary ontologies of gender, which focus on gender classes and social-material causes.

My account of gender identity focuses on the reasons that confer first-person intelligibility onto people’s actions. These are the reasons that make our lives meaningful and significant to us, and that make our choices make sense in terms of how they contribute to the worthwhile projects of our lives. This includes the choices we make about our genders, and understanding how people (trans and cis) navigate and respond to the gender norms they are subjected to, on their own terms and as they are meaningful in their individual lives, is vital to transfeminism’s political project.

I develop a phenomenological account of intelligibility-conferring reasons that captures how a person’s gender identity is the product of activities of self-interpretation. Our identities are vulnerable to outside influence, as the interpretive and other resources we use to interpret ourselves are not our own, and have been exogenously shaped by other powers and interests. Moreover transphobic gender oppression specifically targets trans people’s self-interpretations. Thus trans people are especially at risk of having our activities of self-interpretation disrupted by transphobic and prejudicial depictions of transness. My account explicates how trans people overcome these disruptions and realize and maintain their gender identities in the face of them; simultaneously, my account explicates this threat to trans people’s gender identities as one of the primary harms of transphobic oppression.

This account of gender identity is amelioratively justified as an analysis of gender, and is especially needed given the dominant view of gender in contemporary feminist theory. Current feminism’s class-based analysis centres an ontology of historical and material structural causes, and analyzes gender in terms of the effects and operations of those causes. This analysis has been invaluable for feminism’s political project, enabling feminists to debunk the biological and essentialized views of men and women, and identify social interventions that will lead to more equitable and just outcomes. However the analysis is unable to provide a basis for transfeminism’s political project. A class-based view of gender fails to reveal transphobic gender oppression, as it fails to show how treating trans women as men is a way of oppressing them not privileging them, and it is unable to account for trans women’s identities as women. While this is a problem it is not a fatal flaw; it simply shows that the class-based ontology of gender is incomplete.

My account of gender identity completes the critical ontology of gender. Crucially my account demonstrates that self-identity can be a site of resistance to oppressive structural effects. This is significant. Class-based views of gender have historically de-emphasized the significance of self-identity because of two assumptions, a) that self-identity is predominantly shaped by structural effects, and b) individual self-identity has no power to resist structural effects. Although (a) is true my work addresses the fact that structural influence is not totalizing, and that in the space of an individual’s endogenous interpretation of their identity there is the power to make (b) false. By showing how gender identity is a possible site of social resistance my work motivates a shift in our framing of the ontology of social reality, and opens up new questions about the dynamics of its constitutive power relations.

Chapter 1.
I describe the class-based analysis of gender and show how it fails to explicate the transfeminist political project. The feminist understanding of gender as a hierarchical system where men and privileged and women subordinated cannot capture transphobic gender oppression. This analysis is shaped by feminism’s political goals, and it has been exceedingly helpful in executing those goals. However the account is unable to explain why e.g. forcing a trans woman to live as a man is a form of gender oppression, nor is it able to explain why her claim that she is a woman is true. Moreover I argue that no class-based account of gender can fulfill this second goal, because such accounts define gender in terms of an external feature that transphobia frequently prevents trans people from exemplifying. This problem highlights the need for an additional analysis of gender shaped by transfeminist political goals.

Chapter 2.
I state the goals of transfeminism’s political project and introduce the concept of an identity-based analysis of gender. I argue against Katharine Jenkins’s prominent account of gender identity on the grounds that it has the wrong target concept, which makes it unable to accomplish transfeminism’s political goals. I argue that Jenkins’s account of gender identity is ultimately unable to distinguish between trans and cis people, and often e.g. shows no differences between a trans woman and a cis man. This is because Jenkins accounts for gender identity in terms of people’s experiences of some gender norms being relevant to them. I show that what’s needed in accounting for trans identities is an explanation of why some gender norms are taken seriously and not others, and that can explain e.g. why a cis man does not reject his gender class whereas a trans woman does.

Chapter 3.
I locate a target concept for an account of gender identity that can ground a transfeminist analysis of gender. Building on Talia Bettcher’s work showcasing the significance of trans people’s avowals of their genders, I argue that the reasons that confer intelligibility onto trans people’s acts of avowal are the target for analysis. For instance while a cis man and a closeted trans woman might engage in the same acts of gender expression, their actions are intelligible to each of them in radically different ways. This means that the relevant notion of identity in gender identity is the notion Marya Schechtman discusses under the label of “the characterization question”, and is the notion of identity that’s at stake when we talk about ‘identity crises.’ It is a notion of identity that obtains at an existential level, determined by the person’s values, goals, projects, concerns, aesthetics, etc., rather than a straightforward description of their features. This notion of identity fills a gap in the class-based view of gender. While gender classes provide an explication of how a person’s action contributes to the system (e.g. whether it was privileging or subordinating), gender identity provides an explication of how the person’s action contributed to their individual life project.

Chapter 4.
I develop a phenomenological account of the intelligibility-conferring reasons that constitute a person’s gender identity by drawing on Gaye Salomon’s use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the body image and body schema. A phenomenological account is preferable to an overly cognitive account of gender identity based in any kind of propositional awareness, as it is able to show how people with severe cognitive disabilities still have gender identities. The account can also explain how a person could experience themselves as gender X without ever having been socially classed as X, and so can also include closeted trans people too. Moreover a phenomenological account accords with the idea of gender as a social construct, as the analysis can show how a person’s phenomenological reality emerges as a relationship with the external and social environment, but one that is substantially determined by ‘intrinsic’ and especially affective features of the person themselves. However while Salomon focuses only on the concept of body image (and at times conflates it with the body schema) I show that both concepts are needed to capture the reasons constitutive of gender identity. I then draw on Sara Ahmed’s work and use the concepts of body schema and body image to describe gender identity as a kind of sense-making orientation to oneself and one’s world.

Chapter 5.
While data shows that a person’s gender identity settles by age 5, gender identity is not an experiential given. While many trans people ‘figure it out’ early in life, many others do not and don’t realize they are trans until much later in life. One’s gender identity requires interpretation, and I argue that interpreting one’s gender identity is not just an epistemic act but a metaphysical act that at least partly determines one’s gender identity as the gender identity it is. I make use of Jason Orne’s and Christine Overall’s work to develop an account of metaphysically determinative self-interpretation. A key point is that one’s gender identity is not a singular cognitive datum but a complex, composite, and unfolding embodied reality. However the way our embodied identities unfold is open to and indeed requires both exogenous and endogenous influence. Hence why self-interpretation is vulnerable to prejudice, and trans people face a particular challenge in interpreting themselves. Transphobia directly targets their identities to inflict persist epistemic injustices onto this process, and trans people must continually overcome the prejudicial depictions of them to realize and maintain their gender identities. This demonstrates that the very activity of identifying as trans is a politically resistant activity.

Chapter 6.
I develop some political implications for my view. Along with legitimizing trans identities and explaining their delegitimization as transphobic gender oppression, my account of gender identity substantiates real differences in the way trans and cis people stand in relation to social-structural power relations. This is particularly evident in the case of closeted trans people. For instance a closeted trans woman who is perceived as a man and a cis man appear to be in the same gender class and so the same position in the power structure. However the trans woman is resisting and overcoming transphobic invalidation, and so she is subject to and is being resistant to political domination in a way that the cis man simply is not. My view also has broader metaphysical and methodological implications. As we saw in chapter 1 feminists have generally assumed that self-identity and gender-identity cannot be a site of resistance. By showing this assumption to be false and showing a way in which self-identity can be politically resistant my analysis opens up new questions about the dynamics of social power and the role of self-identity therein.