Toward an Account of Gender Identity

Abstract

Although the concept of gender identity plays a prominent role in campaigns for trans rights, it is not well understood, and common definitions suffer from a problematic circularity. This paper undertakes an ameliorative inquiry into the concept of gender identity, taking as a starting point the ways in which trans rights movements seek to use the concept. First, I set out six desiderata that a target concept of gender identity should meet. I then consider three analytic accounts of gender identity: the dispositional account, the self-identification account, and the norm-relevancy account. I argue that only the norm-relevancy account can meet all six desiderata. Finally, I defend the norm-relevancy account from three objections: that it is cisnormative, that it has problematic implications regarding trans women, and that it entails that some people do not have the gender identity they take themselves to have.

1. Introduction: The Folk Concept of Gender Identity

The concept of gender identity has entered into increasing circulation in recent years, principally due to increasing awareness of gender diversity and to the greater prominence of campaigns for trans rights. The concept plays an important role in these campaigns in two main ways. Firstly, it plays a crucial definitional role: being trans is typically defined as ‘having a gender identity that is different from the gender one was assigned at birth’. Correspondingly, being cis is typically defined as ‘having a gender identity that is the same as the gender one was assigned at birth’. Thus, the concept of gender identity is used to define both trans identity and, by extension, trans rights. Secondly, campaigns for trans rights paradigmatically call for gender identity to be used as the basis for people’s access to, and treatment within, gendered social spaces—for example, for trans people to be able to use the bathroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity, and to be addressed in ways that reflect their gender identity. Although it is important to recognise that campaigns for trans rights are by no means homogenous, the use of the concept of gender identity in these two ways is very widely shared.[1]

The most widely accepted definition of gender identity characterises it as ‘a sense of oneself as a man, woman, or some other gender’.[2] It will be immediately apparent to the reader that this ‘folk’ definition is not complete until some account is offered of what it is to have a sense of oneself as ‘a man, woman, or some other gender’. This is where the folk definition begins to run into difficulties: no such account is usually offered as part of the definition, and there is no consensus on what kind of account might be appropriate. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that many people who use the language of gender identity hold an understanding of what it is to be a ‘man, woman, or some other gender’ that is highly unsuited to supplementing the folk definition of gender identity. This is the view that gender terms such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ought to be understood in terms of gender identity: to be a man is to identify as a man (or, to have a male gender identity);[3] to be a woman is to identify as a woman (or, to have a female gender identity); to be a non-binary person is to identify as non-binary (or, to have a non-binary gender identity), and so on. The combination of this view with the folk definition of gender identity gives rise to a circularity: someone who asks what it means to say that a certain person ‘has a female gender identity’ will be told that it means that that person has a sense of herself ‘as a woman’—but if the questioner then asks what a ‘woman’ is, they will be told that a woman is ‘a person with a female gender identity’. Thus, the questioner is none the wiser as to what it means to have a female gender identity.

I do not intend here to take a stance on whether or not gender terms should be used, in general, primarily to refer to gender identity.[4] The point I wish to make is that even someone who thinks that gender terms should in general refer to gender identity must, on pain of circularity, allow that in the context of the definition of gender identity, the idea of having a sense of oneself ‘as a man, woman or some other gender’ must be explained without reference to gender identity. The current lack of any widely accepted explanation of this idea, and the resulting circularity in the folk concept of gender identity, is a problem from the point of view of trans rights campaigners. It would, from that perspective, be beneficial to be able to explain what gender identity is to people who do not already understand the concept, in order that they can participate in movements for trans rights in an informed way.

The present moment, at which the concept of gender identity is rapidly permeating public consciousness, presents a particularly good opportunity for establishing a widespread and sound understanding. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, however, it is necessary to have a clear and non-circular definition of gender identity. Although, as we have seen, the folk concept of gender identity is not adequate in this regard, the fact that there is widespread agreement on at least some of the work that the concept of gender identity ought to be able to do offers a promising starting point for expanding on the folk definition. Put simply, the thought is this: since we know something about how trans rights movements need to use the concept of gender identity, we can assess various possible ways of extending the folk definition in terms of how well suited they are to those uses, with a view to selecting the one that is best able to do the required work. This is my aim in this paper.

This approach is one that has been the subject of recent discussion within analytic philosophy, where it is known as prescriptive conceptual analysis (Burgess & Plunkett 2013), or as ameliorative inquiry (Haslanger 2012c). Burgess and Plunkett distinguish between two different kinds of projects of conceptual analysis: (i) descriptive, and (ii) prescriptive. In the former, descriptive project, we seek to discover how a concept is currently being employed, including what type or kind in the world (if any) it refers to; by contrast, in the prescriptive project we seek to identify which concept we ought to use given our purposes. Haslanger’s method of ameliorative inquiry, developed in her work on gender and race, is an example of prescriptive analysis. In ameliorative inquiry, we seek to identify which concept (or concepts)[5] would be most helpful for us to use given certain political aims. The concept that an ameliorative inquiry results in is termed the ‘target concept’. My aim, then, can be more precisely stated as follows: to identify the target concept of gender identity, given the shared aims of trans rights movements, where this is understood as a prescriptive endeavour.[6]

In adopting this aim, I do not intend to commit myself to the claim that only one concept of gender identity is needed. The phenomenon is a complex one, and it may well be that different concepts are needed to capture different aspects of it. This pluralism is compatible with the idea that it is strategically useful for trans rights movements to adopt a single definition of gender identity if one can be found that fits their purposes. It is to this latter idea only that I am committed. I will treat it as an open possibility that no definition exists that can do all the work that trans rights movements need it to do, in which case it might be necessary to adopt multiple definitions, perhaps distinguished by different terminology.

I begin by exploring in more detail the work that gender identity needs to do in trans rights movements so as to arrive at a set of six desiderata for a target concept of gender identity. I then assess the three existing accounts of gender identity in the analytic philosophical literature relative to these desiderata. I argue that one, which I term ‘the norm-relevancy account’, can, in a slightly modified form, meet all of the desiderata, and is therefore a good candidate for the target concept of gender identity. Finally, I defend the norm-relevancy account from three objections.

Before I embark on this task, two observations about my approach are in order. Firstly, note that I am simply aiming to establish which concept of gender identity is best able to do the work that trans rights movements, as they currently exist, need it to do. In other words, I am taking the aims of trans rights movements as a starting point for my inquiry. Given the development of the concept of gender identity with reference to the experiences of trans people and the importance of the concept in contemporary struggles for trans rights, this is a natural enough way to approach an ameliorative inquiry on this topic. It is not, however, without potential critics. Some feminists have claimed that feminist considerations entail that the concept of gender identity should be rejected altogether as confused and harmful (for a striking example of this position, see Jeffreys 2014). These claims have been robustly countered by those working from a transfeminist perspective (Bettcher 2009; 2014; Koyama 2006; Lester 2017; Serano 2016). Feminists such as Jeffreys can be interpreted as suggesting, firstly, that feminist aims should motivate the ameliorative inquiry into gender identity, and, secondly, that an ameliorative inquiry motivated in that way will yield the conclusion that no concept of gender identity is required at all. Arguing against the claims of feminists such as Jeffreys is beyond the scope of this article. Although I am fully convinced of the appropriateness of the aims of the trans rights movements, I make no claim to have justified those aims here. I merely seek to establish the concept of gender identity that is required to advance those aims.

Secondly, it must be acknowledged that in bringing the resources of analytic philosophy to bear on gender identity I am adopting an unusual approach to the topic. Although there is a substantial theoretical literature on gender identity in fields such as gender studies and trans studies (see, e.g., Namaste 2000; Prosser 1998; Stone 2006; Stryker 1994) this topic has only recently begun to receive attention within analytic philosophy (Andler 2017; Bettcher 2017; Jenkins 2016; McKitrick 2015). The appeal of adopting an approach informed by analytic philosophy is that, as we have seen, analytic philosophy has many resources to offer when it comes to conceptual analysis. By contrast, the strong influence of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches on gender studies and trans studies means that the latter are typically more focused on phenomenological and deconstructionist investigations than on conceptual analysis, and are thus less likely to be aiming at, and so less likely to yield, a clear and non-circular definition of gender identity. Let me be clear that in my opinion there is room for a wide variety of different and valuable investigations into gender identity. In undertaking conceptual analysis of gender identity I intend merely to investigate the benefits that this approach, which is under-explored in this context, can bring, and not to denigrate existing work on that topic which employs different methods.

2. Desiderata for a Target Concept of Gender Identity

What little work there is on gender identity in analytic philosophy has suffered from a striking lack of clarity as to whether it is descriptive or prescriptive in nature. My own work is no exception; although I have previously set out a definition of gender identity as part of an ameliorative inquiry into the concept woman (Jenkins 2016), I did not make it clear whether the definition of gender identity I offered was intended to be ameliorative/prescriptive, or descriptive. Similarly, both McKitrick (2015) and Bettcher (2017) recommend their respective definitions of gender identity for use without explicitly stating whether or not they are intended as target concepts or as concepts that capture current usage. Accordingly, there is much work to be done in terms of establishing how an ameliorative inquiry into gender identity should proceed.

In order to carry out an ameliorative project, it is first necessary to select a set of political aims that are to guide the project. As I have already made clear, the aims guiding the ameliorative project that I am undertaking in this paper are the aims of trans rights movements, which I take to be twofold: promoting the rights of trans people, and countering transphobia. The next task is to establish how these aims translate into specific desiderata for a target concept. In order to do this, it is necessary to look in more detail at the kind of work the concept of gender identity is being required to do in trans rights movements, and at the kind of features it must have in order to do this work well. Accordingly, in this section I set out six desiderata for a target concept. The first three are based fairly directly on the claims made by trans rights campaigners about gender identity, and the latter three rely to a greater extent on my own reasoning about what features a concept would need to have in order to do this work.[7]

As already mentioned, one of the main claims of trans rights movements is that trans people (and indeed everyone else) are entitled to be able to move through social space as members of their identified gender. For example, a trans woman should be able to access women-only spaces such as bathrooms, and should be addressed and described using female-specific language where relevant.[8] In the philosophical literature this claim has been supported by Stephanie Julia Kapusta (2016), who has argued that misgendering—failing to treat people as members of the gender with which they identify—causes psychological harms such as shame, anxiety, and depression; moral harms such as the undermining of self-respect; and political harms, such as oppression and domination (see also Bailey, Ellis, & McNeil 2014; Bettcher 2007; 2009).

The claim that misgendering causes harm is an empirical claim and will not be upheld by a definition of gender identity alone.[9] However, in order to fully support trans rights movements’ claim that trans people should be treated as members of their identified genders, it is necessary to supplement the claim that misgendering causes harm with a further claim about the nature of the link with such harm. This is because one might think that misgendering is wrong because it causes harm, whilst thinking that these harms only follow due to misconceptions or weaknesses on the part of the individual. Clearly, the claims of trans rights movements would be substantially weakened if they depended on the idea that trans people who are misgendered only suffer harm on the basis of their own disproportionate responses—an idea that I believe practically all trans rights campaigners would reject. Rather, the strongest case would rest on the premise that the harms suffered by those who are misgendered are an accurate reflection of the personal and social significance of gender identity. And here, the definition of gender identity does come into play: a definition of gender identity that makes it difficult to see why gender identity is important, significant, or deserving of respect would seriously undermine this premise. This points towards a first desideratum for a target concept of gender identity:

Another key demand of trans rights movements is self-definition, the idea that people should have the right to declare what their gender identity is and to have this declaration treated as decisive. In particular, trans rights movements typically advocate for legal frameworks that allow people to change their official gender by means of a straightforward declaration, rather than having to produce evidence to show that they meet some set of criteria for warranting a change in their official gender.[10] For example, the current UK legislation, the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, requires people seeking to change their official gender to submit ‘evidence’ to a panel of ‘experts’ showing that they have received a medical diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ and have presented as the gender with which they identify for two years. Trans rights campaigners argue that this system imposes unfair costs on applicants (financially, psychologically, and practically), and that it is demeaning and intrusive. They are calling for new legislation to implement a self-declaration model.[11]

This demand can be understood as a call for what Bettcher (2009) has described as a norm of ‘First Person Authority’ (FPA), a principle stating that a person should be treated as the final and decisive authority on their own gender identity. Accordingly, we can add a second desideratum:

It is worth noting that Bettcher distinguishes between an epistemic norm of FPA and an ethical norm of FPA. An epistemic norm of FPA is justified by the claim that the person who is accorded the FPA has a ‘serious epistemic advantage’ (Bettcher 2009: 100) concerning the relevant subject matter compared to others, whereas an ethical norm of FPA is justified by the ethical badness of failing to treat the person’s avowals as decisive. Bettcher herself defends FPA as an ethical norm. She argues convincingly that a key aspect of transphobic oppression, and one that ties together many different manifestations of transphobia, including physical violence against trans people, is the mistaken belief that trans identities are inauthentic or invalid, and that trans people are either maliciously deceptive or tragically confused (Bettcher 2007; 2009). The ethical imperative for adopting a norm of FPA, according to Bettcher, stems from the need to counteract these transphobic dynamics. An ethical norm of FPA can be defended by reference to the considerations Bettcher raises even if there is no reason to think that people are in a strongly privileged epistemic position with regard to their gender identity. I will leave it open what kind of norm of FPA the target concept of gender identity needs to uphold, since I take it that upholding either an ethical or an epistemic norm of FPA would be sufficient for the concept to do the required work. Note that upholding an ethical norm is much easier than upholding an epistemic norm: all that is necessary is that the account does not generate any reasons for rejecting FPA that are weighty enough to outweigh the ethical reasons in favour of it that are identified by Bettcher.

A third key demand of trans rights movements is affordable and non-burdensome access to transition-related healthcare (e.g., hormone therapy and surgeries such as double mastectomy with chest reconstruction or breast augmentation, colloquially termed ‘top surgery’, and orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, or phalloplasty, colloquially termed ‘bottom surgery’) (Koyama 2006).[12] In countries in which healthcare is provided by the state, such as the UK, this takes the form of advocating for transition-related healthcare to be provided by the national provider, whilst in countries in which healthcare is provided under insurance, such as the US, this takes the form of advocating that insurers be required to cover transition-related healthcare under their policies. In both cases, as well as financial accessibility, trans rights advocates call for the removal of unnecessary and lengthy procedural barriers to accessing transition-related healthcare (Serano 2016). A major rationale for this demand is that delay in accessing transition-related healthcare has been shown to have a strong negative effect on the mental health of trans people (Bailey et al. 2014).

Intuitively, it seems as though this demand should feed in to the definition of gender identity. If the target concept of gender identity were completely detached from the need for transition-related healthcare, it would be hard to uphold the seemingly obvious claim that good access to transition-related healthcare is properly understood as a trans rights issue. In other words, if it were seen as a complete coincidence that, for example, a particular individual (a) is a trans person with a male gender identity, and (b) feels a need for top surgery, it would be difficult to explain why his need to access to transition-related healthcare is connected to his social position as a trans person. We therefore need a desideratum that links gender identity with the need for transition-related healthcare.

However, there are grounds for caution here. Some trans people do not wish to change any of their bodily features to reflect their gender identity, and others wish to change some of the bodily features that are commonly associated with gender, but not others. It is therefore important that this desideratum be phrased in a way that avoids the implication that all trans people desire transition-related healthcare. In particular, we cannot require an account of gender identity to be able to justify the claim that (e.g.) a person with a male gender identity who has breasts automatically needs top surgery simply in virtue of his gender identity. Such an account would imply that those trans people who do not wish to change any of their bodily features are mistaken about their gender identity, thereby undermining FPA.

The following wording expresses the requisite caution:

Having arrived at three desiderata from reflecting on the work that trans rights movements need gender identity to do, I will now propose three more desiderata based on the features that a target concept needs to have in order to do this work well. The first of these relates to the issue that motivates this paper: the circularity exhibited by the folk concept of gender identity. One barrier to the promotion of trans rights is a lack of understanding of trans experiences, including confusion about what it is to be a trans person. For example, a fairly common misconception is that all trans people have had, or plan to have, genital surgery. Clearly, increased understanding of what it is to be trans would aid the promotion of trans rights. Another change that would also help would be greater understanding and uptake of the term ‘cis’ to describe those whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. This would have two benefits. First, it would reduce ‘othering’ of trans people: compare the importance of having a term, ‘heterosexual’, to refer to men who exclusively experience attraction to women and woman who exclusively experience attraction to men, rather than simply describing such people as ‘normal’. Second, it would facilitate greater attention to the phenomenon of cis privilege, that is, the fact that one’s life is likely to be easier in a number of ways, large and small, if one is cis as opposed to trans.

Since the concept of gender identity plays a prominent role in accounts of what it is to be trans or cis, one key function that the concept of gender identity should perform is to help increase understanding of these terms among those not yet familiar with them. Clearly, a circular or unclear concept cannot do this. Having a clear and non-circular definition of gender identity is also necessary if the concept is to be deployed in legal contexts, which is something at which trans rights campaigns regularly aim.

Accordingly the fourth desideratum is:

Some caution is needed here. An unfortunate and wide-spread attitude takes the legitimacy of trans identities to be dependent on the recognition of cis people. In other words, many seem to think that in order to be valid, trans identities must be rendered intelligible from a cis perspective. This is of course profoundly at odds with the aim of countering transphobia (Bettcher 2009; Scheman 1997; Stone 2006; Stryker 1994). Let me make it absolutely clear, then, that I take the value of a greater general understanding of gender identity to stem from the likely beneficial effects this would have for movements to advance trans rights, and not from any implication such an understanding might be supposed to have for the legitimacy of trans identities.

A fifth desideratum is needed to reflect the fact that some trans people are non-binary, which is to say they have a gender identity that is not ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Although some people identify as ‘non-binary’ specifically, the term ‘non-binary’ can also function as an umbrella term for all identities other than ‘man’ and ‘woman’; this includes identities such as ‘agender’ (having no gender), ‘genderfluid’ (moving between genders) and ‘genderqueer’ (calling into question received notions of gender). In this paper I shall primarily use ‘non-binary’ in its umbrella sense. Since some trans people are non-binary, it is clear that an account of gender identity that did not fit well with the identities and experiences of non-binary people could not be effective in securing and improving the rights of all trans people.[14] Accordingly, we can add a fifth desideratum:

A final desideratum is needed to reflect the fact that transfeminist approaches are, and have long been, a key part of trans rights movements (Bettcher 2007; 2014; Koyama 2006; Serano 2016). Transfeminist approaches are committed to analysing gender-based oppression in a way that understands transphobia and misogyny as intimately related in complex ways, with particular attention to the experiences of those situated at the intersection of these oppressions, that is, trans women. Transfeminists argue that paying attention to the dynamics of transmisogyny—the specific combination of transphobia and misogyny that is directed at trans women—alerts us to various important features of gender-based oppression as a whole, and points towards solutions that are emancipatory for people of all genders, whether trans or cis. An account of gender identity that was incompatible with transfeminist approaches would instigate a significant split within trans rights movements, and would also make it difficult for those movements to work in concert with other feminist movements. This would be highly counterproductive.

In order to be compatible with transfeminist approaches, a definition of gender identity must be friendly to critiques of current gender norms and social structures that go beyond the fact that these norms frequently miscategorize trans people. Accordingly, the final desideratum is:

Thus, the six desiderata that I will use to assess possible target concepts of gender identity are as follows:

3. Existing Accounts of Gender Identity

I will now consider the three accounts of gender identity that have been put forward in the analytic philosophy literature and assess how well each of them meets the five desiderata. For reasons of space, I will not consider all six of the desiderata in relation to each account, but will in some cases focus only on the main strengths and weaknesses. It is important to note that there is no reason to think that the authors I survey are themselves committed to all (or even any) of the desiderata I have set out thus far, and that accordingly my discussion tells us nothing about whether these accounts succeed by their own lights.

4. Defending the Norm-Relevancy Account

The previous section shows that the norm-relevancy account satisfies all six of the desiderata, in one case (D5) with a slight extension, whilst both the dispositional account and the self-identification account are unable to meet one or more of the desiderata. Clearly the norm-relevancy account is the best candidate for the target concept of gender identity (within the present ameliorative inquiry) out of the three existing accounts. In order to establish just how strong a candidate the norm-relevancy is, however, it is necessary to check that it does not suffer from other defects that have not yet been highlighted through considering the desiderata. Accordingly, before concluding, I will consider and respond to three criticisms of the norm-relevancy account.

5. Concluding Remarks: A Framework for Further Investigation

I have assessed the three analytic accounts of gender identity developed to date—the dispositional, self-identification, and norm-relevancy accounts—in light of the desiderata I developed for the ameliorative project, and I have argued that, of these three accounts, the norm-relevancy account (slightly extended to better accommodate non-binary identities) is the best candidate for the target concept. Moreover, I have defended the norm-relevancy account from three objections. This suggests that the account is not only the best candidate out of the three considered, but a strong candidate more generally.

It is seldom wise in writing a philosophy paper to aim to deliver the last word on some question, but in this case in particular such an ambition would be especially ill-advised. The topic is one which analytic philosophers have only recently begun to discuss, and which is of tremendous ethical and political significance. Caution is therefore appropriate. There may be considerations I have not taken into account that affect how we should conceive of the desiderata, and entirely new accounts may be developed that are preferable to the norm-relevancy account in various ways. I therefore provisionally and cautiously recommend the norm-relevancy account as the target concept of gender identity that is needed by trans rights movements.

The main contribution I hope to have made in this paper is not so much to advocate for a particular target concept as to clear the ground for better and clearer discussions of gender identity in the future by providing a framework for further investigation. Those who disagree that the norm-relevancy definition captures the target concept of gender identity for an ameliorative inquiry based on the aims of trans rights movements must either (a) disagree with me about what the desiderata for that ameliorative inquiry ought to be, (b) disagree with me about how one or more of the accounts I have considered fares relative to these desiderata, or (c) have a novel account to offer that fares better than the norm-relevancy account (or, of course, be doing some combination of these things). It is also the case that other concepts of gender identity may be proposed as part of different projects of conceptual analysis, descriptive or prescriptive/ameliorative. I gladly anticipate that lively disagreement concerning gender identity will continue, and I hope that the framework I have developed helps to clarify the nature of these discussions and so render them as productive as possible.

Acknowledgements

This paper benefitted from helpful discussions with the following people: Robin Dembroff, Boo Jackson, Stephanie Kapusta, Ian Kidd, Joseph Kisolo-Ssonko, Jennifer Saul, and Aness Webster. It also benefitted from feedback from audiences at the University of Barcelona, the University of Birmingham, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. I thank all those concerned. In addition, I am grateful to the two anonymous referees for this journal for their constructive comments.

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Notes

1. See, e.g., https://transequality.org/; https://srlp.org/; http://www.hrc.org/explore/topic/transgender; https://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/come-out-trans-equality; https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/lgbti-rights.

2. See, e.g., http://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-terminology-and-definitions; http://eige.europa.eu/rdc/thesaurus/terms/1179; http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/introduction/. Sometimes it is further specified that this sense is ‘inner’ or ‘personal’, and that it may not be the same as the gender the person is perceived as having or the gender they were assigned at birth.

3. In this paper I will use the phrase ‘X identifies as a man/woman’ and ‘X has a male/female gender identity’ interchangeably, taking them to mean exactly the same thing. This is purely for reasons of grammatical convenience; I am not, e.g., using ‘male/female’ as sex terms rather than gender terms.

4. I have argued elsewhere (Jenkins 2016) that they should.

5. I have argued (Jenkins 2016) that ameliorative inquiries may ‘branch’ so as to deliver multiple target concepts, no one of which would be able to fulfil all the goals of the inquiry by itself.

6. Note that this is different from the descriptive endeavour of establishing what concept (or concepts) of gender identity is (or are) being used in trans rights movements.

7. As already mentioned, trans rights movements are not homogenous. In what follows, I have restricted my focus to some basic claims that are very widely made by trans rights organizations. In addition to having found the claims in the materials of the organizations that are cited in each case, I am not aware of any trans rights organizations which dispute any of the claims I discuss.

8. See, e.g., https://transequality.org/; https://srlp.org/; http://www.hrc.org/explore/topic/transgender; https://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/come-out-trans-equality; https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/lgbti-rights.

9. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.

10. See, e.g., https://transequality.org/; https://srlp.org/; http://www.hrc.org/explore/topic/transgender; https://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/come-out-trans-equality; https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/lgbti-rights.

11. See https://www.stonewall.org.uk/gender-recognition-act. At the time of writing, a government consultation has just opened on reforming the act.

12. By ‘transition’ in the context of this paper I mean to refer to the process of seeking to move from being perceived and treated as a member of one gender category to being perceived and treated as a member of another gender category.

13. This wording might be thought insufficiently demanding: it is often claimed by trans rights advocates that affordable and non-burdensome access to transition-related healthcare is not only a need but a right. Whilst I am extremely sympathetic to this claim, I note that any claim about rights raises general questions about what sort of thing a right is, the contexts within which rights apply, and how the corresponding obligations should be understood, which I cannot settle here. This is my reason for phrasing the desideratum in terms of needs rather than rights. Moreover, the language of need is, by itself, enough to rebut suggestions that a trans person’s request for transition related healthcare stems purely from, say, aesthetic preferences, rather than being something that is crucial for their wellbeing. Further work in advocating for a right to transition-related healthcare is a separate (though important) project that builds upon the idea of a need for transition-related healthcare. I am grateful to Aness Webster for pressing me on this point.

14. It is worth mentioning that although all non-binary people can be considered trans in the sense that they have a gender identity other than the gender that were assigned at birth (given that very nearly all infants are assigned either a male or a female gender at birth), not all non-binary people consider themselves to be trans or find the notion of being trans illuminating or relevant with respect to their own experiences.

15. In the main body of the paper, McKitrick refers to ‘gender’, rather than ‘gender identity’, but she makes it clear at the outset that she is referring to gender in the sense of ‘gender identity’ (2015: 2577).

16. Note that treating ‘trans’ as a gender, as McKitrick does here, is controversial; most trans people do not consider their gender to be ‘trans’ but rather ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘genderqueer’, etc.

17. Recall that these are weaknesses as a potential target concept for the current ameliorative inquiry; they may not be weaknesses relative to other purposes and commitments.

18. Bettcher’s wording in presenting the account is slightly equivocal: although it is clear that she recommends the account as a solution to certain difficulties with other accounts, it is not quite clear whether she fully endorses it.

19. It might seem that the self-definition account also struggles with D4 (non-circularity). However, the account (as I have interpreted it) is not circular. It does not explain self-identification by referring back to gender identity; rather, it declines to explain it at all. Gender identity is simply equated with disposition to sincerely utter sentences such as ‘I am a non-binary person’, such that no stipulation is made about what a person intends to convey by making such utterances. It would be a mistake to take the account’s minimalism for circularity.

20. Serano herself would not describe this sense as gender identity, because she reserves the term for ‘the way [one] consciously relate[s] to [one’s] own gender’. Instead, she describes it as one consequence of what she terms ‘subconscious sex’ (Serano 2016: 81–83).

21. Note that the norm-relevancy account differs from the dispositional account in that it does not tie gender identity to a disposition to behave in ways that are regarded as masculine or feminine: one can experience a norm as relevant to oneself without having a disposition to behave in the way that the norm demands.

22. I lack the space to explore in any detail the issue of exactly how large this subset needs to be. It seems likely that the relevant requirement would need to involve both the size of the subset relative to the norms of femininity operating in that context, and the size of the subset relative to the size of other subsets of gender norms the person also experiences as relevant. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

23. A similar point is made by Matthew Salett Andler (2017) although Andler’s expression of the point rests on a misunderstanding of my view; see Section 4.1 below.

24. Establishing that the norm-relevancy account entailed that everyone has the gender identity that they think they have was important for the purposes of that paper because I was seeking to solve the ‘inclusion problem’, the challenge of finding an appropriately inclusive concept of ‘woman’ for use in feminist practice. Since that time, Mari Mikkola has argued, in my view convincingly, that the inclusion problem rests on a confusion and can therefore be deflated rather than solved (2016: Chapter 5).

25. Although he need not do so; a person does not have to experience all the norms associated with masculinity as relevant to himself in order to have a male gender identity.

26. These possibilities are intended to express, respectively, genderfluid identity, bigender identity, genderqueer identity, and agender identity.

27. A further benefit of the radio metaphor is that it conveys the difference between experiencing a norm as relevant to oneself and following a norm more clearly than the map metaphor does: one can be tuned in to the woman channel without actually obeying any of the injunctions that are broadcast on it.

28. Exactly how these definitions are interpreted will depend on how the cut-off points are defined for male, non-binary and female gender identities in terms of how many norms a person experiences as relevant, and issue that I lack space to address here (see Footnote 22 above). I anticipate that a full response to this point might include some fuzzy boundaries.

29. See Footnote 24 above.

30. For a critique of the inclusion problem, see Mikkola (2016).

31. It has been raised to me in conversation by Stephanie Kapusta, among others, and I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to address it here.

32. See Section 3.3 above.