The Metaphysics of Gender Identity

Abstract

This paper addresses two related questions. First, what is it to have a gender identity? Second, what is a gender identity, metaphysically speaking? In answer to the first, I defend a ‘doing’ model: to ‘have’ a gender identity is to engage in an ongoing act of self-interpretation. In answer to the second, I defend a social model: gender identities are shared, social tools that individuals draw on and recreate in their acts of self-interpretation. This account of gender identity remains faithful to the operative concept of gender identity, giving philosophical substance to the idea of a ‘gendered sense of self’. It respects sincere self-ascriptions of gender, escaping the exclusion problems which plague other accounts of gender identity. It avoids circularity, and has greater explanatory power than rival accounts. By emphasising how interpretative resources are learned and shared through social interactions, it captures the sense in which gender identities are not wholly internal, but are negotiated in dialogue with others, using resources made available by one’s social context. It can therefore explain how and why practices of self-ascribing gender change over time and across cultures. Moreover, it explains why individuals cannot exercise entirely free choice over their gender identities, yet can exercise some limited agency over them. This paper demonstrates that we can take gender identity to be deeply social without denying its first-personal character; involving agency, but not a matter of unconstrained choice. We achieve this by understanding gender identity in terms of an ongoing, socially-mediated practice of self-interpretation.