27 October, 2025
What is a woman? What is a man? Are there only two sexes, or an infinite spectrum of sexes? Is sex an objective property, or a cultural product of Western society? Do people have “genders” and “gender identities” that are separate from their sex and determine whether they are men or women, female or male?
As has become clear to anyone following the recent “gender wars” on social media and university campuses, the debate about the rights of trans-identified individuals – in particular, their right to be treated equally, and not be discriminated against in activities such as sports, in the workplace, and in medical treatment – is thoroughly intertwined with those types of questions. In focusing on questions that relate to the nature of sex and gender, commentators and activists outside of the academy have followed on, and in many cases closely collaborated with, academic philosophers and members of other academic disciplines. As part of a growing preoccupation with the social world, a subfield now known as “gender metaphysics” has emerged and seen rapid growth in recent years, in both the number of works it produces and their influence on public debate and policy.
In a recent paper overviewing those developments, for instance, University of Virginia philosopher Elizabeth Barnes explains:
[A] rich philosophical conversation on the metaphysics of gender has emerged and gained momentum in recent years… Giving a metaphysics of gender is typically understood as the project of explaining what gender really is… This project is often understood as at least in part political, rather than purely descriptive… when we are trying to figure out who is including [sic] in gender categories like woman… we may in part be asking how we should use these terms and understand these categories… rather than simply asking how such categories and terms are in fact used in their contemporary contexts.
As this short quote illustrates, theorists working in the field see inquiry about the nature of the social world – that is, questions pertaining to social metaphysics or ontology – as inextricably bound up with moral evaluation. They are normally axiomatically committed to the thesis that things found in the social world – often broadly described as ‘social structures’, which include everything from language, concepts and terms, to legal and social norms, to clusters of attitudes and perceptions; and so on – can themselves be (and usually are) unjust or oppressive. ‘Gender’ is no exception; authors working on gender metaphysics normally see operative gender categories or concepts such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’, which they deem to be socially constructed, as oppressive or unjust.
In a paper on ‘ontological oppression’, for example, Yale philosopher Robin Dembroff elaborates this thesis as follows:
The gender kinds that operate in a given social context… may be oppressive. Genders that ought to be recognized may not be, and there may be recognized genders with unjust membership conditions. Classifying gender solely based on membership in operative gender kinds will reinforce them; if the gender kinds are oppressive, it will reinforce that oppression.
Similarly, in a recent book titled Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality, University of Glasgow philosopher Katharine Jenkins posits the existence of “ontic injustice”:
An individual suffers ontic injustice if and only if they are socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind where that construction consists, at least in part, of their falling under a set of social constraints and enablements that is wrongful to them.
Consistent with those commitments, both Dembroff and Jenkins maintain that the role of social metaphysicians doesn’t end with observing or analyzing oppressive social structures, but extends to actively working to change them. Trans-identified individuals often take center stage in activist-academic discussions of gender metaphysics in particular, where they play the dual role of serving as a paradigmatic example of individuals who are oppressed by dominant gender structures, and the main protagonists in the herculean activist saga of dismantling and “reimagining” those structures from the ground up.
To illustrate the notion of “Ontic Injustice”, for instance, Jenkins uses the example of Alex, a trans-identified male (transwoman) who isn’t allowed to enter the women’s bathroom when dining at a restaurant. As she explains:
Gender kinds at present are set up in ways that exclude some trans people from membership in the gender kind with which they identify… this social construction is itself wrongful… Because Alex lives in a transphobic society in which genitals are taken to be the decisive determiner of gender… she is socially constructed as a member of the social kind men… Having the concept of ontic injustice to hand helps us to articulate the claim that it is a social fact that Alex is a man and not a woman – but it ought not to be. Alex is wronged by being socially constructed as a man…
Along with other scholar-activists working in the field, then, Jenkins concludes that trans/gender activism should involve an attempt to change social practices and structures, and reorganize them around the gender categories and concepts that activists view as more “liberatory” and just. In particular, they insist that trans-identified individuals (especially trans-identified males) should be conceptualized, across all social interactions and functions, as part of the “gender category” with which they identify – and that this would outright make trans-identified individuals members of the opposite gender or sex. Robin Dembroff and Catharine Saint-Croix write:
[I]t is reasonable to think that we would do well to (continue to) expand the social positions for ‘women’ to accommodate those who agentially identify as women. As we have seen over the last five to ten years in America, changing the entry conditions for a social position can in turn affect the everyday concept of the associated group that fits that role. That is, by changing who will be seen as a woman, we affect our everyday concept of what a woman is, shifting it away from a biological concept toward an identification concept.
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But how can such a fundamental and broad change to the social understanding of everyday concepts and categories – and the innumerable practices that make routine use of them – be effected? On the face of it, a natural route for trans/gender activism would involve advocating to change laws and other formal norms that contain explicit references to those categories. But contrary to the impression created by activists – especially those who in recent years have been working diligently to pressure various institutions to adopt concepts associated with their dogma – legal systems normally defer to the ordinary meaning of words, and they don’t typically contain mechanisms through which the interpretation of basic, everyday terms can be changed across the board.
However, one effective way to pursue such an ambitious reform is by utilizing anti-discrimination legislation and its associated regulatory apparatus. Anti-discrimination norms exist in many countries, as well as across many international and local jurisdictions. Their interpretation and practical implementation are often widely open to the influence of formal and semi-formal bodies of experts and NGOs, who can leverage their technical expertise and status as repeat legal players to lobby opaque legislative bodies and government agencies. Crucially for the trans/gender movement, anti-discrimination norms are unusually broad and exhaustive in their scope of application: they cover a variety of activities and domains that are typically beyond the reach of legislators, regulators and bureaucrats.
And so, consistent with their view that just about any social practice or interaction – including such mundane ones as using gendered language in conversation or categorizing people as male or female in government forms – ‘constructs’ gender in an oppressive manner that harms trans-identified individuals, activists haven’t shied away from utilizing this heavyweight tool to implement the tenets of their ideology. In their aggressive, organized, and wide-ranging advocacy efforts, scholar-activists have in effect sought to instate a new totalitarian rule – previously unheard of in the context of anti-discrimination jurisprudence – whereby failure to actively espouse their dogma’s tenets and its associated conceptual apparatus in any and all social activities and interactions would amount in and of itself to illegal discrimination against trans-identified individuals, and thus subject to legal penalties.
Such a rule entails, for example, that a medical institution that fails to fully integrate into its operations and internal protocols the notion that biological sex is an oppressive social construct, or fails to categorize people as males or females for medical purposes based on their self-identification would risk, among other costs, facing litigation for discriminating against trans-identified individuals, or having its low “inclusivity” scores significantly reduce its chances of securing research funding from government agencies. Similarly, companies and workplaces that aren’t on board with allowing trans-identified males into the women’s bathrooms and locker rooms, or which fail to convert their sexual harassment policies into “gender-based” harassment policies, would be under constant threat of incurring heavy fines or legal expenses.
Though the encroachment of trans/gender ideology on basic rights and freedoms, especially women’s rights and safety-related protections, has justifiably drawn much of the attention of critics, this focus in fact underestimates the scope of the reforms demanded by activists, and the severity of their potential consequences. Trans/gender scholar-activists aren’t content with allowing trans-identified males into women’s spaces and sporting categories, for example. They demand that the beliefs associated with their ideology be deployed across all social functions, including commonplace organizational and technical arrangements that underpin the proper functioning of much of modern society.
Even setting aside the sheer incoherence and internal contradictions easily found in trans/gender ideology – making it a particularly poor basis for legislation and policy – instituting such a comprehensive change to basic linguistic practices and beliefs would have far-reaching negative implications, many of which aren’t easily predicted from the theoretical “armchair”. Beyond the havoc that the push to eliminate reliance on sex categories, and to have “gender” or “gender identity” trump sex, has already caused in fields such as medicine and psychology, such reforms risk undermining a suite of further objectives: the collection and processing of statistical data used for purposes such as insurance, pensions, and social security; the functioning of administrative and bureaucratic systems, such as healthcare administration and information technologies, that are necessary for providing important services; the internal policies of companies, shaping their everyday interactions with customers and clients; and so on.
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Bizarrely, none of these far-reaching implications appear to have been considered, let alone evaluated and addressed, by the scholar-activists advocating such fundamental reforms – even though they will, of course, negatively influence trans-identified individuals as much as everyone else.
Trans/gender scholar-activists also ignore those consequences of their agenda that directly undermine the legal protections already afforded to trans-identified individuals in many jurisdictions. As just one example, if trans-identified individuals were fully recognized as the opposite sex for all legal purposes as activists demand, this would undermine their ability to file or prove complaints of workplace or housing discrimination – that is, discrimination in the conventional sense, such as when a person is rejected from employment or housing solely on the basis of their identity. This is especially likely in cases where it could be shown that the alleged discriminator does not discriminate against members of the sex with which the person identifies.
But the problems faced by the trans/gender movement in terms of protecting the rights of its professed constituency are even worse and more basic. Most strikingly, despite purporting to act on behalf of trans-identified individuals, in effect it seeks to protect only the civil rights of those trans-identified individuals who share its underlying ideology. This is because for a person to be recognized by the trans/gender movement as someone eligible for anti-discrimination protections based on transgender status, this person has to define themselves as transgender according to the movement’s view of transgenderism. In turn, for this to take place, this person has to be on board with the movement’s belief system about the nature of sex and gender, and its associated theoretical apparatus.
According to the prevailing dogma promoted by trans/gender scholar-activists and enshrined in the official documents of important institutions, transgender individuals are individuals whose “gender” or “gender identity” doesn’t match their sex, or who are a woman or a man because they believe they are that or identify as such – despite being males or females respectively. But to hold this particular set of beliefs about oneself, or “self-identify” in that manner, one has to believe, on a more theoretical level, that there is such a thing as “gender” which is an attribute of individuals entirely separable from their sex, that people in general can have “gender identities” that don’t match their sex (or, on some versions, that people can identify as the opposite sex), and that this self-identification makes them the opposite “gender” (or on some versions, the opposite sex).
But, of course, not all of those who view themselves, or who are likely to be viewed by others as transgender hold such beliefs or self-identify in that manner. This is just an artifact of the fact that how members of the general public view themselves or define their identity may come apart from beliefs about the metaphysics of sex and gender that are currently in vogue in academic or activist circles. In fact, some trans-identified individuals have shared that their beliefs don’t align with trans/gender ideology (and that they don’t wish to take part in its larger agenda for society). Because those individuals don’t subscribe to the theoretical beliefs endorsed by the trans/gender movement, they wouldn’t view themselves in particular as having genders or gender identities that do not match their sex. Some who consider themselves transgenders specifically say that they don’t believe they’re the opposite gender or sex, despite wishing to present as such in social settings.
Those individuals are, presumably, just as likely as trans-identified individuals who are proponents of trans/gender ideology to suffer unfair treatment at the hands of, for example, employers, doctors, or business owners who just don’t want to associate with them, serve or employ them. But they would not be designated as transgender according to the views propounded by the currently dominant strand of trans/gender activism. Hence, they wouldn’t be afforded legal protection against discrimination based on transgender status. In other words, the trans/gender movement leaves out of the legal protections it demands a group of people that arguably should be included under their purview. That it does so is a result of its theoretical commitments relating to the nature of sex and gender. Its primary aim is to propagate its underlying ideology, even when this comes at the expense of protecting the rights of those it purports to represent.
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The focus of contemporary trans/gender activism on changing the basic metaphysical beliefs upon which the law is premised represents a highly unusual phenomenon, to say the least, in the history of movements advocating for social and legal change – particularly those whose aims have been advancing the rights of minority groups or disenfranchised populations. Contrary to the impression that may have been created by trans/gender activism, past civil rights movements haven’t tried to change the ordinary understanding or meaning of terms prevalent in wider society, even in the case of those terms that pertain directly to defining the group in question. In fact, past civil rights movements were not particularly concerned with questions relating to the metaphysical nature of the groups or individuals whose voices they claimed to represent, nor did they tie the anti-discrimination protections afforded to their constituencies to theoretical issues of social metaphysics.
This is despite the fact that there has always been a parallel theoretical, academic interest in those social-metaphysical issues. The academic literature contains elaborate discussions on questions such as whether race is socially constructed or has some grounding in biological properties, and the ’80s-’90s saw lively debates about the nature of ethnicity and national affiliations. Yet it is not plausible that settling any of those debates is crucial for putting in place effective anti-discrimination norms that would protect people against, say, employers who refuse to hire them or doctors who refuse to treat them based on their race or national origin. Certainly, an official endorsement of a particular set of positions offered in those debates – for instance, that nations or ethnicities are “imagined communities“, or that folk racial classifications might be traced to cognitive mechanisms with certain evolutionary functions – need not be part of instating legal protections against racial or ethnic discrimination. Nor does any mainstream legal scholar think, say, that any policy premised on beliefs about the metaphysics of race or ethnicity that diverge from views currently in vogue within certain activist or scholarly circles – for instance, a company’s policy that somehow fails to “affirm” that employees’ racial groupings are “socially constructed” – should thereby be considered discriminatory against members of certain racial or ethnic groups.
As these historical precedents illustrate, just as settling subtle theoretical questions about the nature of race and ethnicity isn’t necessary for instating reasonable anti-discrimination protections that would protect individuals from unfair treatment, settling subtle theoretical questions about gender and sex isn’t necessary for putting together similar legal protections against discrimination based on trans-identification. In most legal proceedings concerning employment discrimination, for example, adequate decisions can be rendered based on findings such as whether the alleged discriminator exhibited unjustified hostility or prejudicial attitudes towards the alleged victim (that is, not just beliefs that don’t conform with trans/gender ideology), or whether there was a business-related reason to fire the alleged victim. Whether the alleged victim is truly a member of the opposite gender/sex, and whether their subjective gender identity should take precedence over their biological sex in determining if they’re a man or a woman would be largely beside the point.
If scholar-activists were interested in addressing the most harmful, objectionable, and easily mitigated instances of discrimination, they would have demanded specific changes to existing anti-discrimination norms, so those would cover trans-identified individuals in a way that is congruent with their existing principles. Those legal protections would roughly identify the relevant group in need of protection – for instance, people who wish to present as the opposite sex in public settings – and declare it illegal to discriminate against them, in the traditional, liberal sense of those words. Such norms would maintain, for instance, that it’s illegal to refuse to provide medical treatment or service to someone who chooses to present as the opposite sex. They could provide straightforward, robust, and (relatively) easily enforceable protection against unfair discrimination and exclusion, and their content would be consistent with largely uncontroversial principles of equal treatment.
Instead, trans/gender activist-scholars have consistently and intentionally shifted the debate towards basic questions of gender metaphysics, and made the anti-discrimination rights of trans-identified individuals hostage to their resolution. They’ve done so because fundamentally, they aren’t concerned with protecting the civil rights of trans-identified individuals, but with promoting their radical worldview. Anti-discrimination law is, quite simply, a tool that they use to instate their social-constructivist metaphysics by fiat. Their concrete demands for legal and social reforms do not track that which is more likely to advance the rights and interests of those individuals they purport to represent, but are derived and reverse-engineered from this broader, ambitious radical agenda. Trans/gender activist-scholars don’t exactly hide this – they explicitly spell that out in their academic writings.
For example, Robin Dembroff and Catharine Saint-Croix explain that discrimination against trans-identified individuals can consist of “making it more difficult for them to come to occupy the social position associated with [their] identity… Such policies systematically target persons who were assigned male at birth, but who want to transition to occupy the social role corresponding to the group women.”
Similarly, in a paper published in the Journal of Constitutional Law already in 2007, Diana Elkind rejects proposals to install gender-neutral facilities to accommodate the needs of trans-identified individuals with the following statement:
The proper means of attaining transgender equality is… to treat transgender individuals as the majority is treated and to permit each person bathroom access based on his or her gender identity. Individuals should be considered as members of the gender group with which they identify and not as an abnormal ‘other’ denied recognition among existing societal groups… Bathroom access is an issue at the heart of the battle for transgender rights. The traditional conception of gender as either male or female is not only an oversimplification of reality; it fosters and perpetuates discrimination against the gender minority who do not fit the stereotypical mold.
And in a more recent article, written after the passage of the Canadian Bill C-16 which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, Canadian philosopher, law professor, and self-described metaphorical cyborg witch Florence Ashley argues that this law is insufficient, reasoning:
The attitudes which impact trans people negatively are frequently neither irrational nor hateful. On the contrary, some of the most insidious beliefs such as the belief that gender is determined by genitalia at birth cannot be accurately described as irrational or hateful, since they fit neatly into the complex social ideology about gender… The othering of trans bodies occurs not only through forms which make use of gender, but by policies which specifically exclude trans people from their gender… [for example] Canadian Blood Services… added criteria for trans blood donors in 2016 which classified trans women as men or women on the basis of genitalia, reinforcing the notion that trans women who have penises are indeed men.
Those were always the views of trans/gender scholar-activists who have been spearheading this radical movement from the comfort of their academic positions. As the movement has gained enormous traction in academia within a largely uncontested framing as a representative of an oppressed minority engulfed in a contemporary struggle for its basic civil rights, it is hard not to be astonished by the fact that many academics who have been cheering it on from the sidelines – many of whom consistently and publicly chastise opponents for not understanding the movement’s claims and not listening to the other side – appear to have not availed themselves of opportunities to simply read what leading scholar-activists say, in their own words, in papers so prolifically produced and widely advertised in academic circles.
Those written works make it abundantly clear that the core of the debate with the trans/gender movement has never been about the right of trans-identified individuals to be treated fairly and equally. For the trans/gender scholar-activist movement is interested not in protecting rights, but in promoting a totalitarian agenda that cares for the rights of no one. There was never an excuse for the motivated ignorance about the movement’s true beliefs that accompanied the debate from its infancy, before its inevitable negative consequences started to spill over into general society and influence the lives of ordinary citizens, who never wanted to undermine the rights of anyone. There is definitely no excuse for not understanding the nature of the debate now.
Rona Dinur has a PhD in Philosophy from Hebrew University and an LLM from Harvard University.
