Title: Against the Ontology-First Approach to Gender Recognition

Abstract:
This talk engages with some recent public discussions about gender recognition, understood as the ways in which people’s genders should be socially recognised, for example in terms of how people should be able to navigate gendered social spaces.  I examine one of the many dysfunctions that currently characterise many of these discussions, which is an assumption about the relationship between ontology and social practices. Roughly, the assumption holds that settling the ontology of gender will automatically determine what shape our gendered social practices ought to take; I call this assumption ‘The Ontology First Approach’. I will show how the Ontology-First Approach creates problems for those who seek to defend trans-inclusive approaches to gender recognition, and I will show how rejecting the approach opens up more fruitful ways of thinking about gender recognition. These ways involve treating many of the issues that are in question as being based on the practical consequences of different possible ways of organising our social practices, rather than on facts about the ontology of social kinds. I argue that adopting this approach makes many questions about gender recognition much easier to resolve.