This week’s seminar will be a talk by Francisca Silva titled “Questions and Gender Questioning”. It will be a hybrid seminar and you can attend either in person, at Castlecliffe Seminar Room G5W, or online, via Teams. For further information or details to join the online meeting, please email arche-fem-soc[at]st-andrews.ac.uk.

Title: Questions and gender questioning

Abstract: Mainly since the work of Belnap and Steel (1976), a growing tradition in metaphysics and formal semantics has modelled questions as their respective direct complete answers. I will highlight how this way of modelling questions can help shed light on a significant process for trans people – that of questioning one’s own gender identity. Namely, the framework emphasises how the act of asking questions highlights certain features of reality while obscuring others and therefore makes it clear how the way agents understand reality also depends on what questions they try to give answers to. After presenting the general theoretical framework and introducing a novel notion of a full and partial grasp on a question, I will proceed to consider the range of questions that might be involved in gender questioning, as well as various factors that might impose a limit on the range of possibilities agents are responsive to when considering such questions. To make the discussion more manageable, I will focus on the particular experience of questioning trans women who report not being able to determine whether their experiences motivate a positive answer to the question “Am I a woman?” or merely to the question “Do I want to be a woman?”. I conclude by showing how such experiences arise as the two questions become conflated, as well as by drawing some normative consequences from what is a presently unjust state of affairs affecting trans people more broadly.