Verbal disputes, social totality, and trans politics

A puzzling feature about the dispute over whether trans women are women is its apparent verbality: gender-critical theorists assert a biological fact about trans women, and trans-inclusionary theorists respond by asserting a social/psychological fact about trans women. But plausibly, both theorists’ assertions are compatible, and so there is no real disagreement. In this paper, I argue that the two theorists are not talking past each other. But I also argue that extant accounts of the dispute fail to adequately explain why the dispute is not merely verbal. Indeed, clarifying the dispute requires us to ask what it is for something to be a gender concept, as opposed to a merely biological or social/psychological concept. After developing a questions-based account of concepts and conceptual roles, I suggest that a necessary feature of gender concepts is that we use them to construct unified and portable narratives about how we will stand in relation to one another as social individuals, regardless of the particular social context we are in. This allows us to understand the trans woman dispute as a dispute about whether we should prioritize biological or social/psychological facts when interpreting our relations to one another.