In recent years, the "Gender Wars" have dominated public debates in several Western countries. Whilst in the US the debate is largely one between progressives and conservatives, the UK debate, and many other European debates, are often framed as being internal to feminism and what a feminist public policy should look like. Gender critical feminists argue that gender is an oppressive social construct; thus, the feminist thing to do with it is simply to destroy it (while failing to recognize trans identities). Trans-inclusive scholars contend that both gender and gender identity cannot be erased without committing very serious harms to some of the already most marginalised people. Predictably, very different public policy agendas follow.

At closer look, however, trans-inclusive scholars and activists agree that gender is largely a social construct. The idea that trans activists and scholars consider gender identity (whether cis or trans) as immutable and innate is largely a myth. The trans-inclusive claim is, however, that something can be a social construct yet be very real and serve important social purposes within a certain social context – such that destroying the concept *whilst maintain the broader social context* would produce significant harms. Most trans-inclusive actors also agree that gender has many oppressive elements – yet contend that, all things considered, trans-inclusion is the most promising way to deconstruct those elements. Gender critical feminists usually counter-argue that this stand is simply confused: if gender and gender identity are not something innate but social constructs, then what are they if not just the oppressive creation of the patriarchy? What else can they be? Thus, according to gender critical feminism, either gender identity is conceived as something immutable and innate – and that is an implausible claim, or it is part of an oppressive ideology which should be dismantled. Everything else is mysterious.

This workshop aims to bring together this debate with developments in feminist epistemology. Recently, much has been written about how the marginalised can be wronged not just in material terms, but also in their “capacity as knowers” (Fricker 2007). This can happen because their very plausible accounts of their lived experiences are discredited; because mainstream language and knowledge lack the terms and concepts for their experiences; and because, as a result, marginalised people have struggled to make sense of their own experiences – both to themselves and to others. All of this is compatible with marginalised people being, in spite of all, very competent or even uniquely insightful knowers in certain domains (Medina 2013).

The workshop asks whether this can be the case for the concepts of gender and gender identity. Could it be that, when the opponent says that trans-inclusive accounts of gender identity are “confused,” “mysterious,” or “don’t make sense,” epistemic marginalisation is playing a role? It would not, after all, be the first time. A standpoint of uncertainty and puzzlement is not necessarily one of ignorance: it can indeed be the starting point of productive epistemic innovations. Indeed, paradigmatic cases of hermeneutical injustice confirm that: the working women who struggled to make sense of their experience of unwelcome sexual flirtation in the workplace are the very same women who went on and developed a new concept for it – workplace sexual harassment.

The aim is to explore whether this can apply to trans-inclusive conceptual innovations about gender and gender identity and, if so, how barriers of intelligibility can be overcome. Conceptions of gender identity are undergoing revisions in feminist philosophy (e.g., Barnes 2022, Cosker-Rowland 2023, Cull 2024, Hernandez & Bell 2025, Jenkins 2023). Our aim is to further explore the connections between debates about conceptual innovations on gender and gender identity, on the one hand, and questions about epistemic injustice, epistemic marginalization and conceptual interventions, on the other hand.

If you are unsure about whether your proposal might fit, please feel free to reach out to the organisers before submitting.

To apply, please fill in and submit the application form below by 30th April:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSexpwhKUBU1pshKnDSXaytdphUEC94XDc5fP2YVYZ5p8wYofg/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=113519902316759272279

References

Barnes, Elizabeth (2022). Gender without Gender Identity: The Case of Cognitive Disability. Mind 131 (523):836-862.

Briggs, R & B. R. George (2023). What Even Is Gender? Routledge.

Cosker-Rowland, Rach (2023). Recent Work on Gender Identity and Gender. Analysis 83 (4):801-820.

Cull, Matthew J. (2024). What Gender Should Be. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Fricker, Miranda (2007). Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hernandez, E. M. & Bell, Rowan (2025). Much Ado About Nothing: Unmotivating "Gender Identity". Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12 (50):1313-1340.

Jenkins, Katharine (2023). Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality. New York: OUP.

Medina, José (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/activities/who-knows-what-gender-is-arguments-and-debates-at-the-intersectio/