"Trans-Inclusive Philosophies" by Sophie Grace Chappell (Keywords: Embodiment; Gender; Truth; Reason; Theory; Lived Experience; Analytic Philosophy)

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This is an edited transcript of a talk Sophie Grace Chappell gave on Wednesday 19th March 2025 as part of our "Inclusive Philosophies" series, convened by Paul Giladi. Thanks to Marie Snyder and Sophia Simeonov for help with the transcription and editing.

This is billed as a masterclass on transgender and trans-inclusive philosophy. I don't know whether I'm in a position to give a "masterclass" for a number of reasons. One of them is simply that I think my own position about trans-inclusive philosophy is not entirely mainstream. Two things are particularly striking.

The first is that I see that for quite a lot of theorists of transgender – for example, Perry Zurn has just published a recent article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – the fight for trans rights is tied up with a lot of other fights against racism, against ableism, against homophobia, against colonial and market-based politics. And I don't necessarily disagree with Perry about all of that. It's when trans theorists, and Perry does this too, also take into their sights things like rationality, logic, things that are often called the "Western canon of philosophy". Sometimes logic itself is said to be under fire. And when this happens, I begin to show my own cards as a fairly conventional analytic philosopher who very much doesn't want to give away words like rationality, reason, truth, objectivity, science, and so on. It seems to me unnecessary to think that all of those things are against us as trans people and as trans-inclusive philosophers. So that's one way in which I'm out of step with at least some of the more radical trans-philosophers.

The second is the impulse to system build, to construct a systematic theory of transgender. And here I also have my suspicions that too much is being given away. The fear is that we're engaging in a game, the game of system building that we don't need to play. My suspicion is of a kind of "gatekeeping". Some people want us to build a theory of what gender and transgender and gender identity and gender identification are. I worry that there's a demand out there, namely to say: you're not allowed to be trans until you can give me your theory of being trans. That's the gatekeeping worry, and I think it's an absurd demand.

I expect most of you are sitting on a chair. I can't give you a necessary-and-sufficient-conditions-definition of what it is for anything to be a chair. I'm also drinking a cup of tea. I can't give you a necessary-and-sufficient-conditions-definition of what it is to be tea (though obviously it doesn’t count unless it was made in a teapot not a cup, with tea leaves not bags, with boiling water not tepid chlorine solution, and of actual tea tea, not this or that ridiculous raspberry lemon ginger arrowroot herbal spritzer cloudberry nonsense). Nonetheless, I sit on chairs, and I drink tea, and I am transgender. And, since I'm a trans woman, I am a woman. And all of these things are true, and you can't go imposing on people the gatekeeping obligation to have a theory of chairs before they're allowed to sit on them or a theory of what tea is before they're allowed to drink tea (though, as I say, in the case of tea there might be related offences that require a more drastic intervention). By the same token, you can't impose on trans people the requirement that they antecedently be able to define woman and man and transgender and have a theory of all this stuff before they're allowed to be it. No one needs a theory of cisgender in order to be cisgender. They're just allowed to do that. Right?

And I think this gatekeeping is enormously dangerous. One of the reasons why I think it's very dangerous is: instead of being transgender people, we're often told that we're transgenderists. And what is that -ist doing on the end? Well, -ism or -ist is a suffix which turns a kind of human being into a kind of ideologue, a kind of theorist. Compare another term, which is now, rightly, pretty much discarded. People used to talk about homosexualists. Horrible word. What the word suggests is that there is this theory, this ideology of being homosexual, which these "homosexualists" are going around imposing on everyone, and they're brainwashing the kids. They're spreading a woke mind virus of homosexualism. And when we're referred to as transgenderists, exactly the same semantic suggestion is in the air and it's one to strongly resist. You may have seen online this trope of saying: transgender people are alright, it's the trans activists who are the problem. And then it turns out that a trans activist is basically anyone who puts up the slightest peep of resistance to trans-exclusionary ideology.

Apart from this gatekeeping worry, I have another worry, which is about systematic theory, and this comes from my broader, theoretical orientation as a philosopher.

I wrote a big book called Epiphanies, which came out in 2022. And Epiphanies is about what we do in ethics if we don't do systematic theory-building in ethics. And I'm against systematic theory. And the theme of being anti-theory comes up also in the book I've written about transgender: Trans Figured came out last year, and in it I talk about the priority of experience to theory just as I do in Epiphanies, but with specific application to transgender.

I believe that constructing systems in ethics, like consequentialism or Kantianism, is putting us into a position where we're funnelled down an increasingly narrow track, and what we end up doing is trying to produce the perfect moral theory. And it's a kind of sausage-machine view of ethics: you have a situation, there are the facts, you have some moral principles, you crank the handle, and out comes the thing you should do in that situation. And I just don't think that life is that simple.

Instead of looking for the perfect theory of ethics we should be looking at experience. We shouldn’t be looking for a simple system which tells us how to live, but at the way we live already and at what we can learn from the way we live. So a question we need to ask ourselves is: What is it like to be a human being? What is it like to be me? What matters? What's big on my normative horizon from where I'm looking at things right now? How might I critique what I take to be important by looking at things from where I'm looking now? How might I come to a better understanding? And there are lots of ways in which that might happen, and the point is precisely the variety. The point is that life is complicated, and a simple theory is never going to give you all the answers that you want. And having taken that view about ethics in general, I want to take it about the ethics of being trans as well. I don't think that we have a simple theory of being trans, and I don't think we need one. I think what counts is not theory, but lived experience.

A lot of philosophers think that what they need to do in order to protect trans people is to build a big, all-embracing systematic theory of gender. And I don't want to offer an account of transgender that has any sort of universalist ambition or a theory that's supposed to be any kind of world domination enterprise. For one of the problems with systematic theory, as usually practised, is that it aims to be all conquering; the aim is exclusive truth. If consequentialism is true, then Kantianism can't be true and vice versa. If theory A of transgender is the truth, then theory B of transgender can't be the truth. So, I want to suggest with systematic theories of transgender, that if these theories were allowed to coexist and each of them do just a bit of the work, then I would be less worried than if any of them is supposed to be the truth about all trans people.

I'm going to move on to criticize accounts of gender. I want to criticize accounts of gender that say gender is a matter of how you are treated in society or how you are entitled to be treated in society. Now I think that such theories get things the wrong way around. If there's anything that's universally true, it's not I should be treated thus and so, therefore I'm transgender. It's the other way around. It's rather because I'm transgender, therefore, I should be treated thus and so.

But having said that, I also want to say, since I'm not myself in an empire-building occupation, I'm not trying to get a single theory of trans that covers all cases. My account of trans bases things fundamentally on the body and on the way our bodies are, and on the way we want our bodies to be, and on the way we conceive ourselves. It's not about how we're treated, in my view.

Now it's important to say that I want to reach a lot of the same conclusions as all the gender theorists that I'm going to be talking about, only from different starting points. I want to reach the same trans-inclusive conclusions about trans people having a free and equal place in society, both in the US and in Britain and in Europe. We should have full trans equality. We shouldn't be the objects of discrimination. It's just a lot of that seems to me, if it follows from anything rather than just being self-evident in itself, it follows from broad principles about justice. It doesn't follow from us having a systematic theory of transgender. We don't need that as a place from which to get our conclusions about trans equality.

And my starting point in all this, as I say, is experience, and so here's a quick autobiographical bit. I've been aware all my life, from when I was a toddler, of a mismatch between my sense of how my body ought to be and how my body apparently was, which was male. That mismatch distressed me and left me feeling wrong. And it's the kind of distress which leads some trans people, including me, to reach for the phraseology of "being born in the wrong body". And that's the phraseology that lots of people object to. There are lots of transphobes and trans-exclusionary people who say: "You can't be born in the wrong body. You're just born in the body you're born in." People say that on both sides of the aisle. Sometimes people say it with a backup of rather crude and Bible-thumping theology, God doesn't make mistakes. Sometimes people back it up by saying, well, what you need to drop here is the assumption that any body is intrinsically male or intrinsically female.

And, there I reach a point of solid disagreement with both these camps. On "God doesn't make mistakes" I want to say to them that this seems a rather cruel and harsh thing to say to people who, for example, are born with a hair lip or with spina bifida or with cerebral palsy or with other conditions. If God doesn't make mistakes, then why aren't they being invited to do nothing at all about the way they were born when for many people the right thing to do, on their own account, is for something to be done to enable them to live free of that condition? And the second thing to say about it, something that some disabled rights activists also say is, if God doesn't make mistakes, then maybe trans people should be saying, "I was born like this, and that's no mistake!" And that's something that I would want to say. I don't regard the mismatch between the gender I was assigned at birth and the gender I'm happy in as a matter of a divine mistake at all.

But on the other side, sometimes people who are more radical in their trans theory than I am say, "there's no such thing as a male sexed body or a female sexed body. Your starting point is all wrong when you say that it seems to you that you were born in the wrong body, Sophie Grace. Your starting point is all wrong because there's no such thing as a wrong body. All bodies are equally open to the impress of society. Nobody is in themselves intrinsically male or female." I'm enough of an Aristotelian to think that this is not right. I think there are clear markers of a biological sex; not just one marker but a cluster, a tick-list, and for some people not all the boxes are ticked—that’s what we mean by talking about “intersex”, and in another way it’s true of trans people too. And it seems to me that for a lot of trans people, including me, the whole of our lives is precisely about learning to live with the fact that you're born and assigned a birth gender that goes with having a body which is shaped one way, and you yourself don't feel happy or fitting in that state, in that body. You feel dysphoric, and you want to do something about it. And then the question is: what?

So this is a place where it seems to me that our emphasis should be about the body. And what we're looking for, is a way of finding a way to be happy in the body that we've got, perhaps by modifying that body. So one way that trans people go is to alter the body so that it becomes a body of the other sex from your birth sex. Very briefly, to rehearse a much more complicated argument extremely quickly: Sex is a cluster concept. Biological sex is a cluster concept. It doesn't hang just on chromosomes. It doesn't hang just on external anatomy. It doesn't hang just on internal anatomy. It doesn't hang on hormones. It doesn't hang on how you're perceived or how you perceive yourself. It's a cluster concept. There's a whole row of boxes that one might tick. People in general line up with the cluster "stereotypically male" or the cluster "stereotypically female", but lots of people don't line up that neatly. And in particular, and because it's a cluster concept, some of those boxes are changeable, in particular hormones, phenotypical morphology of the body, and, of course, whether you are taken to be a woman or a man. All of that is changeable, and changing enough of it is literally changing the sex. So that's one thing you can do. The second is to alter your social presentation so that you're taken to be someone of the other sex, that is, simply to pass. And the third is to alter your social presentation so that you're taken at any rate to be someone who's transgender, and you learn to be content and settled in that role.

So those are three ways of learning to cope with the situation. And, on this account, it's all about the body. And I want to contrast this approach with people who think that gender is all about how you're treated. I'm going to close by reviewing some views about this, all of which I'm disagreeing with because none of them, as far as I can see, base being trans on the bodily requirements that I've identified.

So here's the list:

●     Asta says, X is a woman if and only if X merits the response in a situation that X be treated in manner M, where you go on and define what manner M is. So that's about how you're treated.

●     Judith Butler: They say that to be a woman is to engage in a performative category within the discursive heteronormativity. That's gender as performance. That's not exactly about how you're treated; it's about how you perform. But, again, that seems to me, with all respect to Judith Butler, to get things wrong because, on my view, trans is about the body; it's not about how you perform.

●     Sally Haslanger says, X is a woman if and only if X is a member of a social class whose unifying feature is social subordination based on one's presumed or perceived female biological role in reproduction. And I disagree with what Sally says because this definition of Sally's is heading via the phrase "social subordination" towards the view that to be a woman is necessarily to be a member of an oppressed class. And so Sally is a gender abolitionist because she thinks we should get rid of that oppression and therefore of the class women. And, since I'm more tied to the body and to biology, I don't take that view.

●     Katharine Jenkins says, for A to have the gender identity G is for A to experience the norms that are associated with G’s in their social context.

●     Catherine MacKinnon says, to be a woman is to have a particular place in an eroticized hierarchy of sexual domination and subordination. Again, that has a distinctly gender abolitionist tone.

●     Jennifer McKitrick says, you have gender identity G if and only if you have sufficiently many, sufficiently strong dispositions to behave in particular ways in particular situations and one society considers behaving in those ways in those situations to make one a G.

●     And Rachel Cosker-Rowland says, for it to seem to you that gender G1 fits you is for you to see strong fit-based normative reasons for yourself and/or others to conceive of you and treat you as a G1 for its own sake and for it to seem to you that gender G2 does not fit you. It's for you to see strong, fit-based normative reasons for yourself and/or others to not conceive of and treat you as a G2 for its own sake.

So those are the different accounts of gender that base it on either how you're treated or on a kind of performance of gender in your society or on oppression. And those are three linked concepts: the concept of performance, the concept of how you're treated, the concept of oppression. And I want to say, if that's what gender is, and if we define what transgender is by way of what gender is, then I'm not on the bus. I want to take a different view. I want to say that being trans, in that case, is not about gender. It's about having a trans body. It's about having a relationship with your body, which is, perhaps initially – for people like me, necessarily initially – a dysphoric one. You find yourself unhappy with the way you were born, the way you started off, and you learn to do things about that in order to live a life which gets you somewhere different from your starting point and perhaps, depending on how it goes, all the way across from the category man to the category woman or vice versa; or perhaps to some more fluid position in between those categories. But in all cases it's to do with your relationship with your body. Now, that account still has important consequences for how people are treated. But norms about how we're treated follow from our relationship with our body. It's not the other way around. It's not the norms of how we should be treated that dictate our relationship with our body.

Instead of trying to have a single theory that covers all cases, we should recognize that life is more complicated than that, and we should recognize that different kinds of need can be met by different kinds of theory. Maybe something that's too simple or too narrative in structure even to be dignified by the name "theory" might be what we need in some cases. So I'm a pragmatist in this respect. I want a much more down to earth and relaxed approach than some rigorous theorists, whether trans-inclusionary or trans-exclusionary. I don't think we should be in the business of trying to go for a single all-out theory of gender that's supposed to cover everybody and if someone doesn't fit that theory, then that's their problem and not the theory’s. That seems to me to be putting things quite the wrong way around. Jesus once said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. I want to say likewise that philosophical theorizing is made for human beings, and it should fit human beings, and not the other way around.

And that gives me the freedom to be tolerant in a way that I don’t think more rigorous theorists typically are free. If I don’t fit their theories because I don’t think about gender and transgender in their preferred way, then they have to say simply that I am wrong; whereas if they don’t fit my theory, or rather my account, because they don’t think about gender and transgender in my preferred way, then I am free to say either that they are simply wrong or that even if what they say fits some people, it doesn’t fit me. As we might also say, their theory may work for some people, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Sophie Grace Chappell is a professor of philosophy at The Open University who has published over 100 articles and various books on a broad range of topics – ethics, ancient philosophy, sex and gender, literature, epistemology. Her latest book, Trans Figured: On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World, was published in 2024.

First published online on 5th April 2025

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