ABSTRACT
A recent study portrays a devastating picture of material disadvantages trans people in the USA face. This chapter outlines how trans discrimination involves a complex intermingling of material and symbolic discriminatory forces. Philosophical literature on discrimination is extensive, and surveying it in full here is not possible. Well-known feminist writings on discrimination have focused on employment sex discrimination. The feminist legal theorist and philosopher, Catharine MacKinnon, has famously argued that this understanding of sex discrimination misunderstands the source of such discrimination. One of the most disturbing forms of transmaterial discrimination is transphobic violence and harassment. Reality enforcement is a type of symbolic discrimination against trans people. In order to combat reality enforcement, Bettcher argues that, rather than thinking of trans* identities as being aberrant or somehow in need of explanation, we ought to 'accept the self-identity claims of all trans people as presumptively valid and true without requesting justification as a condition of acceptance'.
