ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the authors (two trans philosophers in the United States), the audience we’re writing for (people who are broadly sympathetic to trans rights but feel philosophically uneasy about some of the terms of the “gender debate”, as well as people struggling to make sense of their own gendered experiences using available vocabulary), and our aims (to introduce new conceptual tools to clarify conversations about “gender”). We consider nine oft-repeated claims about what “gender” is, which we call “Problematic Slogans”. While most of the problematic slogans are truths about something, they’re not all truths about the same thing. We introduce the idea that the conceptual ambiguity of “gender” poses structural obstacles to knowing and understanding the phenomena it covers – often to the particular detriment of trans people.
