ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a theory of gender categories motivated by a political value we call gender self-determination, which says that we should categorize people according to their expressed wishes rather than according to our own presuppositions or projections. Gender self-determination requires us to treat gender categories as irreducible in a certain sense: whether we classify someone as a man, a woman, nonbinary, etc. cannot be settled by their sexed biological features, their gendered behaviors, their feels about sexed biological features and gendered behaviors, or the norms that a cissexist society subjects them to. This irreducibility is sometimes thought to pose a metaphysical or conceptual problem and to make gender categories mysterious or viciously circular. We argue that there is no circularity problem for irreducible gender categories, and we sketch a positive theory of what such categories might be like.
