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What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debates about gender, both within philosophy and in public discourse.

Growing efforts are being made to highlight the importance of gender identity to gender categorization. Philosophical theories of gender have traditionally focused on gender role—the social norms, obligations, and positions that others impose on you based on perceived gender. But the experiences of trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people have shown that an exclusive focus on gender role is inadequate for theorizing gender. We also need to consider a person’s relationship to gender categories and gender norms. Two people might both be perceived by others as women, but while one thinks of herself as a woman the other thinks of themself as genderqueer. And this difference in gender self-identification is not merely a difference in personal feeling. A gender nonconforming woman and a genderqueer person—even if they are treated similarly by others—will often experience and navigate gender norms and roles quite differently, and this difference matters to a full understanding of gender.

In what follows, I am by no means attempting to dispute that gender identity is an important aspect of gender and gender categorization. Rather, I’m going to argue that we shouldn’t swing the pendulum too far the other way. It’s become increasingly common, in both popular and philosophical explanations of gender, to claim that gender identity uniquely determines one’s gender, that is, that gender categorization is solely a matter of gender self-identification. That, I’ll argue, is too strong. While gender identity matters, it isn’t the sole determinant of gender.

Identity-based views of gender categorization put a cognitive requirement on gender membership. One must identify as gender x in order to be classed as gender x. Identifying as gender x, at least on extant philosophical theories of gender identity, is a matter of complex social reasoning and self-understanding. It requires awareness of various social norms and roles (and, moreover, an awareness of them as gendered), the ability to articulate one’s own relationship to those norms and roles, and so on. But many cognitively disabled people have little or no access to language. Many tend not to understand social norms, much less to identify those norms as specifically gendered. And many lack the type of social and interpersonal awareness to be able to make judgements about their own ‘sense of gender’. This won’t, of course, be the case for all cognitively disabled people, and it’s important to acknowledge that there is a wide range of cognitive and social experiences that fall within the broad heading ‘cognitive disability’. In what follows, I don’t mean to paint all cognitively disabled people with the same broad brush, or to assume that all cognitively disabled people are incapable of having a strongly felt sense of gender self-identification. One only needs to look, for example, at the vibrant drag culture among some people with Downs Syndrome to see how richly some people with cognitive disabilities experience gender via self-expression and self-identification.

But the wide range of cognitive disability—and the specific ways in which cognitive disability can affect social understanding and social reasoning—make it plausible that many cognitively disabled people simply don’t have this type of highly developed sense of their own.

https://philarchive.org/rec/BARGWG