• Ethics,  Gender,  Kinds,  Metaphysics,  Sexuality

    Problems of Kind and Identity: Why Gender Claims are Difficult to Ground

    2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: “I am black”“I am a woman”“I am French” It was not obvious what it was that made a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let’s think about gender for a minute.…