Björkholm, Stina | 2024
Social Epistemology
According to contextualism, a gender term such as ‘woman’ does not invariantly refer to a specific social or biological kind. Instead, gender terms have different extensions depending on the context of utterance. Contextualism accommodates that speakers are perfectly able to use gender terms in very different ways and still be coherent and successful in their communicative exchanges. However, while the flexibility of contextualism is its primary asset, it has also turned out to be its potential demise. The worry is that the view not only makes trans-including claims true but also allows that trans-excluding claims can be true and therefore, does justice to the claims of trans people only in a trivial sense. This paper defends the view that contextualists can respond to this worry by showing why trans-excluding claims are often morally problematic even in contexts where they are true. Contextualists are well-equipped to say that when speakers insist on using gender terms in trans-excluding ways, they engage in a meta-linguistic negotiation about how gender terms ought to be used – where using them trans-excluding is treated as normatively superior. This constitutes a kind of epistemic injustice.
