On Our Own Terms: Equality and the Social Meaning of Bodies

Abstract

On Our Own Terms develops an analysis of transgender equality as an element, requirement, and condition of gender equality. Engaging closely with how legal, medical, and carceral institutions define, administer, discipline, and reify gender from the top down through hidden conceptual frameworks, I argue that an adequate treatment of transgender equality in particular and gender equality more broadly must take seriously both the gender (the social metaphysics) and the equality (the political and legal philosophy) of gender equality, not just one or the other. In turn, I present a new analysis of what gender is and how it works that begins with queer trans women’s lived material realities and insurgent gender practices from the ground up, breaking away from prevailing alternatives which primarily seek to retrofit trans experiences into dominant conceptual frameworks and social institutions. I suggest that getting this right is crucial to securing equal justice for trans people, offer it as a constructive intervention to facilitate meaningful self-understanding, legal protection, and social change, and show that it resolves long-standing conceptual and methodological problems that continue to frustrate feminist theory and politics today. The upshot is that transgender equality not only poses difficult challenges to, but more crucially sheds refreshing light on, our understanding of the meaning and requirements of gender equality.