Gender Identity What It Is and Why It Matters

by Cosker-Rowland, Rach

• ISBN13: 9780198947981
• ISBN10: 0198947984
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780198948001
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-10-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters is the first book in philosophy to focus on gender identity and transgender rights. To be trans is to have a gender identity different from the gender you were assigned at birth. But what is it to have a gender identity? In the first part of the book, Rach Cosker-Rowland develops a new account of our gender identities as the genders that seem to best fit us. Supported by trans testimony, this subjective fit account explains why gender identities deserve respect, discusses how we can discover our gender identity, and argues for why this is practically important. It also provides an overview of cis and trans, and non-binary and binary, gender identities.

In the second part of the book, a new view of trans rights to gender marker change, legal gender recognition, gender-affirming healthcare, and sporting participation and participation is developed. Cosker-Rowland presents an integrity-based account, showing how these trans rights arise from basic liberal rights to live with integrity, to live in line with your judgements of how you ought to live, and what a good or meaningful life for you involves. Rights to live with integrity ground basic liberal rights to freedom of religious belief and expression; this book argues that they also ground trans rights.

Finally, Cosker-Rowland addresses a wide range of gender-critical feminist philosophers' views against trans rights and shows that these arguments fail.

Author Biography

Rach Cosker-Rowland, Associate Professor in Philosophy, School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, University of Leeds

Rach Cosker-Rowland is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. She has published widely in ethics, gender, and social and political philosophy including on gender identity, gender metaphysics, social epistemology, moral disagreement in ethics and political philosophy, the moral error theory, reasons and value, and metaethics. Her work has appeared in such journals such as Noûs, Ethics, and Analysis. Cosker-Rowland is the author of The Normative and the Evaluative (OUP, 2019) and Moral Disagreement (2020). She is also the co-editor of several volumes including Fittingness (OUP, 2022) and the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Disagreement (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

1. IntroductionPart 1. Gender Identity2. The Subjective Fit Account of Gender Identity3. Four Virtues of the Subjective Fit Account4. Gender Identities and Respect5. ObjectionsPart 2. The Rights and Moral Reasons that Gender Identities Generate6. Freedom of Gender7. Other Gender Freedoms and Alternative Approaches8. Rights to Gender-Affirming Healthcare9. Trans Rights to Puberty Blockers10. Trans Rights in Sport11. The Wrongs of Misgendering12. Gender-Critical Objections13. Scepticism about Gender Identity Does Gender Identity Really Matter?