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Trans inclusive legal and political concepts
This article draws from Dennis Paterson’s Dworkin on the Semantics of Legal and Political Concepts and explores the legal and political fallacies laid out by gender critics at law. A central tenet of gender critical discourse is its reliance on the natural order of things to create a legal and societal scaffold for the exclusion of trans women at law, as well as the erasure of non-binary identities and denial of trans manhood.
The relationship between sex-based problems in legal theory and the philosophy of language have been a leitmotif in British jurisprudence for the better part of 90 years going back to trans men such as Ewan Forbes and Michael Dillon. This is best seen as a local variant of global realism/anti-realism debate within the philosophy of language, with legal scholars and practitioners agreeing that legal problems can be approached through the use of the philosophy of language.
Gender critics argue that sex both at law and within society is a function of what Ronald Dworkin in Justice in Robes calls a deep structure, namely that the meaning of natural kinds of things is a function of the deep structure of the things to which the term refers. Gender critics make two claims: metaphysically natural kinds are identical to their underlying nature, and semantically natural kinds are directly referential. Namely, the meaning of sex…
