How can the division of resources be systematically unfair even if it is not intended to be so? Existing models have found conditionally majority- or minority-favoring phenomena that are called the cultural Red King and Red Queen effects respectively, named after analogous effects in evolutionary biology. These effects surface even if agents do not “mean” for them to, as emergent properties of how the dynamics of the system develop. I first consider interventions that might contravene or magnify these effects, such as what happens if just a fraction of one group behaves with unconditional aggression? 

Then, I make an addition to the models that has not been deeply explored in the literature: I embed the agents in a world, i.e. I allow them to have spatial relationships with one another. This immediately changes the dynamics of the model, and allows novel minimal conditions of unfairness to surface. Once the agents have a networked world to live in, it’s natural to wonder what happens when they are granted the ability to move within that world. With this mobility, further seemingly benign asymmetries turn out to have unexpected effects.

In the final chapter I consider how segregation develops (or fails to develop) within these models. The surprising result is that inequity in resource division facilitates greater-than-random levels of integration in these models. Even the group that receives the metaphorical short end of the stick prefers to interact with the outgroup that is mistreating them, because this mistreatment is reliable where the behavior of their in-group is not.

Social constructionism and nativism have long constituted opposing camps in discussions of gender, and a significant area of contention between the two is the etiology of trans experience. This causes the two camps to give negative and affirmative answers respectively to the title question. The epistemic situation makes this border war difficult to adjudicate: transhistorical and transcultural variations in regimes of gender provide good evidence for the social constructionist; authoritative first-person narratives, meanwhile, give the nativist their own sturdy ground. I argue that the contradiction in views is caused by the equivocation of trans and dysphoria, which functions as a Trojan Horse to smuggle in the conclusions of both parties. Once this is unraveled, it becomes clear that trans carries different senses for a social constructionist versus a nativist, and it is possible to reconcile these. The baby born in the genderless woods may not grow up to be trans qua relationship to hegemonic regime of gender, but it may easily be trans qua having dispositions and behaviors that read, to us, as trans. 

After decades of attempts at the question, “what is a woman?” answers abound. Many—though not all—accounts within the trans-inclusive milieu emphasize two conditions that any definition of “woman” must meet: first, that “woman” is a gender category essentially characterized by a social position featuring a certain kind of structural subordination; and second, that “sincere” self-identification as a woman ought to be sufficient for being a woman. Within this family, answers to the gender question include the ameliorative (Sally Haslanger & Katharine Jenkins), the dispositional (Jennifer McKitrick), the deflationary (Louise Antony), the norms-based (Rowan Bell), and the unrealist (Nathan Howard & N.G. Laskowski). Unfortunately, answers also consistently fail on one of the two aforementioned conditions, because these conditions tend to cross-cut one another. A definition of “woman” can prioritize the social position condition as sufficient—that “woman” is defined by occupying a certain position within the matrix of social relations. The definition can instead designate self-identification as sufficient—that “woman” is defined by a belief about oneself, or about the adoption of relevant norms by oneself, and so on.

It has been difficult for any account of “woman” to establish both conditions as sufficient without self-contradiction. Definitions assigning sufficiency to social position, it seems, fail to capture all cases of self-identification, because self-identification as “woman” does not guarantee occupying the social position defined as “woman”. Positing that self-identification is sufficient, meanwhile, meets objections from those who use the same fact in the opposite direction: if self-identification as “woman” does not guarantee a particular social position, and “woman” is characterized by a social position (of, say, subordination based on expected roles in the division of labor), then surely self-identification cannot be enough to be a woman. This puts anyone searching for a comprehensive definition of “woman” in a bind.

I want to consider a distinct question: when is a woman? This question is inflected differently, surfacing contingencies and fluidities. Take a spectrum of examples: someone sleeps dreamlessly in a bed, oblivious to the world and unperceived by it. Are they a woman? The same person is awake, alone and lost in thoughts that have nothing to do with gender. How about now? What about when they are in a crowd, not worried about gender but being perceived as a woman all the same? Any trans-inclusive respondent should suggest that there is critical information missing from the examples and that we are therefore precluded from answering the question. This respondent, unlike a cisnormative respondent, would also deem biological facts about the subject of the question irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what they “have”, what medical procedures they may have undergone, or what gendersex they were assigned at birth.

What remains? Only this: how would they answer, “are you a woman?” But this is far from a simple question. The sleeping subject can give no answer, and is at most passively in possession of beliefs about womanhood, but perhaps they have given an answer. The lone wakeful subject can give an answer which may or may not differ from a previous answer. And the scrutinized subject can give an answer which may or may not contradict the answer others would impose on them. This interplay demonstrates how I would characterize the work of defining “woman”: a move within a language game, neither something more (ontologically) nor anything less (materially). This interplay features two opposing forces: the exogenous force of womanizing, of doing gender to another by attribution of “woman”, and the endogenous, more authoritative force of womaning, of doing gender as the self by declaration (in various ways) of “woman”. But critically, neither force is independent of the other: womanizing often motivates womaning, and womaning as a rule will trigger womanizing. The double-bind of defining “woman” is not a knot that we can unravel, but a Necker cube that must be seen for both its aspects. And critically, womanizing is not woman-making, but comes for us all one way or another.

This view has several pertinent upshots for gender attribution and explanation. It relieves anyone making gender claims of the demands of meeting underlying ontological conditions of their gender, allowing self-identification to stand on its own. In this vein, it motivates respecting gender claims much the same as one would motivate respecting a name. Likewise it undoes the concern for “sincerity” in gender claims, which I argue is a red herring that in practice is only mobilized trans-antagonistically. It can make comfortable explanatory room not only for gender-fluidity, but also for the outgrowth of neogenders, each of which has a corresponding agential move in the language-game analogous to womaning. This, ultimately, has the clarifying consequence that the subordinating structures that characterize the matrix of gender are not necessarily coextensive with self-identification claims, but they will be responsive to them. In other words: structural womanizing produces and responds not only to instances of womaning but to virtually any Xing for any self-identified gender X. This is thus a story that meets both the social position and the self-identification conditions on any successful tale of “woman”, and of genders more broadly.