Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University)

In this master class, we will review a variety of approaches to the philosophy of gender and transgender, including some very theoretically laden approaches, and my own approach, which is much more sceptical about our need for a theory of gender – partly because of my general scepticism about theory-building in philosophy, and partly because I distrust both the anti-trans gatekeeping assumption that we are not entitled to be transgender until we have justified ourselves by presenting a philosophical theory  of transgender, and the pro-trans response that starts by implicitly or explicitly accepting this assumption.

Sophie Grace Chappell is a professor of philosophy at The Open University who has published over 100 articles and various books on a broad range of topics – ethics, ancient philosophy, sex and gender, literature, epistemology. Her latest book, Trans Figured: On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World, was published in 2024.