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Just as black people resisted Rachel Dolezal’s claim to be black, gender-critical feminists (and radical feminists before them) have resisted transwomen’s claims to be women. Their resistance has met with a very different reception: it is characterized as dehumanizing; hateful; transphobic; bigoted; even fascistic. There has been no serious consideration of the gender-critical feminist position—at least, by anyone who isn’t themself part of the small group of gender-critical philosophers—in the philosophical literature. It is usually ignored. In this paper, I want to engage with one of the gender-critical feminists’ most serious normative claims. In their view, it is morally wrong for transwomen to claim to be women (more basically, it is morally wrong for men to claim to be women—but transwomen are the only men doing this). My question is, are they right? This is the first philosophy paper to address the normative claim—and thus one of the central tensions between so-called ‘trans-inclusive feminism’ and gender-critical feminism—head on.

Keywords: gender-critical feminism; transwomen; self-identification; meaning of ; feminist politics; sex realism; gender-critical philosophy