This paper critically addresses the logics of exceptionality inherent to emerging regulations of the gender field, with a focus on Spain’s recent self-determination-based regulation of gender. To achieve this, it offers a biopolitical analysis of the concept of “public order” and its influence on gender governance, drawing parallels to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception and exploring the connections between contemporary regulations and the gendered public order of nineteenth-century France. Finally, it analyzes the exclusions and restrictions that the Spanish trans law reserves for migrants, non-binary people, and minors, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the limitations to gender autonomy in contemporary Western societies.

Purportedly in line with the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) commitment to end poverty and gender inequality by 2030, conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) provide poor households with cash contingent on parents making human capital investments in their children. Advocates claim CCTs empower and so benefit women and girls. Critics worry the programs reinforce gendered expectations by tying social protection to “good mothering.” The aim of this paper is to assess whether CCTs are compatible with the SDGs’ stated aims with regards to Goal 5 on gender equality and empowerment. I argue that CCTs run contrary to the stated aims of SDG 5. CCTs rely on and perpetuate sexist ideology about women while simultaneously policing women’s behavior to ensure they fulfill the state’s conception of a “good mother.” Notwithstanding the potential benefits women receive from CCTs, the programs prevent the disruption of power relations by reinforcing norms that incentivize women to engage in self-subordinating ways in exchange for cash. Given that the programs re-entrench and police gender norms, CCTs thwart progress towards SDG 5 and so move us no closer to a gender equal world.

Luce Irigaray offers a critical account of feminist desire in response to Hegelian, Freudian, and Lacanian models of desire based on lack. However, she reproduces anti-Black and colonial logics within her feminist, supposedly liberatory accounts of desire, thereby creating false utopias and limiting possibilities for liberatory struggle. This article brings Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) into conversation with theorists in critical Black studies. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s articulation of Unpayable Debt (2022) and Joy James’ concept of the captive maternal (James 2015; James 2016; James 2021; James 2022), I offer a radical proposal for the abolition of desire. Following revolutionary abolitionisms’ dual method of destruction and creation, I theorize both the destruction of the death-dealing concepts and practices of desire, as well as a sketch of revolutionary love as the inventive dimension of the abolition of desire. The features of revolutionary love that I engage include a valuing of freedom by any means necessary (including sacrifice) and a commitment to social life that honors and defends unpayable debts. Revolutionary love embodies difference without separability, toward the abolition and decolonization of the (colonial, anti-Black, racial capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal) world as we know it, rather than its reformation.

The starting point of this paper is a clarification of the forms that hermeneutical injustice takes for bisexual individuals. While it is often thought that bisexuals do not need special protections or politics because they easily “pass” for straight and thus enjoy so-called hetero privilege, this precise situation is a source of oppression, silencing, erasure, and discrimination for many of them within both straight and gay environments. Bi-invisibility, bi-erasure, and persistent negative stereotypes contribute to specific forms of hermeneutical injustice for this segment of the population. Reflection on these forms, however, as well as reflection on bisexual identity, highlights some problematic aspects connected to the metaphor of hermeneutical “gaps” and the underlying theoretical model that are often used or assumed in research on epistemic injustice. With the aim of clarifying and responding to such difficulties, I introduce Wittgenstein's notion of hinges as a conceptual tool to better understand these phenomena. The case of bisexuality shows that seeing hermeneutical injustice in the light of the metaphor of hinges, instead of that of gaps, helps better grasp its features, its causes, and the forms that it can assume.

This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept's term and its subsequent decontextualization.

The paper presents a Wittgensteinian account of the concept woman, in terms of family resemblance. This approach is deemed superior to the Carnapian account, championed by Sally Haslanger, in that it allows for more inclusivity and to locate the source of sexism not so much in the very concept of woman but in the beliefs sexist people have about women. The compatibility of this account with semantic externalism is explored, as well as its relationship with stereotypes and paradigmatic examples of women. It is further shown how present-day attempts to extend the application of the concept of woman beyond human females may be made sense in terms of a change of hinges—that is, of the rules of evidential significance, which a community of speakers brings to bear on the determination of whether a person is a woman. Finally, it is argued that, despite Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical quietism, such an account is politically significant. This in turn shows that in fact Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical pronouncements far from being inimical to political and societal change may in fact be conducive to it.

In this paper, we consider a range of trans-inclusive approaches to gender concepts and how they relate to the world, from family resemblance theories to conceptual engineering. In so doing, we shall also examine several concepts that are analogous to gender and other controversial and not-so-controversial concepts, such as “vegan cheese” and “adoptive parents.” Having assessed their merits and demerits, we argue that our gender concepts are not fixed in stone but, rather, evolve alongside human practices and behavior.