How should we make sense of pregnancy discrimination as an issue of gender equality? In a striking 1974 decision, Geduldig v. Aiello, the U.S. Supreme Court has answered that we simply cannot. Pregnancy discrimination does not constitute a form of sex discrimination prohibited by law, the 6–3 decision claims, because differential treatment based on pregnancy draws only a gender-neutral line between “pregnant women” and “nonpregnant persons,” not the gender line between women and men. While courts have since invoked Geduldig to curtail both reproductive and transgender rights, the prevailing feminist response to this line of cases is still to double down on an awkwardly cissexist conception of gender, finding the sex discrimination in the “direct” way that pregnancy is thought to connect to womanhood. The failure of that prevailing feminist response, legitimizing rather than challenging biological essentialism in legal analysis and public discourse, epitomizes a broader failure of feminist analysis and intersectional solidarity: it fails to confront the political and social problem that is pregnancy discrimination for either cis or trans people. This essay offers a trans feminist alternative. I argue that pregnancy discrimination is discrimination on the basis of sex, within the legally relevant meaning of that phrase, not because pregnancy is in one way or another distinctive to women as a gender category but because pregnant persons make up a gender category of their own. On my analysis, pregnancy discrimination comes out as a form of sex discrimination directly and immediately, not by way of womanhood.

I discuss issues with what I see as a gender-neutral, cis-centric conception of gender equality that has come to dominate U.S. law, focusing on the law’s systematic failure to protect incarcerated trans women’s health and bodily integrity.

Philosophical discussions of gender have not adequately appreciated the metaphysical significance of the creative, collaborative practice by which trans people come to invent and reinvent interpretations of our bodies that for the first time make genuine sense of our lived genders and gender realities on our own terms—a practice that I call trans meaning crafting. As a result, current philosophical work has missed out a lot on what gender as an empirical phenomenon even is, never mind what it can do for trans people. Drawing on a wide range of trans meaning crafting practices with a focus on trans women’s negotiation of sexual intimacy in particular, this essay motivates an analysis of trans meaning crafting as a distinctively trans feminist approach to the metaphysics of gender, on the model of inference to the best explanation. I argue that the meanings crafted by trans people on our own terms are metaphysically privileged for the straightforward reason that they best explain gender reality as we live and interpret it. Trans meaning crafting, so clarified, brings to light an empirical and explanatory basis for affirming trans people’s lived genders, not merely a moral and political one, as the literature is increasingly resorting to.

Conceptual hang-ups can have real, material consequences. In a recent wave of cases, a growing number of federal courts in the U.S. have held that it is conceptually impossible for discriminatory legislation targeting trans people to violate constitutional guarantees of gender equality on the theory that trans-discriminatory legislation applies equally to all trans persons regardless of gender. In fact, some have gone still further to suggest that such legislation cannot be said to target trans people in the first place since the discrimination may be easily redescribed as applicable to only persons diagnosed with gender dysphoria, only persons seeking gender-affirming care, or only some other category of persons similarly thought to be gender-neutral—but not trans persons as a class. Anticipating a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the merits of these arguments in June 2025, this essay uncovers the social metaphysics and political philosophy taken for granted by mainstream gender equality law which give rise to the neutral application loophole, and in so doing, proposes the first trans feminist alternative.

Gender is a crucial part of the explanation for the substantive inequalities faced by trans people for being trans. Surprisingly, however, most feminist and trans philosophers today do not approach transgender equality meaningfully in gender equality terms. This essay develops and defends a trans feminist account that finally does. I start with the positive project of articulating this trans feminist account by distinguishing it from two leading analyses of transgender discrimination in U.S. law. I argue that transgender equality constitutes an issue of gender equality not because it has to do with sex understood as reproductive biology or sex stereotypes understood as the social roles and expectations of our assigned sex, but because it concerns the equality of persons systematically disadvantaged by the social meaning of our bodies being interpreted as trans—the equality of trans persons considered as a gender category for critical feminist analytical purposes. I then contrast my view with a gender-neutral, autonomy-based alternative currently popular in trans philosophy. The gender-neutral alternative fails, I conclude, precisely because it does not take the gender in transgender equality seriously.