Hi there!
My work addresses a broad set of normative, conceptual, and doctrinal issues about gender and its embodiment, with attention to medical institutions and practices, reproductive rights, race, sexuality, disability, borders, and incarceration.
My recent paper articulating a trans feminist approach to reproductive rights and pregnancy discrimination appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Signs. I have also written about how and why the prevailing understanding of gender and equality in American law has frustrated incarcerated trans women’s access to medical care and right to bodily integrity.
I’m currently finishing my PhD at the University of Arizona. I’m on the job market and look forward to defending my dissertation in May.
Curious about what my deal is? Check out my recent interviews here and here!
Research
Driven by a wave of trans-discriminatory laws, arguments, and practices, recent feminist theorizing on trans issues has focused on retrofitting trans people into existing public, legal, medical, and philosophical conceptions of gender embodiment. At the end of the day, this is a defensive and reactive strategy which attempts to make trans lives make sense first and foremost to a dominant political and cultural world, not necessarily on trans people’s own terms.
I argue for a different way forward. Engaging closely with ways in which legal, medical, and carceral institutions define, administer, discipline, and reify gender from the top down through hidden but operative conceptual frameworks, my research develops an alternative theory of gender that begins with trans people’s lived material realities from the ground up. Using evolving issues in gender equality law as my main case study, I argue that such a bottom-up theory is crucial to securing equal justice for trans people, show that it resolves long-standing conceptual and methodological problems that continue to frustrate feminist theory and politics today, and offer it as a constructive intervention to facilitate meaningful social change and self-understanding. It turns out that lived trans experiences not only pose difficult challenges to, but more constructively shed refreshing light on, our understanding of the meaning and requirements of gender equality.
Journal Articles
“Pregnant Persons as a Gender Category: A Trans Feminist Analysis of Pregnancy Discrimination” (Signs 50.3, Spring 2025)
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.
Public Writing
“Putting Gender Back into Transgender Equality: On Iglesias v. Federal Bureau of Prisons” (APA Blog, Law and Philosophy Series, September 2023)
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.
Works in Progress
Please email me for the most recent drafts! :-)
“On Our Own Terms: Trans Women Crafting the Meaning of ‘Woman’ ”
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.
“ ‘Medical Diagnosis, Not Sex or Gender Identity’: Transgender Equality and the Neutral Application Loophole”
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.
“Taking Gender Seriously”
Gender is a crucial part of the explanation for the substantive inequalities faced by trans people for being trans. Surprisingly, 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.
[paper on the relationship between gender and gender identity]
Euthyphro is a man and he identifies as a man. The identity-first view holds that Euthy-phro is a man because he identifies as a man; the gender-first view proposes that it is the other way around. This paper offers the first trans feminist argument for the gender-first view, appealing to its explanatory power and proceeding in two stages. First, I show that the gender-first view has distinctive explanatory advantages in theorizing trans people’s genders on our own terms. Next, I suggest that not only does the main challenge facing the gender-first view also arise for the identity-first view, but in tackling it, a certain family of gender-first views can tap into conceptual resources not otherwise available to any identity-first alternatives. On balance, then, the gender-first view comes out as the far more metaphysically—and, I think, methodologically and politically—promising treatment of the relationship between gender and gender identity.
Teaching
Current & Recent Courses
Sex, Gender, and Love: An Introduction to Social Philosophy (Spring 2025; Fall 2024)—new Gen Ed Exploring Perspectives: Humanist course
What is sex? Is it a mere accident that the English term ‘sex’ refers to both an activity and a system of categorization? How does sex relate to gender and love, and how might the experiences of queer and trans people both complicate and illuminate these connections? What counts as having sex in the first place, and what counts as having good sex? How should we think about pregnancy, sexuality, consent, desire, pleasure, and love in connection to sexual autonomy and gender equality? This course surveys these central questions about sex, gender, and love, and in so doing, aims to introduce students to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of social philosophy.
Feminist Philosophy (Spring 2024; Spring 2023)
flyer | description | syllabus | as WGS 101
What is the nature of patriarchy, and what would it take to smash it? Is there such a thing as “pleasure under patriarchy” in the meantime? What is it to be gendered, to be sexed, to be constructed? What does being a woman mean to queer and trans women? Who and what is feminism ultimately a movement for? In this course, we will trace the development of contemporary feminist philosophy from the early days of the women’s liberation movement to the present, with an emphasis on trans and queer voices, issues, and experiences throughout this fraught history.
Courses Taught
Law and Morality (Winter 2023; Summer 2023; Summer 2021 × 2; Summer 2020)
This course is an introduction to the philosophy of law in general and feminist philosophy of law in particular. We will consider several significant philosophical issues at the intersection of law and morality and explore their jurisprudential implications. Topics will include the nature of law, judicial discretion, constitutional and statutory interpretation, civil disobedience, racial equality, gender equality, sexual harassment, reproductive freedom, and LGBTQ+ equality.
Logic in Law (Fall 2022; Spring 2022)
This course examines logical reasoning and conceptual analysis in the law, with a focus on the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the equal protection and due process requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment. Topics will include constitutional interpretation, stare decisis, the shadow docket, racial discrimination, sex discrimination, reproductive rights, physician-assisted suicide, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Medical Ethics (Fall 2021)
In this course, we will examine a variety of normative issues in and about medicine. Many of the topics we are going to discuss are more or less standard in a medical ethics course, such as harm, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, medical paternalism and patient autonomy. But what makes our course distinct is we will also look at critical approaches that seek to challenge and expand the traditional themes and positions. Specifically, we will consider feminist relational conceptions of autonomy, the continued debate between biological determinism and social constructivism, epistemic injustice in the practice of medicine, the politics of reproductive care and gender-affirming care, the medical policing of intersex, trans, racialized and disabled bodies, and the connection between lived experiences of the body and structural injustice. In so doing, our aim is to further explore the ethics of medical care in light of its broader political and social significance.
