Affirmation without Assent

This paper deals with the ethics of gender affirmation – or, as I frame it, the ethics of responding to gender identity claims. Drawing on Stephen Darwall’s concept of recognition respect, I make the case for a moral duty of affirmation: conceived of as a duty to affirm a person’s standing to self-theorise. In this I break from other philosophical treatments of the issue, separating the ethics of affirmation from the ethics of assent. In a social world characterised by uncertainty and reasonable disagreement about the metaphysics of sex and gender, we can all expect others to respect our standing to self-theorise. But because of that disagreement, I argue, this rarely (if ever) entails that others are under a duty to acquire the belief (or to aspire to acquire the belief) that we actually are a member of the gender category with which we have claimed identification. Recognising that affirmation and assent come apart in this way, I go on to demonstrate, can help us in navigating a number of fraught contemporary disputes.