Gender Norms and Gendered Traits

Gender oppression is sustained in part through enforcement of and compliance with gender norms. Understanding how they work is therefore salient to the goal of gender liberation.According to the category-based view, which is common in analytic feminist philosophy, gender norms are assigned to individuals based on their assigned gender category, such as woman or man. I argue that this is insufficient, because it ignores the experiences of those who are marginalized or excluded from those categories. On a category-based view, individual responsiveness to gender norms will track gender category assignment; only individuals assigned the category woman will be responsive to and evaluated under feminine norms, and so forth. However, many trans and GNC people experience themselves as responsive to norms that were not assigned to them. For example, a person who hasn't been assigned the category woman may nevertheless feel that they ought to follow feminine norms. This cross-category norm responsiveness has considerable power over choice and behavior; but a category-based view does not explain this it. Moreover, many marginalized people are actively excluded from dominant, white-centric, cisnormative gender categories. However, the norms associated with these categories are nevertheless enforced on marginalized in particularly brutal ways, in part because they are not afforded full gender category membership. In neither of these cases does the category-based view in fact capture the way gender norms are enforced or experienced as normative. I argue that gender norms primarily operate by attaching to traits. Traits are descriptive features of individuals or groups, which are coded as masculine or feminine in a context. Dominant social contexts mandate the coherence of a set of traits; if some individual or group exemplifies a feminine-coded trait, they are thereby expected to exemplify the rest of the set. However, individuals who are disposed to express a trait which does no