Women as Victims of ‘Misogyny’: Re-centering Gender Marginalization

Among various views concerning the nature of womanhood, one difference between the materialist and the pluralist accounts is whether a woman should be defined or identified based on her typical female biological features. The former treats “woman” as the social meaning of the biological female, while the latter insists that one can be a woman by virtue of one’s internal identity without also having the normatively associated biological features. In this paper, I argue against the latter view that the inclusion or demarginalization of transwomen requires more than self-identification and that it demands the recognition of the role of ‘misogyny’.