Gender Identity, First-Person Authority, and Belief

Abstract

Talia Bettcher (2009) has defended a principle known as “The First-Person Authority” (FPA) of gender avowals. Gender avowals are a specific kind of speech acts, namely, present-tense gender ascriptions from the first-person point of view (which we can also call gender self-identifications). This principle has given rise to an interesting debate about what is the best way of articulating and defending the principle in a manner that is useful for promoting the rights of trans people. In this paper, I argue that an adequate explanation of the epistemology of gender self-identifications involves the insight that our knowledge of our attitudinal mental states is based in part on introspection of the conscious manifestations of these very dispositional mental states. That is, it is part of the nature of propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires that they can be manifested, under certain manifesting conditions, in the form of conscious mental states. Thus, given the strong connection between a disposition and its manifestations, the fact that we can know some of the dispositions’ manifestations by introspection explains why I can have an epistemic advantage over other people who are not able to know the conscious manifestations of my mental attitudes by introspection.