This book manuscrispt investigates the nature of gender identity and why gender identities matters for our moral and political rights and for the genders we are. The first part of the book proposes a new account of gender identity on which our gender identities consist in our normative experiences of the gender that it is fitting to treat us as. The second part of the book argues that, because of their normative nature, our gender identities generate integrity-based rights to freedom of gender, to gender-affirming healthcare, to sporting accommodation. The third part of the book argues for a view in the metaphysics of gender on which having a G gender identity is at least sufficient for being a member of gender G. Some of the material from this book project has been published as papers. Take a look at my publications for pdfs of all the relevant publications.

In October 2022 I curated and ran an exhibition, Stories of Gender in West Yorkshire at Leeds City Museum in Central Leeds with Leeds Museums and Galleries. The museum featured interactive oral histories from trans people in West Yorkshire, clothing, badges, and placards from the West Yorkshire Queer Stories collection, as well as zines and other work by local trans artists, an interactive ‘My Gender Mixtape’ activity, and interactive video interviews with trans philosophers about gender identity and gender. The exhibition used materials from the West Yorkshire Queer Stories Archive and Cat Lane’s Breaking the Binary exhibition. It was attended by over 400 people over two days. Materials from the exhibition will be available here soon.

Chris Howard and I edited the first book focussed on the normative notion of fit. This OUP volume explores the nature, roles, and applications of the notion of fittingness in contemporary normative and metanormative philosophy. The fittingness relation is the relation in which a response stands to a feature of the world when that feature merits, or is worthy of, that response. In the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, this normative notion of fittingness played a prominent role in the theories of the period’s most influential ethical theorists, and in recent years has regained prominence, promising to enrich the theoretical resources of contemporary theorists working in the philosophy of normativity. This volume is the first central discussion of the notion to date. It is composed of seventeen new chapters covering a range of topics including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relation(s) between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. In addition to making important contributions to the debates in the philosophy of normativity with which they’re concerned, these chapters together support the hypothesis that notion of fittingness has great theoretical utility in investigating a range of normative matters, across a variety of domains.

I have published several papers on the epistemological and metaphysical implications of moral disagreement which you can find in the publications section of this site. I also published a guidebook on moral disagreement which is an opinionated guide to discussions about the impact of moral disagreement on political philosophy, applied ethics, applied epistemology, metaethics, and moral epistemology. I am currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Disagreement.

My first book, the Normative and the Evaluative, was the first book-length motivation and defence of the buck-passing account of value according to which for something to be valuable is just for there to be reasons to have positive attitudes towards it. According to this account, for pleasure to be good there need to be reasons for us to desire and pursue it. Likewise for liberty and equality to be values there have to be reasons for us to promote and preserve them. Extensive discussion has focussed on some of the problems that the buck-passing account faces, such as the 'wrong kind of reason' problem. Less attention, however, has been paid as to why we should accept the buck-passing account or what the theoretical pay-offs and other implications of accepting it are. The Normative and the Evaluative provides the first comprehensive motivation and defence of the buck-passing account of value. I argue that the buck-passing account explains several important features of the relationship between reasons and value, as well as the relationship between the different varieties of value, in a way that its competitors do not. I show that alternatives to the buck-passing account are inconsistent with important views in normative ethics, uninformative, and at odds with the way in which we should see practical and epistemic normativity as related. In addition, and I extend the buck-passing account to provide an account of moral properties as well as all other normative and deontic properties and concepts, such as fittingness and ought, in terms of reasons.