The ontology of sex and gender: beyond essentialism and constructivism

This paper investigates the ontological status of sex/gender categories within feminist metaphysics and advances a novel account of their nature. While traditional approaches tend to vacillate between biological essentialism and social constructivism—each facing conceptual and explanatory limitations—we argue that sex/gender categories are better conceived as emergent social kinds. Integrating Ian Hacking’s dynamic nominalism with Jessica Wilson’s theory of metaphysical emergence, we develop a model in which sex/gender categories arise from complex social interactions and relational processes, yet display internal structure and autonomous causal powers. This non-essentialist form of social realism accommodates both the historical contingency of these categories and the robustness, reality, and explanatory significance of the phenomena they denote. Keywords: Feminist metaphysics, sex/gender ontology, social emergence, non-essentialist realism.