This will, of course, involve having a norm that allows for shitty and oﬀensive views.' And so I think it’s imperative, if we want to protect the ability of the truly vulnerable to be heard and to question consensus, that we have a norm of allowing views that go against the political grain.

In fact I’m very conﬁdent of the opposite. 'If I was conﬁdent that the progressive elite of academia would always be on the side of right, then I wouldn’t be too worried about a norm of discourse that says you can shout down views that you ﬁnd oﬀensive or that you are politically opposed to. But gender is hard, and our understanding of gender is very much culturally in ﬂux at the moment, so I don’t pretend to have the answers here.' I think that isn’t true, so my work has been an attempt to add to the conversation around the options for things we could think about gender. 'For whatever reason, people who are critical of the idea that sincere gender self-identiﬁcation needs to be treated as accurate and authoritative often seem to think that we can only treat gender self-identiﬁcation as authoritative by denying the importance of the body to gender, or by saying that gender is merely a matter of personal feeling (and thus giving up on materialist or structuralist theories of gender). All that to say, it’s complicated, and I’ve grown wary of answering questions like this at a highly abstracted level.' Disability often involves complex health conditions, and there is striking socioeconomic disparity in whether parents can manage the cost and even in some cases just the time such health conditions can demand. Disability often involves caretaking work undertaken by others - what Eva Kittay calls the labor of dependence - and again in the world we inhabit this is work that disproportionality falls on women, especially women of color, and is poorly compensated.

' Disability, even if neutral, invariably requires accommodation, and accommodation is, in the world we inhabit, a scarce resource.

Flora schreiber sybil