• Acknowledgements


• Preface


• 1: Two Notions of Essence


• 2: Gender and Social Normativity


• 3: Human Organisms, Social Individuals and Persons


• 4: The Argument for Gender Essentialism


• 5: The Person, the Social Individual and the Self


• Epilogue Gender Essentialism and Feminist Politics


• Select Bibliography

Charlotte Witt is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle and Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics. She is also the editor of Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, and the co-editor of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity . She lives in Portland, Maine with her family.

The Metaphysics of Gender is a book about gender essentialism: what it is and why it might be true.