Robin Dembroff

Robin Dembroff, Ph.D is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Yale University. They have written extensively about gender and associated topics such as pronouns and sexuality. In addition to gender and LGBT-related concerns, their areas of research include metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

Dembroff was raised in a conservative fundamentalist Christian household and, although they were "a gender nonconforming kid from the start", they remained closeted until the age of 21. They were mostly homeschooled before attending The Bible Institute of Los Angeles, a fundamentalist Christian college known as Biola for short, where they majored in philosophy. Spiritually, they are now agnostic. They went on to attend the University of Notre Dame and Princeton University for further philosophy education.

Work
Dembroff has written multiple articles with implications for non-binary gender, both in academic philosophy and the popular press.

In a 2018 paper co-authored with Daniel Wodak, Dembroff makes an ethical argument against using gendered pronouns to refer to genderqueer individuals. The authors also defend a more radical claim, asserting that there are ethical reasons to reject using gendered pronouns in general.

In their 2020 paper "Beyond the Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Kind", Dembroff argues that, through a narrow focus on only "men" and "women", previous approaches to understanding the metaphysics of gender contribute to "systematic misunderstandings" of genderqueer persons (here used as an umbrella term). Dembroff proposes a new concept, "critical gender kinds", defined as groups whose members subvert dominant gender ideologies. Since genderqueer people reject exclusive categorization as a binary gender, Dembroff argues that they constitute a possible "critical gender kind".

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