Conclusion

This concluding chapter briefly outlines the aims and objectives of the book. It explains disinterpellation, which emerges when a patient is diagnosed with sex characteristics that contest their gender identity resulting in feelings of subjective incoherence. This incoherence is described as a tear in the fabric of knowledge where two forces, social ideals (two sexes) and scientific fact (sex variance) pull in opposite directions. The chapter provides a brief outline of an epistemic framework, dynamic coherentism, which was designed to analyse disinterpellation through integrating both the social and natural science perspectives. It highlights the three different metaphysical positions explored within this framework as a means of resolving disinterpellation: essentialism, naturalism and emergentism. It concludes that a combination of emergentism and a reinvigoration of Hume’s distinctions best resolve disinterpellation.