Filosofie & Praktijk - Volume 46, Issue 1, 2025

Antigender ideologues argue that gender identity is a phantasy and that ‘sex’ is the rock bottom of who we are. Even some feminists take a ‘gender critical’ position. These thinkers oppose phantasy to reality and hold oversimplified ideas about the embodiment of gender. I argue for an understanding of gender in which imagination plays a role, but that does not have a simple referent: gender as narrative. My inspiration is Ricoeur’s recently published Lectures on Imagination (2024) and his ideas about narrative identity (1992). Applying Ricoeur’s notion of productive imagination to gender, I argue that gender is bodily and implies the stories of others, and that it pertains to a person’s life story that may change over time. I end with asking why it are only transgender people that in therapy are asked to tell their gender story. If we would all tell that story, we would soon find out that every story differs.

This article takes as its starting point the controversy around the assumed sex of boxer Imane Khelif during the 2024 Summer Olympics to consider the history of sex tests in the Olympic Games. This history shows us that when unruly bodies that cannot conform to a binary notion of sex emerge, people start to look for signifiers of sex on different locations on or in the body: from secondary and primary sex characteristics, to chromosomes and hormone levels. This article discusses how each of these different locations are accompanied by different forms of mediation and abstraction that are not neutral, but rather mask how our ideas of biological sex are always already influenced by cultural assumptions of gender. This article concludes by reflecting on the effects that the belief in the absolute and immutable biological origin of sex has on gendered differences in sports.