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Linda Brakel's new book adopts a multidimensional approach to transgender experience: conceptual, analogical, and quasi-empirical. Brakel decides not to focus on the subjectivity of trans experience, as such. As she puts it, absent will be “the always interesting, often compelling, personal and clinical accounts of and by Trans persons” (p. 5). While appreciating the value of such first-person contributions, Brakel hopes her own contribution will come from other directions.
Self. One of Brakel's goals is to consider answers to three questions about the self, often referred to within philosophy as part of personal identity theory. Brakel's questions are “ontological,” “epistemological,” and “conceptual” (p. 12). She anticipates in her introduction (chapter 1) that neither classical (chapter 2), nor modern (chapter 3), nor contemporary gender theorists’ concepts of self (chapter 4), alone or combined, will be able to answer the three questions she poses (p.15) or provide solutions for the apparent Moore's paradox problems of trans experience. She calls many accounts flatly “disappointing” (p. 66). And in a frank summary of the book's achievements (chapter 8), Brakel concludes, “on the whole, I must confess that in this short monograph I have raised many more questions than I have been able to answer” (p. 171). Given the limited positive results, I will pass over the details of what Brakel covers in those chapters to focus elsewhere.
Moore's paradox. Brakel begins early on to discuss so-called Moore's paradox assertions, baptized in G. E. Moore's name by
Wittgenstein (1953, p. 190). For example, “Can a natally-assigned girl state without incoherence: ‘I am a girl, but I don't believe that’?” (p. 3). There is a lot to unpack here, but rather than explain Moore's paradox or her approach to it in any detail in this book, Brakel on p. 9 (n. 4) points readers to an article she recently wrote with Iskra Fileva.
Fileva and Brakel (2019) give a clear definition of the paradox: