About

Robin Dembroff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Their areas of interest include Social Ontology, Feminist Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Religion. Dembroff's work focuses on these fields, contributing to ongoing discussions and scholarship within these domains. They are actively involved in the academic community at Yale, engaging with students and colleagues through teaching and research activities. Contact information for Professor Dembroff includes an email address (robin.dembroff@yale.edu), a phone number (+1 203-432-1668), and a physical office location at 451 College Street, New Haven, CT 06511-6629.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social psychology
• History
• Psychoanalysis
• Mathematics
• Gender studies
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• So Who’s the “Man”?

  The Harvard Review of Philosophy · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• People’s beliefs about pronouns reflect both the language they speak and their ideologies.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2024-04-22 · 4 citations

  article

  Pronouns often convey information about a person's social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender nonbinary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode (if any) and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled speakers of two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., "he" for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., "o" for anyone). Participants' reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and-critically-participants' social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants' ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Intersection Is Not Identity, or How to Distinguish Overlapping Systems of Injustice

  2024-03-19 · 5 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated although inseparable, and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Doing Justice: Ethical Considerations Identifying and Researching Transgender and Gender Diverse People in Insurance Claims Data

  Journal of Medical Systems · 2024-10-12 · 7 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior author

  Data on the health of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people are scarce. Researchers are increasingly turning to insurance claims data to investigate disease burden among TGD people. Since claims do not include gender self-identification or modality (i.e., TGD or not), researchers have developed algorithms to attempt to identify TGD individuals using diagnosis, procedure, and prescription codes, sometimes also inferring sex assigned at birth and gender. Claims-based algorithms introduce epistemological and ethical complexities that have yet to be addressed in data informatics, epidemiology, or health services research. We discuss the implications of claims-based algorithms to identify and categorize TGD populations, including perpetuating cisnormative biases and dismissing TGD individuals' self-identification. Using the framework of epistemic injustice, we outline ethical considerations when undertaking claims-based TGD health research and provide suggestions to minimize harms and maximize benefits to TGD individuals and communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• She/He, Whe/Ble: Lay Beliefs About Encoding Social Identities in Pronouns

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies

  2023-04-25 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies

  2023-04-25

  preprintOpen access

  Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Content-Focused Epistemic Injustice

  2022-12-14 · 23 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content-focused. We describe several cases of content-focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine form of epistemic injustice that stands in intertwined relationships to other forms of epistemic injustice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Much Gender Is Too Much Gender?

  2021-03-30 · 12 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter considers a further normative question: whether we ought to have gender-specific terms in natural language at all. They argue that natural languages ought to have only non-gender-specific pronouns, honorifics, suffixes, and generics on the grounds that gender-specific expressions tend to have stigmatizing and stereotyping effects on certain genders, exclude certain individuals who fall outside of its grammaticalized categories, and force speakers into a bind to either deceive or disclose gender information. Rather than proliferate gendered expressions, which may lead to misrepresentation in practice, they suggest eliminating them from natural languages altogether.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind [Chinese]

  PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Chinese translation courtesy of Zhuanxu Xu. We want to know what gender is. But metaphysical approaches to this question solely have focused on the binary gender kinds men and women. By overlooking those who identify outside of the binary–the group I call ‘genderqueer’–we are left without tools for understanding these new and quickly growing gender identifications. This metaphysical gap in turn creates a conceptual lacuna that contributes to systematic misunderstanding of genderqueer persons. In this paper, I argue that to better understand genderqueer identities, we must recognize a new type of gender kind: critical gender kinds, or kinds whose members collectively resist dominant gender ideology. After developing a model of critical gender kinds, I suggest that genderqueer is best modeled as a critical gender kind that stands in opposition to `the binary assumption', or the prevalent assumption that the only possible genders are the binary, discrete, exclusive, and exhaustive kinds men and women.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Wodak

  University of Pennsylvania

  9 shared

• April H. Bailey

  University of New Hampshire

  6 shared

• Andrei Cimpian

  4 shared

• Elif G. Ikizer

  University of Wisconsin–Green Bay

  3 shared

• Issa Kohler‐Hausmann

  2 shared

• Elise Sugarman

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Catharine Saint-Croix

  Twin Cities Orthopedics

  1 shared

• Dennis Whitcomb

  Western Washington University

  1 shared