In my dissertation, I pursue two goals. The first is exploratory, insofar as I explore the ways in which one could adopt a pluralistic approach to biological sex. The second is to develop what I call a situated-process pluralist framework that can apply beyond scientific classifications of sex. I do this by comparing three frameworks. I start by extracting key insights from John Dupré’s promiscuous realist pluralism with respect to natural kinds and Marc Ereshefsky’s eliminative pluralism with respect to species and then apply them to biological sex. I then compare these views with Sarah Richardson’s sex contextualism. I extract four features of comparison: their dialectical point of tension, their metaphysical commitments and assumptions, their epistemic commitments, and their semantic commitments. I ask three questions: 1) what grounds the legitimacy of sex classification on each of the views, 2) how those assumptions and commitments travel across context, and 3) what follows from these assumptions and commitments normatively for research and policy development around biological sex. 

Methodologically, I show how assumed monistic virtues—namely simplicity, explanatory power, communicative clarity, and rigor—are not, in principle, followed by prominent monistic conceptualizations. In principle, anti-essentialist approaches will fall in line with these values more readily than monistic approaches. I then argue that the three context-sensitive approaches I investigate ground legitimacy in normatively distinct ways; promiscuous realism emphasizes the role of classification with folk conceptualizations, prioritizing complex viewpoints. Eliminative pluralism emphasizes empirical rigor and asks us to replace broad umbrella terms with domain-specific ones. Sex contextualism emphasizes scientific practice that is constrained by understanding the socio-political implications of our operationalizations of biological sex. Each view offers powerful insights into possible proposals, but none of them alone can accommodate both the biological complexity and sociopolitical implications of biological sex. 

This culminates in motivating my own account, a situated-process pluralism that combines the metaphysical openness of promiscuous realism, the conceptual discipline of eliminative pluralism, and the normative accountability of sex contextualism. Ultimately, this paves the way for investigating broader approaches to biological sex and to investigating normatively responsible accounts of classification.