Gender Terms and Normative Significance

In this paper I will address a puzzle about normative significance of gender terms. On the one hand, gender is tied to many normative judgments, and questions about gender make a difference in what one should do. On the other hand, everyday use of gender terms is in flux, and there is not a consensus among language speakers about their meaning. So, questions involving gender terms are in an important sense verbal and, thus, insubstantial. If there are multiple interpretations of a gender term, questions involving them would merely leave us in a dilemma and answering them cannot provide normative guidance. After exploring the puzzle that arises from this tension, I will discuss two possible solutions to it.