Rebecca (Becca) Sanaeikia

I'm a philosopher and bioethicist working at the intersection of trans studies, political philosophy, and AI ethics. My research asks how institutions — hospitals, courts, databases, platforms — can stop using classification as a tool of exclusion and start deploying it as a tool of justice.

Most scholarship on classification asks: what is the most accurate way to categorize people? I start from a different place — what is the most just? This is what I call a justice-first approach to ontological questions about sex, gender, and trans status.

Standard systems impose a single framework across medical records, insurance claims, legal documents, and research databases — what philosophers call ontological monism. For trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, this produces systematic blind spots and real-world harms: misdiagnosis, exclusion from research, and the erasure of people whose lives exceed any single categorical scheme.

Drawing on Robin Dembroff's ontological pluralism and Kristie Dotson's concept of epistemic injustice, I argue that multiple, context-sensitive frameworks must coexist — and that the ethically appropriate one depends on what is actually at stake for the person being classified.

Outside my academic work, I founded Project Sogand — an open-source archive documenting fatal violence against trans feminine and queer people in Iran. I also co-organize Wonder Philosophy, a project dedicated to making philosophy accessible beyond the academy. I am based in Corinth, New York.