Some instances of hate speech and some use of slurs are severely and obviously discriminatory and morally wrong. However, in this chapter I want to focus on speech acts that insofar as they are morally wrong are so in much more subtle and less obvious ways – everyday sexist speech acts such a speaking grammatically correct in a gendered language with a dominant masculine gender, or using words like “chairman” instead of “chairperson”. Specifically, I am interested in whether such everyday sexist speech acts discriminate against women. Offhand, one might think: “How could they not?” Nevertheless, I present a reductio ad absurdum argument showing that we can derive a self-contradiction from a set of premises, which include the claim that everyday sexist speech acts discriminate against women, and all of which seem very plausible. In response to the reductio, I suggest that we should either reject the standard dichotomous distinction between direct and indirect discrimination and introduce a third form of discrimination, which is neither, and which everyday sexist speech acts instantiate. Or we should accept that some everyday sexist speech acts do not discriminate against women. The deeper the rationale for the latter response could be that whereas our concept of discrimination serves to capture a moral wrong, sexism also serves to pick out certain dispositions and what our acts signal about us and how we are disposed, whether or not these dispositions manifest themselves in wrongful actions.
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