The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics

Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases

Bibliographic Data

ID6354099
AuthorsJo Wuest (California University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume15
Issue2
Pages336-360
Publication date2019-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitics & Gender (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1743-923X • E-ISSN: 1743-9248
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1743923x18000338
OpenAlexW2884394320
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited35

In this article, I examine how conflicts over transgender bathroom rights have ignited debates concerning the fundamental nature of transgender identity. Through an institutional and discursive analysis of North Carolina's House Bill 2 or “bathroom bill,” the Title IX case in Gloucester County School Board v. G. G., and similar federal court cases, I explore how and why forces both on the right and in the LGBTQ movement have come to rely on scientific expertise to legitimate their conceptions. As conservatives have marshaled evidence to challenge notions that transgender identity is innate, LGBTQ and transgender organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have crafted a “born this way” biopolitical construction of transgender identity. I find that at their core, these conflicts are over the meanings of gender and sex in relation to transgender identity. Conservatives posit sex as biologically rooted and gender as a psychological phenomenon, whereas transgender advocates subsume gender identity into the definition of sex in arguing that constitutional and federal civil rights law must recognize gender identity as a biologically constitutive element of sex. I conclude by noting the limits of a liberal assimilationist and litigation-centric transgender politics and by exploring alternatives to this biopolitical form of transgender political identity

Human sexuality · Identity (music · Identity politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transgender · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Reproductive Health and Technologies

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