In 1987, Sandy Stone's “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto” facilitated the establishment of contemporary transgender studies as a distinct field of academic study. Stone positioned transsexual individuals and theory as reconstructive forces capable of challenging governing norms and constructs. “For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible” (Stone Reference Stone1987, 13). More than 30 years later, Stone's call to action has resulted in the proliferation of transdisciplinary approaches to studying questions of gender, sex, sexuality, and the complexity of identities. Much of this scholarship seeks to expose the fallacies of the governing sex and gender binaries and challenge dominant normativities to facilitate the legibility of transgender individuals (see, e.g., Currah, Juang, and Minter Reference Currah, Juang and Minter2006; Serano Reference Serano2007; Spade Reference Spade2015; Stryker and Aizura Reference Stryker and Aizura2013; Stryker and Whittle Reference Stryker and Whittle2006). While this research is produced by scholars across multiple disciplines and is instrumental in challenging prevailing conceptions of gender conformity and heteronormativity in the medical, legal, queer, and feminist research, it consistently engages inherently political questions and issues. Similarly, although the four books included in this review are produced by scholars from different disciplines—political science (Davis), philosophy (Janssen), ethnic studies (Puar), and history (Skidmore)—each author engages how governing institutions, populations, and/or norms work together to police bodies and manage populations. As such, despite their different scholarly origins, these books directly implicate the politics of gender and contribute to our understanding of how gender is socially constructed and wielded by the state and public to privilege some and marginalize others.
Although the Davis, Janssen, and Skidmore books focus exclusively on gender identity and transgender individuals, Puar's book includes a chapter on transgender persons as part of a broader analysis of the mechanisms by which the state and other neoliberal forces utilize the right to maim and the debilitation of certain bodies as tools of population management and social control. Puar's analysis of debility complicates the disabled/able-bodied binary and directly implicates biopower and body politics in ways that have resonance for transgender studies and politics. As such, I have opted to include The Right to Maim in this review.
To begin, it is important to acknowledge that the Davis, Janssen, Puar, and Skidmore books cover a broad array of historical and geographic terrains. For the purposes of this review, I examine their shared focus on how the interactions between sociocultural norms and formal institutions enforce binary conceptions of identity that facilitate dominant gender norms and effectively distribute costs and benefits. Governing binaries are powerful tools for locating and policing individuals and determining which bodies will be legible in society. To that end, the sex and gender binaries are instrumental in facilitating the state and dominant publics’ identification and surveilling of the population to enforce gender compliance. Each of these authors attends to these issues in different ways, but their shared attention to the policing of bodies provides evidence that gender is political.
Janssen's Phenomenal Gender is an ontological project that examines the historical origins and construction of gender, from Ancient Greece through early Christianity and the Enlightenment to the present day, to elucidate the making and marking of gender transgressors over time. Specifically, Janssen utilizes Heidegger's phenomenological model of Dasein (human existence, Being-there) from Being and Time (Reference Heidegger, Macquarrie and Robinson1962) to interrogate and articulate the question of gender (3). This proves to be a useful mechanism for teasing out the disconnects between biological categories of male and female and the roles of women and men in order to challenge the widely shared assumption that the gender binary is the logical result of a sex binary. Recognizing that those things understood to be “true” are perceived that way because they conform to a broader knowledge, Janssen explains that for the phenomenologist, “The question is not one of observing differences in bodies and then classifying those differences with names but rather of examining how preconceptions of gender have affected the science of human biology concerning sexual difference. How has the naming of things shaped what can be seen in them?” (47). As such, Janssen's analysis challenges the reader to reevaluate the phenomenon of gender and the governing binary by asking not “What are the differences between the sexes?” but rather “What is meant by ‘sexes’?” (emphasis added, 57).
The widely accepted sex (male–female) and gender (man–woman) binaries are inaccurate with respect to physiology, as demonstrated by the existence of intersex, gender-fluid, and gender-nonconforming individuals. Yet Janssen makes a strong case that these binaries are theoretically problematic as well. As Phenomenal Gender makes clear, binaries may be powerful governing norms, but the gender binary clearly is not “true” because “[i]f it were, there would be no need to tell the story; it would just be” (1). The fallacy of gender explains how and why the policing and punishment of gender transgressors have come to be powerful mechanisms for keeping people as they “ought to be” (1). Das Man (one, the they) institutes and enforces the norms of gender, which then form and constrain Dasein’s possibilities, and those who comply with the dominant discourse are normalized, whereas those who do not are abjected (105). At the same time, however, Janssen argues that das Man’s “truth” and the subsequent sex and gender binaries actually provide a means of resistance. The existence of gender transgressors—including transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals—throughout history serves as evidence that there are multiple ways for Dasein to be in the world, which in turn has the potential to challenge dominant publics and institutions of power.
Davis's Beyond Trans demonstrates how the broad use of sex classification policies empowers public and private administrators to police Janssen's gender transgressors. Consistent with Janssen's argument that “gender generally becomes conspicuous as an issue precisely when there are problems associated with it” (30), Davis explores how discontinuities among an individual's sex identity documents and/or their gender presentation in person shift the inquiry away from “Who are you?” to “What are you?” (5). In this way, transgender discrimination is better understood as sex-identity discrimination, and the problem to be remedied is that sex classification policies empower some individuals to police sex identity and mark as illegible those who do not comply with dominant gender norms. Building on Dean Spade's (Reference Spade2015) research on administrative violence, Davis argues that bureaucratic sex classification policies transform administrative agents into the “misbegotten role of sex identity verifiers” empowered to enforce gender norms and render gender transgressors administratively impossible (142).
In Beyond Trans, Davis examines sex classification policies that lead to sex-identity discrimination in four different areas (i.e., government identity documents, public restrooms, single-sex educational institutions, and athletics) to demonstrate that the need to know an individual's sex organs is irrelevant to most policy goals. Davis explains that government documents and sex-segregated bathrooms rely on antiquated sex classifications that fail to advance rational policy goals. For example, Davis accepts that “vital” documents, such as birth certificates, may be necessary to verify an individual's age and eligibility for government programs, but he makes a strong case that it is not necessary to verify someone's sex organs for eligibility for government policies. Davis's elegant and simple proposal that institutions eliminate sex classification policies belies its radical nature. As Janssen's analysis makes clear, das Man is invested in the “truth” of the sex and gender binaries, and resistance to change is likely to be especially acute in those areas where sex classification policies distribute advantages to certain privileged populations.
As such, Davis's analyses of single-sex colleges and sex-segregated athletics are likely to meet resistance because entry to elite women's colleges and sporting events is highly competitive. Therefore, eliminating sex classification policies in these two venues distributes tangible costs and benefits, and women who benefit from policies that exclude transwomen (or transmen) may resist attempts to replace sex classification policies with gender-neutral criteria. In the case of sex segregation in sports, Davis demonstrates how raced, sexed, and gendered assumptions intersect to reify “real” sex and obfuscate attempts to move beyond gender, as exemplified by the literal policing of athletes’ bodies via invasive physical examinations and/or hormone testing. Yet Davis suggests that “[t]he distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘sex-related’ characteristics can help sports administrators redesign policies that are closely tied to their legitimate policy goals” (137). Consistent with his pragmatic approach throughout the book, rather than advocate a “one size fits all” solution, Davis entertains the idea that recreational, student, and elite athletic programs may consider different mechanisms for moving beyond default sex classifications in sports based on their different goals.
In The Right to Maim, however, Puar suggests that transgender discrimination goes beyond the sex-identity discrimination described by Davis to implicate a far vaster biopower that cannot be remedied by eliminating sex classification policies alone. Puar shows how regimes of biopower make transgressive bodies, including but not limited to transgender bodies, precarious through a triangulation of debility, disability, and capacity (xv). Specifically, Puar challenges the idea that disability is a fixed identity to argue that the disabled/able-bodied binary elides those populations that are marked for debilitation and that this omission enables state control of populations and the maintenance of colonial territories. Thus, although Puar and Janssen share an interest in the ontological assemblages of power, The Right to Maim pushes beyond phenomenological essences to make the case that disability is a form of “risk coding, as an embedded aspect of biopolitical population management” (73).
In the first chapter, “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled,” Puar explains how the popular media refrain that we have reached the “transgender tipping point” in the United States is predicated on the assimilation of a transnormative subject into “racial and gendered mandates of bodily comportment” (35). Bodies that are unable to be comported in this way are not only marked as abjected as Janssen claims but are further manifested as debilitated bodies. For Puar, “debilitating and abjecting are co-substancing processes” (35). The recognition of nonnormative transgender bodies as debilitated bodies enables Puar to craft a powerful intersectional critique of both disability and trans rights movements and their tendencies to privilege the exceptional disabled and transgender figures over those who are debilitated and/or incapable of being recapacitated. Specifically, The Right to Maim criticizes transnormative conceptions of trans “becoming” and the “recapacitation machine” that conditions the acceptance of trans communities and transgender identity on individuals’ abilities to reform their debilitated bodies “through a white/liberal/male assemblage” (10). This racialized capacitation effectively privileges white masculinities within trans communities.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari ([Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987] Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2016), Puar offers becoming trans as an alternative trajectory that seeks to dissolve rather than reify binary frames: “Becoming is not about trying to make the body more capacitated but about allowing and reading more multiplicity, multiplicities of the impersonal and of the imperceptible” (56). To that end, becoming trans entails a political commitment to deterritorializing gender, sex, and race as a means of moving away from the either/or of the normative-nonnormative binary (60). Puar imagines new multiplicities and proliferations of becomings as “a politics of manifesting beyond what control can control” (61), thereby challenging the biopolitics of capacitation.
Interestingly, Skidmore's True Sex validates Puar's claim that gender normativity intersects with other categories of “risk coding” to render some bodies more easily recapacitated than others. Skidmore utilizes newspaper accounts of the “outing” of transmen in rural counties at the turn of the twentieth century to expand the sociocultural history of LGBTQ lives in the United States to document the extent to which local communities accepted and supported their transgender neighbors. Specifically, True Sex reports that “white, middle-class, able-bodied, and economically productive bodies” were granted leeway for their gender transgressions, whereas “foreign” bodies were more likely to be marked as abject (99). Skidmore demonstrates that to the extent that the former were perceived as valuable contributing members of the community (i.e., farmers, ranch hands, husbands, and neighbors), they were largely left alone (45). This finding confirms Janssen's analysis of the phenomenon of gender as a process and not a biological fact. Due to the fact that these transmen complied with expectations about masculinity and successfully fulfilled the roles that were expected of men in these communities, they were recognized as productive members of society and their gender transgressions were overlooked (Janssen 2017, 15). For a period of time, married transmen were even referred to as “female husbands” in the press, which conveyed legitimacy on both their asserted identities and their marriages (41). For example, when George Green—a married transman who worked as a farmhand—passed away in Ettrick, Virginia, his neighbors and friends were shocked to learn that his anatomy did not correlate with his gender. Yet, as Skidmore reports, local newspaper coverage suggests that his neighbors were not troubled by Green's “true sex” because he “had been an honest and hardworking individual during his life” (47). Green's funeral was held in the local Catholic Church, presided over by a priest, and his body was buried in a nearby Catholic cemetery (49). His widow was supported by the local community, and she continued to reside there after Green's death (48).
As such, Skidmore's research challenges traditional assumptions about trans and queer legibility in rural America and US history. Skidmore's exploration of the myriad ways local communities negotiated their relationships with their transgender neighbors is truly fascinating. One of her most interesting findings is that local and national newspaper reports varied greatly in their descriptions of these transgender individuals and their circumstances and that the national discourses informed the ways in which local communities constituted and navigated the boundaries of social membership in their small towns (7). Furthermore, Skidmore's contribution is notable because her research challenges the predominance of metronormativity and the privileging of urban case studies in LGBTQ research. Although “rural” is often “the devalued term in the urban/rural binary governing the spatialization of modern US sexual identities” (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2005, 36–37), in True Sex, the story of queer migration—from closeted rural communities to gay urban enclaves—takes on new dimensions as Skidmore finds that many transmen migrated from their rural hometowns to new rural communities. In fact, Skidmore's research makes clear that for some transmen it was precisely the decision to live in a small or rural town that provided them with the opportunity to live freely as men and to be accepted and integrated into their communities.
Together, these authors’ research demonstrates how binary constructions of gender and the associated normativities distribute costs and benefits. The roles that the state and public play in policing gender intersect with race, disability, and class to mark some as abject or debilitated gender transgressors. In contrast, those who are able to present as they “ought to be” either via gender compliance or assimilation are capacitated as legitimate subjects. Yet, as Janssen and Skidmore's research demonstrates, the histories of gender and sexuality are highly contextual and inform the processes by which individuals are marked as transgressive or assimilated. Throughout the twentieth century, government surveillance and recording of individuals’ gender identities proliferated via various government social welfare programs as well as the broader use of identity documents such as driver's licenses and passports. Effective in 2020, all state driver's licenses must comply with requirements of the federal REAL ID Act, and these documents will be required for boarding airplanes and entering US government buildings and facilities, thereby expanding the federal government's surveilling of the population. The growth of both the administrative and surveillance states is accompanied by increased scrutiny of individuals, which makes some more vulnerable to bureaucratic profiling and sex-identity discrimination as described by Davis in Beyond Trans. Similarly, the past century has witnessed massive technological advancements that have created new opportunities for biopolitics, ranging from the changing nature of military warfare to new methods of manufacturing and production. As Puar makes clear in The Right to Maim, these developments implicate the biopolitics of disability, which intersect with race and gender to mark some as productive citizens and others as debilitated bodies. The politics of gender are imbricated in all of these developments.
Recognizing that the policing of gender is highly intersectional, the question becomes how to advance the interests, well-being, and safety of all transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals as opposed to only those most capable of transnormative capacitation or assimilation. In the past few decades, a new demand for political recognition and legibility for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals has emerged, but none of the four books included in this review focuses on the pursuit of transgender rights per se. In fact, Davis and Puar both offer powerful critiques of the practice of privileging rights-based reform as the mechanism for advancing the interests and legibility of atypical bodies in the United States. They warn that the privileging of assimilation and accommodation as the means by which these bodies are integrated into prevailing normative structures comes with real costs; it ignores how race intersects with gender and other characteristics to make capacitation and assimilation impossible for some. Similarly, Janssen cautions transgender rights movements that absent a critical interrogation of what gender is and how it came to be, legal and legislative reform will merely reify governing binary assumptions about gender (5).
Davis's book is distinct from the others in that he prescribes solutions to the administrative violence that is perpetuated by myriad bureaucratic officials on transgender individuals, whereas the other authors engage in descriptive analyses. As an alternative to rights recognition and litigation, Davis prescribes that organizations proactively apply anti-discrimination law's rational basis test (i.e., asking whether an existing policy is rationally related to a legitimate policy goal) to all of their sex classification policies and practices (17). Davis posits that in most cases, organizations will find that their sex classification policies are not a rational (or necessary) means to furthering their articulated policy goals and that the latter can be advanced via alternative means that reduce the opportunities for sex-identity discrimination. In fact, Davis concludes his book with a “Gender Audit” that he utilizes to move companies and organizations toward more inclusive workplace policies. As stated previously, this proposal is more radical than it sounds, given that entrenched and privileged interests are invested in the maintenance of the gender binary and its associated conformities, and at times I think Davis is overly optimistic about the viability of his proposal. I appreciate that Davis is willing to provide specific policy recommendations and that he is actively working with organizations to reform their sex classification policies. Political science scholarship would benefit from more work in this vein. Finally, Beyond Trans is well written and accessible to a broad audience, and it would be an excellent addition to any undergraduate or graduate class on gender or LGBTQ politics.
Although the Janssen, Puar, and Skidmore books are descriptive in nature, each has utility for those committed to advancing transgender interests. Although many agree that gender is a social construct, Janssen's phenomenological critique provides critics of the biological roots of gender with the discourse needed to challenge these frames. For example, Phenomenal Gender exposes the limitations of allowing individuals to self-select into the existing male/female binary on legal identity documents, a practice that reifies rather than dismantles these categories. As such, Janssen asks whether the state should include gender categories beyond the male/female dichotomy on these documents to represent a broader array of individuals (61). In addition, his theoretical arguments also can be used to substantiate Davis's push to get rid of sex classification policies altogether because these policies sort people according to differences based on sex assigned at birth as opposed to observing how difference emerges over time. Readers unfamiliar with Heidegger's Being and Time may find Phenomenal Gender challenging at times, and those disinclined to his theoretical contributions are not likely to appreciate Janssen's extensive discussion of das Man and Dasein. Ultimately, Phenomenal Gender makes a valid case for why it is imperative to explore the “existential, cultural and historical origins of gender” in addition to “the biological aspect of gender” (3, emphasis in original).
Consistent with Janssen's call to action, Skidmore's True Sex makes legible the existence of transgender men in the rural United States at the turn of the century. This contribution is significant for the advancement of transgender interests because the lack of historical research on transgender individuals in the United States complicates contemporary claims to legibility and recognition. Absent an awareness of our gendered history, it is difficult to critically interrogate the contemporary politics of gender and sexuality. Although research on the history of gays and lesbians across the United States usually references transgender individuals in passing if at all, True Sex makes an important contribution to the growing history of transgender individuals in the United States as well as work on LGBTQ individuals outside of urban contexts. Skidmore's book is filled with the names and lives of previously unknown transgender pioneers, and she does an excellent job of telling their stories and integrating their experiences into her broader historical analysis. As such, I hope that additional historians will follow her lead and bring the stories of other hidden figures to light in order to complete and complicate the history of gender in the United States.
Finally, Puar's project draws attention to the ways in which trans and disabled bodies are both subject to the recapacitation machine as their (racialized) bodily differences are operationalized as defects. Puar not only offers a critique of liberal rights movements but also makes the case for an intersectional disability justice movement that identifies and demands an end to the conditions that debilitate populations around the world, ranging from transwomen of color to black Americans and Palestinians in Gaza. Although Puar's book at times suffers from trying to cover so much ground (i.e., gender identity, disability, queer politics, Black Lives Matter, the Israeli-Palestine conflict), she makes a powerful point about the myriad ways neoliberal forces utilize the politics of debilitation to create precarious populations. Ultimately, the analysis of the Israeli–Palestine conflict in the latter half of the book is arguably Puar's strongest contribution. Her discussion of the Israeli Defense Forces’ practice of maiming, as opposed to killing, Palestinians in Gaza is theoretically and politically powerful, and is a “must read” for fans of Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).
The books included in this review are but a small sample of the outstanding new research on transgender identities and politics being published today. Forty years after Stone's call for a “true, effective, and representational counterdiscourse,” transgender scholars have challenged the “constructed oppositional nodes” that worked as mechanisms for erasing and silencing transgender lives and voices. In addition, their work has paved the way for a broad array of scholars from diverse backgrounds and scholarly orientations to expand their own purviews to critically interrogate the role and power of the gender binary and normativity across time and place (Stone Reference Stone1987). As these books demonstrate, scholars from multiple disciplines are engaging the politics of gender identity and expanding the discourse and scholarship in meaningful and important new directions. Political scientists interested in these issues would be well served by engaging with this innovative research both inside and outside of our discipline.
