A male-bodied person dressed in a ball gown should be referred to as a) transgender, b) a queen (fem, drag, or butch), c) genderqueer, d) a transvestite, e) gender free, f) a girl, g) it depends (on how male-bodied persons self-identify, on their race and class, whether they are transitioning, what they wear the rest of the time, etc.), or h) other (sissy, fairy, woman, etc.). You will read David Valentine's Imagining Transgender without ever arriving at an answer to this question, both because there is no obviously correct or clearly wrong one and because his interesting focus is on the consequences of whatever classifications we choose for ourselves and others. Jude Browne's The Future of Gender is also concerned with “the conceptual efficacy of ‘gender,’ as a mode of analysis and as a basis for envisioning the emancipatory transformation of society” (p. 1). Here, too, you will not come to definitive answers about the relation of gender to sex, to political change, or to inequality, but in this case the cause may lie more in the character of the anthology than the concept itself.

The future of gender, according to much of the Browne volume, is a diminished one, due to the rise of nonhierarchical peer relationships (Juliet Mitchell), to the switch from work conflicts between men and women to conflicts between parents and nonparents (Catherine Hakim), to legislation (Browne), or to reproductive technology and gay marriage (Terrell Carver). An alternative future of gender is that it will continue as a site of discrimination, a measure and standard of justice, and a basis for social theorizing and organizing. This difference of opinion on the fate of gender does not seem to correlate with the fact that some essays are written from a feminist perspective (Valerie Bryson, Rosemary Crompton) while others are uninformed by or about it (Simon Baron-Cohen), and still others somewhat hostile to it (Hakim). The clearest conclusion we are left with is the modestly helpful claim that “gender can be theorized in many different ways, and the usefulness of any such conceptualization depends to some extent on which purposes one wants to use the concept for, and in which intellectual traditions one wants to introduce it” (Ingrid Robeyns, 56). Among my favorite features of the book is that authors have inserted a few references to each other's chapters in their own, creating conversations that more anthologies could fruitfully imitate. (Indeed, given its “diversity,” this volume could have used even more of such links.) The intertwining of theory and policy is another strong feature.

Unfortunately, the book's weaknesses outweigh its strengths. Evolutionary psychology and preference theory take up too much space. Like the rest of the book, even Nancy Fraser's piece urging us to focus on “trans-border sources of gender injustice that structure trans-national social relations” (p. 29) is entirely about the United States and Western Europe. The central idea of gender is (too) variously defined as “stereotypical characteristics” (Browne, 257), “social positions” (Robeyns, 56), “a complex conceptual and experiential system” (Carver, 128–29), and “the social system as a whole viewed under a particular aspect” (Tony Lawson, 160). Some chapters distinguish gender from sex, but sometimes the terms are used interchangeably (Baron-Cohen); one claims a person's gender “may or may not be determined by their sex” (Browne, 252), and one argues that gender “is now an inclusive term that ultimately has come to include even biology” (Mitchell, 168). It is treated as a feature of individuals, but sometimes as an aspect of institutions, and even as social structure itself (Lawson). Most frustrating, a number of entries are only peripherally about gender (Fraser). This range is unsettling for a reader, making it difficult to find any issues to carry through the book. Finally, too many of the essays set up the author's position against antifeminism and/or a particular variety of feminism. This framing not only establishes some tired opponents (liberal feminism, identity politics, and essentialism on one hand, biological determinism, conservative family values, and free-market politics on the other), but also favors “moderate” solutions that carve a middle path between or “reconcile” the supposed alternatives.

Valentine set out to study the transgender community but redefined his task in the face of real-world confusions and apparent contradictions. He found, for example, that despite the rapidly growing use of “transgender” among social service providers, academics, and activists, many of those persons they understand as belonging to that category “did not know the term ‘transgender’ or were resistant to its use to describe them” (p. 21). Further, not only do those labeled “transgender” self-identify in an almost bewildering range of ways but, perhaps most puzzling to Valentine (p. 80), people in every category at a drag ball (also) identify as “gay” (p. 84). He finds that “rather than a pre-existing community, there are a variety of dispersed places which are brought together by ‘transgender’ into an idea of community” (p. 72) (though he also says that “lines of connection, knowledge, friendship, and affiliation join these different places and the people in them together” [p. 77]). He rightly concludes that “community is not a natural fact but an achievement,” an achievement that unfortunately “fails to account for all its imagined members” (p. 73).

Valentine is at his peak in exploring the relationship between homosexuality and transgender, or sexuality and gender more broadly. He looks at “the history of ‘transgender’ and ‘homosexuality’ as categories, the history of their relationship, and the theoretical and political implications of seeing them as discrete throughout history” (p. 30, emphasis in original). He reveals and remains justifiably concerned about the tension between “gender-normative homosexuality” and more “transgressive” identities and practices (p. 52). He is also strong in explaining why a category like transgender “cannot account for the complexity of people's desires, understanding of self, and experience,” and also how “the complexity of experience can disrupt the … analytic categories” (p. 132). He convinced me that inclusion of transgender in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT): politics “is not simply a positive political act but an object of analysis itself, for it already assumes a coherence to the working categories” (p. 175). His lists of questions are themselves a worthy contribution (pp. 5–6, 16, 34–35, 69, 106, 141, 156–57, 181, 226, 250), and he actually addresses them all. He stays remarkably present throughout the book, and moves easily between individuals' stories, ethnographic dilemmas, theoretical questions, and political struggles. He complicates rather than simplifies, trying in every discussion to incorporate issues of race and class, to use and challenge history, and to amplify rather than mute ambiguities and contradictions. This is what kept me on my toes as a reader, and it is that from which I learned the most.

Some of Valentine's concerns necessarily remain unresolved, which is in the nature of categorization itself. First, “the unquestioned use of ‘transgender’ in activist, academic, and other contexts, while progressive in intent, actually reproduces, in novel and intensified forms, class and racial hierarchies” (p. 19). Second, “the institutionalization of transgender produces [certain] selves as unintelligible,” as all identity politics are wont to do (p. 109), though here (as often) it is “the young, the poor, the people of color who are … having to un-know what they know about themselves … as being, inherently, false and outmoded” (p. 135). But while he argues that the category “cannot be understood unproblematically either as a tool for social change or as a descriptor of gender variance transhistorically or cross-culturally” (p. 204), he never wavers that the category has brought gains: “an understanding of gender variance as socially valid, publicly claimable, and free of the stigma of pathologization, … an emerging field of transgender studies which … challenges the claims of scientific, objective knowledge … [and a reframing of] the moral and ethical questions in terms of the negative impact of medical, religious, scientific, and legal practices and theories on transgender lives” (pp. 140–41).

I have a few questions and reservations. Valentine focuses on “the margins of the collective ‘transgender,’” turning, for example, to “African American and Latina fem queens of the balls and Meat Market” (p. 108). While I understand the richness to be found in the borderlands, I am not sure why a choice between margins and center had to be made, or what its costs might be. Also, despite his references to drag kings, those transitioning from female to male, and butch lesbians, he bases the book on the experiences of men. He theorizes more (and well) about the absence of women (p. 74) than he does from their presence p. (97). His explanations (for example, “the institutionalization of the collective mode of transgender [has] been formed precisely around the same absence” [p. 69]) are unconvincing. He does better with feminism, though there, too, it sometimes seems a bit of an afterthought, appearing often at the end of discussions and even, most powerfully, at the end of the book. Finally, pervasive gender stereotypes within transgendered communities merit more attention.

Both books are relevant to political scientists. Browne's “gender” is related to definitions of justice, ideas about human nature, debates about the relationship between bodies and politics, and explanations of inequality, as well as to policy issues including the wage gap, gay marriage, and family–work conflicts. Valentine's “transgender” is related to theoretical debates about the relations “between sexed body, social gender, and sexuality” (p. 4), and to policy issues including antidiscrimination law as well as definitions of hate crimes and pathology. The bottom line of both is captured by Valentine (p. 246): “[T]he categories we live by—must live by—have histories, politics, and economies and produce effects that can be as debilitating for some as they can be liberating for others. The goal is to question how, why, when, and with what effects self-making is other-making.”