In her introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader (2006), Susan Stryker observes that the philosophical challenge posed by trans studies to “the modernist epistemology that treats gender merely as a social, linguistic, or subjective representation of an objectively knowable material sex” has “material consequences for the quality of trans lives” (ed. Stryker and Stephen Whittle, pp. 8–9). In Beyond Trans, Heath Fogg Davis brings gender theory down from its rarefied postmodern heights to prove Stryker right. The book is a theoretically informed yet practical guide to how the fluidity of sex and gender theorized within trans studies can be mobilized to reform a world steeped in dubious notions of binary sex.

The radical claim at the heart of Beyond Trans is that “all of us would be better off in a society with dramatically fewer sex-classification policies” (p. 17). The reason for this, Davis argues, is that “sex-classification policies cause sex-identity discrimination” (p. 7). What Davis calls “sex-identity discrimination” is more generally known as “transgender discrimination” (p. 11). It is the experience of being told that you do not belong to the particular sex category with which you have affiliated yourself—that you are in the wrong bathroom or that you cannot use your bus pass because it is marked with an “F” and you are not a “real woman.” While many transgender people experience this type of discrimination on a numbingly routine basis, Davis perceptively notes that many nontransgender people do as well. Moreover, the author observes, citing his own experience as a normatively masculine transgender man as an example, transgender people who conform to conventional gender norms are often spared the humiliation of having their sex identities second-guessed. For all these reasons, Davis insists, the term “sex-identity discrimination” better captures the discriminatory harm triggered by our society’s investment in the fictive categories of “male” and “female.” The most valuable contribution of the book is its suggestion that the best way to remedy this harm is not to accommodate transgender people within existing systems of sex classification but to eliminate “bureaucratic sex-classification itself” (p. 41).

In each of the four substantive chapters, Davis takes a specific set of sex-classification policies—the inclusion of sex markers on personal identity documents, the segregation of public restrooms by sex, sex-discriminatory admissions policies at private women-only colleges, and sex segregation in amateur, professional, and elite athletics—and subjects them to what he calls the “‘rational relationship’ test.” Adapted from the judicial test of the same name, Davis’s rational relationship test asks whether a given sex-classification policy is “‘rationally related’ to a legitimate policy goal” (p. 17). If a policy fails to meet this minimalist standard, he recommends that that policy be eliminated. If a policy survives—Davis offers the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) collection of sex-specific data for public-health reasons as one example of a policy that passes muster—he still urges caution. In the case of the CDC, he recommends that the agency clearly define its use of sex-related terms and “clearly articulate the ‘substantial’ connection between its use of sex classification and its institutional objectives” (p. 50).

While the rational relationship test, in theory, sets a pretty low bar for sex-classification policies, in practice it proves quite exacting. For example, it yields calls for a dramatic architectural redesign of public restrooms, the replacement of sex markers on government-issued identity documents with alternative methods of personal-identity verification like biometrics, the conversion of women’s colleges to “historically female colleges,” and the use of height, weight, and androgen levels as sorting measures for elite athletic competition (pp. 21–22). Given that Beyond Trans recommends the elimination of virtually every sex-classification policy it considers, it is tempting to think of Davis as a kind of disestablishmentarian when it comes to sex identity. However, one must be careful not to conflate his position with a facile libertarianism. (A recent review of Beyond Trans in Reason Magazine does precisely this). Throughout the book, particularly its second chapter where the author argues that sex-segregated restrooms should be abolished in the name of “potty parity” and for the right of everyone to be free from “the discretionary leeway that sex markers grant to administrative agents,” it is clear that Davis is motivated by normative commitments to substantive equality (anathema to libertarians) and a conception of freedom as nondomination that exceeds libertarianism’s narrow strictures (pp. 78, 28).

The book’s audacious aim of upending the bureaucratic administration of sex identity is balanced by a pragmatic dimension that is all too rare in works of political theory. For example, the appendix includes something Davis calls a “gender audit” (p. 151). A gender audit is a questionnaire that he designed to help organizations put his rational relationship test into practice. It inventories the various ways an organization utilizes sex-identity information and prompts reflection on alternative ways that the organization might achieve its ends without engaging in the administration of sex. Despite its humble, human-resources/diversity-consultant-style exterior, the gender audit strikes me as a potent tool.

These virtues notwithstanding, Beyond Trans is not without its shortcomings. For example, the cases to which Davis applies his rational relationship test reflect something of an elite bias. While the administration of sex identity by private women’s colleges and athletic leagues is not undeserving of critical scrutiny, most trans and gender-nonconforming people will not be impacted by these policies. Rather than making them the focus, why not take on higher-stakes cases like prisons, the criminal justice system, or the family law court? Surely, the sex-classification policies at work in these institutions touch the lives of more people and with much graver consequence than those of Smith College or Little League. How might these institutions be transformed if subjected to the rigors of the gender audit?

This criticism opens onto my greatest reservation concerning this book. Despite Davis’s efforts to distinguish his approach from “liberal” strategies of “accommodation” and “assimilation,” a decidedly liberal commitment to formal neutrality underpins the entire argument (pp. 18, 41). If the state and other entities were made neutral in regard to sex identity by withdrawing from the administration of sex as Davis proposes, would transgender discrimination truly be brought to an end? How would the disestablishment of sex identity address, for example, the discrimination endured by transwomen of color who are unduly targeted by police for questioning, harassment, and arrest and are subjected to heightened risks of incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, assault, and homicide on account of their intersecting race and gender identities? The answer, I fear, is inadequately or not at all because these forms of transgender discrimination are not reducible to the sex-identity discrimination that the book is designed to remedy. Perhaps what the most marginalized members of the transgender community need is not a new riff on liberal neutrality but policies that affirm the dignity and rights of transgender people qua transgender people and that claim a space for them in our deeply gendered world.

Despite these reservations, Beyond Trans is worthy of praise and a wide readership in political science as well as interdisciplinary fields like women’s, gender, queer, and trans studies. By eschewing strategies of accommodation and assimilation and arguing for the elimination of sex-classification policies tout court, Davis foregrounds the needs of some of the most marginalized members of the transgender community: those who cannot or will not “pass” and, therefore, cannot be accommodated within a world structured by a male/female binary. The queer radicalism of this approach sets Davis apart from the mainstream of the transgender civil rights movement and constitutes the book’s greatest achievement.