How Gender Is Policed in America

[Jessica_Rose]

How Gender Is Policed in America

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-gender-is-policed-in-america/ar-AA1kdYqa?ocid=windirect&cvid=bb44451375bb4036842a7c29c3488aaa&ei=41

Story by Sam Huber (Dec 2023)

Paisley Currah's wide-ranging study Sex Is as Sex Does examines how transphobia emerged in America as a result of contradictory and self-serving sex classification policies.

"Who gets to decide whether the woman who spent the night in an Idaho county jail is a man or a woman?" Currah asks. Today, many would say Jones's self-determined account of her sex is the only answer we need. Others might counter with a definition of their own: Sex is a fact established at birth by doctors or God. For decades now, trans advocates and their antagonists have squared off over this question of what sex is.

In what seems to me to be one of the book's most important but understated interventions, Currah points out, at the root of apparent transphobia, a longer history of sexism. "In European and, later, American legal traditions," he writes, "gender difference was codified in laws designed" not to exclude trans people but "to limit the rights and resources available to" women. The law needed to distinguish between M and F to control access to property, the vote, divorce, redress for sexual violence, and countless other entitlements and protections meted out along gendered lines. When "an F designation can no longer be used to curtail" people's rights, the state loses much of its incentive to vigorously police the M/F boundary.