Gender Wars: Two scholars excavate the origins of today’s trans backlash

Gender WarsTwo scholars excavate the origins of today's trans backlash Paisley Currah (bio) If kris kobach, attorney general of Kansas, has his way, the sex designated on driver's licenses and birth certificates issued by the state will have to accord with what an individual was assigned at birth. Legislation passed in 2023 required all state agencies to identify people according to their biological sex, as Republican lawmakers defined it. In the interregnum between the law's passage and its effective date, the number of people applying to change their sex on their birth certificate or driver's license quadrupled over the same period the year before. They were probably disappointed to learn that Kobach interprets the new policy End Page 126 as retroactive. If the legal challenges to the law fail, someone who changed the sex marker on a state identity document—whether right before the law was enacted or decades ago—will have it changed back to F if their "reproductive system is developed to produce ova" or to M if it "is developed to fertilize the ova of a female." Kansas is not the only state in which a relatively recent window of inclusion is already closing for transgender people. Oklahoma had briefly allowed people to change the M or F on a birth certificate, but in 2022 the state legislature reversed policy and, for good measure, explicitly prohibited the nonbinary designation of X. Twenty-three states now ban trans girls and women from playing women's sports, and twenty-one of them limit or restrict gender-affirming medical care for youth. In a growing number of red states, laws now govern gender classification in bathrooms, pronoun use in schools, and the conditions under which queer and trans-related curricula and library books are permitted, issues which would not even have registered in public consciousness a few years ago. While Republicans were busy enacting laws targeting multiple aspects of trans life, twenty-one states under Democratic control changed policy to allow people to choose an X for the gender marker on their driver's licenses. (Only one Republican-controlled state, Arkansas, also allows for this.) In those jurisdictions, state ID markers can usually be changed to X, F, or M just by filling out a form. In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and the trans-care bans, eleven blue states have passed refuge or shield laws for medical professionals, often combining protections for reproductive and gender-affirming care. The legislative assault on transgender people in the United States seems new, but governments have been regulating the lives of transgender people for decades. In the past, bureaucrats quietly defined sex as they saw fit. Whether you were classified as male or female depended more on which government agency you were dealing with than on the state you lived in. A single person could theoretically have F on their passport and M on their birth certificate, be female for the purposes of marriage and male in the eyes of End Page 127 corrections officials. Access to gender-affirming care was regulated by medical institutions, not legislators. Outside of trans communities, few were aware of the contradictions trans people faced and the tangles they found themselves in. What had been a confusing but little-noticed bureaucratic patchwork of policies has now transformed into a high-volume, highly polarized partisan landscape. As Donald Trump pointed out last June, "I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that mimicking polite applause. I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago you didn't know what the hell it was." Two new books attempt to explain how trans people became the ground on which a cluster of huge, seemingly diffuse ideological battles are being fought. In Who's Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler takes on the international "anti-gender" movement, out of which has come the intellectual scaffolding for anti-trans policy in the United States. Butler's book is most valuable for its mapping of the disparate political uses for which "gender" has recently been mobilized. It has become a commonplace of right-wing rhetoric to declaim that sex...