Part III: A Decade of Contestation

From its obscure mid-20th century beginnings, when it was first used in the context of psychological assessments of intersex individuals, gender identity has become a fundamental “principle of vision and division of the world,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase. The concept is now written into laws, bureaucratic regulations, and court decisions and embedded in organizational policies and routines. Widely understood as a basic component of selfhood, it has altered what Ian Hacking has called “the space of possibilities for personhood.” Today, of course, gender identity is being challenged on multiple fronts. But these challenges were slow to emerge. Why did the far-reaching institutionalization of the category, today the focus of such bitter controversy, meet with so little opposition and attract so little attention until a decade ago? What changed thereafter, drawing gender identity into the vortex of culture war debates, but also prompting critical scrutiny from the liberal center? And how might one think and talk about gender identity in a way that might avoid some of the pitfalls and impasses of many current discussions? These are the questions Rogers Brubaker will address in his IWM Lectures in Human Sciences. 

Since the middle of the last decade, gender identity has emerged as a major focus of heated public debate. Many commentators, with good reason, have characterized the controversies over bathroom access, eligibility for women’s sports, pronoun policies, school curricula, self-identification, and gender medicine for youth as a moral panic. But why did the controversies emerge when they did after an extended period of noncontroversial institutional embedding? What changed? Brubaker’s third lecture addresses these questions.

A gender identity at variance with one’s natal sex had previously been understood as a personal matter for the individual. During the last decade, however, it came to be widely understood as concerning others too. As gender identity became an expansively actionable category, one that could be invoked, even by children and adolescents, to demand recognition and identity-affirming medical treatment and to gain access to sex-segregated activities, spaces, and facilities, the category came to be understood as affecting others’ interests: women’s sex-based interest in privacy, competitive athletes’ interest in fairness, and parents’ interest in protecting their children from potentially irreversible harm. This shift in the prevailing public understanding of the category, Brubaker suggests, made gender identity ripe for moral panic and for political exploitation by the right.

Yet while the left-right lens obviously captures a real and consequential polarization—a polarization made much starker, in the US, by Trump’s cruel assault on transgender people—it misses an important part of the story. Brubaker outlines the critical stance toward gender identity-affirming medical care for children and adolescents that emerged from the liberal center in a number of countries during the last decade. He also identifies three more general critiques of gender identity—developed by gender-critical feminists, by some gays and lesbians, and by some transgender people themselves—that cannot be plotted on a left-right axis. These critiques acknowledge that social and medical transitions have relieved the suffering of many transgender people, and they argue that transgender people should be protected from discrimination in employment, housing, and other domains. But they question the enshrinement of gender identity as a core medical, psychiatric, therapeutic, legal, bureaucratic, pedagogic, and statistical category.

Brubaker concludes by analyzing the tension between strong and weak understandings of gender identity—the former too strong to be widely applicable, the latter too weak to do the work they have been asked to do—and by considering the paradoxical and ambivalent effects of the universalization, formalization, and legalization of gender identity as a category of organizational practice.

Rogers Brubaker is a professor of sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. Brubaker is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Grounds for Difference (Harvard University Press, 2015), Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton University Press, 2016), and Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022).

IWM Rector Misha Glenny will introduce the lecture and moderate the subsequent discussion.