For the week 15/11/18, we will be reading Jo Wuest (2018): "The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics: Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases"
With anti-transgender hostility (in politics, media and culture) more prevalent than ever on both sides of the Atlantic, I feel that it is now more urgent than ever that we explore how science and technology studies might intervene critically in support of transgender and non-binary individuals in an always-skewed 'debate' on their lives/livelihoods/rights/freedoms. This committed and unequivocal position of justice for trans individuals and against transphobia will mark the starting point of our discussion of Wuest's paper, which examines the circulation of (among others) legal and biological discourses surrounding sex and gender in North American transgender politics and the possibilities for trans identity offered up by them. Although Wuest's paper is written with a view to United States law and politics, we might consider how applicable the description of the field is to the current UK context, as well as to the more recent and disturbing developments in transgender politics in Trump's US.
Details: Thursday 15th November, 5pm-6pm, Alice Farrands Reading Room, 22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW
Abstract: In this article, I examine how conflicts over transgender bathroom rights have ignited debates concerning the fundamental nature of transgender identity. Through an institutional and discursive analysis of North Carolina's House Bill 2 or “bathroom bill,” the Title IX case in Gloucester County School Board v. G. G., and similar federal court cases, I explore how and why forces both on the right and in the LGBTQ movement have come to rely on scientific expertise to legitimate their conceptions. As conservatives have marshaled evidence to challenge notions that transgender identity is innate, LGBTQ and transgender organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have crafted a “born this way” biopolitical construction of transgender identity. I find that at their core, these conflicts are over the meanings of gender and sex in relation to transgender identity. Conservatives posit sex as biologically rooted and gender as a psychological phenomenon, whereas transgender advocates subsume gender identity into the definition of sex in arguing that constitutional and federal civil rights law must recognize gender identity as a biologically constitutive element of sex. I conclude by noting the limits of a liberal assimilationist and litigation-centric transgender politics and by exploring alternatives to this biopolitical form of transgender political identity.
Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/scientific-gaze-in-american-transgender-politics-contesting-the-meanings-of-sex-gender-and-gender-identity-in-the-bathroom-rights-cases/2FD0E36F3BB00C03BAFCD6790DF6D5A0