Abstract
In Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, Heath Fogg Davis examines the pervasive and routinized sex classification practices and policies and questions their validity and necessity. Through detailed case studies, autoethnographic reflections as a transgender man of color, and legal analysis, the author comprehensively documents the hostile scrutiny toward one’s sex identity (sex-identity discrimination, in the author’s words) in four policy venues throughout the four chapters: identity documents, bathroom bill, single-sex college admission, and sex-testing for athletes. Committed to pushing for actual policy change, the author pays particular attention to the pragmatic rethinking and redesigning of the administration of sex at the end of each case examined. Moreover, in the appendix, the author offers an example of a “gender audit” workshop that modifies the sex classification practices at the organizational level.
Just as the title Beyond Trans indicates, the author argues that “all of us would be better off in a society with dramatically fewer sex-classification policies” (p. 17). Throughout the book, Davis reminds us that the discriminatory effects of sex-classification policies are not transgender-specific but have important bearings on the larger population. To expose this point, Davis first differentiates sexism of sex-identity discrimination from sexism of sex-based disadvantage. To synthesize Davis’s definitions (pp. 11, 31–32, 91, 153), traditional sexism of sex-based disadvantage involves artificial constraints on a person’s opportunities because of sex based on gender stereotypes; sexism of sex-identity discrimination, by contrast, involves judgements about whether a person belongs to or is permitted to be in the binary sex categories, which are based on racialized hegemonic notions of femininity and masculinity. Whoever deviates from the masculine/feminine ideal is subject to sexism of sex-identity discrimination regardless of one’s cisgender or transgender status.
In the arena of gender theory, the author contests the utility of sex/gender distinction in gender theory by invoking the term sex-identity discrimination. The author identifies a complicit parallel between the collapsing and dissolving of sex/gender distinction in postmodern gender theories and the ambiguous and interchangeable usage of sex and gender in the bureaucratic documentation. Based on this observation, Davis argues that the theoretical dissolution of sex/gender distinction “robs us of a language with which to differentiate between the sexism of sex-based disadvantage and the sexism of sex-identity discrimination. . . . Just because we perform sex/gender simultaneously, and both are socially constructed, does not eviscerate the conceptual distinction between sex and gender” (pp. 31–32). While I agree that sex-identity discrimination is an important and much needed conceptual vehicle in the scope of sex-classification policies, I feel like the author’s interpretation of postmodern gender theories seems to be a strawman. Despite the emphasis on the performative nature of sex/gender, postmodern gender theorists are also attentive to the materializing effects of certain discursive formations, including the binary sex categories Davis examines, in people’s lived reality. I further suggest that a strategic essentialist stance might be better to ground the legitimacy of sex-identity discrimination as an analytical category.
In public policy arena, Davis points out that the assimilationist sex-identity “correction” approach in transgender rights advocacy “leave[s] intact the source of sex-identity discrimination: bureaucratic sex classification itself” (p. 41). To offer an alternative approach, the author borrows “rational relationship test” from judicial review in anti-discrimination law as a tool for sex classification policy redesign. The test asks whether a given policy (sex-classification policy in this case) is rationally related to a legitimate policy goal. Davis applies this test in the four case studies and demonstrates that the relevance of sex categories to policy goals is poorly articulated and the sex classification policies being executed thus lack legitimacy.
While the use of sex-identity is articulated against gender-identity in the context of sex classification, the author sometimes confuses the two terms in the book. For example, Davis uses gender identity discrimination for what actually means sex-identity discrimination and sex discrimination for sexism (p. 153), which might confuse the readers. Despite sex-identity discrimination’s usefulness in certain policy venues, I hold that the term needs more elaborated definition. For example, what distinguishes sex-identity discrimination from the more commonly used discrimination against nonconforming gender expression?
Overall, Davis provides an accessible and deep understanding of sex-identity discrimination with both academic robustness and real-world relevance. This book will appeal to scholars in LGBT studies, social policy and law regarding gender, as well as activists working in (trans) gender advocacy. Davis provides us with the theoretical vocabulary to name sex-identity discrimination as the outcome of bureaucratic practices of sex classification; the term is especially helpful for scholars to rethink sex/gender distinction against a real-world policy setting. On the other, the pragmatic tool of rational relationship test could be widely used for better sex-classification policies. To resonate Davis’s call for the eradication of unnecessary sex classification, I have run a rational relationships test for the practice of writing academic review and thus decided not to use gender pronouns in this book review.