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Anti-Trans Attacks: Interrogating “Gender” in Politics and Gender Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2024

Zein Murib Open the ORCID record for Zein Murib [Opens in a new window]
Zein Murib*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Fordham University, New York, NY USA
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E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

This essay considers the rapid uptick in anti-trans legislation that targets transgender girls and women as an occasion to critically interrogate the ways that gender is conceptualized and operationalized in political science (Murib 2022). I argue that the disciplinary tendency to view gender as a single-axis facet of identity that is static and rooted in biology needs to be reconsidered in light of two problems. First, collapsing biological sex and gender naturalizes the gender of non-trans women and men as static, normal, and self-evident; transgender people, in contrast, are locked into perpetual processes of gendering themselves against this biological baseline (Enke 2012). Second, and as a result of this limited view of gender, political scientists face difficulties anticipating, understanding, and addressing recent mobilizations invested in maintaining White, heterosexual, and reproductive families as the cornerstone of what it means to be a proper citizen (Alexander 1994).

Type
Critical Perspectives Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 2024 , pp. 740 - 744
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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