Paisley Currah's "Sex is as Sex Does"

Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Currah has written widely on transgender issues, including on topics such as discrimination, sex reclassification, and the transgender rights movement. He is the co-founder of the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Currah applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, and reported the following:

Opening up to page 99 of my book, one finds the beginning of a chapter titled, “Till Birth Do Us Part: Marriage, ID Documents, and the Nation-State.” On this page I describe both the left and the right’s criticism of identity politics, and of a transgender identity politics specifically: “For those critical of identity politics, the transgender rights movement often stands as its reductio ad absurdum, fixated as it seems to be on pronouns and bathrooms.” For the left, LGBT rights movements seek nothing more than inclusion and exclusion in the neoliberal order. For the right, it’s the erosion of traditional gender norms that’s the problem.

The Page 99 Test works very well for Sex Is as Sex Does: it introduces readers to the chapter that is, in my view, the heart of the book. In it, I ask, how is it possible that one might have an F on their driver’s license or birth certificate but be classified as M for other purposes? What should we make of the contradiction? On the following pages, I explain that, for identity documents like driver’s licenses, the standards for changing the M or F have generally been reformed to make it easier for transgender people to negotiate daily life—from opening a bank account to getting pulled over for a speeding ticket. But when trans people have had something to win or lose—in marriage cases involving money or child custody, for example—judges were much more likely to rule that one’s sex classification is fixed at birth for life.

This chapter articulates the book’s larger argument: when it comes to government decisions, sex as in M or F or now X, depends on the context, not on any ideal definition. The book’s approach is novel, and perhaps to many, a bit counter-intuitive. Rather than taking “transgender” and “transphobia” as analytical starting points, the book argues that decisions about the classification of trans people were historically a consequence not simply of transphobia but of other governing projects—from the gender-based oppression of women to mass incarceration to state surveillance.

Visit Paisley Currah's website.

--Marshal Zeringue