This study explores Àjẹ́kùnrin, a Nigerian film directed by Sharafadeen Olabode that explores the intersection of Yoruba spirituality, witchcraft, and gender politics in an intriguing plot. By focusing on the concept of àjẹ́ (Yoruba witchcraft), the film provides a nuanced portrayal of gender that transcends physical or societal constructs, instead presenting gender as shaped by spiritual forces. This research investigates how the film positions witchcraft as a space for negotiating gender nonconformity and power dynamics, presenting (...) witchcraft as a site where women’s agency is not only affirmed but also continually contested. Through the narrative, Àjẹ́kùnrin challenges traditional Western gender frameworks by illustrating that gender identity is not dictated by biology or external roles but is influenced by spiritual and metaphysical forces. Drawing from African epistemologies, the study lends its voice to the critiques of the dominance of Western knowledge systems and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge, and contributes to the decolonisation of gender studies. This work also adds to the growing discourse on the fluidity of gender in African cultures and underlines the importance of embracing Indigenous frameworks in global gender studies. (shrink)

Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents of preschool children, the author addresses parental responses to children’s gender nonconformity. The author’s analyses indicate that parents welcome what they perceive as gender nonconformity among their young daughters, while their responses in relation to sons are more complex. Many parents across racial and class backgrounds accept or encourage some tendencies they consider atypical for boys. But this acceptance is balanced by efforts to approximate hegemonic ideals of masculinity. The author (...) considers these patterns in the context of gender as an interactional accomplishment, demonstrating that parents are often consciously aware of their own role in accomplishing gender with and for their sons. Heterosexual fathers are especially likely to be motivated in that accomplishment work by their own personal endorsement of hegemonic masculinity, while heterosexual mothers and gay parents are more likely to be motivated by accountability to others in relation to those ideals. (shrink)

Previous research has found that sex differences in occupational preferences are both substantial and cross-culturally universal. Androphilic males tend to display “gender-shifted” occupational preferences, with relatively female-typical interests. Past research has overwhelmingly relied on Western samples; this article offers new insights from a non-Western setting. Known locally as fa’afafine, androphilic males in Samoa occupy a third-gender category. Data were collected in Samoa from 103 men, 103 women, and 103 fa’afafine regarding occupational preferences and recalled childhood gender (...) class='Hi'>nonconformity (CGN). A substantial sex difference was observed in the occupational preferences of men and women (d = 2.04). Interestingly, women and fa’afafine did not differ in their preferences (p = 0.89), indicating a complete gender inversion of occupational preferences in the latter. Although there was no correlation between women’s CGN and masculine occupational preferences, there was a significant correlation (r = −0.62) between these variables in both men and fa’afafine. Among males (both men and fa’afafine), increased CGN was associated with preference for feminine occupations. The present research corroborates past findings and furnishes support for the conclusion that female-typical occupational preferences are a cross-culturally invariant aspect of male androphilia. (shrink)

The first scientific questionnaire to establish gender and sexual “intermediate” identities “objectively” was published in 1899 by the internationally renowned sexologist and pioneer of LGBTI emancipation, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). In this article, I show that this questionnaire changed how interactions took place between psycho-medical professionals and people who did not conform to sexual or gender norms. Rhetorically, the questionnaire created a delicate balance between self-expression and objectification of the subject. It broke down already existing semiautobiographical case histories into (...) a list of characteristics, behaviour, and inclinations; all predicated on a conventional binary view of gender. I conclude that the questionnaire paradoxically activated and reified conventionally binary-gendered phenomena precisely by offering gender nonconformist people a robust frame for (gender-fluid) self-understanding; an inheritance still haunting us today. (shrink)

Trans and gender-nonconforming people sometimes say that certain gender norms are authentic for them. For example, a trans man might say that abiding by norms of masculinity tracks who he really is. Authenticity is sometimes taken to appeal to an essential, pre-social “inner self.” It is also sometimes understood as a moral notion. Authenticity claims about gender norms therefore appear inimical to two key commitments in feminist philosophy: that all gender norms are socially constructed, and that (...) many domains of gender norms are both morally and prudentially bad. I argue that that this apparent tension is illusory. Concordant with existing trans narratives of authenticity, I articulate an existentialist view that understands authenticity as a socially embedded, constructive project undertaken in a non-ideal social world, rather than a reflective uncovering of a pre-given, essential self. I then show that authenticity and morality can come apart; what is authentic for someone need not be either morally good or good for them. I conclude that the authenticity of gender norms does not cut against the feminist commitments that I identify. This conclusion enables a theoretical space that is both respectful of trans experience and critical of dominant gender norms, an important liberatory goal. (shrink)

Gender-neutral bathrooms are usually framed as an accommodation for trans and other gender-nonconforming individuals. In this paper, we show that the benefits of gender-neutral bathrooms are much broader. First, our simulations show that gender-neutral bathrooms reduce average waiting times: while waiting times for women go down invariably, waiting times for men either go down or slightly increase depending on usage intensity, occupancy-time differentials and the presence of urinals. Second, our result can be turned on its head: (...) firms have an opportunity to reduce the number of facilities and cut costs by making them all gender-neutral without increasing waiting times. These observations can be used to reframe the gender-neutral bathrooms debate so that they appeal to a larger constituency, cutting across the usual dividing lines in the ‘bathroom wars’. Finally, there are improved designs and behavioural strategies that can help overcome resistance. We explore what strategies can be invoked to mitigate the objections that gender-neutral bathrooms (1) are unsafe, (2) elicit discomfort and (3) are unhygienic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Sonny Nordmarken Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Beginning in the 1960s, scholars began to theorize (...) gender as a contextually specific process rather than a universal category reflecting an essential pre-discursive sex. Two interrelated traditions developed: a discursive approach, which theorized gender as performative, and an interactionist approach, which investigated the interactional achievement of gender. For Judith Butler, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”1 Gender is therefore performative : it is a series of effects produced through the repetition and citation of stylized acts, which are named via and thus produced through discourse ; discourse also produces the defining limits of subjects.2 Candace West and Don Zimmerman theorized gender as a “routine, methodical, 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 2. Butler, Gender Trouble; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sonny Nordmarken 37 and recurring accomplishment” produced in social interaction.3 They observed how, in the relational process of “doing gender,” social actors display gender, presenting an appearance to others, who attribute gender by interpreting this appearance. In this article, I investigate how actors interactionally challenge and construct discursive structures in order to contribute to scholarship that analyzes the role language plays in such interactions.4 Following Sandy Stone, who suggests that transsexuals are not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre, “a set of embodied texts,” who, through their interpretation, might potentially disrupt dichotomous sexuality and gender categories, I examine the spaces in which the discursive and the interactional merge to investigate how gender minorities, as simultaneous subjects, texts, social actors, and cultural workers, queer hegemonic gender practices.5 I argue that members of trans linguistic communities and gender nonconforming individuals queer the normative gender process in two ways: by productively linguistically communicating third-person gender pronouns and by disruptively inhibiting gender’s hegemonic attribution. Lal Zimman has made parallel observations, explaining linguistic gender self-determination practices as a new cultural phenomenon, focusing on terminology for types of gendered persons, grammatical gender forms (i.e., pronouns), and lexical items that relate to embodied sex.6 My analysis builds on Zimman’s observations using sociological, performance 3. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 126. 4. For example, see Mimi Schippers, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 85–102. 5. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 296. The term “gender minorities ” encompasses individuals identifying with gender identity terms other than those they were assigned and individuals with gender nonconforming appearance. 6. See Lal Zimman, “Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language,” Journal of Language and Discrimination 1, no. 1 (2017): 84–105; Lal Zimman, “Trans People’s Linguistic Self-Determination and the Dialogic Nature of Identity,” in Representing Trans: Linguistic, Legal, and Everyday Perspectives, ed. Evan Hazenberg and Miriam Meyerhoff (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2017). 38 Sonny Nordmarken studies and performativity frameworks to theorize these practices. By approximating new gender pronoun-attribution norms that bring a trans queer paradigm to life in interactions and by disregarding their perceptions of each other’s bodies, actors accomplish gender pronouns linguistically, override hegemonic gender attribution norms, and reorganize gender accountability. These practices institutionalize a new interpretive frame and accountability structure through which social actors create and recognize a variety of gender expressions, identities, and pronouns, reworking performativity to produce gender minorities as subjects. I argue that this gendering-queering is a form of disidentificatory gender accomplishment. In addition, I... (shrink)

This commentary responds to the article “What Is the Aim of Pediatric ‘Gender‐Affirming’ Care?,” by Moti Gorin, in the same issue of the journal. Gender‐affirming care is often treated as exceptional and subject to heightened scrutiny. This exceptionalization results in its being held to stricter evidentiary standards than other forms of medical interventions are. But values and value judgments are inextricable from the practice of evidence‐based medicine. For gender‐affirming care, values shape what counts as “strong” evidence, whether (...) the legitimacy of transgender identity is assumed versus treated as something to be investigated, how to characterize the testimonial accounts of trans and gender‐nonconforming patients, and more. We argue that these kinds of questions are part of the practice of medicine, not exceptional to transgender people and gender‐affirming care. However, litigation of evidence for gender‐affirming care in state and national policy underscores the moral urgency of thinking carefully about what values ought to guide evidence. (shrink)

Over the past several years, various operational definitions of gender have been used in studies of gender conformity in homosexual males. The goal of these studies is to demonstrate that childhood gender nonconformity (CGN) is either the proximate cause of adult homosexuality or an intermediate step in a biologically mediated process. The hypothesis of a causal connection between the development of gender and sexual orientation is embedded within the context of a biological (evolutionary) understanding of (...) human behavior. Thus, testing the hypothesis of a causal connection between CGN and sexuality requires a concept of gender that is compatible with the basic principles of biological causation and our current understanding of evolutionary processes. I will argue that the concepts of gender used in the attempt to demonstrate a causal connection between CGN and sexual orientation are inappropriate because they provide no uniform, consistent method for identifying and measuring the biologically significant components of gender. I will also argue that the concept of gender that does emerge from these studies suggests an hypothesis about the connection between sexuality and gender that is not consistent with the cross-gendered theory of the etiology of homosexuality. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender has largely focused on examples of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. Cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another. In light of these cases, metaphysicians of gender have devoted substantial attention to defining gender kinds and concepts. In this paper, I consider a different set of examples. I discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence, patterns of targeted structural violence toward (...) trans and gender-nonconforming people. Specifically, I argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. I claim that metaphysicians of gender need to give a real definition of the gender binary, and I present my own preliminary account. The methodological upshot of this paper is that the metaphysics of gender is not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how masculinity and gender nonconformity are viewed by 37 migrant Puerto Rican gay men who had been raised in Puerto Rico and migrated Stateside as adults. Most of these migrant men note the importance of masculinity in their development and interactions with others, particularly other men. They resist identification of themselves as effeminate and distance themselves from locas. They associate locas with overt homosexuality, disrespect, and marginality. I argue that migrant Puerto Rican gay (...) masculinities are maintained within the precept of hegemonic masculinity through various social mechanisms, including a gendered construction of male homosexuality; the connection of social and interpersonal respect with masculinity; the socially allowable and pervasive ridicule and punishment of male femininity; and marginalization based on multiple social statuses. Through these interconnected social mechanisms, heteronormative perspectives on gender, gender binaries, and power are incorporated into homonormative migrant Puerto Rican gay masculinities. (shrink)

This article explores whether and how research into biological influences on gender identity can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender diversity and gender nonconformity. First, the current state of genetic and neuroscientific research on gender identity is surveyed. While the scientific findings are as yet preliminary, tentative, and sometimes contradictory, researchers argue that they already give grounds for thinking that many biological factors have some influence on gender identity through complex interactions with (...) many social and environmental factors. Next, the article offers some general remarks about how natural scientific findings should—and should not—inform Christian theological and ethical reflection. Finally, three specific proposals are developed for how scientific research can and should inform Christian ethical reflection on gender identity. The article offers both a contribution to this Christian ethical reflection and a case study of how the natural sciences may be used in Christian ethics. (shrink)

Using an analysis of child care books and parenting Web sites, this article asks if second-wave feminism’s vision of gender-neutral child rearing has been incorporated into contemporary advice on child rearing. The data suggest that while feminist understandings of gender have made significant inroads into popular advice, especially with regard to the social construction of gender, something akin to “a stalled revolution” has taken place. Children’s gender nonconformity is still viewed as problematic because it is (...) linked implicitly and explicitly to homosexuality. (shrink)

In the past decade, a few countries have created a third gender category to legally recognize gender-nonconforming individuals. However, we know relatively little about the response of the gender-nonconforming individuals toward the legal third gender category. To address this gap, this article analyzes the different social, religious, and institutional discourses that have emerged around the recently created third gender category in Pakistan and their influence on the legal consciousness of the Khawaja Sira community, a marginalized (...) gender-nonconforming group. Even though the third gender category was created to address the unique gender identity of the Khawaja Sira community, most continue to legally register as men. My research indicates that the patriarchal stigma, high compliance costs, and limited material benefits associated with the legal third gender category dissuade the Khawaja Sira community from choosing to register. My findings point to the limitations of a legal third gender category within a patriarchal sociolegal order where important benefits associated with the masculine identity are forfeited by registering. In doing so, I caution against over emphasizing the symbolic value of legal recognition for gender-nonconforming groups. (shrink)

Historically, the transgender population has faced prejudice and discrimination within society. The purpose of diagnostic terms is to direct clinical care and facilitate insurance coverage. However, the existence of a medical diagnosis for gender nonconformity can exacerbate the stigmatization of transgender people with adverse consequences on their emotional health and social life. Whether transgenderism and gender dysphoria are indeed a psychopathological condition or even any kind of nosological entity is a contested issue. Many advocates of human rights, (...) trans activists, social scientists, and clinicians support either the removal of gender incongruence from the list of mental disorders or at least its transfer to a separate category. Reforming the classification is an intermediate step toward depathologization and permits access to transgender-related care. Nonetheless, it partly preserves the stigma associated with abnormality and puts the availability of psychiatric care at risk. A more radical approach dictates that the classification of diseases serves exclusively medical purposes and must be dissociated from the respect for the legitimacy of one’s autonomy and dignity. In the long term, only a swing in societal values can detach stigma from mental and physical illnesses. Enhancing collective respect for life, human rights, and diversity is the best way to achieve cohesion and well-being among members of society. Health professionals can be pioneers of social change in this field. (shrink)

Aren Z. Aizura's Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment is one of the best nonfiction books I have read recently. I was interested in Aizura's work because of the several ways in which this book's subjects resonated with my reflections on gender nonconforming subjects, gender reassignment, and the medical-industrial complex with a focus on interrogating the West/non-West binary. It focuses on trans and gender nonconforming people, issues of mobility, and access to various technologies for bodily (...) modification. This book, divided in two parts, will be of interest to a variety of readers, especially scholars doing feminist studies, queer theory, feminist science and technology... (shrink)

Until recently, raising a young child as transgender was culturally unintelligible. Most scholarship on transgender identity refers to adults’ experiences and perspectives. Now, the increasing visibility of gender-variant children, as they are identified by the parents who raise them, presents new opportunities to examine how individuals confront the gender binary and imagine more gender-inclusive possibilities. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “truth regime” to conceptualize the regulatory forces of the gender binary in everyday life, this work examines (...) the strategies of 24 such parents, who represent 16 cases of childhood gender variance. Specifically, I analyze three practices—“gender hedging,” “gender literacy,” and “playing along”—through which these parents develop a critical consciousness about gender binary ideology and work to accommodate their children’s nonconformity in diverse discursive interactions. Taken together, their newfound strategies and perspectives subvert traditional conceptions of “gender-neutral” or “feminist” parenting, and reveal new modes of resistance to the normative transmission and regulation of gender practices. (shrink)

Showing how the law and medical knowledge intersect, Steph Jowett examines the law governing consent to medical treatment for trans youth in Australia, England and Wales. Using clear examples and accessible language, Jowett offers a comparative perspective that will benefit future reform efforts.

'Transgender’ is often described either as an identity, or else as the full spectrum of gender nonconformity. In this essay, I suggest that these descriptions do not align with the conceptual labor that we often ask ‘transgender’ to do: highlighting people who engage in forms of self-directed gender nonconformity that are heavily penalized.

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, (...) I show that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

Gender norms can guide our sense of what we feel like we ought to do, even when we don't want them to. Understanding this norm responsiveness is an important part of understanding how oppressive gender systems are sustained. According to a social constructionist position, gender norm responsiveness happens as a result of social training, or socialization. It's often assumed that this training depends on our gender categories—that, for example, those who occupy the category “man” will be (...) responsive to masculine norms, and so on. Call this a category-based view. But trans and gender-nonconforming people are often responsive to gender norms that don't match our gender categories. This is sometimes taken as evidence for the conclusion that normative masculinity and femininity are somehow innate or presocialized. I reject this inference. I argue that we should instead dispense with a category-based view, and instead adopt a traits-based view. Gender norms apply to individuals on the basis of the gender-coded traits that they express. A traits-based view represents a social constructionist account of gender norms that leaves room for trans and GNC experiences of normative gender, and thus represents an important step towards creating inclusive theory. (shrink)

Much of the history of Western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives. Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude (...) differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study respond to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability or incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate. Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues. Contributors include Christine Daigle, Shannon Dea, Lindsay Eales, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Guenther, Lynne Huffer, Ada Jaarsma, Stephanie Jenkins, Ladelle McWhorter, Jane Barter Moulaison, Astrida Neimanis, Danielle Peers, Stephen Seely, Hasana Sharp, Chloë Taylor, Florentien Verhage, Rachel Loewen Walker, and Cynthia Willett. (shrink)

RESUMEN El apetito rapaz de los conquistadores produjo sodomitas Indígenas en Abya Yala. Corrompió también sus entendimientos sobre vitalidad corporal. La violación convirtió una permeabilidad anal, que comunicaba varias formas de lo vital, en un acto de destitución socio-corporal. La permeabilidad carnal Indígena, y su transición, quedó signada como infrahumana. La colonialidad oculta esa condición infrahumana al confundir las movilidades transgéneros con todo tipo de disconformidad corporal. Al considerar la permeabilidad corporal como un índice de disidencia tanto cognitiva como sexual, (...) la modernidad configuró lo transgénero como un vínculo monstruoso entre la permeabilidad y el capacitismo. El legado de la colonialidad fusiona conceptualmente a los cuerpos infra y cuasi-humanos. Para desenredar esa confusión, este ensayo examina la materialidad ancestral de prácticas anales, ritos funerarios, y apariciones y danzas ceremoniales. Este materialismo decolonizante negocia la permeabilidad sobre el puente que se extiende entre, por un lado, las cosmologías Andinas y Mesoamericanas y, por otro, las corporalidades travesti y trans. Al introducir el marco de la colonialidad de lo transgénero, el ensayo coloca el pluralismo ontológico en el centro de los debates sobre los materialismos trans*. ABSTRACT The voracious lust of the conquest produced Indigenous sodomites in Abya Yala. Native peoples saw their understandings of bodily vitality interrupted. Rape turned anal permeability, which had once communicated various forms of life, into an act of bodily destitution. The permeability of Indigenous flesh, and its transition, was rendered non-human. Coloniality veils this infrahuman condition by mistaking transgender transitions for any nonconforming embodiment. By reading permeable bodies as gender nonconforming, modernity gives rise to monstrous and disabled embodiments. Thus, transgender emerges as the linchpin between ableism and permeability. The legacy of colonialism conflates near-human and infrahuman bodies. Moving away from this conflation, this writing examines the materiality of ancestral, nonwestern, anal practices, burial rites, ceremonial apparitions, and dances. This decolonizing materialism negotiates permeability over the bridge between, on the one hand, Mesoamerican and Andean cosmologies and, on the other, travesti and trans Latinx embodiments. Ultimately, the coloniarity of transgender framework that I develop centers ontological pluralism in the current conversations about trans* materialisms. (shrink)

In this essay, I offer a brief for “abolitionist genealogy” as a method and philosophical practice. By locating instances of this method within the work of prison abolitionists who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, I argue that such a method is already available to theorists and critical historians of the present if we are willing to attend to the absences and presences that constitute our academic communities. I ground my brief for abolitionist genealogy by centering the experiences of queer, trans, (...) gender-nonconforming, and intersex incarcerated people as exemplary of how prisons and jails are fundamentally violent places which cannot, as McDonald puts it, be made safe. Lastly, I link these concerns to the broader question of queer and TGNCI visibility politics in carceral institutions such as the jail/prison and the university. (shrink)

We examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1920 and 2000 in their probability of having had sex with same-sex partners in the last year and since age 18. Using data from the 1988–2018 General Social Surveys, we explore how trends differ by gender, race, and class background. We find steep increases across birth cohorts in the proportion of women who have had sex with both men and women since age 18, whereas increases for men are less steep. We (...) suggest that the trends reflect an increasingly accepting social climate, and that women’s steeper trend is rooted in a long-term asymmetry in gender change, in which nonconformity to gender norms is more acceptable for women than men. We also find evidence that, among men, the increase in having had sex with both men and women was steeper for black than for white men, and for men of lower socioeconomic status; we speculate that the rise of mass incarceration among less privileged men may have influenced this trend. (shrink)

Historians have linked the emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities to the development of capitalism. A materialist approach should also look atdifferentforms of sexual identity, and their connections with specific phases of capitalist development. Marxist long-wave theory can help us understand how the decline of Fordism contributed to shifts in LGBT identities, speeding the consolidation of gay identity while fostering the rise of alternative sexual identities. These alternative identities, sometimes defined as ‘queer’, characterised by sexual practices that are still stigmatised, by (...) explicit power-differentials and above all by gender-nonconformity, are particularly common among young and disadvantaged working-class strata. The growing diversity of identities is a challenge to any gay universalism that neglects class, gender, sexual, racial/ethnic and other differences, to the currently dominant forms of lesbian/gay organising, and ultimately to the prevailing division of human beings into gay and straight.1. (shrink)

Psychology’s emphasis on individual experience has created idealised prototypes for gender identity, promulgated through traditional tools of psychological evaluation. Transgender and gender nonconforming people have been urged to fit into binary conceptions of such evaluations, at least until the recent depathologisation approved by the World Health Organization. The present theoretical study examines how psychological discourses around gender diversity and corporeality have been transformed. To this effect, it appeals to four arguments: to the activist mobilisation against homogeneous definitions (...) of transness, to the applicability of taxonomic systems’ categories, to the resistances against psychometric tests’ validity scales, and lastly, to issues concerning cross-cultural adaptation of terms, measurements and conceptions of bodily and gender identity. (shrink)

Healthcare delivery can present ethical conflicts and dilemmas for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs)--nurses who already have a myriad of responsibilities in caring for patients. Ethical Case Studies for Advanced Practice Nurses improves APRNs' agility to resolve ethical quandaries encountered in primary care, hospital-based, higher education, and administration beyond community settings. Through case studies examining various types of ethical conflicts, the authors empower APRNs and students with the critical knowledge and skills they need to handle even the most complex dilemmas (...) in their practice. By applying a set of criteria and framework, this book guides APRNs to use critical thinking to make ethically sound decisions. Case study topics include: substance use in pregnancy, elder-care issues, depression screening in adolescents, abortion and moral values, medical emancipation versus confidentiality in transgender and gender-nonconforming people, prescription refills for patients with financial hardship. (shrink)

This article argues for the necessity of recognising the collective rights-holding status of ‘sexual and gender minorities’ (SGMs) by examining the limits of the discourse concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in international law. I consider both symbolic interactionism and queer theory, which are critical of the assumption that everyone subscribes to a gender and a sexual identity. The theorisation proposed here accounts for not only people who possess a relatively stable identity, but also people whose situations (...) are not conclusively characterised but still require recognition justice. Not equating SGMs to LGBTI populations, I contend that the use of the term ‘SGMs’ should capture the sociocultural dynamics of the way in which one is made a ‘minority’. In light of the variations regarding sexual and gender norms in diverse contexts, SGMs are conceptually useful to accommodate differential experiences of nonconformity with the normative. (shrink)

This article is a postscript to Bem's (1996) theory of sexual orientation, which claims that an individual's sexual orientation is more directly the result of childhood experiences than of inborn biological factors. The possibility that the theory provides a successful strategy for preventing gender-nonconforming children from becoming homosexual adults is considered and rejected. So, too, is the thesis that biological explanations of homosexuality are more likely than experience-based explanations to promote gay-positive attitudes and practices.

Contestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled (...) colonial constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression. (shrink)

This article examines the mutual imbrication of gender and class that shapes how some transgender women seek incorporation into social hierarchies in postcolonial India. Existing literature demonstrates an association between transgender and middle-class-status in the global South. Through an 18-month ethnographic study in Bangalore from 2009 through 2016 with transgender women, NGO workers and activists, as well as textual analyses of media representations, I draw on “new woman” archetypes to argue that the discourses of empowerment and respectability that impacted (...) middle-class cisgender women in late colonial, postcolonial and liberalized India also impact how trans women narrate their struggles and newfound opportunities. Trans woman identities are often juxtaposed to the identities of hijras, a recognized group of working-class male-assigned gender-nonconforming people. Instead of challenging stereotypes of gender nonconformity most evident in the marginalization of hijras, some transgender women are at pains to highlight their difference from hijras. These trans women are from working-class backgrounds. It is partly their similarities in class location that propel trans women’s efforts to distinguish themselves from hijras. They employ the figure of the disreputable hijra to contain negative stereotypes associated with gender nonconformity, thus positioning their identities in proximity with middle-class respectable womanhood. (shrink)

This article situates Mexican sexology, and how it engaged homosexuality and gender nonconformity, within more familiar nation-building projects in Mexico following the Revolution (1910–20). It argues that much like with understandings of race, Mexican sexologists, influenced by neo-Lamarckism and ‘Latin' eugenics, viewed sexuality as caused largely by social and environmental factors, rather than simply as a congenital characteristic. Such experts advocated for social solutions for what they saw as the ‘state of danger’ that homosexuality represented, targeting their interventions (...) at youths, who were seen as pliable, future citizens, rather than adults, who were largely seen as irredeemable and best isolated from the national body. The article explores discursive, ideological, and methodological threads in Mexican sexology from the 19th to the mid-20th century, the field’s professionalization and transnational connections, case studies of youths in which the preferred solutions involved promoting family stability and coherence, and adult cases ranging from prison studies to the case of Marta Olmos, recipient of Mexico’s first widely known sex reassignment. Overall, it demonstrates important intersections between sexology and nation-building projects related to criminology, anthropology, and eugenics, and how the attempted management of homosexuality and gender nonconformity sheds light on Mexican development more broadly. (shrink)

The public sphere has been seen by conservatives as an arena for safeguarding private relations. Private power relations could be threatened by newly recognized social groups that make claims on the state for justice and equality. Therefore, conservatives have been concerned about who can speak and exist in public and who can thereby make demands on the state. In the debates over transgender rights in Canada, social conservatives and neoliberal forces have merged in complex and impactful ways. Analyzing House of (...) Commons and Senate debates and committee proceedings for Bill C-279 and Bill C-16, I examine three conservative arguments that illustrate attempts to maintain private power relations and hierarchal gendered divisions by ensuring that transgender and gender nonconforming people are not allowed to exist, speak or make claims in public: first, the assertion that gender identity and gender expression are not definable identity categories for claims-making because transgender people are deceptive and can change their gender based on their feelings; second, the targeting of public facilities, and particularly public bathrooms, as sites of contention, danger and necessary gender segregation; and third, the attempt to delegitimize rights claims by criminalizing transgender people in relation to cisgender women and children. (shrink)

Examines traditional sites of binary thinking in ancient Greek texts and culture to demonstrate surprising ambiguity, especially with regard to sexual difference.

As secular culture exerts pressure on Catholic health care to conform to its standards, there is need for a clear response to those who claim that the body is not constitutive of the person but can be manipulated to suit a subjective view of the self. Patients who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve our compassionate support, but "therapies" that carry out or encourage the destruction of one's natal sexuality are contrary to the Christian tradition and to the teachings of (...) the Catholic Church. This book provides the arguments, evidence, and practical advice needed for Catholic health care to resist this ideology and courageously affirm the biological reality of the person. Through careful analysis, narrative case studies, and policy language, Transgender Issues in Catholic Health Care critiques current interventions for gender dysphoria and provides practical guidance for professionals and institutions committed to providing whole-person care. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

It would be an almost comical understatement to say that, throughout my graduate study in philosophy and subsequent years of teaching and writing, I found myself engaging with the works of Jeremy Bentham somewhat infrequently. Beyond flavorful anecdotes about mummified heads and jabs about stilted nonsense in my undergraduate Intro to Ethics courses—as we segued into extended discussion of John Stuart Mill, of course—Bentham’s direct and recognized role in my philosophical activities has been pretty much nonexistent. With all that said: (...) as a sexual- and gender- nonconforming aesthetician and LGBTQIA+ educator and wellness professional living in what is now a post-Roe United States, I found Carrie D. Shanafelt’s Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (2021) to be rich, captivating, and at times, even genuinely comforting. -/- Shanafelt’s short book is equal parts history of philosophy, philosophical history, biography, and queer manifesto, written in an accessible manner that successfully balances scholarship with readability. I could easily see Uncommon Sense engendering rich discussion in graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses of various sorts—though I can just as easily see portions of the book’s content generating various rumbles of controversy, at least at some of the institutions I’ve taught at before. (See, for example, Chapter Four, titled ‘Bentham’s Queer Christ.’) Any anticipatory worries of short-sighted reactionary takes aside, the book would absolutely serve well as the central focus on an entire course, supplemented by a range of literature and scholarly material from philosophical aesthetics, queer studies, political theory, and more. Honestly, I would love to teach that class. (shrink)

This article begins with an ethnographically documented incident whereby nursing students dissected a medical human simulator model and rearranged it so that the “male” head and torso was attached to the “female” lower half. They then joked about the embodiment of the model, thus staging a scene of anti-trans ridicule. The students’ lack of ability, or purposeful refusal, to recognize morphological biodiversity in medical settings indicates a lacuna in clinical imaginaries. Even as trans-identified and gender nonconforming people increasingly access (...) care in the clinic, the lacuna of transsex—as a proxy term for non-binary embodiment—persists at the heart of clinical practice. This article concludes that we might engage in more ethical clinical practice if we recognize and affirm the trace of multiple forms of human being in the non-human simulator. (shrink)

Call for Paper The 2014 publication of three of Jeremy Bentham’s extensive manuscript papers on sexual nonconformity as _ Of Sexual Irregularity and Other Writings on Sexual Morality _ has inspired a wide range of new scholarship on the relationship between utilitarianism and queer theory and history. Bentham’s sexual nonconformity papers demonstrate that the experiences of pleasure and pain are individual to each person, and thus, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" necessitates the maximal toleration of as (...) many experiences of happiness as there are persons, rather than a normative or hierarchical delineation of acceptable forms of happiness. Bentham asserts that differences in sexuality and gender must be accounted for in epistemology, law, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and theology, and addresses these differences in the context of oppression on the basis of race, gender, class, religious dissent, disability, and animal species. In the context of Bentham’s sexual nonconfor... (shrink)

Por uma política de leitura aberta de mundos: o buraco negro e o fim do mundo como possibilidade de nascimentos crianceiros Resumo: Este artigo é resultado de conversas afiadas e tecidas nos inconformismos e rebeldias desde as margens dos buracos negros de vidas em dissidências. O texto busca tensionar os buracos fechados pela polícia do sistema sexo-gênero na manutenção de seus privilégios e que não nos permite, via políticas públicas, acessar histórias em gêneros e sexualidades diferentes das tradicionais narrativas feitas (...) para meninos e meninas de um certo tipo. Há subjetividades circulando entre nós nos espaços educativos que convocam os corpos, os gêneros e as sexualidades ao direito de nascerem, crescerem, florescerem e coabitarem o mundo, as escolas, as memórias e as narrativas hegemônicas das políticas curriculares na literatura infanto-juvenil. Exercitando perguntas que não se conformam com as histórias contadas, apresentadas e curricularizadas diariamente, o artigo faz problema sobre os modos de ler heterocêntricos que privilegiam o cérebro. Propõe, então, leituras buraco-negro. Estas apostas políticas, feitas de políticas anais e suas revoluções, buscam despreguear as relações de poder e as literaturas. Palavras-chave: Leitura como atividade. Gênero e sexualidade. Buracos negros. For an open world reading policy: the black hole and the end of the world as a possibility for births of childhoods: This article is the result of sharp conversations woven into nonconformities and rebellion from the margins of black holes in dissenting lives. The text seeks to tension the holes closed by the sex-gender police in maintaining their privileges and that does not allow us, through public policy, to access stories in genres and sexualities different from traditional narratives made for boys and girls of a certain type. There are subjectivities circulating among us in the educational spaces that call the bodies, genders and sexualities to the right to be born, grow, flourish and cohabit the hegemonic world, schools, memories and narratives of curriculum policies in children's literature. Exercising questions that do not conform to the stories told, presented and curricularized daily, the article questions the heterocentric ways of reading that privilege the brain. It then proposes black hole readings. These political bets, made up of anal politics and their revolutions, seek to unravel power relations and literatures. Keywords: Reading as an activity. Gender and sexuality. Black holes. Por una política de lectura de mundo abierto: el agujero negro y el fin del mundo como posibilidad para el nascimiento de las infâncias Resumen: Este artículo es el resultado de conversaciones agudas entretejidas en no conformidades y rebeliones desde los márgenes de los agujeros negros en vidas disidentes. El texto busca tensar los agujeros cerrados por la policía de género y sexo para mantener sus privilegios y eso no nos permite, a través de políticas públicas, acceder a historias de géneros y sexualidades diferentes a las narrativas tradicionales hechas para niños y niñas de cierto tipo. Hay subjetividades que circulan entre nosotros en los espacios educativos que llaman a los cuerpos, los géneros y las sexualidades al derecho a nacer, crecer, florecer y convivir con el mundo hegemónico, las escuelas, los recuerdos y las narrativas de las políticas curriculares en la literatura infantil. Ejercitando preguntas que no se ajustan a las historias contadas, presentadas y curriculadas diariamente, el artículo cuestiona las formas heterocéntricas de lectura que privilegian el cerebro. Luego propone lecturas de agujeros negros. Estas apuestas políticas, formadas por políticas anales y sus revoluciones, buscan desentrañar las relaciones de poder y la literatura. Palavras clave: Lectura como actividad. Género y sexualidad. Agujeros negros. Data de registro: 11/12/2019 Data de aceite: 26/08/2020. (shrink)

Means–ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation, and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and goal achievement, most especially (...) when the latter is difficult to evaluate. Although recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via nonconformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for nonconformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism. (shrink)

Subject of numerous interpretations and studies, the vicissitudes of the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research nevertheless still reserve some little-known pages, such as the human and scientific relationship that bound philosopher Max Horkheimer and economist Friedrich Pollock for over fifty years. Based on texts and letters translated here into English for the first time as well as some previously unpublished documents, the book reconstructs the crucial moments in the friendship between the two scholars with a narrative style and philological (...) accuracy. Nicola Emery accompanies us through the two friends and intellectuals' "nonconformism" and search for an alternative life-form that led to the birth of the Frankfurt critical theory. (shrink)

Philosophy: Dissent and Nonconformity forms part of the Doctrine and Devotion trilogy. The book represents the first attempt to tell the story of those who taught and wrote philosophy outside the Anglican-Oxbridge Academy. Dr. Sell investigates the place give to philosophy in Dissenting academies and Nonconformist colleges between 1689 and 1920. During this time there were over one hundred such academies and colleges and he examines each of them in turn. The beliefs and views held by the philosophers are (...) also examined in detail. This is both an important and an engaging book on a fascinating subject, and will appeal to those interested in nonconformist history and the history of philosophy in academic institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920Bruce KuklickAlan P. F. Sell. Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920. Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2004. Pp. 296. Cloth, £50.00This is a competent, clearly written, and authoritative exploration of its topic, in some respects a labor of love, for the author is both a pastor and a student of theology. Sell comprehensively examines the proliferation of dissenting academies and nonconformist colleges of (...) England and Wales, with some excursions into the Scottish scene, from the Toleration Act of 1689 through the early twentieth century. For the 230 years of this study, a great variety of schools, many of which had only a brief moment of existence, and most of which were barely funded, offered training for the ministers of over a dozen protestant denominations in Britain. Often one man provided instruction in subjects as diverse as mathematics, science, and literature—as well as religious fields.Sell does not focus on ministerial training or even theology, but the way in which the nonconforming religious élite expounded on and was taught philosophy. Thus, one sees how a diverse group that surely had sectarian needs in mind was also interested in grasping how thinkers outside its belief system approached basic problems of human existence. Over time Descartes and other continental rationalists, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists, Kant and Hegel, and the nineteenth-century British idealists were taught by the dissenting professoriate. In summarizing its interpretation, Sell presents a history of modern Anglo-European philosophy as it was refracted in the minds of (some) English-speaking Protestants. Their emphases are not unexpected: empiricism is somewhat devalued, and rationalistic and a priori modes of thinking perhaps inflated. The ethical implications of epistemology and metaphysics are most carefully explicated, and what is taken to be most strategic for [End Page 211] Reformed theology is underscored. Overall, if one is tempted to generalize (as Sell himself does not), the positions reached are credible and not out of line with the philosophical cutting edge of each era.For the most part the dissenters were not themselves creative philosophers of the first rank, but Sell rightly puts forward (206) a short list of thinkers at these schools who have genuine claims to merit, and my own very short list would include Richard Price, James Martineau, and Robert Mackintosh.The author uses diverse strategies to give readers a sense of the effort of these mostly forgotten men. To some extent the book is a biographical compendium, with brief sections on individual or paired thinkers. But Sell also offers coverage by denomination, and he adds a series of discussions by topics—on an assortment of recurring dilemmas in moral philosophy and on apologetics. A final and most useful feature of the book is a trio of indices, in addition to the very full notes and a complete bibliography, mainly of the writings of the many authors cited. Two of the indices are standard, but helpful, lists of persons and topics; the third one is a compendium of all the academies Sell treats, as well as their denominational affiliation, and the duration of their existences.Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity has the defects of its virtues. It is encyclopedic in nature, available for reference but unlikely to be read as a synthetic book, except by devotees of a certain kind of historical philosophical theology. The author also presumes his readers are unlikely to tackle the volume unless they have a prior attraction. That is, the book is written without much contextual explication, and attention to the needs of the non-specialist certainly would have made the volume of wider interest. The work is still relatively brief, under 300 pages, and because of its character, I would have liked to have seen a series of maps that pinpointed the whereabouts of the dissenting schools, giving the reader a visual sense of when and where they arose and declined among particular denominations, and that informed us of what the relations were among the successive professors who defined the learning.Bruce KuklickUniversity of PennsylvaniaCopyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

During the time of English Nonconformity, Arianism was not only embraced, but openly acknowledged by most of the Presbyterian ministers. That generation of ministers, who contended so zealously for the orthodox faith, had finished their labours, and received from their Lord a dismissal into eternal rest. Those champions among the laity who, at the beginning of the controversy, stood up so firmly for the truth, had entered as well into the joy of their Lord. Though their children continued Dissenters, (...) too many of them did not possess the same sentiments or spirit. Among those who succeeded these ministers were too many who embraced the Arian creed. To this unhappy change contributed the example and conversation as well of many from the younger Presbyterian ministers. In consequence Arianism spread far and wide in the Presbyterian congregations, both among the ministers and the people. This unhappy controversy proved the grave of the Presbyterian congregations, and of those of the General Baptists. The effects of Arianism, though at first scarcely visible, gradually produced desolation and death. (shrink)