Beyond Trans

Goes beyond transgender to question the need for gender classificationBeyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. He examines four areas where we need to re-think our sex-classification systems: sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage. For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis’ recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people.

We will soon be reading books that are truly new, indeed revolutionary, in arguing that the future of gender will be the end of gender binaries altogether.How can future writers debate & essential sex differences when there are more than two sexes, or when some women and men who choose to become the other, and when some people want to be both or neither?Heath Fogg Daviss Beyond Trans: Does gender matter?, one of the first among many that I am sure are in the pipeline, invites readers to question why we care so much about labels and categories on drivers licences, passports and bathroom doors, and in sports and schools., Both clear-eyed and eye-opening, Beyond Transchallenges all of usgender-nonconforming and cisgender, trans and gender-conforming, individuals and organizationsto ask ourselves why and how we are using sex classifications, what harm they might be doing, and just how theyre even defining & sex. A provocative and compelling book., In a lively and accessible style, Davis questions the administrative and social practices of labeling individuals sex or gender solely in correspondence with the binary categories of female or male. He challenges the validity of sex-identifying documents and sex-segregated facilities or institutionseven competitive sportsas solutions to privacy, safety, or equality. This is a thought-provoking and highly relevant subject, perfect for todays political and cultural debates., Whyand whenis it important to say whether somebody is a man or a woman? Those are the provocative questions Heath Fogg Davis poses in this informative exploration of gender markers . . . But even more provocative are the questions of how we determine what counts as & man and & woman in the first place, and why we imagine there can be only two genders. This is a great book for students and specialists alike who are interested in the profound transformation of gender we are all experiencing in the early twenty-first century., In another major book about our current gender moment,Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?Heath Fogg Davis, a professor of political science at Temple University and a transgender man, makes the argument that the modern trans rights movement shouldnt be so heavily invested in integrating trans and gender-nonconforming people into our existing gendered institutions. Instead, Davis suggests, we should use the so-called & transgender tipping point to explode our bureaucratic definitions of gender altogether.

Heath Fogg Davis is Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of The Ethics of Transracial Adoption."