What if we just said: “Here we are, we don’t want to be harmed.”

August 20, 2022 1:09 PM

Andrea Long Chu talks to gender studies and political science scholar Paisley Currah about trans rights, official definitions of gender and his new book Sex Is as Sex Does.
When Currah was on a NYC Dept of Health committee to figure out a new birth certificate policy, at one point the committee had agreed to define sex by gender identity. The city was like, “No, that won’t work for prisons,” or “Yes, it will work for homeless services,” or “It’ll kind of work for drug rehab but not for the facilities that are residential.” The city just cared about how sex was operationalized, what effect it would have on the government, and not the fact that sex as a biological concept is really messy.
posted by spamandkimchi (6 comments total)

Also from the interview:

In one chapter in the book, I talk about how there’s all this advocacy for trans prisoners that implicitly rests on the idea that cisgender prisoners have it good. Yes, trans prisoners don’t get the gender-affirming care they need. But also, cis prisoners are getting Advil instead of chemo. We live in a carceral-industrial system that grabs people and throws them in prison as an economic policy, and vulnerable trans people get swept up in that.

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:10 PM on August 20, 2022 [14 favorites]

The same way that activists say "budgets are a moral document," I think that how things like sex and gender are operationalized matters. I think about this story (from the book "Everyday Information Architecture") about how race was operationalized by Virginia's bureaucracy: racial categories were written that shaped segregation for nearly a century and reified racism.

I say this having also sat on NYC Dept of Health working groups on how to better handle sex and gender diversity in data (more recently than 2005), and I can say that at least in the working group I was on, the interest in how sex is operationalized was rooted in earnest, informed desire to make government work for more people, and to reflect a broader set of human experiences in how we describe the lives of New Yorkers.

Currah's decision to "define sex as a result of government decision" is pretty powerful - it reminds me of Judith Butler's point about gender assignment: "Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us."
posted by entropone at 1:45 PM on August 20, 2022 [21 favorites]

Andrea Long Chu can be a bit of a troll at times but anytime I read her work there's some insight in there that makes me think more deeply about gender. I'm really glad she's out there doing this work, and this is a good conversation. Thank you for sharing it!
posted by potrzebie at 5:12 PM on August 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

This bit struck me as realistic:

PC: You know, a lot of law professors and legal studies people like to talk about doctrine, but I think talking about doctrine and the court’s logic is sort of like talking about how Santa Claus makes the toys. Doctrine is for clerks. For the justices it’s like, “This is the result I want, you go write it up.” They reverse-engineer the doctrine.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:50 AM on August 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

I am still reading, but spamandkimchi's comment cued me to start seeing ideas similar to those in Racecraft:

"Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order.

[...]

"They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition."

posted by mph at 8:16 AM on August 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

It’s like we’ve spent all our time reading Judith Butler and not Marx

Or, if we're thinking of the State and prison and human bodies, Foucault, who's hard to escape (as it were). I have a bit of contact with prisons and their history and heritage in my country; there are men's jails and women's jails, but that's only the start of the extremely elaborate and ever-changing grain of segregation and control that goes on. There are the various levels of min-max security. Then, prisoners are classified by their offence, behaviour, protection requirements (for e.g. informants/informers), languages, group membership (of gangs, religions, political groups), physical health, mental health, age and time-in-custody, and most controversially, by defacto race/ethnicity. There are juvenile prisons, there are forensic mental-health prisons (for prisoners who can't be tried), there are day-work prisons and there are home-release hybrids; the history of post-1788 Australia is the history of penal experiments. And the classifications are emergent; Cooma Jail for example was once a prison for homosexuals, but by offence rather than identity, and with a totally confused protection-reform remit, reflecting the State's own confusion, and likely that of the prisoners themselves.

Currah is exactly right to say there should be more attention paid to what States actually do; in the instance of prisons States are historically very, very creative, and infinitely changeable in matters of identity. If the rules stop working for purpose and interests—that of the prison's, not the prisoners, of course—they'll simply make up new rules. And if we look at the purpose of an institution like a prison as seeking stability, making sure that today is like yesterday, and tomorrow is like today, then their flexibility in classification starts making more sense, instead of none. The very last thing prison governors and warders want, historically, is legislators trying to impose well-meaning or ill-meaning inflexible laws on them.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:19 PM on August 21, 2022 [3 favorites]