Gender as Technology

Abstract

This case study examines how gender functions as a technology to regulate, classify, and narrow human identity. Its origins dating back to psychologist John Money's work with intersexed patients in the 1950s, the study asks how the split between sex and gender developed to hold bodies that defied binary dictates. This model was both employed in time to legitimize harmful attempts to "cure" gender variance and to provide space for recognition of intersex and transgender identity. The case demonstrates the way that gender, like race, operates as a social construct system which determines who belongs where, who is "normal," and who does not belong. Through the use of a contemporary example in which the Trump administration forces federal IDs to recognize sex assigned at birth, this study demonstrates the ways in which gender classification becomes an apparatus of surveillance, stigma, and restricted mobility. Transgender persons are more vulnerable to harassment and criminalization if official records concerning them conflict with their lives. Utilizing histories of racial segregation and bathroom politics, the case contends that gender binarism is sustained by myth and moral panic, not evidence. It finally calls on students to consider how legal constructions of gender as a tool of social control and what it would entail to deconstruct systems of policing embodiment and identity.