Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?

by Heath Fogg Davis Narrated by Paul Boehmer

Overview

Beyond 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, drivers licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/03/2017
Davis (The Ethics of Transracial Adoption), a professor of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia, challenges readers to consider why binary sex identity categories are used so pervasively in our everyday lives, and whether such routine categorization is needed. Sex-identity discrimination, the author argues, happens to both transgender and cisgender individuals whose appearance is at odds with observers’ beliefs about how masculine and feminine people should look in public, and the routine sorting of individuals into sex identity categories invites discriminatory social and institutional policing of individuals’ sex identities. In four brief chapters, this work examines four common locations of sex-identity sorting: sex markers on identity documents, sex-segregated restrooms, single-sex colleges, and sex-segregated sports. Davis consistently pushes readers to consider whether the practice of sex sorting bears any rational relationship to the goals its proponents claim to further: fighting identity fraud, promoting personal health and safety, addressing sexism in higher education, and encouraging fair play in competitive sports. An appendix offers guidelines for conducting a “gender audit” of organizational policies and practices, encouraging critical self-assessment of everyday acts that unnecessarily invoke sex and gender classifications. The author, a transgender man of color, approaches this topic as both an expert scholar and an individual whose own identity has been subject to hostile scrutiny. (June)

Jamison Green

"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."

Christian Century

"Readers may not agree with all of Davis's conclusions, but his method of discerning rational relationships provides a helpful way to create conversations about whether a particular instance of sex segregation is legitimate or problematic. It encourages us to become far more reflective about when and why we believe sex needs to be marked and managed."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Daviss solution-orientedBeyond Transis a necessary voice in current debates about the administration of sex and transgender identity. From the infamous bathroom bills to cis citizens objection to financing the medical expenses of trans military personnel (the specter of which Donald Trump backhandedly invoked during his transgender ban tweets), to womens colleges determining that sex-segregation and defining the boundaries of womanhood were necessary to a feminist project of education, Daviss book offers applicable solutions and applies the knowledge gained from the positionality of trans, intersex, and non-binary viewpoints."

Reason Magazine

"[R]efreshing.Davis situates the struggle for transgender dignity and rights squarely within the larger framework of personal freedom and privacy concerns, and shows how removing institutional barriers to living beyond the gender binary can help everyone live fuller, freer lives."

Times Literary Supplement

"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."

BUST.com

"Davis constantly challenges the value of forcing people to adhere to a binary, successfully arguing that the problems far outweigh the benefits."

Plentitude Magazine

"Davis's book is the quintessential transgender issue primer."

Joshua Gamson

"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."

Foreword Reviews

"Arefreshingly intersectional perspective on sex identity. . .takes a perhaps seemingly singular topic and makes it approachable through passionate and relevant analysis of modern issues. Davis time and again shows the importance of understanding transgender rights as a matter of all rights, and does so in a challenging, memorable, and accessible way."

Popmatters.com

"Reading Beyond Transis like having ones window shades thrown open after arising from a long night of sleep: the sunlight burns the eyes, but it awakens them . . .Beyond Transfeatures accessible, clear prose and direct argumentation. Anyone with an interest in trans rights and the public application of gender theory would benefit from Davis book.Beyond Transis as much a call to remediate the harm done to trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals as it is a plea for good reasoning."

Susan Stryker

"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."

Paisley Currah

"In this important and original book, Davis argues that most bureaucracies should get out of the business of administering sex by classifying people as Female or Male. Drawing on a number of case studies, including identity documents, bathroom bills, college admissions, and sex-testing for athletes, Davis shows most policies for sex classification are not rationally related to legitimate government interests. Drawing on a range of literatures and methods, including critical race scholarship, feminist theory, auto-ethnography, and doctrinal legal analysis, Beyond Trans is applied political theory at its best."

Quartz.com

"Davis argues that current precedent that restricts discriminating against people on the basis of gender could be used to challenge laws or practices that discriminate against people perceived as falling outside the gender binary. More broadly, we can all work toward a change in perspective. Demanding that people conform to stereotypes of masculinity or femininity does everybody harm. So instead of trying to fit more people into societys preexisting categories, we might try rethinking whether we need those categories at all."

BuzzFeed News

"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 shouldn't 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."

Library Journal

★ 05/01/2017
In 2014, Time magazine published the article, "Transgender Tipping Point," acknowledging the heightened visibility of the "T" within the LGBTQ population. Recently, that visibility has come to the fore in states' battles over who has access to which bathrooms. Davis (political science, Temple Univ., PA) covers that issue here in his cleverly named chapter "Bathroom Bouncers." But the author also does much more in his survey of the hot-button issues confronting transgender people navigating society's barriers. He explores the complex questions of identification and documentation, college admissions, and single-sex sports. The overarching question: To what extent are gender markers useful, accurate, and productive in these instances? The author not only challenges the status quo but, in the appendix, provides guidelines for organizations to perform a gender audit, which includes worksheets and policy guidelines based on Davis's consulting experience. VERDICT This highly recommended work offers clear, real-world discussions of issues facing transgender people, along with practical applications and solutions. It will be useful to academics, policymakers, and general readers.—David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170690275
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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