Sex and State Are Action Verbs

Sex and State Are Action Verbs Claudia Sofía Garriga-López (bio) Paisley Currah’s Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, New York: New York University Press, 2022 In the face of the present moment’s relentless culture-war legislation against transgender people, Sex Is as Sex Does is a gift to educators who want to teach transgender studies from a political science perspective. This book is accessible and clearly written in a way that makes it especially suitable for undergraduate students as well as people outside of academia who want to deepen their understanding of transgender politics. Paisley Currah’s experiences as both an advocate for transgender rights and a social theorist guide readers to look at big-picture questions about the social construction of sex in and through governance practices, without losing sight of the immediate material needs of trans people for political reforms. Currah moves through a series of legal cases, administrative rules, and legislation to demonstrate what sex categorizations do across a wide range of government agencies and institutions. In doing so, he demonstrates the plasticity of sex as a tool of governance, as one of many categories used to distribute resources and exert control over populations. Sex classifications and the requirements for sex reclassification are a function of government, even or especially within agencies that purportedly have nothing to do with sex. Currah points out that institutions that surveil, confer benefits, or incarcerate have different sets of interest when it comes to sex designation. He helps us make sense of the contradictory and uneven distribution of sex reclassification policies by pointing out the different work that sex classification does in a driver’s licence, on a marriage certificate, in prison, and so on. Through this narrow yet versatile focus on the regulations surrounding sex reclassification, Currah theorizes state formations. Sex is as sex does, but also, government is as government does. States are not inherently coherent, unified, or rational; they are an amalgamation of practices that often contradict one another. [End Page 255] This book can be thought of as a transfeminist theory of state. Transfeminism offers us a path through which to move beyond the gender essentialism and biological determinism that has plagued feminisms since the sex/gender divide was made a central principle through which to refute women’s subordination. Currah’s state-based political analysis compliments transgender scholarship’s deconstruction of sex as a stable biological category in the fields of medicine and gender studies. Currah sustains that despite their limitations, it is many times necessary to employ talking points about the correct medical and scientific understanding of sex or the need for sex reclassification, even as he proposes that a more just approach would be to do away with sex classification altogether. Currah traces how sex categorization was founded on the institutionalization of patriarchal norms over landownership, education, employment, inheritance, voting rights, and so on. He argues that while liberal feminism has been rightly critiqued for the ways it reinforces racial capitalism, it has also been effective at removing the formal use of sex categorization for access to rights and resources in ways that has made sex reclassification possible for trans people. Similarly, while queer critics of same-sex marriage have rightly pointed out its homonormative effects, Currah notes that the legal prohibition against same-sex marriage was a major obstacle for trans people being able to change their sex designation on official documents, on account of the speculation that same-sex couples would seek out marriage certificates by changing the sex designation of one of the partners. Currah repeatedly reminds his readers that sex classification has historically been used to limit access to rights and resources to far more than just trans people. Currah also intervenes to undo the cisgender/transgender binary in relation to a commonly employed narrative within transgender advocacy about trans people’s increased risk for policing and incarceration. He argues that this emphasis obscures the function of race and class in determining which trans people are at an increased risk of incarceration. Herein lies an example of the work “transgender” does to link together under one umbrella category a wide range of people...