Gender Identity: The Career of a Category

From its obscure mid-twentieth-century origins in clinical assessments of intersex individuals, "gender identity" – understood as an inner sense of self that may or may not align with one's natal sex – has become central to the public and private culture of selfhood throughout the Western world. The category has been enacted in laws and regulations, encoded in organizational policies and routines, and embedded in everyday ways of thinking and talking. It has introduced a novel principle of social classification, created new possibilities for personhood, and come to rival or redefine the category of sex itself.

These developments have provoked intense controversy. Disputes rage about the legitimacy of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric youth, the meaning and limits of gender self-determination, and the terms governing access to women's spaces and activities.

Rogers Brubaker treats this hot topic in a cool manner, bringing much-needed analytical distance and conceptual clarity to a discussion dominated by polemics. Renowned for his foundational analyses of basic social categories, Brubaker sidesteps intractable debates about what gender identity ultimately is in order to show how the category actually works in medicine, law, data-gathering, and education. And he challenges prevailing understandings by demonstrating that despite its obvious instrumentalization by the right, most spectacularly in the US, the controversy over gender identity cannot be understood solely through a left–right lens.

Wide-ranging and rigorous, this book will inject a healthy dose of reason into one of the most troubled and acrimonious debates of our time.

"This book is a profound service to anyone who values clarity, sound thinking, and compassion – qualities which have not generally characterized the discourse surrounding 'gender identity.' Drawing on decades of experience as one of the world's top thinkers on human groups, Rogers Brubaker has published the first absolute must-read treatment of gender identity. Anyone with even a faint interest in this subject, regardless of their opinion on it, will benefit from his analysis." - Jesse Singal, writer of the newsletter Singal-Minded and co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported

"How, why, and when did it become self-evident that each person possesses a distinct gender identity? With impressive skill, clarity, and erudition, Rogers Brubaker tells a sweeping story of how a now-ubiquitous concept migrated from the periphery to the vital center of contemporary life – transforming myriad social practices, igniting intense political debates, and offering new ways of imagining selfhood." - Steven Epstein, author of The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life

"This brilliant book extends Rogers Brubaker's masterful body of work on principles of social classification to examine the historical institutionalization of, and struggles over, gender identity as a legible and actionable category of practice. Meticulously researched, impeccably argued, and thoroughly illuminating, Gender Identity shows how this concept has proliferated ways for people to position their inner, subjective sense of self in relation to the sexed and gendered social order. An absolute must-read." - Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley