Beyond Trans

This is the book on transgender rights, gender identity and expression, and policy that you never knew you wanted.

Welcome to the latest instalment of “$#A$^% am I ever behind at reviewing my NetGalley books”. Today I review Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, out at the beginning of June from New York University Press. To summarize Heath Fogg Davis’ thesis in one sentence in his own words: “I show why it is in the best interests of organizations of all kinds to minimize their administration of sex”. What follows is a careful, methodical, logical, but heartfelt analysis of specific areas of Western society in which categorization, segregation, or discrimination on the basis of sex/gender is, in Davis’ opinion, unnecessary. Moreover, Davis goes beyond pointing out problems and actually suggests practical, workable solutions that involve breaking down gender barriers and gender binaries rather than—as he phrases it—using assimilation and accommodation to fit trans people into those binaries.

Before we go on, a quick disclaimer: I am cis and so can only review this book from that perspective. I can’t tell you if it provides a good representation of the views of various trans people. Davis himself is a trans man. Also, I appreciate how he quotes a variety of transgender and non-binary people, not all of whom necessarily share his views; Davis is careful not to represent trans communities as monolithic in their desires or views on gender. Finally, Davis acknowledges that while he has experienced the oppression, marginalization, and fear that comes with being transgender, he also has privileges of class, and he does not appear “visibly” transgender, so he has male privilege that he did not have prior to his transition.

Beyond Trans is not actually as controversial as some of the marketing might make it seem. I was a little wary because of the title and the first lines of the description. Was Davis going to make some kind of argument about how gender doesn’t matter, how we should all be blind? No—if anything, it’s the opposite. Davis says that your gender matters, and that it matters so much to your identity that the government and other organizations should stop policing it in silly, contradictory, unenforceable ways.

Really, libertarians should be all about this book. (Disclaimer: I am not a libertarian either, so I guess I shouldn’t speak for them.) It always amuses me how there is this overlap, at least in the States, between people who call for smaller government and people who want the government to legislate what people can do with regards to their sexual and gender orientations and identities. Much of Davis’ argument is classically libertarian: the government has no business regulating sex and gender. Indeed, one of Davis’ chief criticisms of government regulation is its inconsistent and often absent definition of sex or gender. Various laws and regulations just use these words, often interchangeably, without offering proper legal definitions, leaving it up to the courts to decide what was actually meant by the law.

Davis also points out that existing attempts to be inclusive have major shortcomings. He cites, for example, the movements to add “other” categories to the sex checkboxes on many official forms. It’s well-intentioned and better than nothing, but it also creates confusion. Ultimately, he argues the collection of sex/gender information from people happens in situations where it is entirely irrelevant. For gender-conforming individuals, this isn’t a big deal; we don’t get called on it. For non-conforming people, though, it puts amazing power in the hands of administrative authority that can, in some cases, lead to violence.

I used the terms “gender-conforming/non-conforming” for a reason, because Davis asserts that the superfluous collection of and segregation by gender harms cis people as well as trans people. He gives the example of a lesbian woman kicked out of a New York restaurant for using the women’s washroom: the bouncer didn’t believe she was a woman. Since her gender expression didn’t conform to his personal beliefs for what matches “woman” in our society, he felt it was within his power to police her gender and her access to essential facilities.

Along the same lines, Davis points out that the strategy to accommodate and assimilate trans people essentially erases non-binary people, agender people, etc. It’s all well and good to let a trans person change their sex on official documents from male to female or vice versa—but what about people who want to change from male to … nothing? Or female to non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, neutrois, or so on? Amendments and improvements to laws that focus on removing the barrier to changing one’s sex within the existing binaries can’t fix the fact that the entire idea of a sex or gender binary is itself a flawed and broken one and should be demolished post-haste.

Beyond Trans looks at sex markers on official documents, sex-segregated washrooms, single-sex admissions policies at colleges, and sex-segregated sports. In each case, Davis examines why these policies are harmful, unnecessary, and ill-advised. He then suggests how to fix them, whether it involves dismantling them altogether or going a different route. He emphasizes how this approach doesn’t just benefit trans people or gender non-conforming people but everyone. For example, on the subject of sex-segregated washrooms, he points out that “bathroom bills” as they are so-called in the United States cannot possibly accomplish their purported goals, because truly dangerous people will follow someone into a washroom no matter what the sign on the door says. More open-plan washrooms, with floor-to-ceiling individual stalls, would be a huge step forward in both safety and gender inclusiveness.

Later, when addressing sex-segregated sports, Davis unpacks the contradictory approaches to policing men’s and women’s sports. There is a greater emphasis, he argues, on “catching” men who are “pretending” to be women to gain an unfair advantage, whereas few people seem as concerned about women masquerading as men. He points out how this “trans misogyny” is in fact harmful to society at large: “this kind of misogyny is an extension of the general assumption that ‘femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity’.”

I love this. And this is why my feminism will always include trans people, and why my feminism will always fight for trans women to be treated as the real women they are. Drawing a line in the sand is not only arbitrary but damaging and harmful in the very way that people drawing that line are often themselves oppressed and marginalized. Why inflict that on another?

In case you can’t tell from my effusive encomium of the arguments in Beyond Trans, I loved this book. I can’t think of a single criticism of it, except perhaps that it is very focused on American society and policy. Yet a much broader survey would probably be very long, and I also appreciate that this book is short. Even so, it manages to accomplish a lot in this brief length: multiple case studies, and an appendix with practical suggestions for companies who want to do a “gender audit” on their policies.

Last time I requested a book from NetGalley on trans issues I got burned, badly. Beyond Trans is a salve to that burn: it’s #ownvoices, acknowledges diverse points of view, and has impeccable logical, ethical, and moral arguments. This is an academic book, with all sorts of great references and sources—but Davis’ style is very accessible and easy for a layperson to read. If you are interested in gender, or particularly gender and its intersections with social policy, I highly recommend this book. It will get you thinking.

In a seemingly radical, but ultimately common-sense challenge to status quo, this author asks whether it's ever necessary to require someone to have their gender flagged on something like a birth certificate or a driver's license. He examines four areas where a true unisex environment is called for - not just to not use a binary sex-marker, but to dispense with sex-markers altogether. These areas are (from the blurb): "sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver's licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports." A section of the book is devoted to each of the four topics.

While I support this agenda as a general principle - there are far too many areas where gender is irrelevant, but where it's made into an issue of one kind or another - I'd take some small issue with the way this argument is presented in some areas. I felt it didn't make as good of a case as it ought to have, and I felt it was a somewhat biased case - there wasn't much of a serious effort to look at the opposite side of the argument or to seek out opposing views and present them - and argue against them.

Yes, there were some objections raised and summarily overruled, but it felt more like the author was trying to steamroll his case through in preference to offering a completely calm and rational approach. Not that he was raving or ranting, but it felt a little bit like a high pressure salesperson, and I have little time for those!

One example of this was in the section where the author is talking about how long a person has to live as a woman before they're considered fully a woman. It's more complicated than that, and you'd have to read the book to get the full scoop on the issues and arguments, but for my purposes, this fell into the gripe I made about too little use of studies to back arguments and more reliance on personal opinion and anecdote than was healthy to make a solid case.

The author says, "...does it matter that some transgender women will have been socialized as boys and/or men for certain periods of their lives?" The problem with this is the inherent assumption it carries that they have indeed been fully socialized as their biological gender as opposed to their desired or self-identified gender.

I could see my argument being irrelevant if a need for a gender-switch was triggered from a head injury or by a sudden whim or need for attention, but this is flatly not the case. One thing I learned early in my reading about transgender people is that they had lived all their life feeling like they were the gender they eventually (hopefully!) were able to migrate to. So why would they honestly be socialized as boys/men or as girls/women necessarily?

It felt presumptive and patronizing to leap to the conclusion that they had or likely had. We had no evidence presented to support (or refute) this - it was just out there like it was self-evident, and this felt like the author had fallen into the same trap he was arguing against: if it's always been this way, why should we change?

Of course we haven't always been this way. Binary gender is just a convenient convention we fell into because historically we were too ignorant and blinkered to think it through. Maybe a biological male who has always felt female might be rather less acclimatized to male patterns of behavior and thinking than we should feel comfortable assuming, and so might a female in inverse circumstances. This is what I mean when I talk about making better arguments.

So one issue I had with the book was that it felt like it relied too much on anecdote - some of which was personal - which left some holes where a wider survey or study would have filled the gap. Some studies are quoted, but the inline references in this book are not actually links, which is a problem in this day and age for an ebook. In a print book you can flip through pages to get to end notes. It's a lot harder in an ebook, which is why actual links would have been a big help.

That said, the anecdotes were engrossing, saddening, disturbing, and downright horrifying at times, and this is the main reason people need to read this book, because the hit is still shitting the fan, even after all these years, and it needs to stop now. If getting rid of sex markers is guaranteed to do that, then I'm pretty well on-board! But I have some qualms about the arguments, mainly because of the area the book did not cover, which is medical care.

You can argue all you want about men and women and everyone between and on both sides being treated equally in areas of sports, rest rooms, college admissions, and state and government documents, but being treated in hospital is another issue because the fundamental fact is that men and women are anatomically and biochemically different and sometimes it genuinely matters what gender you are.

Let me give a simple example:- a traffic accident victim is brought into an ER unconscious, and xrays need to be taken. if this is a man, there's usually no problem, because men never get pregnant, but if this is a woman, the doctors need to be sure they're not harming a fetus.

Often, it's easy (or at least seems easy!) to tell what gender the patient, but also often it's not and it's downright foolish to make assumptions, as this author has pointed out often! If the woman is a mtf individual, then short of religious miracles, there's going to be no fetus, but if the doctors do not know, then there's potentially a problem.

I'd argue this is a case where gender does indeed matter and more importantly, knowing the gender matters, and while this is a simple demonstrative example, it's not the only medical instance where the gender (or sex if you like - I don't like to use that term because it's so loaded with baggage) of the patient matters. Men and women react differently to some medications, so knowing the gender of the patient can be vitally important.

Now you can no doubt press arguments against my simplistic example, and maybe against medical treatment and knowing the birth sex of the patient, but that's just the problem: since this critical topic wasn't covered in this book, none of this was ever addressed. Having a sex-marker on the driver's license could be in some cases, the difference between life and death here. So maybe we should not argue to eliminate the sex-marker at least on driver's licenses or state ID cards, but to make it voluntary? It's just a thought.

I don't typically comment on book covers because my blog is about authoring, not façades and lures, but in this case I have to say that this cover was quite a stunner. The ambiguity and charm in it were remarkable! It's a credit to the book and a pity the publisher rarely sees fit to give some credit to the model.

One curious personal comment I found was when the author volunteered, "For example, my birth mother was white and my birth father African American. I identify as either biracial or black" but he never went on to explain why he doesn't ever identify as white. It seems to me he has an equal case for either or both. It's not a big deal to me, but I just found it interesting and curious that someone with one black and one white parent had to be (at least historically), considered black instead of white!

To me, that's just as screwed-up as the gender issues discussed here, but I guess it's none of my business; however, it was one of several times things were tossed into the mix which I found curious. Another was his reference to the 2013 movie Identity Thief. The author cites this as an exemplar of the inadequacy of sex verification as fraud protection.

I thought it was an inappropriate reference in a book that rightly tries to set a more scholarly tone, but the objection here was that, as the author explains, "...the fact that many people have gender-neutral or 'unisex' names, Sandy being just one of many examples." I get that this is irrelevant when credit card fraud is perpetrated over the phone,or the internet, but it does prevent some abuse in person when a woman might try to use a credit card which clearly has a male name on it. It's not foolproof, especially in these days of fast everything, but it does offer some preventive opportunities! The real question to ask is: is it worth the hassle some people might get for the prevention it offers in other cases?

But that's not the reason I thought the example of the movie was a poor one; it's that, in the movie (which I have not seen I have to say), the man whose identity has been stolen, Sandy, seems like a sad sack of an example to offer since he apparently never thought to report his card stolen and thereby avoid all of the issues he was subject to in the movie! Hollywood is not real life and I think it was a mistake to cite what seems to be a rather slapstick comedy movie in support of a serious topic like this.

That said, I recommend this because it needs to be read - it's that simple. It has important issues in it about an ongoing problem that needs to be cut off summarily at the ankles, and it makes some good arguments, especially in sports, which has long been a pet peeve of my own. Some of the sports anecdotes are truly upsetting, as indeed are the anecdotes in other areas. Read them and weep - seriously. I felt like it after reading what some of these people - including the author - have had to endure.

This book was fantastic -- it's intersectional, radical, and incredibly thought-provoking. Fogg Davis doesn't just point out flaws and discriminatory practices when it comes to gender definitions/markers (whether talking about government-issued IDs or college admissions or sports team qualifications), he makes a case that removing bureaucratic administration of gender is the only way to achieve gender equality. Then, he actually presents tangible solutions and ways to do so, complete with resources for businesses, schools, non-profits, etc. Can't recommend this book highly enough.

I enjoyed this book immensely -- it was a perfect intersection of my professional and academic interests. While I don't identify as transgender myself, I've known transgender people for a long time and count several as friends. Over the years I've done lots of thinking about this topic, and avidly followed all the litigation and now social media controversies over transgender civil rights. There is no surer way to be defriended by me than to treat people who identify as transgender with disrespect.

The thing I really liked about this book is that it wasn't about how to ensure civil rights by shoehorning trans identities into existing gender categories, but looked to the binary gender categories themselves to determine whether they are really necessary to the situations in which they are constantly and consistently involved. Do we really need to check the M/F box on bureaucratic forms, or to have single-sex restrooms? What about women's colleges or segregated sports teams?

I fear it will take society considerably longer to catch up to some of the policy ideas the author proposes. But he makes an excellent case for each policy proposal and keeps the book moving along without getting too bogged down in pedantic arguments. It's given me several things to think about and more information to use in online arguments against transphobic people.

I was provided a free copy of this book for review by NetGalley in exchange for an honest opinion.

This is an excellent and thought-provoking discussion about the failings of a binary system to meet the needs to transgender, intersex and non gender-conforming individuals. By examining the effects of mandating binary gender identification on documents like drivers licenses, bus passes, college applications, FAFSAs, or in places like restrooms, or in sports participation, people with complex gender identity are placed in difficult (if not impossible) and sometimes even dangerous situations.

From the absurd unfairness of sex-marked bus passes to the unfairly personal demands of birth sex-mandated bathrooms, from women's colleges to sex-segregated sports, Beyond Trans takes us on a journey that probably just scratches the surface of what any transgendered, or non-gender conforming person has to endure.

One example Fogg Davis presents for our consideration that of Coy, a five year old transgender girl who would like to use a girls bathroom in her elementary school. Told she can't or to use a teacher's bathroom, her family sues and wins. Now let's fast forward to puberty. To forestall development of secondary sex characteristics until legal adulthood, Coy's parents may allow her pediatrician to prescribe hormone blockers. (This will allow her to decide at age 18 what she wants to do about surgery, hormonal treatments, etc.) Now fast forward to age 18. In addition to making all these important personal medical decisions, imagine Coy wants to apply to a historic women's college like Smith or Mt Holyoke. Coy has lived 13 of her 18 years, virtually all of her life she will clearly recollect, as a female. Will she be admitted? Some schools might still refuse her. Some institutions like Mt Holyoke have sought to embrace individuals "identifying as female," albeit with a long list of clarifiers. But is this enough? (Indeed, this particular case made me contemplate just how long we expect someone to be female to be female and how ridiculously unfair it is.)

Just the idea that often someone has to complete radical surgery to be able to get "certified" as a sex different from that on their original birth certificates gives me pause. Having known a transgender woman who chose not to complete full transition surgery because she just isn't sure she wants more surgery, I just can't accept how unfair the situation is. Do we really need to know if she's 100% female because she has no trace of male genitalia? SMH. The argument for biometric identification on drivers licenses, metro passes and other documents in lieu of sex markers sounds like a good one to me, even with its potential risks. But, based on dinner table debates of the entire topic, many sadly have a long way to go before relinquishing their binary world view.

This is a slender volume of 192 pages of which only about 52% is discussion. An appendix offers a thorough Gender Audit for institutions. I happily bought a copy of the book to be able to share it.

Goes beyond transgender to question the need for gender classification.

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, driver's licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage.

For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis' recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people. (via Goodreads)
I received an eARC from Netgalley and the publisher, New York University Press, in exchange for an honest review.

So often, nonfiction and research about trans and gender-noncomforming people is just really bad. This is a huge problem in research and academia, but I'll go on about that in another post, not in this book review.

This book, was not. It was awesome. It was feminist, intersectional down to its bones, and gives wonderfully reasoned arguments about gender identity.

Heath Fogg Davis is a biracial black transgender man and an Associate Professor at Temple University. His focuses are on anti-discrimination law, transgender civil rights, political theory, race, gender and sexuality studies. You can read some of his published research on his Temple U site.

This book was very academic, and yet also very personal. It's an extensive collection of case studies similar to what you might find in a doctoral thesis, only book length.

Davis did a great job of explaining the terms and discussion points that those who are less knowledgeable about transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer people's issues.

He also presents tangible solutions to each of the problems that he discusses, which was awesome.

I honestly don't feel qualified, as a cisgender person who knows nothing about most policies, to review and parse the arguments that Davis made. What I'm going to do in this review instead is talk about the things Davis does, so that people interested and knowledgeable can find it.

"More often than not, I think there are better, more efficient ways for an organization to meet its policy goals than invoking sex classification."

Davis argues that sex markers should be removed from personal identity documents in order to prevent sex-identity discrimination, and because there are more accurate ways for the government to gather that demographic information.

He believes that the safety and privacy issues in public restrooms could easily be solved by constructing them differently.

Davis argues that women's colleges should get the HBCU treatment and be called "historically female colleges" and formulate more accurate sex-related questions in order to get more accurate data and foster a more feminist education.

The final case study involves sex-segregated sports, which would use actual physiological measures for categorizing instead of the more imprecise category of sex.

"My hope is that change makers will use it as a template for making their organizations better for everyone."
I saw that my genderqueer friend Monika had reviewed this book, and I am linking their review with permission here! If you see other trans, nonbinary or genderqueer reviews of this book, I'd love to link them up here!

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in these issues and the government and organizational policies that surround it. You can pick up a copy on Amazon, Indiebound, or your other favorite bookseller!

This book was given me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This book challenges our understanding of gender and sexual identity. The author asks the question ‘why are so many spheres of life dependent on a rigid sexualised/gendered segregation. Utilising the case studies of; Transport passes requiring gender identifiers, public toilets, sex segregated colleges and sports, they question the necessity of the sexual/gendered divisions utilised by the institutions that create and govern these artefacts/spaces. This is an interesting and thought provoking work.

4* An eye opener. The US, and a lot of the world, have much to learn. Makes me proud to be British.

This is not an anti-US book, and in fact whilst it is US-focused for the most, it is also not anti-world, but as a British woman in live-and-let-live London, it was shocking for me to read. Shocking in the sense that I had no idea that so much prejudice can exist in enlightened countries, prejudice that as the title says, goes beyond trans.

I was shocked to read of the 2016 (I've not checked to see if it's still current) public transport system in an area of the US where every bus pass has to have a person's gender issued on it, and that bus drivers have the right to refuse to accept/deny access to/scrutinise the person offering it. The author, a FtM trans professor, goes on to admit his shame that he was on one such bus when a trans colleague was subjected to scrutiny and prejudice, not by the bus driver, but by many passengers who took issue with her appearance and build, and that he could have walked over to offer support, but did not, for fear of being subjected to the same treatment and being classed as 'one of them'. This saddened me, as he'd been so vocal until now about how things need to change. But, it reflected his humanness. His fear of being put on the spot, of being treated the same, his desire to conform and not stand out. His experiences of life as a trans man, despite being a learned and respected professor.

The author transitioned at 38yo and is a married man, 10 years into his transition at 48yo - the same age as me, and on top, has a Caucasian mother and black father, and sometimes refers to himself as black and other times as mixed race. Again, this saddened me a little, as it felt as if he wasn't always comfortable in his skin, in his own country. Reading on, though, with the examples cited and my own other reading (including about Jim Crow), I was not entirely surprised.

I was shocked about how gender and appearance are dealt with in the arena of professional sports and how disrespectfully some of the investigations that are mentioned were carried out, and the 'leaking' of confidential information. I was also shocked at how hard it is, differing state by state in the US, for a transgender person to get his or her birth certificate and documentation changed. And, for the objections allowed, the disrespect allowed to be shown by individuals - it's practically unheard of in this country. In fact, I'm of Asian origin and in a mixed relationship and have just had a conversation with my 53yo Caucasian husband, and he agrees with me that he's never witnessed firsthand, or close secondhand, *any* form of prejudice. This book has made me see how decent we generally are as a people, how much our country protects the rights of every citizen, much we Brits take for granted, and makes me a little ashamed that we have it so easy and don't appreciate it, really.

A good trans friend explained his thoughts on 'passing' - I can't adequately express them, but it's not a measure that he wants to be judged on, and yet the author here, mentions his relief at passing for a middle aged man, admitting that he does this via age-appropriate dress and mannerisms. Again, this saddened me a little, as in the UK, trans people are not invisible or silent. A slightly upmarket department store in my 'provincial' part of London, has a MtF trans customer services assistant working in a female uniform, with customers, and with confidence and with the clear support of her colleagues, and with not a whisper or an eyelid batted by customers. To me, as a Brit, that's normal, expected - but from what I read of this tale, a trans person in the US is almost always on his or her guard, due to the reactions of employers, colleagues and strangers. In 2017, in one of the supposed most advanced nations in the world. Un-frigging-believable. I'm sure that I read about LGBT people getting married at the weekend and finding themselves out of a job on the Monday - again, un-frigging-believable.

I hope things change in the US. They need to. I know more than one LGBT friend out in the US who has concerns for safety. I wish the country was as progressive as we in the UK, and Europe, are. People need to open their minds and hearts and make changes, or support those seeking to make changes. This needs to happen now, before the US becomes even more the laughingstock that its current leadership has made it. LGBT awareness needs to be emphasised and taught in all US schools, the sooner, the better.

ARC courtesy of NetGalley and NYU Press, for my reading pleasure.