Gender Identity: The Career of a Category

This paper analyzes the remarkable career of the category “gender identity” in recent decades. Tracing the institutional embedding of the category in medicine, law and administration, data-gathering, and education, I show that gender identity became established as a basic principle of vision and division of the social world, competing with, displacing, or redefining sex. I then seek to explain why this development provoked so little opposition and attracted so little attention until the middle of the last decade and why it has subsequently become the focus of intensifying controversy. Once gender identity became an expansively actionable category, one that could be invoked, even by children and adolescents, to demand recognition and identity-affirming medical treatment and to gain access to sex-segregated activities, spaces, and facilities, the category ceased to be understood as a private, self-regarding matter and came to be widely understood as affecting others’ interests: some women’s sex-based interest in privacy, competitive athletes’ interest in fairness, and parents’ interest in protecting their children from potentially irreversible harm. This shift in public perception, I suggest, made the issue ripe for political exploitation and moral panic, though I also note the limits of the “moral panic” perspective.