Gender Collisions

Is gender a system of inequality that should be abolished? Alternatively, is it a social identity that should be celebrated? Should gender identity—one’s internal sense of being a man, woman, or neither/both—replace birth sex in the law and in society? Or are there situations in which birth sex remains relevant? Can we acknowledge the importance of birth sex in certain situations without causing harm to transgender people? My next book, provisionally titled Gender Collisions, addresses these questions and implications for contemporary debates about sex discrimination, public restrooms, parenting, pronoun practices, sex/gender markers on identity documents, medical science, and women’s sports. It does not dictate how readers should think or talk about these issues. Rather, it offers analytical tools that will help readers better understand, navigate, and discuss some of the most crucial and fraught topics of our time.

This book builds on earlier work (with Juliet Williams and Mallory Rees) that examined academic and activist debates over how the concept of gender neutrality has been employed in the courts, in the news media, and in political activism on topics including gender-neutral restrooms, pronouns,  identity documents, and parenting ideologies. My co-authors and I published articles from on these topics in Social Forces, Social Problems, Gender & Society,  Signs, and in Law & Society Review.

I also published an op-ed on gender-neutral pronouns (with Juliet A. Williams) and a second op-ed on the topic (with with Juliet A. Williams, Robin Dembroff, and Daniel Wodak) in reply to a response to that original op-ed.

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you cannot access any of these articles.