Normative Sexual Citizens: Administrative Burden, Citizen-State Interactions, and Transgender People in the US

• In Event: Administrative burdens: inequitable burdens, inequitable access.

Abstract

Recently, scholars have begun to examine the intersections of race, gender, and administrative burdens (see Ray, Herd, and Moynihan 2023; Herd & Moynihan 2024). However, despite this increase in scope, gender is often if not always regarded as binary and synonymous with sex, an issue reproduced across the field of public administration. As a result, little is known about the experiences gender-expansive people have during citizen-state interactions. I seek to address this gap with this mixed-method study of transgender and nonbinary adults who considered applying for or applied for SNAP, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance. 

Utilizing a survey of 465 transgender and nonbinary adults that I administered, along with follow-up interviews with 43, I make two main arguments; First, that trans people face identity-specific learning, compliance, and psychological costs in ways that cisgender people do not. These burdens are born from institutionalized norms in the US that sex and gender and synonymous, binary, and immutable. Second, for trans people, but also for all marginalized people, interacting with the state comes with the compliance cost of positioning oneself as a “normative sexual citizen,” a racialized and binarily gendered archetype of what the state sees as the ideal citizen—white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied and deserving.

Herd, P. & Moynihan, D. (2024). “Gendered administrative burden: Regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 35(1), 45-57.

Ray, V., Herd, P. & Moynihan, D. (2023). “Racialized burdens: Applying racialized organization theory to the administrative state.” Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory, 33(1), 139-152.

Author

• Isaac Sederbaum, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author