Liberalism and the Identity Politics of Gender

• In Event: 40820 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Politics and Gender

Abstract

In this paper I want to test out a line of thinking about and inquiring into the politics and practices of gender identity, as they have taken shape in a recent flurry of popular mobilization, controversy, and litigation around what is sometimes called “gender ideology.” I want to ask whether it is possible to understand something about this particular dimension of gender identity politics and practices in terms of their relationship to liberal modes of governance and in particular the separation of private conscientious belief from public civic rights and obligations, liberalism’s pragmatic means of managing ethical and ontological diversity. As with other irreconcilable questions of belief and conviction, the basic liberal strategy for managing disagreement is to divide persons, spaces, discourses between that which pertains to the public civic domain and that which pertains to private conscience, to agree to disagree in the former and allow individuals to pursue the beliefs and commitments of their choosing in the latter. This pragmatic mode of managing ethical diversity, born out of the interminable religious civil wars of 16th and 17th century Europe, is logistically and organizationally easier when the categorical divisions pertain to transcendental, metaphysical questions about the existence and characteristics of God, afterlife, the divine, etc. than are such divisions around questions about the nature and characteristics of categories man, woman, boy, girl, which are historically and logistically deeply enmeshed in the this-worldly organization of everyday life. The paper examines the Biden administration’s executive orders and guidance policies around gender categories as illustrative of a liberal mode of managing diversity of beliefs and convictions about gender, and compares them with the second Trump administration’s executive orders and forthcoming guidance policies as an illiberalizing reaction that seeks re-impose common, shared, social truthful relationship to gender – or rather sex – categories.

Author

• Graham Wilson Hill, University of Bern