Compulsory Gender and Nongendered Existence: Beyond the Trans/Cisgender Binary

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Measuring Gender Beyond the Binary

Abstract

There is widespread agreement in sociology that gender is a social construct. Yet sociological inquiry continues to assume that everyone has an internal sense of gender. I argue that this assumption—which I call compulsory gender—hinders our ability to understand important developments in how individuals experience and relate to gender. Indeed, recent empirical research has found that some people do not identify with any gender identity. These individuals feel “detached” from gender, speaking to a sense that gender is not helpful in defining the self. They are not cisgender, but they are also not transgender. Building on that empirical work, I argue that sociologists must move beyond merely expanding the gender identities we study; instead, we must also examine individuals who wish to remove themselves from the process of gender categorization. I argue that this revised approach to gender will help sociologists more deeply examine what it means for gender to be socially constructed; revive feminist and queer scholarship’s theorization on undoing gender, ungendering, and gender abolition; and help push against the marginalization of Indigenous and decolonial scholarship that has argued that gender is a Western cultural product rather than a universal organizing principle of humanity. This article provides an argument for the importance of theorizing around compulsory gender while also providing concrete methodological suggestions for studying those who fall outside the trans/cisgender binary.

Author

• Canton Winer, Northern Illinois University