Is It Transphobia or Misogyny Behind the Fight Around Gender Identification?

State legislators these days seem to be losing their minds over the gender classification of their fellow citizens. Why? What is the deeper reason they seem hell bent to terrorize transgender citizens and why are legislators so afraid of self-identification?  Our guest Paisley Currah offers insight. In the new book SEX IS AS SEX DOES: Governing Transgender Identity (NYU Press; May 2022), Paisley explains how transgender people struggle to navigate a confusing and contradictory web of legal rules, definitions, and classifications. Paisley shows how government agencies have been far less interested in adhering to a universal idea about what sex is—biological assignment at birth, self-understood gender identity, and so on—than in what sex does for that agency's mission. Officials in prisons, for example, often define sex differently than do officials in the Department of Motor Vehicles, even when those officials work in the same jurisdiction of a single city or state. Today we discuss gender ideology and its core beginnings, issues and effects if it is not understood and managed appropriately.   Paisley is Professor of Political Science and Women’s & Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. An award-winning author, he is the founding co-editor of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly and the co-editor of Transgender Right and Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge.    With co-host Brody Levesque