TY - JOUR PY - 2010// TI - "A Rose is a Rose" JO - Gender and society A1 - Meadow, Tey SP - 814 EP - 837 VL - 24 IS - 6 N2 - Gender is perhaps the most pervasive, fundamental, and universally accepted way we separate and categorize human beings. Yet in recent years, U.S. courts and administrative state agencies have confronted a growing challenge from individuals demanding to have their gender reclassified. Transgender people create a profound category crisis for social institutions built on the idea that biological sex is both immutable and dichotomous. During the past four decades, the central legal question shifted from how to allocate specific individuals to categories to the permeability of gender categories themselves. This analysis of 38 judicial gender determinations provides a glimpse of the literal construction of the gender order and of the ways institutions gender individuals. It also provides powerful evidence that cultural anxieties about reproduction and the heterosexual, conjugal family underscore institutional efforts to manage the uncertainty of postmodern gender identities.

LA - SN - 0891-2432 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0891243210385918 ID - ref1 ER -