What is Gender?
Part 1 of my talk from the Brooklyn Public Library "Sips and Scholars" Series
Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to be invited to give a lecture at The Bush through a partnership between the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where I’m a member of the associate faculty. The lecture was part of BPL’s Sips and Scholars series, which features BISR faculty giving public seminars at bars and venues across Brooklyn. I love these kinds of events, ones that introduce people to local resources like the library and provide access to rigorous thought-provoking conversations on important topics, without the traditional gatekeeping of higher education. There are more Sips and Scholars events coming up this August and the line-up is pretty fantastic. I recommend taking a look at the webpage and making time in your schedule to see some of my incredible colleagues speak.
Without further ado, here is a lightly edited version of part 1 of my talk “What is Gender?”
On January 20, 2025, the President of the United States signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order proclaimed that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” The order defined “sex” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
Elaborating on this definition, the order explained that “Female” means “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” and “Male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” The order went even further, making its fascistic aims clear: “Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in government itself.”
Only a few months later, in June of 2025, the language of sex as an immutable biological classification reappeared in the text of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the case United States v. Skrmetti. In Skrmetti, the Court issued a 6-3 ruling in favor of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, SB1, arguing that the law did not discriminate on the basis of sex, but rather on the basis of medical diagnosis, and thus did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. SB1 prohibits the prescription, administering, and dispensation of any puberty blocker or hormone in Tennessee for the purpose of “enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”1 However, puberty blockers and hormone therapy have not been banned in Tennessee. They can still be prescribed to minors suffering from precocious puberty or other diagnoses unrelated to gender identity disorder.2
Though the majority opinion in Skrmetti falls short of granting or denying transgender minors status as a “suspect class” for the purposes of equal protection, the language of the ruling nonetheless implies that, in line with the requirements of “intermediate scrutiny” in cases of discrimination, the Tennessee legislature does indeed have a “compelling interest” in ensuring that minors are encouraged to “appreciate” rather than “become disdainful of” their sex.3 In other words, the majority tacitly acknowledges that it is well within the realm of legitimate government intervention to legislate and enforce the meaning of sex.
To complicate matters further, each concurring opinion in Skrmetti added its own caveats and expansions, each chipping away further at the protected status of transgender people. Justice Amy Coney Barrett argued in her concurring opinion that transgender minors could not be legally considered a “discrete group” in need of heightened scrutiny, because the group is “large, diverse, and amorophous.”4 Justice Alito made a similar argument in his concurring opinion. Both justices set up the legal argument that transgender people are not a valid, discrete minority in need of constitutional protection.
Race, religion, national origin, and alienage, for example, are all considered suspect classifications for the purposes of constitutional law.5 Sex usually falls within this category as well, owing to the legal precedents established by the work of people like Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray and former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This means that when laws come up for judicial review that deal with any of these categories of people, the justices are asked to analyze them with extra scrutiny to see if they violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Ironically, Justice Barrett cites the World Professional Association for Transgender Health while making her argument that transgender people, as a group, basically do not exist, noting that the term “transgender” describes “a huge variety of gender identities and expressions.”6 She uses this and a couple of other citations to argue that “the boundaries of the group, in other words, are not defined by an easily ascertainable characteristic that is fixed and consistent across the group.”7 For transgender people to be covered by the equal protection clause, Justice Barrett argues, they would have to share the “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics” of a “discrete group.” In her opinion, they do not.
Trans people, it seems, exist both too much and not at all in the eyes of conservative legislators and judges like Justice Barrett. They are identifiable enough to be a threat to national security, but not identifiable enough to deserve protections as citizens.
With this context in mind, I want to focus my remarks today on the question of gender. What is it? Where does it come from? Is it innate or socially constructed? Is it biological or cultural? Is it the same thing as sex? Can it be changed? I especially want to consider the consequences, for better and for worse, of the mainstreaming of the term “gender” as a way of accounting for sexual difference.
As the examples above show, viewing gender as an “identity” is not in fact a partisan gesture. Gender might be positively described as an “identity” by someone on the furthest end of the left political spectrum, just as it might be derisively described as an “identity” by Christofascists on the far right.
My question is: what do we gain or lose by “identifying” with gender? I’d also like to open up the discussion, by the end of this talk, into other fundamental political questions at the intersection of queer, feminist, and critical race theory: especially the question of whether liberation can be achieved through strategic deployments of identity, or whether, instead, identity is a “master’s tool” incapable of dismantling “the master’s house” (to quote Audre Lorde).
To explore the question “What is Gender?” I’ll be focusing today’s talk on a few key works of feminist and queer theory that have emerged within the Western academic tradition in the past seventy-five years: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex from 1949, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity from 1990, Susan Stryker’s speech/essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” from 1993, and Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” from 1997.
If this were a classroom, I would start out by having everyone share what the term “gender” evokes for them; when you first heard it, what it feels like to encounter this term, how you would define it, how others have defined it for you. This is something I often do with my students when teaching a weighted term like “sexuality,” “homosexual,” or “queer.” You would think that a term like “gender” would be pretty hard for students to define or agree on, but one thing that has surprised me in recent years, especially with my undergraduate students, is that “feminism” is a much more contentious term for them, and much harder to define. I don’t think this is a coincidence.
Geminism evokes strong reactions, as you probably all know. One is much more likely to say “I am a feminist” or “I am not a feminist” than “I have a gender” or “I don’t have a gender” or even “I believe in gender” or “I don’t believe in gender.” Gender, in other words, is more or less taken for granted in the year 2025 as a something that exists, whatever subcategories it may or may not encompass.
Though “gender” might now seem like a synonym for “queer theory”—a framework created by and for queer people—the roots of the theory of gender are decidedly feminist. As an academic concept, gender was feminist before it was queer.
But the ubiquity of “gender” as a way of talking about sexed bodies is, historically speaking, relatively new. Before the late-twentieth century, the term “gender” was rarely used, and when it was used, it usually described grammatical gender. If you speak a romance language, you know what I’m talking about: le soleil is French for sun, and requires a grammatically masculine article “le,” whereas la lune, “moon,” requires a grammatically feminine article “la.”
With this in mind, I want to begin by taking us back to Simone de Beauvoir’s classic 1949 book The Second Sex, which she wrote over the course of about fourteen months in the years directly following World War II.8 For some historical context, women in France were not granted the right to vote until 1945, and birth control remained illegal until 1967, as did abortion, until 1975. When Beauvoir began writing the book, she had only been allowed to vote as a citizen of France for one calendar year, and it would be another twenty-one years until she could legally access birth control. By then, Beauvoir would already have been going through menopause.
The book comes in at roughly eight hundred pages, and it is rich with references and citations to everything from scientific papers to psychoanalytic theory. It is incredibly exhaustive in its attempt to answer a question that had begun to plague Beauvoir in the years before its writing: what is a woman? (qu’est-ce qu’une femme?). Apparently, she came up with the idea for The Second Sex upon noticing that, when asked to define herself, the first though that came to her mind was “I am a woman.”9 Presumably, this startled and unsettled Beauvoir, a committed existentialist who had spent her formative years matching and outpacing some of the smartest men in France to achieve intellectual fame. Simone de Beavuoir? A “woman”?
The book was originally translated into English from the original French in the 1950s, but the man tasked with translating it, H.M. Parshley, was a retired professor of zoology ill-equipped to translate a voluptuous and highly technical philosophical treatise on the existential status of woman.10 As a result, he cut much of Beauvoir’s original text, simplified many of her sentences and phrases, and replaced her precise, philosophical terminology with vague, pedestrian phrases. Only in 2011 did English-speaking readers finally get an unabridged and loyal translation of The Second Sex translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
If you know anything about The Second Sex, you probably know it’s most famous sentence: “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Many people probably think this is the opening sentence of the book, but actually it doesn’t appear until page 283, at the beginning of the second volume, Lived Experience. In the original French, the sentence reads: “On ne naît pas femme : on le devient.”
If you speak French, you might notice that a couple of things stand out about this sentence. First of all, the word femme—woman—does not have an article, which is why in English translation it reads “one is not born woman” rather than “one is not born a woman.” Additionally, the grammatical construction of the second half of the sentence, on le devient, turns the noun femme into a direct object, using the masculine pronoun le—roughly translated as “it” or “that”—as a stand-in for “woman.” So the literal, if clunky, translation of the sentence is actually something like: “one is not born woman : one becomes it/that.”
This is an important distinction, not only because Beauvoir’s meaning was for so long muddied by patriarchal interpretations, but because the sentence undergirds the entire philosophical framework of her book. One is not born woman: in other words, there is no essence of woman that precedes the concrete existence of an individual consciousness. One is not born woman, one becomes it/that. If woman is “it” or “that,” then the word “woman” provides more questions than it does answers. Becoming is a process with no beginning and no end. There is no final point at which one is done “becoming” a woman. And because one is always “becoming” it/that, “woman” is not a stable, immutable, transhistorical essence.
Ironically, if we consider the fact that Beauvoir was writing a full twenty years before the first rumblings of Women’s Liberation in France, The Second Sex actually positions itself as a kind of post-feminist text. This is something we will return to later, when we discuss Judith Butler’s quasi post-feminist position in Gender Trouble. According to Beauvoir, “Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it any more.”11
It’s pretty astounding to imagine that anyone could confidently argue, in 1949, that feminism was “almost over”—that there was nothing left to talk about when it came to women. In Beauvoir’s opinion, the debates about feminism were stuck in a discursive rut from which they couldn’t seem to escape. the terms of the debate were always: superiority, inferiority, or equality. Women were either inferior to men, in which case feminism was unnecessary; superior to men, in which case sexual difference was key to feminism; or equal to men, in which case feminism had done its job.
“Everyone agrees there are females in the human species,” Beauvoir goes on to proclaim, “today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity.”12
Beauvoir may as well have been citing Trump’s executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Seventy-five years later, women must still apparently be “defended” from encroaching ideologies. The so-called “biological truth” that the federal government claims to “restore” through new legal definitions of sex belies the reality that woman must not, after all, be fundamentally and forever woman, from conception to death. If she was, there would be no use defending her womanhood through executive orders.
For Beauvoir, sex is not an identity, it is a situation, a term that Beauvoir engages through the existentialist canon and applies to the experience of “becoming woman.” Importantly, Beauvoir does not use the term “gender” at any point to describe this situation of sex. In some cases, her reliance on the word “sex” leads to inadvertent biological essentialism, as when Beauvoir describes, at length, the excruciating details of menstruation and childbirth for women and posits their centrality to the experience of womanhood. But when looked at another way, Beauvoir’s philosophical commitment to troubling of the idea of “sex” on its own terms, without recourse to “gender,” appears to be ahead of its time.
For years afterward, “gender” would be elaborated by Western feminists as something different from sex, though related to it. In some formulations, feminists would argue that gender is to sex as culture is to nature, otherwise known as the theory of gender as a “social construction.” In this view, so-called “chromosomal sex” derives from differences in genitalia, hormones, hair growth, body fat, and other secondary characteristics that exist in dimorphic opposition to one another, and “gender” is the system of signification, power, and privilege built on or around those differences.13 Other feminists would argue that gender was fundamentally about the control of women’s reproductive power, and that reproduction was the conceptual basis of both sex and gender.14 Black Feminists in the tradition of the Combahee River Collective insisted that gender could only be understood at the intersections of race and class; that there was no such thing as sex oppression in and of itself, no “essence” of sex oppression prior to or outside of imperialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.
Toward the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist, queer, and trans theorists began to return to the category of “sex” as something that, in and of itself, might require critical reappraisal. What if the so-called sexual binary of male/female, upon which social constructions of gender are built, is not so binary after all? What of intersex people? What of natural differentiations in hormone levels and other secondary characteristics among so-called human “males” and so-called human “females”? What if it is not only “gender” that is socially constructed, but “sex” itself?
This is an argument that Beauvoir unwittingly anticipated. Contemporary readers might be surprised to discover that a white French woman of aristocratic heritage would have written, in the year 1949, that “the differentiation of individuals into males and females thus occurs as an irreducible and contingent fact” and that “males and females develop more as variations on a common base” than as distinct biological categories.15 In fact, she devoted an entire chapter to the complex phenomenon of sexual differentiation in various organisms, from one-celled animals like amoebas to invertebrates to humans. She explores the many kinds of reproductive processes that occur in nature, which do not always require sexual differentiation among organisms and remain nuanced even when they do.
Beauvoir manages to hold two seemingly opposing truths at the same time. On the one hand, she argues that “biological data” are of “extreme importance” and are “an essential element of woman’s situation.”16 And on the other hand, she argues that a situation, whether bodily, cultural, political, or otherwise, is not a destiny, and that biological traits of particular bodies do not hold any specific meaning in and of themselves, but only in and through the world in which we live.
Anatomy and hormones, for example “never define anything but a situation and do not posit the object toward which the situation will be transcended.”17 The situation of sex is irreducible, meaning it is impossible to transform it into or restore it to a desired or simpler condition. And the situation of sex is contingent, meaning it is dependent on or influenced by something else. It is never just sex. It has no essence in and of itself.
As Beauvoir tells us:
“Because the body is the instrument of our hold on the world, the world appears different to us depending on how it is grasped, which explains why we have studied these [biological] data so deeply; they are one of the keys that enable us to understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for a sexual hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her forever to this subjugated role.”18
So, from Beauvoir, we have this idea that sex is a situation: it is contingent and irreducible; it cannot be adequately explained as an ontological certainty through science, psychology, history, religion, or literature; it is not a destiny, but a potential instrument for transcendence.
…
Stay tuned for part 2 of my talk, where I will delve into Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
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And if you live in Brooklyn, please consider checking out one of the books I mentioned by signing up for a library card!
Opinion of the Court, page 5. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf.
Opinion of the Court, page 5. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf.
Barrett, J., Concurring, page 4. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf.
For a primer on suspect classification, see https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/suspect_classification
Barrett, J., Concurring, page 5. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf.
Ibid.
See Judith Thurman’s 2010 introduction to the book, which was re-translated into English by Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier. Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, Vintage: New York, 2011.
Ibid.
Ibid., xiii.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid.
Sedgwick, Eve K. Epistemology of the Closet; University of California Press: Berkeley Los Angeles London, 1990.
For more on these distinctions, see Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
See her chapter “Biological Data.”
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 48.
Ibid., 418.
Ibid., 44.