Paisley Currah

Brooklyn College | CUNY · Department of Political Science

Policy debates concerning transgender people are embroiled in the culture wars. Let data and science — not politicians — guide laws. Policy debates concerning transgender people are embroiled in the culture wars. Let data and science — not politicians — guide laws. Paisley Currah Paisley Currah

Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (o...

This is a discussion between Professors Aeyal Gross and Paisley Currah, moderated by Joseph Fischel, about how we configure law, legal theory, state recognition, and institutionalized sex classifications in our pursuit of sexual and gender justice. Fischel asks what the terms queer, legal, and studies mean for the scholarship and political commitme...

Our chapter reviews the successes of the mainstream transgender rights movement in the US. But it also examines the embodied practices and lived realities of transgender people, from gender expression to varied gender identities, as they are performed outside of the law’s rational gaze. We deploy the concept of epistemic injustice, using it to crit...

In this introduction to the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on the theme “making transgender count,” the authors delineate the senses in which trans people can count. On one hand, one makes trans count (in the sense of having its importance recognized) by counting it (making it visible through quantification). On the other hand,...

Introduction to the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, a special issue titled, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies."

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a partic...

Celebrating the re-election of Barack Obama as a win for GLB equality or denouncing the focus on marriage rights as honormative misses the point. Both approaches obscure what actually happens in local sites where authority is exercised. Looking into the cracks and crevices of regulatory apparatuses generates a more complex picture. In examining con...

It is widely assumed that the more information surveillance apparatuses can collect about an individual, the less risk she poses. In this article, we examine how gender figures into and potentially disrupts the link between identity and security. Our analysis centers on one very particular event: the confusion that erupts at the airport when US Tra...

On July 2, 2010, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law a bill that reduced the act of soliciting a "crime against nature" for compensation from a felony to a misdemeanor. A felony conviction had meant a fine of up to $2,000, imprisonment for up to five years ("with or without hard labor"), or both. Because of the change in the crime's cla...

It is 2002. The US Central Intelligence Agency has captured Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a high-ranking member of al Qaeda involved in planning the attacks of September 11, 2001. The CIA wants to know if its plan for interrogating Zubaydah—involving a combination of “walling,” facial holds and slaps, confining him to a box, putting insects in the b...

The modern regulatory project of sex classification is currently in crisis. Contestations over the legal meaning of “sex” — manifested not only in the incommensurate outcomes of different cases but in inconsistent rulings in the same case as it moves through the judiciary from lower to appellate courts — are stark illustrations of the clashes takin...

This article examines shifts in the legal, medical, and common sense logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the City of New York between 1965 and 2006. In the initial iteration, the stabilization of legal sex categories was organized around the notion of "fraud"; in the most recent iteration, "permanence" became the...

In April 2008, news about an Oregon man's impending parenthood spawned a media tsunami across the US and even internationally. The pregnant man was Thomas Beatie, a transgender man who had had "top" surgery and been on hormone therapy but had stopped taking testosterone in anticipation of getting pregnant. For trans people in the U.S., much of Beat...

The title that appears on the cover of this journal is Trans-, not Trans, and not Transgender. A little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the implied nominalism of “trans” and the explicit...

Over the last 15 years, the transgender rights move- ment has burgeoned in the United States. A handful of states and dozens of localities in the United States have passed nondiscrimination legislation inclusive of gender identity; courts have begun to rule that transgender peo- ple should be treated equally; educational institutions and companies...

This Article examines recent efforts to enact civil rights statutes for transgender people in the United States. Part I provides an overview of the largely negative case law on the issue of whether transgender people are protected under existing sex, sexual orientation or disability discrimination laws. This context is provided, in part, to explain...

The panelists discussed the landscape of the law and societal conditions faced by transgendered individuals. They discussed the role of gender, as well as strategic errors in transgendered activism and the unique challenges that transgendered individuals face in the United States. Finally, the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins decisions was discussed in...