The Gender Identity Episode

My guest on the show today is Rogers Brubaker, professor of sociology at UCLA and author of many books, the most recent of which, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, is our subject for discussion on this episode.

If you want a really good kind of primer on this book before you listen to this episode, I recommend you pause and go read the review essay of it, by Shreeharsh Kelkar, that I published on my Substack recently.

Both the book and Shreeharsh’s review of it have the double virtue of taking on a really fraught topic, one that very easily tends to dysregulate people, with both analytical dispassion and also genuine consideration and compassion for the people for whom these questions of gender identity, and gender identity at variance with biological sex, are not primarily or exclusively analytical ones.

I wanted that kind of access point to talking about what I would globally call “trans issues” because it's just a tough topic to address without getting sucked into the culture war binaries. As in so many things, and you will deduce this from listening to the episode, I find myself in neither camp. I'm absolutely a gung-ho defender of equal rights for trans people. I'm absolutely and consistently grossed out by the ways in which the right treats with contempt the real lives of real people for the sake of their political gain and sometimes it seems just for the sake of the kind of pleasures of sadism. I also think the “left” side of this debate (I put it in quotes because in other countries it doesn’t break down as a clean left-right issue) has been profoundly illiberal in its efforts to police the discourse and to relegate to out of bounds all sorts of thorny policy questions that really do pit kind of various rights and concerns that are legitimate against each other in ways that simply can't be reduced to right bad, left good.

This conversation with Rogers is really kind of prior to most of that, however. It's about what we're even talking about when we talk about this category of gender identity, which as I think Rogers demonstrates pretty persuasively wasn't until fairly recently even a way of understanding the world. Which is to say it's a social construction, which is not to say that that means that it's illegitimate, that it's not a real or authentic social construction any more than it's real or authentic for us to talk about all the other very real ways that we construct our senses of self. Even the modern idea of having a self, as R