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Abstract:
This article provides an analysis of gender reclassification policies - policies that determine when an administrative agency will change an individual's gender marker on its records - in three contexts: policies related to placement in gender-segregated facilities, policies related to changing gender marker on ID, and policies related to the state provision of healthcare that is prohibited based on the gender on record for the person seeking care. The article looks at the significant variation in these policies across agencies to demonstrate the instability of gender as a category of identity verification and to ask whether the assumed usefulness of gender for identity tracking in the variety of state programs reviewed is well-founded. It also places these concerns in the context of the "War on Terror," which has included many policy innovations aimed at standardizing recordkeeping and surveillance nationally. By exposing the consequences of such national standardization in the specific instance of the gender reclassification rule matrix, this article raises questions about the nature of the "War on Terror" as a state-building project, classification as an equality issue, the limitations of privacy and accuracy-based critiques, and the role of surveillance in population-level state care-taking projects.

transgender, surveillance, war on terror, identity documents, identity categories

Abstract:
This article addresses the economic marginalization of transgender populations, describing factors leading to poverty and criminalization. It examines how trans people are excluded from social services and face violence in the institutions where poor people are concentrated. It takes up feminist analysis of welfare programs and broadens the inquiry to suggest that the sex-segregation of the welfare state institutions and the criminal punishment system should be a target of feminist analysis.

welfare, prison, jail, homeless shelter, transgender, race, class, gender

Abstract:
Transpolitics are gaining visibility and momentum, and increasingly trans activists are forming projects and organizations focused on promoting political change. Given this context, this article examines how critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex might be incorporated into trans political analysis and how they could inform this moment of trans political institutionalization. Taking tools and lessons from antiracist and feminist scholars and activists and recognizing the widespread critique of the neoliberal co-optation of the gay and lesbian rights movement, this article highlights alternatives to traditional nonprofit structures. The authors provide an in-depth look at one trans legal organization that operates with a collective governance model and centralizes the leadership of trans people of color, offering it as a potential model for emerging trans organizations.

transgender, nonprofit, neoliberalism, race, poverty, gay, lesbian, LGBT

Abstract:
This paper considers two critiques of how law and rights struggles co-opt social movements and applies them to the example of the emergent law reforms in the area of transgender rights. First, it considers the limitations of the discrimination principle. Second, it looks at the emergent critique of "nonprofitization." Examining how the focus on formal legal equality and the growth of non-profit formations that centralize the concerns and experiences of white and upper class people have impacted gay and lesbian rights work, the paper suggests that these avenues present dangers to creating meaningful transformation of conditions facing trans population, including poverty and criminalization. This paper is an edited version of keynote remarks presented at a symposium.

transgender, discrimination, non-profit, co-optation, social movements

Abstract:
These edited Keynote remarks from the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review Symposium on transgender law address how questions of law reform strategy relate to critical understandings of neoliberalism. The paper addresses questions of administrative governance, identity documentation, the relationship between law and social movements, and questions of economic and racial justice as applied to transgender politics.

transgender, neoliberalism, administrative governance, identity documents, hate crimes, discrimination, critical race theory, biopolitics

Abstract:
This piece, co-authored with Sel Wahng, was part of a set of essays published together under the title "Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender." In this article, we explore how identity politics that underwrite many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender discourses have proved limiting in regard to potential political alliances and social change. We address this concern by looking at the questions under consideration in this forum through a particular lens: how bodies and identities interact and intersect with modern formations of power. Through this mode of inquiry we seek to relate supposedly disparate elements for the purpose of making new social, political and scholarly connections.

transgender, sex, gender, poverty, race

Abstract:
This short article explores three key myths codified in various laws and policies that impede the life chances of transgender people. The article ties together problems occurring in a range of institutions including homeless shelters, ID-issuing agencies, health insurance programs, Medicaid programs, prisons, jails, foster care programs, juvenile justice programs and private employers and traces how these three myths operate simultaneously to create impediments to basic economic participation and access to social service for transgender people.

Abstract:
This article draws from Chela Sandoval's typology of forms of oppositional consciousness taken up by social movements of the last half century to analyze key strategic questions facing transgender liberation movements today.