@inbook {409236,
	title = {Unnatural Boundaries: the Challenge of Transgender},
	booktitle = {Edges},
	year = {Forthcoming},
	publisher = {NYU Press},
	organization = {NYU Press},
	address = {New York, NY},
	abstract = {For many people, the {\textquotedblleft}M{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}F{\textquotedblright} stamped on government-issued identity documentation represents little more than a common formality, a universally applicable biometric, an unquestioned indicator of group membership. This is not true for everyone. Over the last few decades, an international transgender community, given shape, in some part, by victories of feminist and gay liberation movements and larger transformations in scientific thinking about sex and sexuality, has called upon law and the broader culture to remake understandings of male/female difference. Thus begins a series of public contests over the border between {\textquotedblleft}M{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}F.{\textquotedblright} Will biomedicine and law recognize a more diverse constellation of indicia of gender, including personal identity? What are the conditions under which the state will allow individuals to elect to alter their legal identities? What counts as gender, and who can be the target of {\textquotedblleft}gender discrimination?{\textquotedblright} At base, in the words of Judith Butler (2004): {\textquotedblleft}whose world is legitimated as real?{\textquotedblright} These questions are answered in small ways in a variety of local settings, and the answers often conflict. In this chapter, I explore the paradoxical role played by legal gender classifications in ongoing cultural disagreements about gender difference. On one hand, they reinforce the notion that there are predictable, stable ways to identify, mark and secure the individual. On the other, law has become an expressive tool in the lives of individuals, who both depend on its recognition for access to the most basic forms of social participation, yet whose own transgressive identity practices can push against, resist and transform the very ways the law codifies its categories. Much like the edge effects identified by urban sociologists, ecologists and literary and queer theorists in other contexts, gender diversity flourishes at the edges of legal recognition. State identity schemes vary widely, and their inconsistencies open up a space to think in nuanced ways about how gender is lived and recognized. While the law constructs gender classifications as boundaries, in fact, they function more like borderlines. Though a repressive and regulatory state apparatus keenly guards the edges of gender, they remain surprisingly permeable. In their most ideal forms, they respond to the demands, needs and resistances of individuals. Indeed, if legal gender classifications wish to do their work, they\&nbsp;must\&nbsp;become more fully the open systems they suggest{\textemdash}that is, always in evolution, responsive to the multiplying ways in which individuals embody, express and assert their identities. They must allow for the expressive movement through,\&nbsp;and use by individuals of, the categories themselves.},
	author = {Tey Meadow},
	editor = {Craig J. Calhoun and Richard Sennett}
}
