Kristen Schilt

Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: “Gender Normals,” Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality

This article brings together two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, “gender normals,” interact with transgender people to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity. By contrasting public and private interactions that range from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual, the authors show how gender and sexuality are inextricably tied together. The authors demonstrate that the criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus (hetero)sexual circumstances. While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of ones genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations. Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered; men and women select different targets for and utilize gendered tactics to accomplish the policing of supposedly natural gender boundaries and to repair breaches to heteronormativity.

Just One of the Guys? How Transmen Make Gender Visible at Work

This article examines the reproduction of gendered workplace inequalities through in-depth interviews with female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs). Many FTMs enter the workforce as women and then transition to become men, an experience that can provide them with an “outsider-within” perspective on the “patriarchal dividend”—the advantages men in general gain from the subordination of women. Many of the respondents in this article find themselves, as men, receiving more authority, reward, and respect in the workplace than they received as women, even when they remain in the same jobs. The author argues that their experiences can make the underpinnings of gendered workplace disparities visible and help illuminate how structural disadvantages for women are reproduced in workplace interactions. As tall, white FTMs see more advantages than short FTMs and FTMs of color, these experiences also illustrate how mens gender advantages at work vary with characteristics such as race/ethnicity and body structure.

Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System

This article explores “determining gender,” the umbrella term for social practices of placing others in gender categories. We draw on three case studies showcasing moments of conflict over who counts as a man and who counts as a woman: public debates over the expansion of transgender employment rights, policies determining eligibility of transgender people for competitive sports, and proposals to remove the genital surgery requirement for a change of sex marker on birth certificates. We show that criteria for determining gender differ across social spaces. Gender-integrated spaces are more likely to use identity-based criteria, while gender-segregated spaces, like the sexual spaces we have previously examined (Schilt and Westbrook 2009), are more likely to use biology-based criteria. In addition, because of beliefs that women are inherently vulnerable and men are dangerous, “men’s” and “women’s” spaces are not policed equally—making access to women’s spaces central to debates over transgender rights.

‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians

(2003). ‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 5-16.

The Sexual Habitus of Transgender Men: Negotiating Sexuality Through Gender

In this article, the authors consider how trans men’s decisions about physical body modifications impact their sense of themselves as gendered and sexual actors. Based on interviews with 74 trans men, the authors explore how their embodiment, gender identity, erotic ideation, lifetime of sexual practices, and domain of potential partners—what the authors term “sexual habitus”—can be affirmed, transformed, or challenged as their embodiment changes. These changes underscore the dynamic relationship between gender and sexuality and illustrate how bodies matter in sexual trajectories across the life course.

The Unfinished Business of Sexuality: Comment on Andersen

Margaret L. Andersen provides an insightful overview of the development of feminist studies in sociology and a roadmap for the future. Using her impressive history as a feminist sociologist as a backdrop, she illustrates the inroads women and gender scholarship have made into mainstream sociology. However, as a junior gender/sexuality scholar and generational product of third-wave feminism, I raise three queries to Andersen’s conceptualization. I first argue that her framing of the current status of feminist sociology downplays the challenges newer gender and sexuality scholars still face—challenges that, unfortunately, are not dissimilar to those women faced in the past. Second, illustrating the continued tension between social construction and biological determinism, I question whether we can close the chapter on the early themes of feminist studies she lays out. Finally, while I agree with Andersen that the integration of the study of sexuality is crucial to the future of feminist sociology, I see her hesitation to award sexuality similar analytic status to race, class, and gender as deeply problematic. Rather than engaging in generational boundary guarding that separates “serious” research on the political economy of sexuality from seemingly less weighty research on communities and identities, I suggest we recognize how these forms of research—and the diversity that comes from mixing the insights of feminist generations— work together to strengthen feminist sociology.

Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics

How transgender rights legislation got framed as “bathroom bills,” with seemingly everyone trying to mark their territory.