The Transgender Exigency

Front matter

DEFINING SEX AND GENDER IN THE 2IST CENTURY

“Above all, this book provides a very basic service to our society’s vexed debates about transgender: it gives the empiricals. I have not come across a book that lays out the relevant factual background better than this one does. Through careful and detailed discussion of the particularities involved, Schiappa develops a pragmatic, moderate, and sensible approach to the main issues, culminating in his very helpful proposal to apply four different levels of gatekeeping to transgender people in different kinds of context. This moderate and context-nuanced approach is a sensible corrective to the ideological extremism that all too often comes from both sides.”

—Professor Sophie Grace Chappell, Open University

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments

Preface: Stronger together Introduction

PART | Definitions and the Transgender Exigency

PART III What now? 10 A pragmatic approach to defining sex/gender

References Index

191 235

FIGURES

0.1 5.1 8.1

The Transgender Umbrella

Tweet by Michael Hughes, used with permission

UK Evidence of Living in the Gender with which the Offender Identifies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began to write this book in January 2020 and soon after went into isolation with my spouse to try to outlast the pandemic. All books depend on the support of family, colleagues, and helpful librarians, but such support was especially crucial in these challenging times.

Special thanks to an eclectic group friends and colleagues—whose responses varied from enthusiastic agreement to vigorous critique—who read the entire manuscript or large portions of it, including John Jackson, Minjie Li, John Nordin, Justin Reich, Nicholas-Brie Guarriello, Alex Byrne, Doriane Coleman, Karl Surkan, and the reviewers for Routledge. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer who pushed me to reflect further on my subject position and to reckon as best I could with the principle “nothing about us without us.”

I could not have finished the book in a timely manner without the aid of a terrific team of undergraduate research assistants. From Wellesley College I am indebted to Aliza Amin, Jessica Anthony, Eva Chang, Julia Cho, Maria Galebach, Isabella Garcia, Emily Huang, Alex Hussey, Ella Matticks, Grace (Yongxi) Pan, Yilia Qu, Gunjan Singh, Si Yan “Carrie” Wang, Sophie Wang, Sam Wolstenholme-Britt, and Chen Xu. From MIT I wish to thank Titash Biswas, Theresa Caso-McHugh, Sophie Cohen, Qiuyue Liu, Kathryn Mohr, Diane Mwizerwa, Harley Ride, Aiyedun Uzamere, and Nina Wang.

Each chapter incurred specific debts. For the chapter on schools, I want to acknowledge those willing to be interviewed, including Alexander Abbott, Paige Flanagan, Carrie Friend, Adam Howard, Justin Killian, Ninotska Love, Rick Melvoin, Eric Di Michele, Dawson Nash, Quinn Sipes, Larry Stimpert, Guy Terrell, and Michael Utzinger. The bathrooms chapter owes a special debt to Terry Kogan and to Kristie Seelman. The military chapter benefited from talking with Riley Dosh, Lt. General Robert Caslen (Ret.), Lt. General Michelle D. Johnson (Ret.), Dr. Aaron Belkin, and former Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning. I thank David

Acknowledgments xi

Handelsman, Joanna Harper, Lindsay Pieper, and Eric Vilain for their assistance with the sports chapter. The prison chapter was aided by Jackie White Hughto, Valerie Jenness, and Jennifer Macy. And the chapter on feminisms received helpful feedback from Asta, Sophie Grace Chappell, Sally Haslanger, Jennifer Saul, and Naomi Scheman.

Thanks also to the following for their assistance on specific aspects of the project: T.J. Billard, Katharine Dunn, Marla Eisenberg, Andrew R. Flores, Marshall Ganz, Anil Gupta, Hahrie Han, Rebecca Helm, Austin H. Johnson, John T. Kirby, Bonnie E. Litowitz, Tove Lundberg, Gabriella Lukacs, Deirdre McCloskey, Laura Miller, Patrick R. Miller, Hiromu Nagahara, Bruno Perreau, Paul Roquet, Quayshawn Spencer, Jami K. Taylor, and Stefan Th. Gries.

Gratitude and all my love to my partner Elizabeth Murray and daughters Lauren Murray and Jacqueline Schiappa.

The open access edition of this work was made possible by generous funding from the MIT libraries.

PREFACE: STRONGER TOGETHER

This book brings together a long-time scholarly interest in definitions and the political work of categories with an on-going commitment to social justice. Especially in the wake of the calamitous Trump presidency,' I felt it was high time to add the T to three decades of (intermittent) research and advocacy concerned with LGB issues.?

It is important to make clear that I do not pretend to speak for the transgender community. It was more than three decades ago that Linda Martin Alcoff described what she calls “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1991). Alcoffs analysis remains a powerful scholarly intervention that reminds us of the inescapability and salience of our own position—in my case, a privileged white man. I am aware that I speak from a position of privilege, even if I cannot claim to be 100% aware of all the ways my training and previous research limits my field of vision. Still, as Alcoff notes, if I were to remain silent and “retreat” from these issues, I would fail my political responsibility to speak out against oppression, a responsibility “incurred by the very fact of my privilege” (1991, 8).

I have read and consulted with many trans people throughout the research and writing of this book. In my concluding chapter, I discuss the importance of the theme “Nothing About Us Without Us” and involving trans people in efforts to resolve sex/gender definitional controversies. There is, of course, great variability in the viewpoints held by transgender people. Two noteworthy examples must suffice to make the point: Some transgender people describe their decision to transition as a matter of freedom and choice, and reject the “woman trapped in a man’s body” (or vice versa) narrative (McCloskey 2007; Bettcher 2013, 2014), while others insist there was no choice at all and embrace some version of the “wrong body” narrative.’ Recently, some trans people support J.K. Rowling’s and so-called “gender critical” scholars’ right to speak (McCloskey 2020), while others actively work to “cancel” or “de-platform” such speakers (see Chapter 9).* In any case:

Preface: Stronger together xiii

Though we must avoid essentializing a “transgender perspective,” I acknowledge and respect the fact that experiencing life as transgender is profoundly different than my own life experience.

Thus, I offer this book as a contribution to a conversation, speaking with my cis and trans brothers and sisters. I strongly urge readers to take up related policyfocused work by such trans authors as Paisley Currah (2021, 2022), Heath Fogg Davis (2017), Dean Spade (2015), and Ann Travers (2018), as well as the important historical work by Susan Stryker (2017) and the extensive philosophical work by Talia Bettcher (see 2022, among others). It is important that we all listen to each other, and for us to all recognize the truth of the well-known saying that we are stronger together than apart.*

1 Paisley Curah aptly describes the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse Obama-era policies on sex reclassification as violence that “is both epistemic and has real material effects” (in Fischel 2019, 97).

2 See Schiappa (2021) for a brief account of the origins of Schiappa (2008, 2012a, 2012b, 2019) and Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes (2005, 2006).

3 Some trans activists and scholars argue that the “wrong body” narrative was imposed by the medical profession, while others feel that the it is a useful way to express their felt experience. As Jack Halberstam put it: “The term ‘wrong body’ was used often in the 1980s, even becoming the name of a BBC show about transsexuality, and offensive as the term might sound now, it at least harbored an explanation for how cross-gendered people might experience embodiment: I, at least, felt as if I was in the wrong body, and there seemed to be no way out” (2018, 1-2). Ulrica Engdahl provides a succinct summary of the critiques of the essentializing aspects of the “wrong body” narrative, while pointing the way to a theoretical account that avoids essentializing a gender binary while acknowledging the lived experience of some trans people: “Wrong body as lived body expresses the situatedness of trans body experience as wrong, hence relativizing it. Wrong body as trans embodiment expresses subjectively felt bodily meaning interacting with cultural interpretations of bodies, where the subjective and the cultural are not always congruent. This way the gender binary is replaced with gender variance as a frame for understanding gender, offering a more fluid understanding of the trans body” (2014, 269).

4 As Roger Brubaker puts it, “[W]hat does it mean to ‘think with trans’? The sheer variety of transgender experience precludes a univocal answer” (2016, 10).

5 Taylor, Lewis, and Haider-Markel document how important it has been for the transgender rights movement to join itself with the “gay rights cause, creating a broader LGBT collective identity” (2018, 35). Van Dyke and Amos (2017) provide a recent summary of the considerable scholarly literature documenting how central coalition building with allies is for social movement success. See also Baumgartner et al. (2009) and Van Dyke and McCammon (2010).

Introduction

The argument of this book is that increased visibility and interest in transgender issues and politics have contributed to a definitional rupture with regard to sex and gender. By definitional rupture 1 mean a dispute or series of disputes that cannot be resolved simply or neutrally by reference to a dictionary or authoritative source, but only by considering the process of defining itself—how and why do we define words? Who should have the power to define? What values and interests are advanced by competing definitions?!

Though cultural understandings of what it means to be a woman or a man have gone through times of reconsideration and debate, it is arguably the case that at no

>> cc other point in recent history have the definitions of “woman” and “man,” “male”

>> ce and “female,” “masculine” and “feminine,” been more up for grabs than the present. To resolve these definitional controversies, we need to consider carefully the political, practical, and ethical dimensions of the act of defining.

Despite the fact that transgender history is far from new (Meyerowitz 2002; Stryker 2017), the visibility and salience of transgender issues has increased dramatically in the 21st century (Billard 2019, 165). The result is a clash over how one defines sex and gender. On one end of the spectrum, those who can be described as biological determinists argue that biological sex determines one’s gender and thus both are evident at birth or earlier, and that one’s medical designation should determine a host of legal and societal constraints based on one’s assigned sex. On the other end of the spectrum, those who might be called autonomous nominalists or advocates of “self-identification” or “first-person authority” contend that gender identity is independent of biology and is a purely personal decision and, as such, should be respected and never regulated or discriminated against.’

These two opposing ways to define sex/gender have become highly politicized, first with the Trump administration and now with conservative state legislatures pushing a biological determinist approach wherever possible, while the Biden

2 Introduction administration, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and more liberal state legislatures have championed self-identification.

Though I have simplified the extreme positions, it is worth noting that advocates on either end of the spectrum might invoke the phrase “a boy is a boy” or “a girl is a girl” The biological determinist means that biology is destiny and thus immutable; whereas the nominalist is advocating that we respect a person’s self-identification and not qualify it, for example, with the “trans” prefix. That people with such disparate starting points would make similar pronouncements while meaning very different things suggests a definitional rupture that cannot be resolved simply or neutrally but only by considering the process of defining itself.

If asked how I think sex and gender should be defined, my answer is that it depends on the context in which the question is posed. My goal in this book is not to offer a single, definitive answer, but rather to advocate a definitional process that takes seriously the political, practical, and ethical dimensions of the act of defining. In the final chapter, I describe the need for purpose-oriented definitions, and offer “levels of scrutiny” that are adapted from different levels of scrutiny found in USS. constitutional law, in order to unpack the idea of context-specific standards or criteria for definitions of sex/gender. To preview the book’s overall argument: The purposes of definition, and the values and interests that competing definitions or definitional criteria advance, vary considerably by context. While self-identification or first-person authority should be presumptive whenever and wherever possible, I conclude that there are rare contexts in which something more than a potentially ephemeral self-identification is justifiable. As will become clear, the further that definitional criteria move away from self-identification (such as requiring gender reassignment surgery), the more compelling the justification for segregation by sex needs to be.

Defining “transgender”

“Cisgender” refers to people whose sense of gender corresponds to their assigned sex at birth. “Transgender” describes people whose sense of gender does not correspond to their assigned sex at birth, and they wish to transition socially and sometimes medically to live and express their gender.” As the National Center for Transgender Equality notes, “Gender expression is how a person presents their gender on the outside, often through behavior, clothing, hairstyle, voice or body characteristics” (2016b; see also Parsa & Katz-Wise 2021).

We learn the meaning of words that denote categories by seeing or hearing other language-users (initially, parents and caregivers) demonstrate how to use the word with respect to clear examples, which can be described as prototypical exemplars. Thus, most people learn the word “transgender” in reference to people who have both socially and medically transitioned, such as Caitlyn Jenner, Renée Richards, or Chaz Bono. Social transitioning typically includes a change of name, pronouns, clothing, and hairstyle. Medical transitioning can include hormone treatments and

Introduction 3 surgery. In prototypical cases, the decision to transition is a response to a strongly felt discomfort with one’s assigned gender, known as gender dysphoria. As we will see, some regulatory definitions of men and women require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a necessary attribute for a transgender person to “count” as a woman or man in a particular context (such as the U.S. military).

For the purposes of this book, I focus on the prototypical understanding of transgender as someone who a) experienced gender dysphoria and b) transitioned socially and often medically. That focus certainly is not intended to deny the word to people who do not share both attributes, but rather to identify and illumine the issues facing transgender people who navigate very specific contexts that have been segregated by sex, such as single-sex schools, bathrooms, sports, and prisons.

The transgender phenomenon is related but conceptually distinct from the larger cultural phenomenon of gender variance. Some people identify as gender nonconformist, genderqueer, nonbinary, or other terms that challenge the traditional binary language of gender. For the most part, I will not be focusing on gender variance. Again, this is not meant in any way to marginalize the experience of nonbinary people or gender nonconformists, but is designed to maintain focus specifically on the regulatory definitions based on the binary of male and female.

An example of how the vocabulary of describing gender is, itself, fluid is how the actor and comedian Eddie Izzard has self-identified over the years. As a stand-up comedian, Izzard often wore women’s clothing and self-described (at the time) as a transvestite, straight, and (tongue in cheek) as a “male lesbian.” In the Emmywinning show, Dress to Kill, Izzard talks about the category of transvestites to point out that it could include people ranging from “weirdo” transvestites to “executive” transvestites, and as a category distinct from drag queens (2002). Research I conducted with colleagues Peter Gregg and Dean Hewes found that watching Dress to Kill not only helped to educate viewers about the category of transvestites but also reduced negative attitudes held toward the group (Schiappa, Gregg, & Hewes 2005).

Since that time, Izzard has self-identified as transgender (Ruby 2016). Izzard and others embrace what has been depicted as the Transgender Umbrella” that subsumes a wide variety of categories including “any individual who crosses over or challenges their society’s traditional gender roles and/or expressions” (Mays & Hill 2014).

Initially, the labels “nonbinary” or “gender nonconformist” would be more precise (from my standpoint), since Izzard said “I identify somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish. I identify both but I fancy women” (Ruby 2016). More recently, however, Izzard has stated that she prefers “she/hers” pronouns and “at the moment, Izzard is self-identifying as a trans woman” (Hattenstone 2021). To be clear, Eddie Izzard can self-identify any way Eddie Izzard wants to self-identify. I make a distinction between transgender and nonbinary because it matters for how regulatory definitions function in sex-segregated contexts. Thus, when I use the word “transgender” in this book I am using it in the more limited, prototypical sense stipulated earlier.

4 Introduction ambigender

4 Y 4 A ES 7

O SS ist N g GENDER QUEERS thir irg a, &

What does transgender mean? What do all An element of crossing over or challenging these different identities have in common? binary gender roles or expectations.

Bigenderk

FIGURE 0.1 The Transgender Umbrella Source: Graphic courtesy of the GENDER book (thegenderbook.com)

The objective of this book is a narrow one—to raise the question of how regulatory definitions of sex/gender should be thought about at a time I describe as the Transgender Exigency. There are other transgender issues that are important but go beyond the scope of this book, such as “At what age should children be able to make decisions about medical transitioning?” I set aside this particular question in part to keep the current project manageable, and in part because there are questions involving developmental psychology that I do not feel confident about handling.’ I also do not address the issues of “desistance” or “detransitioning”-—when a person who has begun or even completed social and medical transitioning to a different gender and later changes their mind. Important issues, to be sure, but for now I want to maintain a specific focus on regulatory definitions.

In Chapter 3, I recount some of the awful statistics of how transgender people in the United States are frequently treated. As a nation, we need to do better. It is my hope that this book can contribute to the ongoing national dialogue to articulate and enhance the rights of transgender people.

1 Academic colleagues in philosophy tell me that my work here bears a relationship to work described as conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering. I agree that there is an affinity,

Introduction 5 but must set aside for another day the task of integrating the growing literature in that area with my previous and current work on definitional practices (Schiappa 2003). See: Burgess, Cappelen, and Plunkett (2020), Cappelen (2018), and Cull (2020).

Brubaker describes the two approaches as essentialist versus voluntarist (2016).

In Transgender: A Reference Handbook, Aaron Devor and Ardel Haefele-Thomas stipulate that “Transgender or trans are both umbrella terms used to describe a range of people who share the feature of not feeling that the sex and gender assignments made for them at birth were correct” (2019, 8). See also Rawson and Williams (2014).

There are a number of graphic representations of the Transgender Umbrella, the earliest of which can be found as Appendix E to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission’s Investigation Into Discrimination Against Transgendered People (Green 1994, 68).

For a thoughtful history of transgender children, see Gill-Peterson (2018). Also, though I do not write here about age-related issues of transition, it is clear that legislation such as that passed by the Arkansas legislature to ban any and all medical treatment for those under the age of 18 is not supported by sound medical science, as noted by the American Medical Association (2021).

PART |

THE ROLE OF REGULATORY DEFINITIONS

Think about the word “woman.” What does it mean? In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the first definition listed for “woman” is “An adult female person.” While this is a perfectly reasonable definition, the point I want to make initially is that if English is your first language, it is highly unlikely that you learned how to use the word “woman” by looking up its dictionary definition. More likely, you have no memory of learning the word, though obviously at some point you did.

Learning a word like “woman”—a noun that refers to a category of people— typically involves witnessing the word used by one’s parents or acquaintances to refer to what are described as prototypical exemplars. That is, we learn categorydenoting words by seeing or hearing more experienced language-users employ the word with respect to clear examples. As we see or hear the word used to refer to examples, we acquire what are called “learned similarities” among them such that we can successfully generalize from those examples to use the word correctly. When we use the word incorrectly as a child, generally someone corrects us so we learn what does or does not count as a woman.

In fact, most of our vocabulary is learned without ever needing to refer to a dictionary. History illustrates the fact that languages can grow and flourish without collecting formal definitions into a dictionary. After all, the first dictionary of English was Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical in 1604, after William Shakespeare had written such masterpieces as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, scholars who study how children learn their first language document that formal dictionary definitions are rarely part of young children’s language learning process. Learning to define a word, especially with the classic Aristotelian form (“An X is [a kind of] class name that has such-and-such attributes”), is an advanced linguistic skill developed through “time, practice, and exposure” (Gandia 2016, 4).!

Dictionary definitions represent the publisher’s account of how words are most commonly used by a linguistic community. Dictionaries provide a descriptive account of definitions commonly referred to as lexical definitions. Such definitions obviously change to reflect new language use. In November 2020, for example, Oxford dictionaries updated their account of the word “woman” to correct outdated and sexist usage (Zdanowicz 2020).

A definitional “gap” occurs when someone hears or reads a word they don’t recognize and need to look up the definition, such as someone hearing reference to a “shingle” haircut or hearing someone describe a political belief as “antediluvian.” Such gaps are easy to fill under most circumstances. Even if several definitions of the same word are listed in a dictionary, an experienced language user normally can consider the context in which the word appears and correctly identify the relevant definition.

Even if children do not learn the meaning of most words by reference to a dictionary, dictionary definitions nonetheless serve a valuable archival function of identifying the most common uses of the words of a given language. They serve as a sort of collective memory to fill in the gap when we read or hear a word with which we are unfamiliar. Dictionaries are descriptive in the sense that they provide the predominant meaning of words, but also prescriptive in the sense that they convey what is taken as the “correct” usage and hence implies how we ought to use words.

Certain definitions describe a category of objects or actions that are considered important only or primarily within highly specific contexts to a particular group of language-users. Thus, in addition to conventional dictionaries, there are dictionaries that are designed for specialized language-users, such as legal dictionaries for the field of law and medical dictionaries for health care professionals. The larger and more complex a society becomes, the greater the need for such resources as specialized dictionaries to ensure that specialists talk the same talk, so to speak.

In this book, I am interested in a specific category of definitions that is a subset of what are known as stipulative definitions. A stipulative definition of a word does not depend on prior usage (though it may be informed by it); rather, a group of language-users agree that in a given context, the word X has a specified and agreed-upon meaning. For example, in poker the word “flush” is defined by Merriam- Webster as “a hand of playing cards all of the same suit,” and the word has no necessary relationship to uses of the word “flush” in other contexts, such as plumbing.

The focus of this book is on what can be called regulatory definitions, understood as stipulative definitions that function to regulate some aspect of human behavior.

Regulatory definitions can be found in a wide array of contexts, from recreational games to laws governing matters of life and death. Learning to play a game typically involves learning the rules, and as games grow more sophisticated, such rules often require a set of specific definitions. The 2019 edition of Major League Baseball’s Official Baseball Rules includes a section titled “Definitions of Terms” that includes all of the key words found in the rules, from “adjudged” to “wind-up position.” Under normal circumstances, the umpires officiating a game have the power to decide what counts as a “balk,” “spectator interference,” and so forth.

The role of regulatory definitions 11

As I describe in an earlier book titled Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning, the legal definition of “death” changed in the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to the change, the standard definition used to declare a person “dead” was the cessation of cardio-respiratory activities. As technology changed such that patients could have their cardio-respiratory activities maintained with the aid of machines, the standard definition became one of the cessation of brain activities—so-called “brain death.” The legal change was important because there were patients who could be considered alive under one definition but dead under another, and indeed there was a case brought against a doctor for murder for harvesting organs for transplant before the patient was considered dead by current law. Under normal circumstances, it is stipulated by law that an authorized medical professional and only an authorized medical professional has the power to pronounce a person dead.

The two examples I just described may seem quite different, but from the perspective of regulatory definitions, they share important elements. First, from the standpoint of linguistic behavior, regulatory definitions advance what I describe as “denotative conformity.’ That is, learning the definitional rule that “X counts as Y in context C”? improves the odds that we understand and describe aspects of our reality in a common manner. We want to be able to observe a phenomenon and agree that X is a Y. We don’t always achieve this goal, as anyone who has observed an argument between a baseball manager and an umpire can attest, but the goal of regulatory definitions is that we use language to describe a situation in a predictable and shared manner. Thus, one important goal of regulatory definitions is denotative conformity.

Second, we define words to serve one or more specific purpose and to promote certain values or interests for those involved. To play baseball, one has to know what counts as a balk, a walk, a run, etc., so the purpose of baseball’s rules and definitions is to ensure all players know what is going on and how to play the game. In matters of life and death, there are serious consequences to declaring someone dead, from filing criminal charges of murder in some cases to being permitted to harvest organs to transplant in another. We need to know if a particular person counts as alive or dead to meet all sorts of needs and interests—religious, legal, medical, familial, etc.

Groups, organizations, or institutions have various motivations for advancing regulatory definitions. In games, a paramount value is fairness. And because we value life, it is understandable that we want to be very careful not to make mistakes in pronouncing someone dead prematurely. As we will see later in this book, the question of why an organization or institution is defining a word—what values and interests are being served by a particular definition—is crucial.

Third, regulatory definitions are formulated and authorized by recognized organizations or institutions, such as Major League Baseball or a state legislature. Outside of the purview of those organizations or institutions, the rules potentially have no authority. As this book proceeds, there will be ample examples of how one organization or legal jurisdiction may have one set of definitions (of “male” and “female,” for example) that are different from another organization or legal jurisdiction. Regulatory definitions always depend on the backing of some sort of recognized entity that has been empowered to regulate a particular domain of human activity. Within the relevant contexts, specific individuals typically are empowered by the regulating entities to decide whether X counts as Y or not in any given instance, from an umpire declaring a balk to a medical professional declaring a patient dead.

I argue in this book that—in some contexts—definitions of female and male, women and men, should be treated as regulatory definitions crafted to further social and personal purposes, needs, and interests. They are formulated for the purpose of “determining gender” in specific contexts that are typically segregated by sex (Westbrook & Schilt 2014).* For the foreseeable future, it is neither necessary nor possible to devise a “one size fits all” definition that will meet all our needs at all times and in all contexts. This will strike some as counter-intuitive, because most of us grow up believing that one’s identity as a man or woman is something stable, enduring, and “given” at birth. As we will see, as we move into the third decade of the 21st century, the situation is more complicated than that.

We have many “social selves,’ as William James put it (1981, 294); some of those selves are recognized and acknowledged by institutions while others may be relevant only in informal social settings. The point with which I want to end this chapter is that the practice of having regulatory definitions that pertain to our personal identity is not new or unique to defining sex and gender. Each of us, as individuals, have many qualities and attributes that are used to define us in various social contexts. I am an educated, white, cisgender male well over the age of 21 who is a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The attribute of my age is irrelevant in some contexts and highly salient in others. My age “entitles” me to certain privileges afforded by governmental agencies or institutions, such as the legal right to buy alcohol, to vote, and to obtain a drivers license. My eligibility for certain institutional benefits that are dependent on age, such as Social Security retirement and Medicare benefits, also is regulated by law. So, age is an identityattribute that is sometimes used to regulate aspects of human behavior and other times is irrelevant.