Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Paisley Currah, "Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity" (NYU Press, 2022)
Description: Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you’re dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transg...