Professor Brubaker’s Cognitive Biases

The initial impulse was: finally, a scientific attempt to do justice to what we call gender identity. After all, this term had indeed enjoyed a remarkable trajectory in connection with the legalization of trans people, and as a paradigm shift it remained an open question.

Moreover, the term instantly riles up any TERF. Because gender identity designates what defines the gender belonging of trans, intersex, and nonbinary people (TIN). The term was necessary to clarify that with TIN individuals and their gender assignment it is not about the so-called biological sex. Trans and nonbinary people, as is well known, never identify with their birth sex.

After 150 pages of reading, I was, however, wiser, and unfortunately the conclusion remained: too soon to celebrate. The book recently published by Mandelbaum Verlag, written by American sociologist Rogers Brubaker and titled “Gender Identity. The Career of a Category,” does have a few positives.

Brubaker’s Partisanship Is Not Hard to Discern

Overall, however, the objections outweigh the positives, and the book becomes a source of irritation, especially when Brubaker ends up in a quite transphobic morass of opinion. If only the other side had been given a chance to respond, which could reasonably be expected in scholarly work — but that opportunity is conspicuously missing. That, in turn, makes Brubaker’s partisanship easy to recognize.

Besides this pronounced one-sidedness, it was also noticeable how often the author’s argument clashes with basic logic. Yet, as I said, the book has its merits. Its principal achievement lies in tracing the career of the category “gender identity” in the United States and Great Britain, in their respective stages and inflection points. This is helpful because it offers an overview of a fairly complex subject. It also makes clear how differently the developments in those countries unfolded compared with our own.

Indeed, while our struggles for recognition also centered on gender self-determination, the category “gender identity” does not hold the dominance it apparently enjoyed in the United States and the UK—especially with regard to the medical care of transgender youths and currently is far less dominant. The political reversal there shows, as we know, devastating consequences. What Brubaker calls a “quiet revolution” in this context, referring to the institutionalization of gender identity, found only modest echoes here.

A quick look at our Self-Determination Act makes clear what restrictions the concept of gender identity faced there—the keywords house rule, freedom of contract, and military provisions may suffice—and the current policy, which keeps gender identity at a distance and excludes trans people from equal treatment and equality.

Why Gender Identity Became a Flashpoint
Yet, step by step. Brubaker’s aim was to “trace the history of the institution— and the subsequent challenge— of this new principle of social classification [distinct from and competing with the classification of people by biological sex].”

We know from the birth-assignment practice that nothing fundamental has changed about sorting people by biological sex, and aside from obvious variations in sex development among intersex individuals, there are only male and female. The power of genital status has not actually changed. What did change was simply that, with the introduction of the category gender identity, trans people were granted a more lenient path to changing their gender affiliation. But that does not explain why gender identity became such a hot topic.

Brubaker tries to explain it this way: what began as a concern about a group of people gradually shifted the frame. Because arguing that this gender identity is innate implies that all people possess such an identity. But why should, as Brubaker assumes, it be merely a “minority trait”? And why did gender identity become a problem for everyone? Isn’t it natural and logical that there should also be a positive awareness of gender identity if there is in the case of trans people a negative one that tells a person they belong in a gender different from their birth one? Or is the cis world already satisfied with the pressure of heteronormativity?

Trans as a “Strategy to Avoid Homosexuality?”
We confront the big problem: we cannot definitively say what gender identity exactly is, how it arises, or where it resides in us. And yet it exists and wields power over us. The question remains: how does a gendered consciousness come to be known? That it is produced in the brain hardly invites doubt, and yet we don’t know how it works.

Precisely this, however, Brubaker’s reflections unfortunately do not treat. He, like so many, remains stuck at the level of the genitals and the patriarchal gender order in questions of gender—as if humans did not also have a brain and as if gender maturity were not desirable. In any case, Brubaker seems unaware of the neurobiological insight offered by Milton Diamond, who once offered this wonderful explanation: the central sexual organ of a human sits between the ears, not between the legs.

Well, that, of course, still does not tell us what gender identity actually is. Other than that it’s a placeholder for the still-waiting answer to why there is trans existence. That Brubaker also dredges up the old notion that trans may be a “strategy to avoid homosexuality” is today at best a transphobic narrative, and has little to do with scientific objectivity.

Fighting the Power of Heteronormativity
“My central thesis,” Brubaker writes, “is that gender identity, once it left the clinical setting and gained wider prominence in public debate, was initially understood as a personal matter, situated in the realm of self-directed action. But as it became a fully actionable category — to which even children and adolescents could appeal — it ceased to be viewed as something self-contained. It came to be seen as something that touches the interests of others: the interests of women in privacy and safety.”

That may sound reasonable at first glance, but it contains major conceptual errors. First, the supposed conflict of interest between trans and cis women is not a matter of numbers. The rejection of trans women, the non-acceptance of their female identity, existed from the start and did not need gender identity to become a public debate. And second: where does the certainty come from that children and adolescents lack gender consciousness? Is it because they are from the start conditioned and controlled by heteronormativity? If a sociologist does not grasp the social constraints of socialization, perhaps he chose the wrong field of study.

And one more word on the question of identity, where Brubaker speaks of an identity imperative. It did not arise on the agenda only because of TIN individuals. On the contrary, our patriarchal culture has long practiced the strictest form of identity politics through heteronormativity. Nothing else was, and is, a binary gender defined exclusively by anatomy and reproductive biology. Here too, a sociologist should have a clearer view of social relations—or perhaps need a sociology tutor?

My conclusion: I do have a more nuanced picture of the institutionalization of the concept of gender identity in the United States and Britain, but one should not have expected the associated paradigm shift toward gender self-determination to be conflict-free. The fight for it was, at least here, a decades-long, hard, arduous struggle for recognition and against the power of heteronormativity and its fundamentally antisocial gender order.