Part II: A Quiet Revolution

From its obscure mid-20th century beginnings, when it was first used in the context of psychological assessments of intersex individuals, gender identity has become a fundamental “principle of vision and division of the world,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase. The concept is now written into laws, bureaucratic regulations, and court decisions and embedded in organizational policies and routines. Widely understood as a basic component of selfhood, it has altered what Ian Hacking has called “the space of possibilities for personhood.” Today, of course, gender identity is being challenged on multiple fronts. But these challenges were slow to emerge. Why did the far-reaching institutionalization of the category, today the focus of such bitter controversy, meet with so little opposition and attract so little attention until a decade ago? What changed thereafter, drawing gender identity into the vortex of culture war debates, but also prompting critical scrutiny from the liberal center? And how might one think and talk about gender identity in a way that might avoid some of the pitfalls and impasses of many current discussions? These are the questions Rogers Brubaker will address in his IWM Lectures in Human Sciences. 

The concept of gender identity has its roots in 19th-century European sexological speculations about cases in which “psychological sex” differed from the sex of the body. But the term “gender identity” itself—and the language of “gender” more generally—was coined only in the mid-20th century. It first gained an institutional foothold in the highly specialized and medicalized context of psychiatric assessment of intersexuality and transsexualism, and it was initially understood as relevant only in rare cases. Brubaker’s second lecture analyzes the category’s subsequent remarkable trajectory, tracing its institutionalization in medicine, law, bureaucracy, data-gathering, and education. 

Until about a decade ago, the embedding of the category in these key institutional domains met with little opposition and attracted little public attention. The relative invisibility of the process resulted from the fact that the category was institutionalized for the most part in a behind-the-scenes, under-the-radar manner, through a series of incremental changes. These cumulative changes, though they attracted little public attention, amounted to a quiet revolution, a fundamental change in the basic conceptual infrastructure of the social world. They institutionalized a new principle of the vision and division of the social world, an entirely new axis of classification that came to compete with, redefine, or displace sex.

How did an initially marginal category, introduced in a very specific and limited context and relevant only in rare cases, become relevant to everyone and central to the structuring of social experience? How did it escape the confines of the clinic and the jurisdiction of medical professionals? How did a specialized medical category become a generally binding legal and administrative classification? And how did a category initially introduced alongside sex, in a supplementary capacity, come to be understood, in a widening range of contexts, as more fundamental than sex?  The lecture will conclude by identifying five intertwined processes that contributed to the remarkable career of “gender identity”: the depathologization, universalization, vernacularization, legalization, and promotion of the category.

Rogers Brubaker is a professor of sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. Brubaker is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Grounds for Difference (Harvard University Press, 2015), Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities (Princeton University Press, 2016), and Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022).

Moderated by: Ana Mijic, Department of Sociology, University of Vienna