Securitizing Gender

Tara Mulqueen and I have just published an article, ” “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport.” It’s about how different security mechanisms in place at US airports assume that gender is an easily known, permanent, and reliable metric of identity, and the problems these assumptions pose for transgender individuals. If you don’t have access to Social Research, email me for a copy of the paper: pcurrah AT brooklyn.cuny.edu

Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen, “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport,” Social Research 78:2 (Summer 2011): 556-582.

ABSTRACT: It is widely assumed that the more information surveillance apparatuses can collect about an individual, the less risk she poses. In this article, we examine how gender figures into and potentially disrupts the link between identity and security. Our analysis centers on one very particular event: the confusion that erupts at the airport when US Transportation Security Administration agents perceive a conflict between the gender marked on one’s papers, the image of one’s body produced by a machine, and/or an individual’s perceived gender presentation. Gender has been so deeply naturalized—as immutable, as easily apprehended, and as existing before and outside of political arrangements—for so long that its installation in identity verification practices largely goes unthought. In what follows, we describe how the two TSA programs, “Secure Flight” and “Advanced Imaging Technology,” operationalize gender differently. We examine what happens when different sources of knowledge about gender clash within the security assemblage of the airport. As part of state security apparatuses’ unceasing quest for more and better information, both programs securitize gender. We argue that the effects of gender’s unreliability as a measure of identity do not constitute a problem for the TSA but rather for the transgender individuals whose narratives, documents, and bodies reveal the category’s mutability.

Gender at the airport

Body Scanning at the Airport

Rushing to finish an article with partner in crime (co-author) Tara MulQueen on “Gender at the Airport” — the Transportation Security Administration’s Whole Body Imaging and Secure Flight programs — and came upon this blog:
Body of the Law: Trans Bodies in Cis Law (Adventures in Transgender Studies, Part II by “QUINNAE MOONGAZER.” A good read, a smart read.

Salon on pregnant transgender bodies

A good piece on the cultural fallout of the intense press coverage of the Beatie story from Salon: “What the Pregnant Man Didn’t Deliver”– “Thomas Beatie brought us a media circus and late-night punch lines. But there’s something missing, say some transgender advocates — more respect,” an article on the July 3, 2008 edition of Salon, by Thomas Rogers.

According to the activists interviewed, jury is still out on the long-term implications for trans rights of the media attention — good, bad, or none.

Media flare up on Virginia groom-groom marriage

“Va. Accidentally Marries Two Men,” headlines a story by Dionne Walker in the AP wire. Two individuals the state of Virginia later classified as male got married in March. When one of them, Justine McCain, went to court to change her legal name to “Penelopsky Aaryonna Goldberry” officials realized that McCain’s legal first name was actually Justin, and that her birth gender was male. I’m using this media anecdote as a teaser into the more dense legal stuff in a chapter I’m working on for my book, The United States of Gender: Regulating Transgender Identities.

Of course, the VA officials and the media had a hard time getting their minds around this, even though a story like this erupts in the mainstream every few months, it seems. But there are a couple of points I want to put a little pressure on for this analysis. First of all, the idea of an “illegal marriage,” a phrase used by the reporter and the marriage commissioner she quotes. A marriage can be invalid, improperly executed, later annulled, but “illegal”? That’s an incoherent concept from a legal point of view. But that something is muddled as a technical concept doesn’t stop it from gaining traction in the popular imagination. (Like “illegal” alien.)

Another point of interest: “A prosecutor says the decision to press charges could turn on whether the pair knowingly misled officials…If the bride was transgender, and identified as a woman, it is unclear whether the marriage would be consider illegal.” So, if it were two individuals legally classified as male and also identified as men themselves, then the prosecutor says charges would be brought. (What charges? “Fraud”? “False personation”? ) But if Justine can be classified as transgender, if she identifies as a woman, then that might not result in the same sort of charges for an “illegal” marriage–perhaps just further civil litigation about determining her legal sex for purposes of marriage in Virginia. So the state’s response depends on what she says about her gender identity. A same-sex marriages draws possible fraud charges; a transgender marriage might be challenged under a different logic, but not fraud. (Of course, I doubt the prosecutor would actually pursue fraud charges, but the initial reaction is what I’m interested in here.)

This is how it goes. I start off wanting to make a simple point about something or other related to the legal regulation of sex, but it’s never simple…bodies of all sorts, unexpected gender identities, different state rules in different jurisdictions.