This article brings together two case studies that examine how nontransgender people, "gender normals," interact with transgender people to highlight the connections between doing gender and heteronormativity. By contrasting public and private interactions that range from nonsexual to sexualized to sexual, the authors show how gender and sexuality are inextricably tied together. The authors demonstrate that the criteria for membership in a gender category are significantly different in social versus (hetero)sexual circumstances. While gender is presumed to reflect biological sex in all social interactions, the importance of doing gender in a way that represents the shape of one's genitals is heightened in sexual and sexualized situations. Responses to perceived failures to fulfill gender criteria in sexual and sexualized relationships are themselves gendered; men and women select different targets for and utilize gendered tactics to accomplish the policing of supposedly natural gender boundaries and to repair breaches to heteronormativity.

This study leverages multiple measures of gender from a US national online survey (N = 1,508) to better assess how gender is related to self-rated health. In contrast to research linking feminine behaviors with good health and masculine behaviors with poor health, we find that masculinity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender men, whereas femininity is associated with better self-rated health for cisgender women. The patterns are similar whether we consider self-identification or how people feel others perceive their gender, though reflected appraisals are most strongly associated with health for cisgender women. We also find that people who report they are seen as gender nonconforming report worse health, but only when this perception does not match their gender identification. Our results demonstrate that multiple measures of gender allow researchers to disentangle how health is not only shaped by gender enactments but also shapes perceptions of gender and gender difference.

Grand Valley state university, usa aLiya saperstein stanford university, usa recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. the focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond "male" and "female" to questions about the respondent's gender. this is an important step toward both reflecting the diversity of gendered lives and better aligning survey measurement practice with contemporary gender theory. However, our systematic examination of questionnaires, manuals, and other technical materials from four of the largest and longest-running surveys in the united states indicates that there are a number of other issues with how gender is conceptualized and measured in social surveys that also deserve attention, including essentialist practices that treat sex and gender as synonymous, easily determined by others, obvious, and unchanging over the life course. We find that these understandings extend well beyond direct questions about the respondent's gender, permeating the surveys. a hyper-gendered world of "males" and "females," "brothers" and "sisters," and "husbands" and "wives" shapes what we can see in survey data. if not altered, surveys will continue to reproduce statistical representations that erase important dimensions of variation and likely limit understanding of the processes that perpetuate social inequality.

This article explores “determining gender,” the umbrella term for social practices of placing others in gender categories. We draw on three case studies showcasing moments of conflict over who counts as a man and who counts as a woman: public debates over the expansion of transgender employment rights, policies determining eligibility of transgender people for competitive sports, and proposals to remove the genital surgery requirement for a change of sex marker on birth certificates. We show that criteria for determining gender differ across social spaces. Gender-integrated spaces are more likely to use identity-based criteria, while gender-segregated spaces, like the sexual spaces we have previously examined (Schilt and Westbrook 2009), are more likely to use biology-based criteria. In addition, because of beliefs that women are inherently vulnerable and men are dangerous, “men’s” and “women’s” spaces are not policed equally—making access to women’s spaces central to debates over transgender rights.

How transgender rights legislation got framed as “bathroom bills,” with seemingly everyone trying to mark their territory.