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In this comprehensive academic treatment of the emerging social, medical, and psychological category of the transgender child, ethnographer Tey Meadow introduces readers to a generation of parents who actively facilitate gender nonconformity in their children. Whereas previous generations of parents sent such children for psychiatric treatment aimed at a cure, these families call their children new names, allow them to wear whatever clothing they choose, and even approach the state to alter their legal gender. Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition

Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

Gender is perhaps the most pervasive, fundamental, and universally accepted way we separate and categorize human beings. Yet in recent years, U.S. courts and administrative state agencies have confronted a growing challenge from individuals demanding to have their gender reclassified. Transgender people create a profound category crisis for social institutions built on the idea that biological sex is both immutable and dichotomous. During the past four decades, the central legal question shifted from how to allocate specific individuals to categories to the permeability of gender categories themselves. This analysis of 38 judicial gender determinations provides a glimpse of the literal construction of the gender order and of the ways institutions gender individuals. It also provides powerful evidence that cultural anxieties about reproduction and the heterosexual, conjugal family underscore institutional efforts to manage the uncertainty of postmodern gender identities.

Is maleness as durable a social classification as femaleness? Theories of gender suggest that men's dominance in the gender hierarchy affords them greater privileges than women, whereas theories of status predict that men would be subject to greater scrutiny precisely because they occupy a higher-status position. We interrogate the nature of gender categories themselves by examining which theories hold in the context of gender nonconformity. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine how a child's sex assigned at birth affects their likelihood of being reclassified as transgender for engaging in gender-nonconforming behavior. We find that people are more likely to reclassify boys exhibiting feminine behavior into an alternative identity category (transgender) than girls exhibiting analogous masculine behavior. Thus, membership in the "male" category is more fragile than in the "female" category. These findings suggest that gender nonconformity is itself a gendered process, and that the durability of membership in a social category depends on the status of that social identity. This study provides the first causal evidence of the effect of gender nonconformity on perceptions of both transgender and homosexual identity.

This article investigates the often cited and dismissed, but rarely examined, relationship between legalizing same-sex marriage and polygamy. Employing a comparative historical analysis of U.S. and South African jurisprudence, ideology, and cultural politics, we examine efforts to expand, restrict, and regulate the gender and number of legally recognized conjugal bonds. South African family jurisprudence grants legal recognition to both same-sex marriage and polygyny, while the United States prohibits and resists both. However, social and material conditions make it easier to practice family diversity in the U.S. than in South Africa. Our analysis of the very different histories of polygamy and same-sex marriage in the two societies suggests the centrality of racial politics to marriage regimes, yielding paradoxical narratives about the implications of legal same-sex marriage for the future of polygamy and sexual democracy. If there is a slippery marital slope, we argue, it does not tilt in a singular or expected direction.

"Located within the critical conversation about what it might mean to 'queer' research methods that has developed over the past decade in conference panels, workshops, edited volumes, and journal symposia, Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology presents an array of experiences, insights, and approaches that show the power of queer investigations of the social world and of the disciplinary conventions of sociology. Incorporating the experiences of sociologists who utilize a range of interpretative and statistical methods, this volume offers methodological advice and practical strategies for getting queer research off the ground and for building a collaborative community within this emerging subfield"--Provided by publisher

Although popular media across the United States reported that the coronavirus disease 2019 COVID pandemic incited dramatic transformations in personal relationships, identities, and practices, little sociological research examines these developments. What exists elaborates the "how" and "how much" of sex, the frequency of sexual conduct, and changes in the patterning of sexual behavior. In this study of the intimate trajectories of 46 young adults, conducted during the height of U.S. quarantine restrictions in 2020 and early 2021, the authors explore the "whys" of sex. They find that the exogenous force of the pandemic profoundly altered individual relationship trajectories, prompted sexual introspection projects, shifted understandings of sexual risk, and promoted new modes of intimacy. These findings suggest that pandemic life reached deep into subjective self-understandings and ways of relating to others. They also reveal the benefits of foregrounding cultural meanings over behaviors, changes in thoughts over actions, and social processes over individual outcomes.