Signs

In recent years, official gender classification schemas have been expanded to include a third category, typically designated by an X. This development has been heralded in media reports as a milestone victory for nonbinary people, but it also has generated debate about whether adding new categories does more to subvert or stabilize legal gender classification systems. This article offers a new perspective on gender marker politics by shifting focus from whether third gender markers should be adopted to examining how newly added X gender markers are defined by the administrative agencies that use them. To do so, this article analyzes US state policies on obtaining an X gender marker on a driver's license-an option available in nearly half of US states. A review of state policies reveals something unexpected: not one but two different versions of the X gender marker now in use on driver's licenses across the United States. In some states, an X gender marker on a license means a person's gender is classified as nonbinary. Other states, however, have made a nonspecific version of the X marker available to anyone for display on a driver's license, regardless of gender. Existing appraisals consider the implications of adding the nonbinary version of the X marker option to binary gender classification schemas. The nonspecific version of the X marker remains largely unexamined. Given evidence that this nonspecific version has been adopted for use in some jurisdictions, this oversight is glaring. To address it, this article elucidates how the nonspecific version of the X marker destabilizes legal gender classification schemas in ways that incorporating the nonbinary version of the X marker does not. The nonspecific X marker builds on the feminist tradition of degendering, inviting critical examination of the purposes served by legal gender classification and creating a new opportunity to resist gratuitous gendering. Moving forward, administrative agencies should be encouraged to adopt the nonspecific version of the X marker to address the limitations of current binary gender classification schemes.

Trans panic politics in the United States has taken a new paranoid form, one that places trans medicine at the center of a vast capitalist conspiracy. This "gender identity industry," critics assert, sits at the nexus of Big Pharma's and Big Tech's capital accumulation strategies and those industries' ideological capture by trans advocates. This essay investigates the power of this conspiratorial perspective and why it appeals to an ideologically diverse anti-gender coalition, an assemblage that has proven useful for today's Republican Party and its populist self-image. Drawing from studies of conspiratorial reason and paranoid politics, the essay first excavates the psychic resonance and political economic foundations of the industry trope, examining what a paranoid politics perceives accurately about the health-care and tech industries and what it ultimately fails to comprehend, committed as it is to seeing trans subjectivity as nothing other than a manipulated consciousness and medicalized corporeality. It then maps the industry narrative's discursive trajectory out from the fringe of right-wing blogs and trans-exclusionary radical feminist tracts and toward the center of US conservative politics. In doing so, it reveals how conservative media outlets, think tanks, and national politicians deploy selective critiques of so-called ideologically captured industries, criticisms that displace outrage toward those sectors' exploitative practices and the deeper rot that characterizes the US political economy. By thinking with and beyond paranoia, we might see how anti-gender has taken an anti-industry form.

With reproductive health and rights actively under attack, it is critical to support researcher and activist communities in pushing beyond basic access. In this article we propose a framework for a "feminist abortion," which, rather than positioning medico-legal framings as the sole or foremost consideration, sets out aspirations for a model of abortion care that centers the pregnant person and their needs and attends to the power structures through which pregnant people are located. We propose seven key principles for a feminist abortion: supported, informed, safe, stigma-free, decriminalized, autonomous, and accessible (SISSDAA). We adopted a holistic approach in devising the SISSDAA principles, proposing that a fully feminist abortion cannot be viewed within regulatory and legal frameworks alone and would require enactment of all seven of the proposed principles in combination. The framework has potential application in diverse settings, whether abortion is (de)criminalized, (non)medicalized, normalized, or highly restricted. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we apply it to three case studies: Australia, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. There are contextual similarities between our case studies (e.g., all are in the Global North), but using the SISSDAA principles enables us to distinguish significant differences in abortion norms, policies, legalities, and care models. The SISSDAA principles can be used to facilitate comparative research, highlight areas of good practice, and inform abortion policy and campaigning. As such, they are of relevance to those working in or supporting abortion care: researchers, activists, and abortion seekers alike.

Feminist histories have been written, rewritten, and unwritten based on universalized liberal frameworks, privileging Western feminist paradigms over sociopolitical realities on the ground. This article seeks to trouble the dominant account of feminism's development in (post)-socialist Lithuania by, first, reflecting on the prevalence of Western liberal frameworks in constructing (Lithuanian) feminism and, second, critically examining how socialist feminism has been erased from contemporary accounts of Soviet history. This article challenges the prevailing depictions that position Soviet women as passive subjects with no agency. By moving away from a Western-centric account of what is deemed "feminist," the article calls for a rethinking of agency and emancipatory practices within the specific constraints and possibilities of different sociopolitical and ideological superstructures, whether it be state socialism or neoliberal capitalism. The article proposes embedding socialist feminism as a legitimate historical development with its own logic and ongoing legacy. Such rethinking allows for an account of feminism that is rooted in Lithuania's specific sociopolitical context, repositioning the (post)-socialist space as a producer rather than merely a recipient of feminist knowledge.

This article offers a critical feminist analysis of the perversions of care that appear in moments when care is instrumentalized by neoliberal and fascist states to cover for financial cuts and repressive or controlling actions of security. It follows Michel Foucault's analysis of biopolitical power in the context of the state of exception and the contemporary return to fascism, as well as the works of Giorgio Agamben. It offers a detailed analysis of the feminist theories of care expounded by Nancy Fraser and Joan Tronto, highlighting the need to strengthen our critique of the appropriations and abuses of care in its neoliberal, imperial, and fundamentalist perversions. While discussing social reproduction theory and other feminist revindications of care, the article argues in favor of combining the critique of exploitation with a critique of power, as suggested by Angela McRobbie, Sarai Aharoni, and Johanna Oksala. The Hiacynt police operations conducted in 1980s Poland to surveil and control gay men, as well as more contemporary examples of conservative perversions of care, are discussed to showcase the need for their feminist critique. This article's main claim is that a feminist critique of perverted care is a necessary companion to any critique of today's neoliberal state of exception, as the fascist doctrine re-emergences in different countries by means of right-wing fundamentalism.

Although contemporary feminist practices tend to be imagined as "digital by default," these engagements are often hybrid in nature, combining online and offline settings and actions. Using the 2023 International Women's Day march in Portugal as both case study and methodological entry point, this article explores how hybrid feminist practices are engaged and negotiated within this context and how this is shaped by affective experiences and emotional investment in activism. The article adopts a multi-methodological and multi-situated approach, combining online observations of feminist practices on Instagram, offline ethnographic observations of Lisbon's International Women's Day march, and twenty-two in-depth interviews with people engaged with feminisms in the Portuguese context. Our findings illustrate the deep entanglement between online and offline feminist practices, showing how digital and social media permeates all stages of mobilization, participation, and documentation of the International Women's Day march. We explore the ambivalent feelings of feminist participants, interrogating how they negotiate the perceived potentials and drawbacks of digital platforms. In this context, everyday practices of dis/connection and a revalorization of offline practices can emerge as a way to manage these tensions.

This article analyzes how Moms for Liberty mobilizes neoliberal, white feminist rhetorics about girlhood in their public-facing recruitment and training events. Moms for Liberty's training events on gender ideology and "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) teach that trans identity is a peer contagion that causes vulnerable teenage "girls" to mistake the inherent struggles of adolescence for gender dysphoria, putting youth on a pathway to "sterilization and mutilation." I argue that Moms for Liberty's narrative about ROGD borrows heavily from the figure of the girl constructed by the pop-feminist parenting classic Reviving Ophelia. Moms for Liberty's rhetoric echoes the three major themes of Ophelia narratives: that puberty is uniquely stressful and traumatic for girls, that girls take on "false selves" to cope with the social and developmental challenges of puberty, and that responsible adult women must help to guide girls back to their "true selves." The main character of Moms for Liberty's story about ROGD is thus Ophelia herself: a girl in crisis who has lost her true, cisgender self due to peer and media pressure to identify as trans. Through this analysis, I show that anti-trans groups' efforts to reify notions of a "natural," essentialized gender binary are inextricable from efforts to reify "natural" and essentialized notions of adolescent development. Moms for Liberty co-opts neoliberal feminist rhetoric about the girl for robustly anti-feminist causes, mobilizing developmental stereotypes about girls as tools of gender discipline and social control.

Feminist businesses are often framed as either complicit in neoliberalism or as resistant alternatives to capitalism. This article moves beyond such binaries by investigating the motivations behind the creation of feminist businesses. Drawing on fifty-two in-depth interviews conducted across Western Europe and the United States in 2023-24, this article examines the experiences of feminist business founders-often self-employed women, trans men, and nonbinary individuals-who respond to personal and collective experiences of marginalization. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyze how participants frame their businesses not primarily as profit-driven ventures but as efforts to create safer economic spaces shaped by care, autonomy, and inclusion. The findings reveal that many feminist businesses are created in response to experiences of systemic discrimination, offering safer economic spaces for those who have felt marginalized. This result provides a nuanced understanding of founding feminist businesses as an act of agency that addresses personal needs for safety and community, highlighting their potential to resist oppressive economic structures. Drawing on the diverse economies framework developed by J. K. Gibson-Graham, we theorize feminist businesses as contingent and relational sites of economic becoming-neither outside capitalism nor fully absorbed by it but situated practices of negotiation, refusal, and ethical experimentation.

Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Jasmine Crockett. When women step into the political spotlight, they're often met with a barrage of gendered and racialized attacks. And while there have always been hecklers, the evolution of information and communication technologies has changed the game. What does this landscape of identity-based abuse and harassment look like? What impact does it have in general? In this episode of "Ask a Feminist," Moya Bailey, Nina Jankowicz, and Sarah Sobieraj help us understand the way intersectional inequality, technology, and politics intersect. The authors also take advantage of the critical distance we now have from the 2024 election to reflect on what Kamala Harris's candidacy can teach us going forward.

This essay provides a concise summary of the not-yet-published findings from a study conducted in Brazil between 2023 and 2024. The study captures the national trajectory of anti-gender politics, focusing on how it resurfaced after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, manifesting as a fierce onslaught on trans rights. The study also looks more closely into the role played by essentialist feminist streams, self-defined as radical or gender critical, in this resurgence.

This article considers the role that so-called gender-critical feminist mobilizations play transnationally, not only in amplifying global anti-gender movements but in fueling broader left and liberal complicity in growing fascism. While anti-gender mobilizations most often act in the name of conservative, right-wing, or fascist politics, "gender-critical" articulations are more politically ambiguous. This is particularly apparent when considering anti-trans/gender-critical arguments within feminism, where left and right arguments coalesce around claims to protect women and children from danger. While asking broader questions on leftist/liberal complicity in rising fascism, I caution against blanketly understanding all gender-criticals as fascists. Rather, I am interested in what gender-critical thought, especially on the left, does for fascism. I analyze transnational sites of this ambiguity and argue that gender-critical left positions offer a key case study that helps us theorize the role of the left and of liberalism in right-wing times more generally. A "right-wing times" framework is useful because it redirects attention to the discursive boundaries of the debate rather than the positionality of the speakers involved. In both left/liberal and right-wing iterations, anti-gender and anti-trans politics frequently overlap with anti-immigration and anti-Palestine rhetoric and with attacks on fields of knowledge like critical race theory and intersectionality. Analyzing these discourses together, as I suggest, will not only generate more precise tools to address the current global rise of fascism but also reveal the necessity for explicitly transnational epistemologies and organizing strategies in response.

This article introduces and conceptualizes a new transnational phenomenon that we call "popular financial feminisms." Popular financial feminisms are highly mediated projects in which women claiming to have insight and expertise in financial matters-whether pertaining to everyday money management, the workings of complex financial instruments and investments, or anything in between-are moving to "empower" other women with it, to disseminate or share what they know as a kind of feminist act. We contend that such texts and actors represent a culture of contemporary popular feminist "solutionism" applied to a general situation and sense of economic precarity, engendering a novel form and site of financial self-help. While these projects represent a pragmatic response to the binds many women find themselves in, we argue that aspects of them are pernicious in terms of what they bind women as well as feminism to. We develop our arguments with reference to two illustrative cases from disparate national and cultural contexts, chosen to demonstrate that these new money-focused feminisms span various forms of difference. The first is The Smart Money Woman, a fictionalized financial education book and television series from Nigeria; the second, Her First $100K, a multimedia brand created by American financial influencer Tori Dunlap, who declares herself a "financial feminist." We conclude by setting out a future research agenda, proposing themes and questions in need of urgent exploration by feminist scholars.

This article examines how carceral safety logics have driven cross-political, anti-transgender alliances within the global "anti-gender" movement. While anti-gender politics are typically associated with right-wing, nationalist, and religious conservatism, this article traces how "gender-critical" strands of feminism on the left have joined these mobilizations by reframing opposition to trans rights as protective measures for women. Through the concept of "carceral diagonalism," the article explores how divergent political actors-across left, liberal, and right formations-are sutured together through a shared vision of safety that relies on the identification, exclusion, and punishment of perceived dangerous others. This framing positions trans people, particularly trans women, as threats to non-trans women and children to justify the blocking and rollback of gender-based rights. Drawing on Britain as a key example, the article shows how carceral logics enable unlikely alliances to converge through affectively charged safety narratives that mask deeper structural violences.

Rape is increasingly defined as sex without consent in public conversations, advocacy, and law. Yet, historically, feminist scholars have long identified a series of conundrums related to consent across these domains. As a result, it is not always clear what we talk about when we talk about consent. To respond, I present a synthesis of feminist scholarship on the political meanings and legal applications of consent in relation to sexual violence in US history. In this synthesis, several paradoxes emerge. They reveal four distinct but often conflated views of consent, which I term traditional, liberal, radical, and communicative approaches. Interdisciplinary scholars of sexual consent can draw on this typology and the feminist arguments that underlie it to place their own use of consent within the broader history of feminist advocacy and research.

This is a transcribed interview with professors K.J. Rawson and Libby Adler, with questions from board chair Carla Kaplan, discussing the initial actions by the second Trump administration to set back transgender progress and erase all federal government recognition of trans existence. Much of the discussion focuses on Donald Trump's executive orders from his first week in office, purporting to govern everything from military participation to passports to athletics. Professors Rawson and Adler address the concrete effects of the orders on trans people in the United States as well as the legal and political context in which the orders can be situated.

In Sri Lanka, several organized anti-gender actors with transnational ties, including the group Mother's Front, with ties to a US-based evangelical church, have gained some traction in the media for their queerphobic and transphobic narratives. This intervention situates these developments within the global context of anti-gender movements by focusing on two key themes: motherhood and anti-imperialism.

This introductory piece lays out the issues at stake in contemporary transnational "anti-gender" politics and explores modes of resistance available to activists and knowledge producers. The authors consider shifts in anti-gender focus in recent times and, in particular, states' take-up of anti-gender politics as part of populism and increasing anti-trans* and anti-queer movements globally. The article also introduces the scope and interventions of the three full-length articles and the four shorter interventions that make up this thematic section.

This article reflects on the workings of recent anti-gender, anti-feminist, and anti-queer politics in the Persian Gulf region and further explores possibilities of resistance. I draw on empirical research through case studies of anti-feminist lectures, attacks on the discipline of gender studies, the targeting of feminist activists and scholars, and the spread of anti-queer campaigns across the Gulf. The article contests dominant Eurocentric conceptualizations of anti-gender movements and instead insists on a transnational and anti-colonial understanding.

This article explores a wave of queerphobia that washed over Lebanon in the summer of 2023, some features of which were notably distinct from those of previous moral panics around gender and sexuality in the country. Traditionally moral panics around gender and sexuality in Lebanon have framed queer people as agents of Western imperialism. While this framing continues to fuel these panics, I argue that more recently Lebanese political actors have also begun capitalizing on the so-called Western culture wars to fashion a politically productive image of the West as not only a threat but a harbinger of things to come. Within this framing, the West emerges as having been weakened by the spread of "gender ideology," in turn presented as an out-of-control contagion that a morally superior but threatened Lebanon must protect itself against. This invites an approach to the increase in and evolution of queerphobia in Lebanon not so much as a reaction to and backlash against LGBTQI+ rights gains in the West but as a convergence and entanglement with a growing Western anti-gender movement. I argue that the Lebanese state and political actors have not merely been passively reacting to the anti-gender movement in the West but actively drawing on it for their own political gain in ways that encourage us to rethink governance and state power in the Global South as more than just reactive to a power imbalance vis-& agrave;-vis the West.