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.
