Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 397TP - S-TransIdentitiesIssues&PubPol

This course examines the social, cultural, legal and political issues transgender and gender non-conforming people face in the United States. We will explore historic issues this group of people have encountered and engendered both today and as they have evolved since the colony at Jamestown in 1607. Among the problems we will probe in this course are: The conceptual frameworks around gender, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation; the categorization, medicalization and pathologization of trans identities and bodies; how media has portrayed trans people; how laws have shaped and been shaped by trans identities and bodies; and, finally, the politics of the trans equality and justice movement. We will seek to find the contexts within which transgender can be used to make claims of the state in a representative democracy. We will ask, what possibilities and problems are presented by using the term to describe people who refuse it as descriptive of their experiences? Similarly, we will inquire what issues arise when cisgender people question those who take the category transgender as meaningful and even essential to their lives. And we will seek to answer, what does transgender tell us about the organization of gender and sexuality in the contemporary United States?