When Harry Became Sally offers a multidisciplinary critique of transgender identity.Ĭhapters 1 and 2 describe our transgender moment and the ideology of transgender activists, respectively.Ĭhapter 3 then turns to the personal narratives of transgender people who subsequently detransitioned to their birth sex.

This is a metaphysical claim, one that needs to be subjected to more scrutiny than it has been. A transgender boy is a boy, not merely a girl who identifies as a boy.” Popular culture and political action may have normalized transgender identity, but Anderson reminds readers how radical it is: “At the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person - in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence. (The Trump administration reversed many of these executive actions.) The Department of Health and Human Services (2016) similarly proposed expanding the meaning of sex to include “gender identity.” Various federal laws ban discrimination based on sex (e.g., Title IX), but Obama administration actions required schools and hospitals to act as if there were no legal difference between a biological female and a biological male who identifies as a woman. In a series of “Dear Colleague” letters, first the Department of Education (2010) and then the Department of Justice and Department of Education jointly (2016) redefined the word sex - i.e., biological sex - to include “gender identity.” Jenner’s transition put a well-known face on America’s transgender moment, but actions by the Obama administration gave the moment legal muscle.

In October, Glamour magazine named Jenner a “Woman of the Year.” A judge legally approved Jenner’s name and gender change in September of that year. The inflection point was probably Diane Sawyer’s April 2015 interview with Bruce Jenner, in which he said, “for all intents and purposes I’m a woman,” taking the name Caitlyn a few months later. “Not long ago, most Americans had never heard of transgender identity, but within the space of a year it became a cause claiming the mantle of civil rights.”

America is in the midst of what has been called a ‘transgender moment,’” writes Ryan T.

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