Gender Identity as a Category
Sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s Gender Identity: The Career of a Category (Polity, 2026) studies “gender identity” as a category — who coined it, how its scope expanded, and what institutional work it does — instead of adjudicating the political disputes around it. The book grew out of Brubaker’s 2025 IWM Lectures in Human Sciences in Vienna; Shreeharsh Kelkar’s review essay “The Puzzle of Gender Identity” is the entry point used here. 1 The analysis continues Brubaker’s long-running program on categorization in social analysis (rogers-brubaker), and is a case study of how classifying people feeds back on the classified (looping-effects-of-human-kinds).
The career of the category
Psychiatric coinage, 1950s–60s. Brubaker traces the term to clinicians working with intersex children (historically called “hermaphrodites”) who were surgically assigned to a sex category and sometimes rejected the assignment. For these doctors, the operative variable was the “sex of rearing”: once established in the first years of life, this “gender identity” was “imprinted” and nearly immutable regardless of chromosomal sex. The category was originally about rare cases where the imprint failed to match the body — and the fix was to change the body. 2
Expansion to transsexuals. The category then extended to people whose felt sex did not match their bodies, and to a political project modeled on gay-rights depathologization: own the identity, destigmatize it, reduce doctors’ gatekeeping role. The DSM listed “gender identity disorder” from 1980; DSM-5 (2013) renamed it “gender dysphoria,” dropping “disorder” and explicitly stating that gender nonconformity is not itself a mental disorder — the diagnosis targets clinically significant distress, not the identity. 3 Brubaker calls the outcome “equivocal”: the condition’s remedy is hormonal and surgical intervention, so medical professionals remain in the loop.
The “quiet revolution.” Through bureaucratic negotiation rather than legislation or street politics, “gender identity” displaced “sex” across statistics, education, access to sex-segregated spaces, and youth gender medicine — including teaching materials that present gender identity to young children as an internal feeling. Kelkar reproduces an Advocates for Youth first-grade script (“Identity starts with an I… That’s how you can remember it. ‘I’ feel, ‘I’ know”) and California’s statutory definition, which Brubaker calls “cumbersome” and “circular.” 4
Backlash. Once the changes drew attention, opposition formed on two fronts: parents contesting what schools taught and what youth clinics provided, and gender-critical feminists contesting self-ID access rules for women’s sports, shelters, and restrooms. Brubaker argues the backlash was overdetermined by the scope of the quiet revolution rather than manufactured by right-wing activists alone; he compares the US backlash to the UK’s (where opposition came from the left) and continental Europe’s (where universal healthcare systems scaled back youth gender medicine). The US pattern matched earlier identity-category conflicts: the category stopped describing a small defined population and began imposing recognition duties on everyone. As Brubaker puts it, a change in pronouns “cannot be accomplished unilaterally; it requires the cooperation of others” (p. 70). 5
The self-identification contradiction
Gender identity is defined as an interior state, knowable to the individual (“your internal sense of being a girl, boy, both or neither”). That interiority is what grants it autonomy: no external authority decides it. It is also what makes it hard to administer. Brubaker’s formulation: “No other socially and legally recognized identity rests entirely on self-identification” (p. 123), and “when rights, opportunities, or resources are at stake, identity claims cannot generally be administered on the basis of self-identification alone; they require some form of external validation” (p. 123). Kelkar reads this as the central contradiction the category’s advocates have to resolve for it to survive as a legally enforceable category. 6
Anti-categorical categories
The movement’s driving logic is what Brubaker calls the “anti-categorical impulse” — resistance to categories, especially binaries. Its outcome is paradoxical in his account: the impulse “is here transformed into a neo-categorical label, or what I have called an anti-categorical category: a category for those who do not fit established categories. Genderqueer, genderfluid, and nonbinary can also be understood as anti-categorical categories. There is no escape from categories: it’s ‘categories all the way down’” (p. 26). Kelkar adds that these labels specify no behavior — which makes them freeing to adopt and hard to enforce. The framework comes from “Beyond ‘Identity’” (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), which argued that the social sciences “have surrendered to the word ‘identity’”: the term “tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity),” and does better work under other, less reifying terms. 7
Gender system vs gender identity
Kelkar’s review opens with a classroom incident around Don Kulick’s 1997 ethnography of Brazilian travestis, who live as women, take hormones and silicone, and reject sex-change operations as unnatural — and who are organized, Kulick argues, by a Latin American gender system of “men and not-men” (penetrators vs penetrated) rather than a male/female binary. When Kelkar taught the paper in 2016, students objected that describing travestis as “non-male” erased their identities. Kelkar’s retrospective diagnosis: the students read the ethnography through individual gender identity while it analyzed an underlying gender system — two frameworks that talk past each other. 8
Open questions
- Kelkar’s unanswered question: why did the category resonate so strongly with college-educated young people? He asks for the Kulick-style thick ethnography of that resonance, which Brubaker’s “sober” category analysis deliberately does not attempt.
- Comparative question (Kelkar): disability followed a similar bubbled-up-then-inscribed-into-law path (ADA, accommodations), keeps medical and compliance gatekeepers, and did not draw comparable backlash. Why the two categories diverged is open.
- Brubaker’s earlier “The Dolezal Affair” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2016) — transgender and transracial as a paired thought experiment — is the comparative case for how far self-fashioning in categories is socially accepted.
Relation to identity metaphysics
The category presumes an interior identity stable enough to certify and administer. Nathan’s discontinuous-self view — internal states as “liminal and malleable,” no stable platonic identity to be discovered — is the introspective counterpart to Brubaker’s administrative worry: external validation has to pin down something the claimant experiences as fluid. Hacking’s looping-effects-of-human-kinds supplies the general mechanism: a classification that names an interior state changes how the classified understand and present that state, which changes the category again.
Sources
- Shreeharsh Kelkar 2026 — The Puzzle of Gender Identity
- Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper 2000 — Beyond “Identity”
- American Psychiatric Association — Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis