Research interests

I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the sociology and demography joint program. My work centers on the politics of categorization. Drawing from queer, Black feminist, and anti-colonial theory, I explore how embodied experiences of race/gender are made legible and illegible within binary, hegemonic forms of categorization.

The Cis/Trans Binary

My dissertation focuses on detransitioning, or the process of pausing, stopping, or reversing a gender transition of some sort. I believe that detransitioning experiences are an important standpoint from which to analyze the emerging cis/trans gender binary. In recent years, “trans” as a category has become an increasingly visible and central to the organization of rights and resources in the U.S. “Cis,” as its supposed opposite, functions as the other half of an emerging gender binary. Centering detransitioning practices disrupts any easy distinction between trans and cis. Using computational and qualitative methods, as well as novel sources of data, I explore how trans medicalization has expanded, reshaped, and worked to maintain the legitimacy of binary gender categories.

The Man/Woman Binary

I have recently submitted a paper about gender outside the man/woman binary for publication. I argue that new gendered terminology within the U.S. can be understood as a way of “feeling gender,” an affective form of knowing and communicating about gendered experience, rather than an intentional expansion of institutionalized forms of categorization. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with people who identify outside the man/woman binary, I identify three ways in which feeling gender rests on different epistemic assumptions than hegemonic forms of categorization. This article contributes to the literature on categorization by providing an empirically grounded example of the ways categorization can differ from our current institutionalized forms.

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