Policing Gender: The Interest Convergence of Women's and Transgender Rights

Authors

Michael Ulrich, Boston University School of Public Health; Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

ISSN

1550-7815

Publisher

University of Iowa College of Law

Language

en-US

Abstract

The social, political, and legal landscape has seen a resurgence of gender fundamentalism, seeking to reinforce archaic notions of what it means to be a woman. Social media movements run in tandem with this resurgence of gender fundamentalism. For instance, the “tradwife” phenomenon that romanticizes a domestic, subservient role for women.¹ Alabama Senator Katie Britt most infamously reflected the convergence of these trends when she delivered her response to the State of the Union from a kitchen table and proclaimed that her message was “a direct appeal” to her “fellow moms.”² Meanwhile, executive orders and state laws have exponentially increased efforts to narrowly define sex and gender to exclude transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people, emphasizing the importance of women’s ability to reproduce.³ Yet, the pervasive effort to define and redefine what it means to be a “real woman” contradicts the asserted ease of a gender binary based solely on “biological sex.”

Anti-transgender laws seek to enforce the gender binary based on the illusion that all people can be easily and objectively categorized as male or female.⁴ This allows proponents to assert that anti-trans restrictions are merely protections for cisgender women from dangers posed to them by transgender women.⁵ These laws, however, ignore the unavoidable truth that there are millions of people born who defy the scientifically inaccurate claim that there is one universal truth for each sex.6 More importantly, these laws have enabled enforcement of gender norms that seek to codify the qualities and characteristics that all women should share. Far from protecting cisgender women, these laws have facilitated increased examination, surveillance, and inspection into who rightfully qualifies as a woman.

For example, cisgender women who outperform their contemporaries in competition or perhaps do not conform to the right feminine norms have been attacked, vilified, and ostracized.⁷ Indeed, these persistent efforts to limit the scope of womanhood reveal that it is not simply a biological category but rather a sociopolitical construct that is carefully crafted and enforced to maintain the gender hierarchy, exercise paternalistic control over bodily autonomy, and further disenfranchise marginalized groups. Controlling the rights, liberties, and bodies of women under the guise of protecting those very same women is nothing new.⁸ Yet, by shrouding anti-trans laws under the fallacy that they are meant as a benefit to “real” women, these governments have been able to garner alarming levels of support from cisgender women.⁹

This Essay first observes in Part I how the increasing rhetoric around gender roles and the gender binary dovetail to surreptitiously ensconce the gender hierarchy. Part II examines how the need to enforce anti-trans laws paves the way for heightened surveillance of women. This leads to a discussion in Part III of how women who support and defend anti-trans laws are likely advocating against their own interests and could be helping to justify expanding transgender surveillance to include reproductive data as a means to avoid more intimate inspections.

Recommended Citation

Michael Ulrich, Policing Gender: The Interest Convergence of Women's and Transgender Rights , 28 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 587 (2025).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4123