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While transgender people have had some success in gaining recognition and human rights in the collection of nations known colloquially as ‘the West’, a well-financed reactionary movement is attempting to roll back these gains. A constellation of white supremacist, conservative, and heteropatriarchal organizations and movements are in collusion with so-called ‘gender critical feminists’ to resist feminist and gender-inclusive challenges to traditional gender and sexual hierarchies by targeting trans girls and women – more so than trans boys, trans men and non-binary people – for surveillance and exclusion (Sharrow, 2021a, 2021b). In the past several years, bills designed to delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways have been introduced in many US state legislatures. Within this larger anti-trans campaign, bills designed specifically to block trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport have been signed into law in 11 US states to date and proposed in many others. It is no accident that organized sport is a site for contesting the inclusion of transgender people and that transgender girls and women are the primary targets of these campaigns. Debates about criteria for female eligibility and a succession of pseudo-scientific forms of ‘sex testing’ in elite levels of sport highlight both the ideological nature of the two-sex system and the intense material and cultural investment in maintaining its façade. In this chapter, I mobilize moral panic theory to focus specifically on anti-trans campaigns in the United States aimed at preventing trans girls and women from participating in ‘female’ sport as evidence of a testosterone panic.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to examine women’s college alumnae’s gender panics surrounding transgender admittance policies and negotiations on how to define the boundaries of the alumnae community in moments of these panics.

Methodology/Approach: I explore these negotiations by conducting a modified grounded theory approach of online discussion threads of one women’s college alumnae Facebook group from 2013 to 2016. These threads (39 threads; 2,812 comments) discuss transgender admissions policies at women’s colleges and the definition of woman more broadly.

Findings: I outline three strategies that define who belongs to a women’s college community in response to peers’ gender panics. First, I discuss the ways in which alumnae “call out hate” and label exclusionary peers as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFS). Second, I discuss the negotiated boundaries of who is included within the women’s college community. Finally, I focus on the recommended suggestions and expectations for fellow alumnae to be allies toward their trans peers.

Social Implications: These findings imply that feminist boundary negotiation is not only simply based on external threats, but can also be debated among members within the community.

Originality/Value of Study: This study highlights the nuances and strategies of boundary construction in regards to the social category of woman. I propose that researchers expand theorizations of gendered boundary negotiation to consider the ways in which boundaries are drawn not only as a form of panic and exclusion but also as a response to such panics to promote inclusivity and diversity.

Purpose/approach: This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

Research implications: The chapters in this volume present original research employing empirical and textual methods illustrating the complex responses and policy challenges posed by contemporary understandings and misunderstandings of the nature of gender. Various forms of gender panic and responses to it within individuals, institutions, national states, and the world society are explored.

Practical and social implications: Research demonstrates that gender panic can lead to potentially harmful reactions and fruitless policies that reinforce rather than dismantle the gender binary, thereby, impacting vulnerable members of societies.

Value of the chapter: The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate the nature of current gender panics and related policies and to encourage further scholarship with the goal of promoting greater understanding as well as developing constructive solutions to issues raised.

This paper aims to test penis panic theory, which predicts that trans women will face more discrimination than trans men in some but not all situations.

Respondents were 262 American college students who were all enrolled in the same undergraduate course. They were presented with a case about coworker resistance to transgender employees' use of the workplace restrooms of their choice. Four versions of a case were randomly distributed as follows: trans woman, restroom with one toilet; trans woman, restroom with three toilets; trans man, restroom with one toilet and trans man, restroom with three toilets.

The authors observed greater discrimination against trans women compared to trans men when there was one toilet but not when there were three toilets. This supports penis panic theory.

The chief limitation was the use of American college students as respondents. The results may not generalize to practicing managers especially in other countries. Future researchers should develop a scale to measure situational discrimination against trans women. This study should be replicated in other contexts to deepen the understanding of discrimination against trans men and trans women with disabilities, as well as discrimination against nonbinary individuals who identify as neither trans men nor trans women.

Employers need to search for situations in which trans women face greater discrimination than trans men, because they can be resolved in ways that protect the rights of transgender employees no matter how transphobic their coworkers may be. Also, employers need a nuanced approach to combat discrimination that recognizes the unique perspectives of trans men, trans women and other members of the transgender community.

This is the first quantitative study of penis panic theory, and it illuminates the understanding of discrimination against transgender individuals.

Purpose: In the early 2010s, Japanese society recognized and experienced a panic about increasing infertility and people’s lack of knowledge about human reproduction. This chapter focuses on several graphs that misrepresented or distorted scientific findings that were used in the campaign related to this panic and explores (1) how the graphs were made, used, and authorized, and (2) how they contributed to changes in discourses and policies.

Methodology/approach: Literature survey.

Findings: (1) The graphs were made in the field of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive medicine by questionable methods, including falsifying, trimming, and misunderstanding of data. (2) Researchers in the field of fertility study relied on secondary and tertiary sources thus ignoring and compounding errors. (3) Such inauthentic research was approved and politically mobilized by professional organizations, rather than being penalized or criticized. (4) Discourse based on such unscientific knowledge may have encouraged a pronatalist policy of promoting early marriage and education about human fertility and life planning, targeted at teenage girls.

Research limitations/implications: Any society suffering from a low birthrate can experience similar phenomena. This study focuses on Japan, but it has wider implications about how low integrity and quality of the presentation of medical research can cause these issues elsewhere in the world.

Social implications: This chapter includes a warning against biological explanations that contain unscientific connotations about gender.

Originality/value of study: This study confirms how gender-related policy in 2010s Japan was influenced by science that lacked research integrity and was of sub-standard quality.

Even though trans and nonbinary athletes regularly experience oppression and exclusion in sport, many encounter sport as a site of gendered liberation. Most literature on trans and nonbinary athletes focuses on experiences of oppression; much less examines trans and nonbinary athlete resistance. Centring the voices of trans and nonbinary athletes in sport is essential for attending to the complexity of their experiences in sport. I draw on my own experiences as a nonbinary elite boxer to explore what is at stake in sport and demonstrate how sport can function as a site of joy and resistance for trans and nonbinary athletes. Amid ongoing debates about whether or not it is fair for trans women athletes to compete in sport, Gleaves and Lehrbach (2016) argued that sport does not solely concern who wins but also encompasses the ‘the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’ in competitive sport. I argue that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in competitive sport stay with us for a lifetime. These stories shape how we make sense of ourselves and others. I explore how women, trans, and nonbinary boxers issue a threat to patriarchal cisheteronormative customs in boxing, precisely because we disrupt the assumption that aggression is the male domain and that masculinity equals cisgender maleness. I contribute to the growing body of literature centring trans and nonbinary voices by drawing attention to how trans and nonbinary athletes' experiences of sport are characterized not only by exclusion and oppression but also by joy and resistance.

Purpose: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Belarus began to develop a national policy on reproductive health, influenced by late Soviet policy, market relations, and international actors. The central question of this research is how the issues of reproduction and woman’s health are reconsidered in post-Soviet Belarus, in light of the influence of various social and political factors.

Methodology/approach: This chapter critically examines discourses of legal regulations of reproduction and how they promote certain understandings of national security and traditional values through reproduction. In particular, the study is based on the discourse-analysis of the official legislative documents on reproduction in Belarus between 1991 and 2015.

Findings: The transformation of the post-Soviet social protection system, reproductive health care, family policy, as well as specific configuration of public discourse legitimize one model (unified and homogenized normative body that is heterosexual, fertile, healthy, prosperous) and exclude others (non-normative bodies that are non-heterosexual, infertile, unhealthy, poor, and thus precarious for the nation) in favor of the interests of biopolitical governance, nation-building, and neoliberal ideology. Moreover, legal documents legalize new principles of social stratification and produce new ideas about responsible parenthood.

Social implications: Although there is some scholarship on reproduction in Belarus, a thorough analysis of the public discourse and the legal regulations of reproduction has yet to be conducted. Contributing to the debate about post-Soviet reproductive politics, this chapter explores the influence of the biopolitical dialogue and the panic around depopulation on social policies. In particular, this chapter offers more critical perspective toward the economic and social dynamics in Belarus, taking into account the variety of processes and configurations of discourses that influence official policy.

This chapter explores issues related to building a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis, one that acknowledges the southern challenge to hegemonic western scholarship, develops means to hear subaltern voices on their own terms and takes lessons learned into account. Following the author’s positionality statement, the characteristics of feminist theory are briefly stated, and some current southern perspectives are reviewed. Recent published research is used to illustrate the place of gender issues in theory building, data collection, development efforts and pedagogy. The challenges related to and uneven progress toward the goal of a globally conscious body of feminist gender knowledge and praxis are acknowledged.