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Purpose: To consider the extent to which the legal recognition of non-binary gender has the potential to disrupt the gender binary.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter will employ case study as method, focusing on recent changes to Australian law and policy, which introduce a third gender category. I rely on the work of queer theorists on normativity and recognition as a theoretical framework and on the work of social scientists on transgender people as evidence.

Findings: This chapter finds that while there is much to be celebrated about increasing alternatives to the dominant categories of male and female, the legal recognition of non-binary gender may in fact serve to conceptually purge the dominant gender categories of non-conforming elements while simultaneously masking the ways in which institutions of regulatory power continue to demand conformity with normative standards of gender.

Research Limitations: Since few non-binary individuals in Australia have adopted the X marker the implications laid out in this paper are speculative. The experiences of non-binary individuals present an important avenue for further research.

Practical Implications: I recommend, as an alternative to further gender classifications, that we should seek to minimize the degree to which membership of a particular gender category is used to distribute rights and privileges.

Originality/Value of Paper: This chapter advances the literature on non-binary gender, contributes to existing queer and feminist analyses of the gender binary and extends work on normativity to legal recognition of alternative genders.

In the contemporary US, pregnant women must navigate competing ideas about their bodies, including expectations for weight gain. Given that there are few social spaces where women may gain weight without disapproval, pregnancy represents a period when women are allowed to put on weight. However, gaining weight means doing so within the context of the obesity “epidemic” and increased medical surveillance of the body. To explore how women navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, I draw on data from in-depth interviews with 40 pregnant and recently pregnant women. Findings indicate that women reframe the meaning of pregnancy weight as “baby weight,” rather than body weight. This allows them to view it as a temporary condition that is “for the baby,” while holding two concurrent body images – a pregnant and a non-pregnant version of themselves. Women also resist the quantification of their maternity weight, either by not keeping track or not looking at scales in the doctor’s office. Doing so prevented baby weight from turning back into body weight – a concrete and meaningful number on the scale. Such resistance to quantification is often accomplished with the help of doctors and healthcare professionals who do not explicitly discuss weight gain with their patients. These findings suggest that women rely on a variety of strategies to navigate the medicalization of pregnancy weight, and provides another lens through which to understand how and why women may make similar choices about other medicalized aspects of their pregnancy (or pregnancy experiences).

Public libraries in the twenty-first century are facing the challenges of being relevant in the face of new technologies, neoliberal cost cutting, and changing social realities. One of the fastest growing and changing social realities is associated with the trans community. We may be able to talk about the transgender tipping point; but in Spain, positive representations, access to information, and dialogue between local communities and the trans collective have traditionally been notable for its absence. In order to address these shortcomings in the public library system in Catalonia (Spain), a group of staff at the Biblioteca Nou Barris in Barcelona created the “Trans Identities and Gender” project.

The project envisioned creating a collection of materials aimed at the trans and gender-variant community as well as to all those who might be interested. In addition to the collection, activities were planned to use the library as a communal meeting point between the local and the trans communities as well as a means of promoting the collection and its use. The chapter focuses on the development of the project, on the growing relationship between the library, trans authors, trans community, and general public, and how new possible futures are being forged.

The participation of trans people is increasingly being framed as a defining issue for women's sport. A dominant narrative, promoted by various newly formed feminist organizations located in the Global North, is that (cisgender) women's sport will be forever changed – and negatively so – by the increased recognition and sports participation of trans athletes. The message is the following: first, that biological sex is fundamentally binary; second, that the place of ‘females’ in sport depends on the recognition of this biological ‘truth’; and third, that sports policymakers must choose between advancing the rights of interests of (cisgender) women or those of trans athletes, but can't do both. I call this phenomenon biofeminism: the wielding of scientific knowledge and expertise to claim binary, biological sex difference as the ‘true’ basis of (cisgender) women's experience and her rights. In this chapter, I offer an exploratory, empirical account of this variety of feminist mobilization by analyzing an awareness-raising event held in the United Kingdom in 2019. I approach this event as an opportunity to better understand how biofeminist actors are organizing, their epistemic strategies and the political frames they rely upon to give meaning to ideologies of binary sex difference and impact policy and legislation. Given the unfinished business of realizing gender equity within the institution of sport, I reflect on how women's sports organizations might counter biofeminist mobilization and pursue allyship between cis and trans women.

Disability is often described in a way that suggests that it is most often a permanent state. Several, if not most, of the concepts and models of disability suggest this. Even when it is described as being socially constructed, the implication is that an impairment leads to a permanent status of “disabled” within that social, cultural, or historical milieu. However, many types of changes can be seen on an intrapsychic level or on an individual or group/societal level; across time, cultures, societies, and subcultures; or within or across any other social unit. The relationship between impairment (physical state) and disability is neither fixed nor permanent but is fluid and not easily predicted. Furthermore, if this is true, we need to rethink how we are measuring or counting disability.

The chapters in this volume examine this premise from many points of view. Several look at micro-level interactional processes over time, some look at cultural change over time and their effects on definitions and measurements, and some look at how social processes shape physical conditions into disabilities or impairments/disabilities into “normality.”

Scholars who study humility tend to think of it in highly individualized terms, such as an absence of vanity or an accurate self-assessment. Individuating definitions can lead to such jarring concepts as the “humble white supremacist” (Roberts & Wood, 2007). Qualitative sociological research in the (predominantly North American) evangelical movement to accept and affirm lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) identities, same-sex marriage, and sex/gender transition reveals that humility is not simply the awareness that “I could be wrong.” That awareness is rooted in what we have found to be humility’s defining element, concern to foster relationship. These findings prompt us to define humility as a fundamentally social disposition, as concern to protect the kinds of intimate connection with others that can transform the self. Recognizing the social nature of humility reveals why humility is incompatible with injustice.

Anyone who has recently watched television or movies can tell you that transgender, gender nonbinary or gender expansive people are becoming more visible in these media. This trend reflects the reality that younger generations are increasingly identifying with more fluid and nonbinary gender and sexual identities and are progressively expressing those identities in a more flexible and changing manner (Herman et al., 2022; Wilson & Meyer, 2021). Unsurprisingly then, those individuals are also more visible at work, including in workplaces with employer-mandated dress codes. Indeed, in 2020 the US Supreme Court decided a case involving a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired because her employer, a funeral home, required her to conform to its gender-binary dress policy and wear clothing mandatory for people assigned male at birth, rather than appropriate for her female gender identity ( Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020).

However, as the description of Aimee Stephens's own experience illustrates, often these employer appearance codes are based on a binary and fixed conception of gender and gender identity and expression at odds with the increasing number of workers who do not identify within those rigid parameters. Moreover, even when an employee, like Aimee Stephens herself, could have fit within her employer's dress code, the improper application of that policy to her, or employer concerns about customer or co-worker discomfort with an employee's appearance under the policy may mean that a worker's identity and expression may still conflict with a workplace appearance code. For gender nonbinary or nonconforming individuals, these complications are magnified.

This chapter explores the practical problems and barriers that employer dress codes have on employees whose gender identity and/or presentation move beyond the traditional male/female binary. Using insights from queer theory, gender expansive employees serve to interrogate fundamental assumptions behind workplace dress policies and the formal and informal ways in which these policies are policed. The chapter will explore that discordance, examine possible employer resolutions, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those responses.

Purpose: This chapter provides a contextualized understanding of the gendered anxieties expressed by elite sport regulators that motivated the formulation of sex testing policies in sport between 1937 and 1968. The focus is on complicating the claim that sex testing was first instituted to prevent explicit male bodies from fraudulently masquerading as women in sport. Rather, the chapter argues that sex testing policies were formulated in response to anxieties over sex binary pollution.

Methodology: The chapter is based on a genealogical study of the female category in elite sport, built on archival research conducted at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) historical archives and online newspaper archive collections.

Findings: Boundaries around female embodiment were navigated and written into sex testing policy in response to threats to presumed ideas around gendered and sexed normality in sport. These threats were embodied by athletes who polluted or crossed the border between female and male, to the extent that their bodies were rendered hermaphroditic, excessively masculinized, or hybrid. These bodies caused gendered anxieties for sport regulators, who reacted with policy responses that aimed to purify the sex binary from category pollution or sex abnormality.

Implications: As long as sex binary policing in elite sport continues, awareness of the contextual history of sex testing is essential for understanding the underlying ideas upon which sex binary policing in sport has been built.