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What the evolving fight for transgender rights reveals about government power, regulations, and the law Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to your state's Department of Motor Vehicles to your local elementary school, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to "F" or "M" (or more recently "X") depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you're dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transgender and non-binary people. Providing examples from different states, government agencies, and court cases, Currah explains how transgender people struggle to navigate this confusing and contradictory web of legal rules, definitions, and classifications. Unlike most gender scholars, who are concerned with what the concepts of sex and gender really mean, Currah is more interested in what the category of "sex" does for governments. What does "sex" do on our driver's licenses, in how we play sports, in how we access health care, or in the bathroom we use? Why do prisons have very different rules than social service agencies? Why is there such resistance to people changing their sex designation? Or to dropping it from identity documents altogether? In this thought-provoking and original volume, Sex Is as Sex Does reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States and shows what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society's approach to sex and gender writ large.Ultimately, Currah demonstrates that, because the difficulties transgender people face are not just the result of transphobia but also stem from larger injustices, an identity-based transgender rights movement will not, by itself, be up to the task of resolving them

Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

On July 2, 2010, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law a bill that reduced the act of soliciting a "crime against nature" for compensation from a felony to a misdemeanor. A felony conviction had meant a fine of up to $2,000, imprisonment for up to five years ("with or without hard labor"), or both. Because of the change in the crime's classification to a misdemeanor, those convicted of a first offense now face lesser penalties: a fine of up to $500, six months in jail, or both. Thus, the penalty for a first conviction for solicitation of "unnatural carnal copulation by a human being with another of the same sex or opposite sex or with an animal" for pay is the same as the penalty for a first conviction for prostitution not deemed "unnatural." (Regular prostitution is defined in the Louisiana criminal code as "indiscriminate sexual intercourse with others for compensation.") Another reform: Before this bill was enacted, anyone convicted of soliciting "unnatural carnal copulation" for compensation was required to register as a sex offender. Now, one is not deemed a sex offender until a second conviction.