The Personal Is Political and the Political Is Personal: The Public/Private Partitioning of Gender

The turn of the 21^st century has seen – in political campaigns, policy debates, court cases, street protests, and social media firestorms across Europe and the Americas – an explosion of popular mobilization, controversy, and litigation around what is sometimes called “gender ideology.” “Ideology” in these debates is typically used pejoratively, to denounce an educational/political agenda as one of indoctrination and manipulation, but the term also suggests an underlying reality that is more convoluted and problematic than its explicit derogatory use suggests. If we understand the word “ideology,” in its more neutral sense, to mean a relatively systematic practical constellation of beliefs that shapes understanding and facilitates communicability of experience of self and world, then a proliferating, multiplicity of irreconcilable ideologies is increasingly all that remains of gender categories in liberal societies. Liberal modes of governance were born in the separation of religious convictions of conscience from civic rights and obligations, a pragmatic strategy for governing European populations that were consuming themselves in civil warfare in the 16^th, 17^th, and early 18^th centuries. As with religion in 17^th century Europe, the categories of gender, at least when it comes to questions of ontology and ethical value, increasingly only have meaningful content as personal categories in the private sphere – where they are indeed ever more meaningful; in the organizational and administrative terms of public spaces, discourses, civic rights and obligations, the meaningful content of gender categories, the rationale of their demarcations, and the criteria of their adjudications are dissolving, and rather quickly. How to agree to disagree about the categories of “man,” “woman,” “boy,” “girl,” which permeate historically and practically liberal societies? This paper examines some recent court cases around pronoun policies in higher education institutions to see how public/private divisions are being drawn around this new ethical good/truth: gender.