Rogers Brubaker is an American sociologist who has written about transgender identity through a sociological perspective that centers anti-transgender activism.
Background
William Rogers Brubaker was born on June 8, 1956. Brubaker earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1979 and a doctorate from University of Cambridge in 1984.
In 1992 Brubaker published Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, a comparative historical study examining the development of citizenship regimes in the two countries from the nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. In 1996 Brubaker published Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, which analyzed national identity and minority politics following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Brubaker joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the early 1990s. Brubaker later served as professor of sociology and held the UCLA Foundation Chair. During the 2000s Brubaker continued publishing work on ethnicity, religion, and social categorization. In 2004 Brubaker published Ethnicity without Groups, which argued for a shift in sociological analysis away from treating ethnic groups as fixed entities. In 2013 Brubaker published Grounds for Difference, examining how categories such as citizenship, religion, and language structure social boundaries.
A central idea that Brubaker proposes is a distinction about categories:
- Categories of practice: terms and classifications used by people in everyday social and political life
- Categories of analysis: conceptual tools used by academics
Brubaker argues that academics often uncritically adopt categories of practice as categories of analysis, thus reproducing the assumptions made by political actors who are trying to construct or mobilize those identities.
2016 book
In 2016, Brubaker released Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. The short book centers heavily on the media spectacles surrounding Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal, both of whom Brubaker characterizes as part of a “trans moment.” Brubaker says there are three points of view:
- essentialist: neither race nor gender are mutable
- voluntarist: both are mutable
- race essentialist / gender voluntarist: race is not mutable, but gender is
Brubaker argues that transgender now is actually three different kinds:
- trans of migration
- trans of between
- trans of beyond
The first is the original (previously called transsexual) which encompasses a traditional binary gender transition where the goal is to assimilate and be accepted as a member of the “other” group than the one to which one was assigned. The second encompasses those who seek to blur the existing gender binary: nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer, etc. The third is those who seek to move beyond categorization and eliminate the gender binary.
2025 paper
In 2025, Brubaker published “Gender Identity: The Career of a Category” in the inaugural issue of Theory and Social Inquiry. Brubaker traces the medico-juridical development of gender identity and how that was then embedded in law, medicine, and policy. Brubaker cites and thanks Leor Sapir and Jesse Singal in the paper, which explains why their anti-trans points of view are centered.
Brubaker correctly notes that a moral panic began to develop in the mid-2010s, as reactionary movements in media and academia began to coalesce into organized resistance (e.g., the “intellectual dark web,” reactionary centrism, anti-“woke” animus, “viewpoint diversity” and “academic freedom” movements in academia). Elsewhere I have described how trans activism entered a decadent phase in around 2014, where complacency, cis/trans boundary work, a fixation on respectability politics, and generational infighting following 20 years of meager progress, then 20 years of significant progress, led to strategic miscalculations and overreach. Jesse Singal emerged as a central media figure at the onset of this moral panic, with work promoting Alice Dreger, Kenneth Zucker, and other anti-trans academics in that invisible college. Leor Sapir exemplifies the well-funded professionalization of anti-transgender extremism that came in the wake of high-profile media events.
Brubaker presents the embedding of gender identity as a quiet movement led by cisgender experts, largely ignoring that since the previous moral panic in the late 1970s, trans people fought decades-long battles over access to medical care, pushing back against disease models and reducing barriers to legal recognition. Activists challenged medical gatekeeping and pushed for recognition in public-facing ways that were often deliberately strident. Brubaker’s framing of a calm, top-down embedding downplays the role of grassroots social movements and the gender diverse thought leaders who challenged the cis-supremacist worldview. Brubaker’s article reflects the gatekeeping impulse common among cisgender academics and other socially credentialled public figures who see trans people as something to observe from a sociological distance.
References
Mazouz, Sarah (July 19, 2018). Gender Boundaries, Race Boundaries. About: R. Brubaker, Trans : Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, Princeton UP. Books & Ideas https://laviedesidees.fr/Gender-Boundaries-Race-Boundaries
Davis, J.E. (2017). Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities . Soc 54, 78–82 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-016-0103-8
Loudermilk, A. (March 28, 2017). Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal, and the Shifting Boundaries of Identity. PopMatters https://www.popmatters.com/caitlyn-jenner-rachel-dolezal-and-the-shifting-boundaries-of-identity-2495397173.html
Stein, Arlene (March 20, 2017). Trans Like Us. Public Books https://www.publicbooks.org/trans-like-us/
Wolf, Jessica (November 9, 2016). Press release: Sociology professor examines the pairing of the terms transracial and transgender. UCLA https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/sociology-professor-examines-the-pairing-of-the-terms-transracial-and-transgender
Emma Green (October 2, 2016). If Americans Can Be Transgender, Can They Be Transracial? The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trans-brubaker-race-gender/502397/
Selected writing by Brubaker
Brubaker, R. (2025). Gender Identity: The Career of a Category. Theory and Social Inquiry, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/tsi.18211
Brubaker, Rogers (2018). Academic Freedom and Controversial Speech about Campus Governance In Academic Freedom: The Global Challenge, edited by Michael Ignatieff and Stefan Roch, 93–100. Central European University Press, ISBN 978-9633862339
Brubaker, Rogers (May 18, 2017). The Uproar over ‘Transracialism. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/the-uproar-over-transracialism.html
Brubaker, Rogers (December 2, 2016). Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and instability in gender and race. Maclean’s https://macleans.ca/culture/books/caitlyn-jenner-rachel-dolezal-and-instability-in-gender-and-race/
Brubaker, Rogers (November 2, 2016). The Trans Paradox: Why transgender became a thing, but transracial did not. The American Prospect https://prospect.org/2016/11/02/trans-paradox/
Book
Brubaker, Rogers (2016). Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691172354
Resources
UCLA (ucla.edu)
- Rogers Brubaker
- brubaker.scholar.ss.ucla.edu
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
X/Twitter (x.com)