Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement (SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures) - Softcover

Nownes, Anthony J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438473001 ISBN 13: 9781438473000

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2020

Synopsis

Illuminates transgender activists' successful strategies to organize for social and political change in the US.

In recent years, gender-variant people-including those we now call transgender people-have won public policy victories that had previously seemed unwinnable: the American Psychiatric Association replaced the term "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Department of Justice announced that discrimination on the basis of gender identity constituted sex discrimination, and the Department of Health and Human Services decided that it would no longer stop Medicare from covering gender reassignment surgery. What accounts for these and other victories?

Anthony J. Nownes argues that a large part of the answer lies in the rise of transgender rights interest groups in the United States. Drawing on firsthand accounts from the founders and leaders of these groups, Organizing for Transgender Rights not only addresses how these groups mobilized and survived but also illuminates a path to further social change. Nownes shows how oppressed and marginalized people can overcome the barriers to collective action and form viable organizations to represent their interests even when their government continues to be hostile and does not.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony J. Nownes is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Interest Groups in American Politics: Pressure and Power, Second Edition and Total Lobbying: What Lobbyists Want (and How They Try to Get It).

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438473001
• ISBN 13: 9781438473000
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226