Abigail Saguy is the author of RSF book Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue. In Gender Flashpoints, Saguy gets to the root of major disagreements about gender, including disagreements about participation in women’s sports, gender and parenting, gender-neutral restrooms, and more.

Saguy is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Gender Studies. She is a former RSF visiting scholar.

Q. What motivated you to write Gender Flashpoints? What are gender flashpoints? Why is it important to study them?

Thanks, Jenn, for that question and for helping get the word out about Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue!

Listen to the interview.

In response to your question, Jenn, about what motivated me to write a book about gender flashpoints or the importance of engaging in dialogue, I should say that this was not the book I initially thought I was writing!

This book grew out of earlier work with my friend and colleague, Juliet Williams in the UCLA Gender Studies on the concept of gender neutrality—its meaning in news media reporting, the law, and in political activism. It was in the context of that project that we conducted over 90 interviews with activists across the political spectrum—with a generous grant from the National Science Foundation and with the help of two amazing graduate research assistants, Mallory Rees and Sa Whitley.

During my year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2023 to 2024, I shifted the project to focus more generally on how different activists were discussing gender itself—how they defined and conceptualized gender.

The concept of flashpoints emerged even later, during final revisions, when I realized that this was a good metaphor for discussing many of the hot button topics I discuss in the books, such as restrooms, pronouns, and women’s sports.

They are fraught and difficult topics to discuss because of how they touch upon people’s identities and values. But that’s also why I think it is important to discuss them—to lay out and explain different perspectives fairly with the goal of transcending black-and-white thinking, recognizing nuance and complexity, and dialoguing across difference.

Q. That’s an excellent segue: The subtitle of the book is “the power of dialogue.” Please tell us how you came to write a book that advocates for dialogue and having difficult conversations with people whose viewpoints we disagree with. Why has this been so hard to do? And how can we go about having these conversations in a productive way?

Thanks, Jenn, for that question.

Again, funnily enough, I did not know I was writing a book about dialogue until I was done writing it.

Initially, the plan was only to interview progressives and specifically LGBTQ+ activists and trans-inclusive feminists. It honestly didn’t occur to us to solicit other voices on the topic of gender.

Then, in 2016, Trump was elected and we had a moment of reckoning. Like others, we realized that we had not been listening to important voices in our country. If we wanted to understand political debates over sex and gender, we needed to also interview activists on the political right. So, we expanded our sampling strategy to include conservative activists, libertarians, and others on the political right who were working on the topic of gender. Later, we added a small sample of gender-critical feminists. This was the first turning point, when I realized the importance of including multiple perspectives.

But it is not enough to do the interviews. Once you do them, you need to actually listen to what people are saying and try to understand them on their own terms. That is easier said than done, especially in a polarized political environment. When I started writing this book, I realized that I was subjecting the right-leaning and gender-critical perspectives to greater scrutiny. I was looking for holes in their logic in a way I was not doing for the progressive activists. This is what social scientists call motivated reasoning, a form of confirmation bias. Over time, I pushed myself to return to those interviews, do additional reading to try to better understand the perspectives of all the interviewees, present the strongest version of their argument, and bring them into conversation with others.

The book I ended up writing and the emphasis on dialogue emerged from the research and writing process.

This was not easy. It is difficult to see one’s own blind spots. It is even harder to question the sacred cows of one’s own community. We are social creatures and, as such, the prospect of being cast out of one’s community is a scary proposition. One community in which I have invested academically and personally is that of gender scholars. I am a former chair of the Sex and Gender Section of the ASA. Many of my former students and treasured colleagues are gender scholars. It is scary to critique one’s own subfield. While I did get some pushback from former students and colleagues while writing the book and during the peer review process, I have been gratified to receive a lot of positive feedback from other gender scholars to the published book and to an op-ed I published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Gender Studies Needs to Change.”

The final part of your question was about how we can go about having these conversations in a productive way. One simple tip that I share in my book, developed by the organization Resetting the Table, involves approaching conversations differently. Rather than seeing a conversation as an opportunity to explain why another person is misguided, you can enter the conversation with curiosity. Ask follow-up questions designed to clarify why they see things how they do.

When you think you understand their position, before sharing yours, you can say something like, “Before sharing my view, I’d like to be sure I understand what you’re saying. Am I right that, for you, it’s X?” You might find that they have very different reasons for seeing things as they do than you thought.

Only when you fully understand them and have communicated your desire to do so, do you then offer your own perspective. You may find that, once you have shown your interest in understanding their view, they will show you the same consideration. Of course, there are no guarantees, but you may be surprised!

Social scientists who conduct research interviews already have practice with this sort of listening. When we conduct interviews, we know that our job is to understand the interviewee’s perspective, not share our own. This can help us shift how we have conversations with Uncle David at Thanksgiving.

I have been using drafts of this book in my own UG lecture class for two years and have found it helps students find the courage to have constructive and respectful conversations with classmates who disagree with them.

I was also the first professor in the world to use in my classrooms an AI-facilitated chat platform called Sway, built by philosophers Simon Cullen and Nick DiBella. Each week, I write statements designed to split the class, such as “Designating babies as male or female at birth is arbitrary and potentially harmful.”

After students complete the “opinion survey,” the software pairs students who disagree for a 30-minute, anonymous, one-on-one text chat. An AI “Guide” asks follow-up questions and steps in when things get heated. If a student drafts something inflammatory, Guide suggests a more constructive rephrasing that keeps their point but drops the antagonism (hateful content gets blocked outright).

The students love it! In follow-up surveys, ninety percent said they felt comfortable sharing honest opinions, 83 percent said their partner was really trying to understand them, and 58 percent said their partner had better reasons than they'd expected. On some topics, views shifted significantly. On others, including eligibility for trans women and athletes with XY DSDs in women's sports, positions barely moved, but students were able to have respectful dialogue and left with a clearer sense of exactly where the disagreement lay.

Q. Gender is a contested term. What are some of the different conceptions of gender?

Indeed!

I discuss this in Chapter 1 of the book, Multiple Meanings of Gender.

Originally, the term gender was only used in grammar. In English, only people and some pets are he or she; we refer to most objects as it. But in romance languages, all objects are masculine or feminine. This is what the word gender initially referred to. Some of the conservative activists would prefer that we only use gender in this context, as, in the words of conservative activist Anne Schlafly, “a language term.”

In the 1970s, feminist scholars began using the term gender to refer to the social meaning and stereotypes that we ascribe to being a woman or man, which they differentiated from sex, biological differences between women and men. This was an important intellectual and rhetorical move because, until then, most people assumed that women’s biological differences from men explained their social subordination—that biology and the social were one and the same. Feminist scholars acknowledged that there were biological differences between women and men but refuted the idea that women’s biology determined their subordination. Instead, they insisted that women were socialized into subordination. That’s also what Simone de Beauvoir was discussing when she said “one is not born but becomes a woman.” Social factors, including laws and processes of discrimination maintain women’s subordinated status. This is a founding concept of gender studies and sociology of gender. Sex and gender are not the same. Sex is biology. Gender refers to stereotypes and the social subordination of women.

Yet, as soon as feminist scholars began using term gender is this way, the term was also misused as a synonym for sex—including by feminist scholars themselves. A prominent example is a paper published in 1975 by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, where she explicitly says that she is using the term gender to speak about sex to avoid other unwanted associations with the term sex having to do with the act of sex. Still today, lots of people use gender when they mean sex including social surveys.

To confuse things further, people also use the term gender to as a shorthand for gender identity, a person’s internal sense of being a woman, man, both, or neither.

One reason people often talk past each other when discussing gender is that they are referring to different concepts.

Q. The debate about gender neutral/all gender bathrooms has been particularly contentious. However, you found that advocates across the political spectrum were able to find common ground on the issue. Can you talk briefly about that?

With pleasure!

As you say, debate about gender-neutral public restrooms has been contentious. Transgender rights activists have pushed for gender-neutral or all gender restrooms to increase access to public restrooms for gender-nonconforming or transgender people who feel uncomfortable using either the women’s or men’s restrooms and, as result, may hold it and develop urinary tract infections or impacted bowels. In contrast, right-leaning activists and gender-critical feminists worry that women and girls are at risk of sexual assault when they are in a state of undress in spaces that are not women-only.

Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 4, “Penis Panics and Public Places,” activists across the political spectrum care about both access and safety. For activists on the right, they would like restrooms where a dad can enter with a young daughter and a woman can enter with her disabled husband. Activists on the left also want restrooms that are safe. They are more likely to insist that transgender women are the last group to threaten women’s safety and are themselves at high risk of assault, but, like right-leaning activists, they value safety.

When presented with the idea of a redesigned and reimaged desegregated public restrooms that includes an open space for sinks and mirrors, along with European style, fully enclosed floor-to-ceiling doors that ensure privacy, activists across the political spectrum expressed enthusiasm. Left-leaning activists appreciated how this would provide access for trans and gender nonconforming people. Right-leaning activists liked how they would allow a father to accompany his daughter to the restroom or permit a wife to assist her disabled husband. Both liked that this configuration would ensure everyone’s safety.

I think it is worth pursuing solutions like this one, even if people support them for different reasons. We live in a large, diverse country. It is unrealistic to think we will agree about everything. That doesn’t mean we should give up on finding solutions that people find acceptable for different reasons.

Q. The inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports has been another highly contested issue. Can you speak briefly about the complexity of this debate?

Absolutely.

The debate about transgender women athletes participating in women’s sports has been vitriolic, with each side has presented an oversimplified account. The left has insisted that trans women are women period and that anyone who questions that in any context is a bigot. The right has countered that trans women athletes are men stealing trophies from women and girls. This shouting match harms trans women athletes, athletes with XY DSDs, and female athletes.

I try to transcend this binary debate and recognize how sports are different than other social contexts. I argue that, when it comes to sports, we need to evaluate what the science tells us not only about the physiological differences between females and males, but also between people with various XY divergences of sex development or DSDs, trans women who have undergone male puberty, and those who have not.

Let’s back up: female sports categories exist for competitive athletics because male levels of testosterone confer a large, systematic athletic advantage. Testosterone surges at three points in male development—in utero, in infancy, and especially at puberty—and each contributes to that advantage, although puberty matters most.

This is why the one XY DSD long permitted in women's sports is Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. These athletes have testes that produce male-range testosterone, but they lack a receptor necessary to respond to it, so they never get the advantages associated with male levels of testosterone.

In contrast, athletes with 5-alpha reductase deficiency type 2 (5-ARD), a different XY DSD, lack an enzyme necessary for masculinizing the genitalia in utero and are often identified as female at birth. But they do process testosterone. During puberty, their voice deepens, they develop an Adam’s apple, and, crucially for sports, their upper body widens and becomes more muscular. In terms of the factors that account for the bulk of the male advantage—bioavailable testosterone—adults with 5-ARD are indistinguishable from males without a DSD.

 In my book, I argue that eligibility for competitive women’s sports should be decided based on such physiological considerations. I also argue that—when discussing elite women’s sports specifically—we need to acknowledge that there will be difficult tradeoffs. 

Finally, I argue that we should not treat eligibility for women’s sports as a referendum on who should count as a woman in other social contexts, including non-competitive sports, where physiology is less central.