This article introduces the new module Gender in Contemporary Europe: Rethinking Equality and the Backlash developed for Round 11 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The module represents the first large-scale, cross-national effort to comprehensively map contemporary gender attitudes using both established and innovative measures. It captures five interrelated contemporary concepts that have rarely been included in prior cross-national surveys available for public use: gender identity, sexism (hostile, benevolent, and modern), perceived and experienced gender discrimination, the salience of gender equality as a social value, and support for gender equality policies. Pretesting and cognitive interviews conducted across a group of participating countries highlighted both the value and the complexity of measuring gender-related constructs, particularly in relation to translation challenges, perceived item bias, and social desirability effects. As we introduce the new data set, we highlight four critical challenges for gender research: bias, gendered translation, response bias, and cross-national measures of sexism. We also provide details on how the module development tackled each of these.

This article examines the construction of gendered collective identity among leftist women in Turkey through their post-1980 coup prison memory. By analyzing 124 autobiographical narratives, we uncover a process of identity formation grounded in a continuous negotiation between past struggles and present concerns, constituting a counternarrative that challenges the master narrative of defeat and submission prevalent after the coup. The article’s tripartite framework of distance, substance, and persistence underscores women’s journey from marginalization to collective empowerment, producing shifting subject positions across time. By placing temporality at the center of collective identity formation, this study contributes to feminist memory literature and identity studies while addressing a significant historiographical gap by bringing the neglected struggles of leftist women in Turkey to light.

Ameliorative approaches to gender propose ways of defining gender terms which are intended to be trans-inclusive. In this article, I discuss two such proposals and find them wanting. I suggest a new ameliorative definition which aims to improve on those already in the literature.

The English pronoun they is currently undergoing a rapid change, in that they is increasingly being used to refer to specific (named) individuals as a singular personal pronoun. Although it has been used with a singular, indefinite antecedent for centuries, singular specific they is relatively new and coincides with rising recognition of the fluidity of gender identity and expression. For many individuals, they/them pronouns fit their gender identity best. However, such individuals are at a high risk of being misgendered because this new usage of they is neither well established grammatically nor part of prescribed use. In two experiments, adults from across the United States created short written narratives about individuals of different gender presentations. We varied whether participants saw a pronoun in the stimuli and, if so, whether they saw they, he, or she. We found that singular specific they was used less than she/he and that they-usage increased for those who reported being more familiar with it and with the LGBTQ+ community more generally. We further found that images that appeared androgynous or nonbinary were more likely to elicit singular specific they than were images that appeared binary. Finally, we varied whether participants received brief information about the person that included singular specific they. This type of modeling led to dramatic increases in they-production overall, and increases were most robust for participants who reported higher familiarity. Overall, this research illustrates that characteristics tied to social experience, modeling, and visual cues to an individual's gender identity are highly informative for the production of singular specific they. More broadly, we illustrate that language-processing costs related to language production can be boosted for users and therefore can intervene in the likelihood of misgendering.

This article examines the historical evolution of gender concepts in modern Afghanistan, tracing its development from nation-state building in the late nineteenth century through the revolutionary influences of Socialist and Islamist movements, and into the transformations prompted by the U.S. invasion in 2001. While situating the topic within its broader historical framework, the analysis centers on two archetypal figures of iconoclastic women in twentieth-century Afghanistan: those affiliated with communist parties under the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) and those associated with Islamist mujahidin groups. Drawing upon the traditional Afghan archetype of the heroic-poet woman, the discussion explores how warfare—both in theory and practice—reconfigured gender identities via a recurring cycle of uneven advancement and regressions. These shifts were driven largely by elite, top-down strategies that positioned urban women as symbolic agents enlisted to fight entrenched gender norms, rather than to transform them through meaningful reform. The article further addresses the roles of migration and regional ideologies in this process, underscoring how such dynamics often disregarded the lived experiences and needs of ordinary Afghan women. This oversight contributed to the rise of novel iterations of the poet-heroine archetype, which paradoxically sought to dismantle conventional notions of femininity. Ultimately, the article advocates for a viable feminist approach in Afghanistan grounded in local histories, geographies, and social realities—moving beyond rigid binary frameworks to achieve genuine relevance and effectiveness.

Cross-gender behaviour gradually entered the spheres of aetiology and diagnosis during the eighteenth century with reference to scattered instances of male cross-dressing. But well into the nineteenth century, “gender identity” (a mid-twentieth-century term) remained a poorly theorised instance of medicalisation. Late eighteenth-century concepts of “dynamic hermaphroditism” accounted for gender-nonconforming behaviours and aspirations, but could not account for the observed heterogeneity in disparities between sexed body and mind. Increasingly substantive contributions to aetiology were seen during the late 1870s and 1880s, particularly in response to Carl Westphal’s convoluted, 1869 concept of “contrary sexual feeling” (conträre Sexualempfindung). Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notion of metamorphosis sexualis paranoica provided one of the most authoritative approaches to the question of gender identification in “sexual inversion”. The notion, which took the first seven German editions of his Psychopathis sexualis to achieve a definitive formulation, needs to be seen in light of Krafft-Ebing’s earlier conceptions of sexual delusion, which straddled the realms of the experienced sexual body and sense of self. Moreover, Krafft-Ebing was not the first to outline a theory of non-cisgender identity, as demonstrated by the mid-1880s work of Théodule-Armand Ribot and Rudolph Arndt, as well as various significantly earlier approaches to what had been considered the “monomania of sexual transformation”.

Despite societal shifts in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to experience multiple forms of labour-market disadvantage – including greater unemployment, lower job satisfaction, and slower career progression. However, existing scholarship has paid little attention to the comparative employment conditions of LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Leveraging unique data from a large, Australian, employer-employee dataset (2024 AWEI Employee Survey), we fill this knowledge gap by examining the relationships between LGBTQ+ status, non-standard employment (NSE), and workplace well-being. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we provide novel empirical evidence of the ‘double whammy’ faced by LGBTQ+ employees in relation to NSE. On the one hand, LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to be in certain forms of NSE than non-LGBTQ+ employees; on the other, their workplace well-being is more negatively impacted by these employment arrangements. These findings bear important lessons for policy and practice, indicating that closing the gap between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ workers requires careful consideration of their employment arrangements and the circumstances that surround them.

This article examines Bianca Lovado’s human rights complaints as the first trans woman transferred from a men’s to a women’s remand facility in British Columbia, Canada. Despite the initial transfer, upon re-arrest, Ms. Lovado was inconsistently placed in men’s and women’s facilities and was denied gender-affirming care between 2015 and 2019. Drawing on theories of biopolitical and queer/trans necropolitical governance, I conduct a thematic analysis of her five complaints against BC Corrections. The paper investigates how, despite human rights legislation protecting gender identity and expression, cisnormative sex-based correctional logics regulate trans prisoners. Building on Foucault’s institutions of power, I identify how cisnormative techniques of power led Ms. Lovado to face necropolitical violence via incorrect prison placement and denial of gender-affirming care. Analyzing how Ms. Lovado uses the tribunal to combat necropolitical violence, this paper illustrates the consequences of sex as an institution of power governing over gender, despite equal protections in Canadian law.

Most twin registries have not systematically collected the data required to determine gender identity, which has limited opportunities to evaluate potential familial contributors to gender diversity. This study addresses this gap by analyzing responses to gender identity questions introduced in Twins Research Australia’s 2023 survey. Among 4475 respondents (mean age 52.2 years, SD = 15.3), 36 (0.8%) indicated a transgender or gender diverse identity, which is consistent with population-based estimates of gender diversity internationally. Gender diversity co-occurred in 2/19 monozygotic pairs and 0/8 dizygotic pairs, giving rise to tetrachoric correlations of 0.62 (95% CI [0.33, 0.87]) and 0.00 (95% CI [0.00, 0.88]), respectively. These results broadly align with previous concordance estimates from twin studies that were specifically focused on gender identity. Although limited by a small sample size, these findings demonstrate the feasibility and utility of systematically collecting gender identity data through routine twin registry surveys.