{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026136096067812573, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006121968448316459, 'mean_word_length': 5.340298507462687, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 6, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic. By Jill Frank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 288p. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

review of Beyond Trans in Reason Magazine does precisely this). Throughout the book, particularly its second chapter where the author argues that sex-segregated restrooms should be abolished in the name of “potty parity” and for the right of everyone to be free from “the discretionary leeway that sex markers grant to administrative agents,” it is clear that Davis is motivated by normative commitments to substantive equality (anathema to libertarians) and a conception of freedom as nondomination that exceeds libertarianism’s narrow strictures (pp. 78, 28). The book’s audacious aim of upending the bureaucratic administration of sex identity is balanced by a pragmatic dimension that is all too rare in works of political theory. For example, the appendix includes something Davis calls a “gender audit” (p. 151). A gender audit is a questionnaire that he designed to help organizations put his rational relationship test into practice. It inventories the various ways an organization utilizes sex-identity information and prompts reflection on alternative ways that the organization might achieve its ends without engaging in the administration of sex. Despite its humble, humanresources/diversity-consultant-style exterior, the gender audit strikes me as a potent tool. These virtues notwithstanding, Beyond Trans is not without its shortcomings. For example, the cases to which Davis applies his rational relationship test reflect something of an elite bias. While the administration of sex identity by private women’s colleges and athletic leagues is not undeserving of critical scrutiny, most trans and gender-nonconforming people will not be impacted by these policies. Rather than making them the focus, why not take on higher-stakes cases like prisons, the criminal justice system, or the family law court? Surely, the sexclassification policies at work in these institutions touch the lives of more people and with much graver consequence than those of Smith College or Little League. How might these institutions be transformed if subjected to the rigors of the gender audit? This criticism opens onto my greatest reservation concerning this book. Despite Davis’s efforts to distinguish his approach from “liberal” strategies of “accommodation” and “assimilation,” a decidedly liberal commitment to formal neutrality underpins the entire argument (pp. 18, 41). If the state and other entities were made neutral in regard to sex identity by withdrawing from the administration of sex as Davis proposes, would transgender discrimination truly be brought to an end? How would the disestablishment of sex identity address, for example, the discrimination endured by transwomen of color who are unduly targeted by police for questioning, harassment, and arrest and are subjected to heightened risks of incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, assault, and homicide on account of their intersecting race and gender identities? The answer, I fear, is inadequately or not at all because these forms of transgender discrimination are not reducible to the sex-identity discrimination that the book is designed to remedy. Perhaps what the most marginalized members of the transgender community need is not a new riff on liberal neutrality but policies that affirm the dignity and rights of transgender people qua transgender people and that claim a space for them in our deeply gendered world. Despite these reservations, Beyond Trans is worthy of praise and a wide readership in political science as well as interdisciplinary fields like women’s, gender, queer, and trans studies. By eschewing strategies of accommodation and assimilation and arguing for the elimination of sexclassification policies tout court, Davis foregrounds the needs of some of the most marginalized members of the transgender community: those who cannot or will not “pass” and, therefore, cannot be accommodated within a world structured by a male/female binary. The queer radicalism of this approach sets Davis apart from the mainstream of the transgender civil rights movement and constitutes the book’s greatest achievement.