Abigail Saguy on teaching students how to talk about 'gender flashpoints'

Professor Abigail Saguy has been teaching the sociology of gender at UCLA since 2002. She was the first professor in the world, in Fall 2024, to incorporate the AI-guided discussion app Sway into her curriculum - using this tool to help students have difficult conversations about controversial topics. Professor Saguy discusses her use of Sway in the classroom in her new book, "Gender Flashpoints: The Power of Dialogue," published by the Russell Sage Foundation, as an example of how to facilitate productive dialogue on hot-button topics. "Gender Flashpoints" examines heated debates involving gender and equips readers to think through and talk about these challenging topics.

The sociology of gender is a subfield that examines the social factors shaping inequality and differences between women and men, as well as the experiences of people who identify as gay, transgender or queer. As professor Saguy's own teaching experience illustrates, what falls under the umbrella of "gender" - and what a sociology of gender course should cover - has itself become a matter of debate.

Saguy addressed her area of expertise and her new big in a Q&A with UCLA Newsroom.

How has the sociology of gender changed in the last two decades of teaching it, and what makes it still relevant?

It has been fascinating to watch how the field has changed since 2002. Equally interesting has been seeing how UCLA undergraduate ideas about gender have evolved over this same period. When I started teaching this class, "gender" mostly designated the social processes that amplify differences and inequality between women and men. Today, many students enter a class on the "sociology of gender" assuming it will focus on gender identity (whether one identifies as a woman, man or neither) and on inequality between transgender people and people who are not transgender.

When I started teaching this class, few students were politically mobilized around issues of gender. Today, many are. The upside of having a personal investment in a topic is that it feels more urgent and important. The downside is that it can make people unwilling or unable to engage with arguments or ideas that challenge their own strongly held beliefs.

Since Fall 2024, with the support of the UCLA Dialogue Across Difference program, I revamped the class to center on active discourse. Students in my class not only learn about gender inequality and gender identity, [but] they also learn how to discuss various contemporary "gender flashpoints" - such as restrooms, pronouns, IDs and women's sports - with people who disagree. That skill, I believe, is essential not just for building critical thinking but also for producing the engaged citizens and leaders required to have a democracy.

How do you approach what you've dubbed "gender flashpoints" in this book?

Rather than advocating for one side, the book offers a sociological analysis of how and why activists and scholars - from across the political spectrum and diverse scientific disciplines - have taken different stances on these topics. I examine the roots of these flashpoints, why they ignite such fierce disagreement and what values and fears drive them. I identify areas of common ground or potential compromise that get buried when conversation devolves into a shouting match.

I try to stay above the fray and let readers arrive at their own conclusions based on the empirical evidence presented and their own values. The book doesn't tell readers what to think. It equips them to think better. It offers readers the analytical tools to participate in conversations about these fraught topics with people who may disagree with them.

Why did you write the book?

I wrote the book with my undergraduate students as the target audience. And writing for undergraduates means writing for any educated general audience. The issues of gender inequality, gender identity and the specific flashpoints I discuss in the book have long moved beyond academic and activist circles to become matters of public concern. And yet, public discussions of them are often woefully incomplete. Left-leaning and right-leaning media often talk past each other, each reinforcing the assumptions of their own audience.

I wanted to write a book that would help people make sense of these complex issues and understand why people take such different stances. Rather than dismissing some perspectives as stupid or evil, I wanted to cultivate curiosity about how others see the world and why.

Where common ground exists, the book surfaces it. Where the divide is too large to bridge, it tries to humanize people on the other side and to cultivate in readers some humility about what they think they know. I believe this makes for better social science and a better society.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

It has been gratifying to see how students who have read draft versions of this book respond to it. Repeatedly, they tell me that they feel less threatened by exposure to views different from their own and better able to engage in dialogue across difference. I hope general readers will also experience that.

I also hope that readers will come away with a richer, more nuanced understanding of what is at stake in debates over restrooms, pronouns, IDs and women's sports, and a deeper sense of the values, histories and fears that animate different positions. I hope that learning how to talk about gender - one of the most heated topics these days - will better equip people to have difficult conversations about other contested topics.

I hope it will encourage curious, open-minded and open-hearted conversations about issues that have been oversimplified and moralized. I hope it will toughen our skins and sharpen our minds so we can use them to thoughtfully address the pressing issues of our time.

What do you think is the biggest surprise of the book?

One of the biggest surprises in researching this book was discovering how much common ground exists - even among the most engaged activists - once you get past the headlines. The news media tend to present these debates as black-and-white, with two irreconcilable camps. But the research interviews told a different story.

Take gender-neutral restrooms. Transgender rights activists have raised serious concerns about trans or gender-nonconforming people getting urinary tract infections or impacted bowels because they cannot access public restrooms. Conservative activists and gender-critical feminists, meanwhile, have raised concerns about safety and privacy for women and girls. The media frame these two positions as opposites.

But in my interviews, activists from across the political spectrum emphasized the importance of both access and safety. When presented with the idea of redesigning multi-stall gender-neutral restrooms to provide greater privacy and security than existing single-sex restrooms do today, many expressed enthusiasm.

My research on debates over eligibility for women's sports produced a different sort of surprise. In this case, the surprise was the complexity itself - the science is more contested, the history more fraught and the stakes more difficult to reconcile than either side typically acknowledges.

In both cases, there is power in dialogue. In the first, it can point toward common ground. In the second, it can illuminate what is at stake - the key empirical questions and competing values, such as providing female athletes an opportunity to compete for the win and affirming trans women's gender identity - that make the issue so difficult to resolve.

Saguy is hosting a virtual book launch on June 23 at 9:30 AM Pacific. Those interested in attending can register at this link.