(Trans)National Gender Expertise and the Politics of Recognition

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) require a global rights category around which they can make claims. But, social category systems vary across context. How do INGOs articulate a global transgender rights category amid rapidly shifting political landscapes? Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and expert reports published between 1990 and 2019, I show how the gender experts who staff INGOs used a variety of recognition strategies to navigate competing demands from gender-diverse communities, opponents of LGBT rights, and broader political and cultural shifts. Initially, gender experts subsumed divergent gender category systems. As a widening array of gender-diverse people and opponents of LGBT rights contested the universality of the category system, INGOs shifted their approach. Rather than flattening divergences or decoupling them from institutional categories, gender experts substantively responded to misalignments, qualifying and transforming the original category in the process. In showing how INGOs address contradictions inherent to human rights frameworks and reflexively respond to critiques of coloniality, this article advances science, knowledge, and technology studies, global and transnational studies, and gender and sexuality studies.