Mainstreaming Dissidence: Confronting Binary Gender in Social Work's Grand Challenges

To genuinely embody its commitment to anti-oppression, social work must call on a critical gender framework in its response to the Grand Challenges for Social Work. Such an approach demands that social workers move beyond reactivity to thoroughly interrogate the binary gender system upholding the gendered injustices this special issue calls us to confront. This includes a consideration of the ways a binary gender system is ideologically linked to and acts together with constructs of whiteness, nationhood, citizenship, and ability. The present article seeks to complicate the lens such that gender is not a proxy for White cisgender womanhood but rather a call to unravel webs of normative thinking. Guided by transfeminist theory, the authors examine three grand challenges-climate change, technology, and advancing long and productive lives-in an effort to detail the current and historical function of the binary gender system as a tool for the subjugation of trans and nonbinary people and to explore social work's role in building freer and more equitable futures.