US states collect sex and gender data on official government forms to understand, identify, classify, and surveil populations. These forms’ gender boxes—sets of questions about sex, gender, and gender identity paired with a wide variety of answer options—can mean the difference between legibility and erasure or between surveillance and privacy. They also create classic disclosure and legibility dilemmas that disproportionately burden transgender, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex individuals. And yet, the socio-legal forces determining the design of these gender boxes have been insufficiently studied. Documents obtained through public records requests and interviews with civil servants responsible for form design demonstrate that gender box design stems from the competing yet mostly inertial pressures that define the socio-legal contexts of street-level bureaucracy. In other words, gender boxes are products of the institutional, technological, political, and social contexts in which they are designed. Specifically, gender boxes look the way they do because they are subject to the effects of bureaucratic processes, social networks, expertise, intergovernmental dependence, norms, path dependencies, and technologies, with implications for research and advocacy.

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打开性别盒子：美国州政府表格上的易读性困境和性别数据收集

美国各州在官方政府表格上收集性别数据，以了解、识别、分类和监测人口。这些表格的性别框——关于性别、性别和性别认同的问题集以及各种各样的答案选项——可能意味着易读性和擦除性、监视性和隐私性之间的区别。它们还造成了经典的披露和易读性困境，给跨性别者、非二元性别、不合性别者和双性人带来了不成比例的负担。然而，决定这些性别框设计的社会法律力量尚未得到充分研究。通过公共记录请求和对负责表格设计的公务员的采访获得的文件表明，性别框设计源于竞争性但主要是惯性的压力，这些压力定义了街头官僚机构的社会法律背景。换句话说，性别框是设计它们的制度、技术、政治和社会背景的产物。具体来说，性别框之所以如此，是因为它们受到官僚程序、社交网络、专业知识、政府间依赖、规范、路径依赖和技术的影响，并对研究和倡导产生影响。