Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

Tey Meadow holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law. Her work examines the ways social institutions such as law, politics and the family respond to challenges to gender and sexual classifications.  Her dissertation, entitled “Bringing Up the Transgender Child: Parents, Activism and the New Gender Stories,” won the Martin P. Levine Memorial Dissertation Fellowship from the American Sociological Association for the best dissertation proposal in gender and sexualities. In it, she utilizes the responses of parents, physicians and educators to extreme gender atypicality in children to depict the rapid expansion of a cultural lexicon for gender over the last decade. Previous projects include a study of how U.S. courts cope with transgender individuals who seek to alter their legal gender, and a comparative historical analysis of the law and politics of same sex marriage in South Africa and the United States. Tey’s work has received support from the American Sociological Association, The Social Science Research Council, The Institute for Public Knowledge, and New York University. Tey maintains an active commitment to public sociology, holding a Bennett Fellowship at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, contributing to reports on LGBT youth for the National Institutes of Health and serving on the board of directors of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Ettelbrick Project at the Stonewall Community Foundation. At Princeton, Tey is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation research, which will be published by the University of California Press. During the 2012-2013 academic year, she will teach a lecture course in Sociology called “Sex, Gender, Sexuality."