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The Development of Transgender Studies in Sociology
Abstract
The field of transgender studies has grown exponentially in sociology over the last decade. In this review, we track the development of this field through a critical overview of the sociological scholarship from the last 50 years. We identify two major paradigms that have characterized this research: A focus on gender deviance (1960s-1990s) and a focus on gender difference (1990s-present). We then examine three major areas of study that represent the current state of the field: Research that explores the diversity of transgender people's identities and social locations, research that examines transgender people's experiences within institutional and organizational contexts, and research that presents quantitative approaches to transgender people's identities and experiences. We conclude with an agenda for future areas of inquiry.
... Then, it may not be surprising that conventional theories of public policy making begin with normative assumptions about individuals or groups who are directly or indirectly affected by the policy process, paying minimal attention to the complexity of social identities and the relational nature of group memberships (Hornung et al., 2019). These problematic propensities are aggravated by the reality that most large-scale demographic surveys conflate sex and gender and only provide female and male options to indicate gender identity (Bauer et al., 2009;National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020;Schilt & Lagos, 2017;Westbrook & Saperstein, 2015). As a result, the role of sex and gender in public policy making remains underdeveloped relative to the progress in documenting diverse experiences of gender identities. ...
... To explore whether and how heteronormative assumptions embedded in public policy shape and regulate the lives of trans individuals, we must first identify them. However, prior to 2010, there was virtually no large-scale survey data that would have allowed demographers and policy scholars to study trans people quantitatively, because options for gender identities were limited to male and female (Schilt & Lagos, 2017). The availability of quantitative data that include transgender individuals has been growing in the United States (Baker & Hughes, 2016;Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 2021;Tobin et al., 2015), but large-scale multicountry data that allows demographers and policy scholars to study trans people has been gravely lacking. ...
... Such an effort has been tried and tested in the United States for sexual minority cisgender adults (Meyer et al., 2020), but more work needs to be done to produce probability samples of trans people (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020; Schilt & Lagos, 2017). Second, to conduct comparative policy analysis in a multilevel framework, we need harmonized data that include large enough samples of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals in each country so that we can account for other demographic and socioeconomic factors, as well as their intersections with gender identities, that may explain social welfare outcomes. ...
To most demographers and policy scholars, discussions about gender equity in health may entail consideration of various health outcomes in relation to just two population groups, males and females, or men and women. The result is that public policy debates and decisions both passively and actively promote cisnormativity, or the notion that one’s assigned sex at birth should match their gender identity. This chapter examines healthcare utilization among transgender and gender-nonconforming people and the nature of transition-related healthcare policies across 28 European countries using the first large-scale survey of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people conducted in 2012. My results suggest that countries with higher levels of healthcare utilization among trans individuals also reported greater health parity between “women and men,” and that countries with less inequality between “women and men” provided more expansive support for transitions. But broadly speaking, masculinizing surgeries are covered more evenly across the European Union member countries, compared to feminizing surgeries, meaning female and male body ideals impact policy decisions differently. To ensure more equitable democratic process for all, it is crucial that we pay attention to trans rights and experiences for our understanding of public policy making.
... While the political and public arguments about transgender rights and equality has intensified, the transgender studies have expanded quickly in three areas in the United States: identity and social locations, institutional frameworks, and quantitative research to transgender identities and lives [4]. To begin, some academics apply the intersectional lens to transgender studies, demonstrating how social location and identification characteristics like class, race, and sexual identity, influence transgender people's relationships and experiences. ...
... Which indicates an inclination to the experiences of transgender people? Moreover, little social science research has been done about the experiences of elderly transgender people, and There is much of opportunity for debate about transgender and gender nonconforming people's lives, including insights into occupation, race, and education [4]. ...
With transgender gaining more visibility among the public, transgender students still experience stigmatization on campus. Based on this, the paper explores policy initiatives taken to promote greater trans-inclusive climates to remove stigma and policy limitations in schools in California. Firstly, transgender stigma is presented in three fields related to discourse, identity, and value. Employing policy analysis based on one case, which is a multidisciplinary research method that seeks to generate, assess, and disseminate policy-relevant knowledge. This paper also reviews the current policies of transgender protection in California, further examining the effects of the transgender-inclusive policies in one specific area and the limitations. Finally, this paper ends with some recommendations for what kind of revision or reform is anticipated to remove transgender stigmatization. This research not only stimulates further discussion of the transgender youth which is a relatively hidden group but also serves as the source in favor of changing policy to improve access to high-quality care and the advancement of the rights of transgender individuals.
... As suggested in the previous section, there is a long tradition of Symbolic Interactionist research concerning BTLG populations (see, e.g., Gagnon & Simon, 1973;Garfinkel, 1967;Goffman, 1963;Scott & Lyman, 1968). Although problematic in many ways (see, e.g., Schilt & Lagos, 2017;Schrock et al., 2014;, classic Interactionism often utilized the prejudice and discrimination faced by BTLG populations as deviant or exceptional cases for demonstrating the (1) social construction of (cisgender heterosexual) norms and beliefs throughout society, and (2) the conceptualization of Interactionist approaches to identity (Mason-Schrock, 1996), narrative (Plummer, 1994), inter-group (Sandstrom, 1990), ideological (Gagné & Tewksbury, 1998), and other systems of meaning, interpretation, and reflection (see also Sumerau, 2020Goffman, 1977West & Zimmerman, 1987). In so doing, such work paved the way for the expansion of BTLG sociological studies in the past couple decades. ...
... When Plummer (2010) calls for analyses of the sexual complexity of society or Schrock and associates (2014) argue that Symbolic Interactionist approaches are especially important for understanding sexual inequalities in society, one pathway for accomplishing these endeavors may involve mobilizing Interactionist toolkits to ascertain the interpersonal negotiations, conflicts, and other meaningmaking that occurs within and between various portions of the broader BTLG population (see also Schrock et al., 2004). Likewise, when Interactionists seek to understand how social norms shift and remain stable over time in relation to political and other cultural transformations (see Dunn & Creek, 2015), continuity and change within and between BTLG populations may provide a case for theorizing broader sex, gender, and sexual politics (see also Schilt & Lagos, 2017). As such, the examination of intergroup politics among BTLG populations may dramatically extend Interactionistand broader sociologicalunderstandings of gender and sexuality in society. ...
Within and beyond Symbolic Interactionism, sociological studies of bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and gay (BTLG) populations have expanded dramatically in the past two decades. Although such studies have invigorated our understanding of many aspects of BTLG life and experience, they have thus far left BTLG Pride relatively unexplored. How do BTLG populations experience Pride, and what insights might such efforts have for sociologically understanding such populations and events? We examine these questions through an interview study of bi+ people (i.e., sexually fluid people who identify as bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise outside of gay/straight binaries; Eisner, 2013). Specifically, we analyze how bi+ people negotiate both (1) experiencing Pride as “outsiders within” the broader BTLG population (Collins, 1986), and (2) framing who Pride is for and what it means in practice. In so doing, we demonstrate how Interactionist analyses of certain groups’ meaning making around and experiences of Pride can expand existing sociologies of BTLG populations, bisexual experience, and Pride.
... Although mainstream criminology sometimes includes the queer community in samples, gender identities are not incorporated and questioned as salient characteristics (Peterson & Panfil, 2014). That is, queer people have only been incorporated into criminology as objects of fascination and populations of study, not as subjects in our research or in ways that take their lived experiences seriously (Schilt & Lagos, 2017). One main tenet of queer criminology is to allow the voices of oppressed people to be heard and believed. ...
... One main tenet of queer criminology is to allow the voices of oppressed people to be heard and believed. To do so involves qualitative analysis through interviewing, listening, collaborating with organizations outside of academia, and providing the information and stories gathered to the public (Lombardi, 2018;Schilt & Lagos, 2017;Sumerau & Mathers, 2019). The dissemination of the collective voices of oppressed and marginalized people will allow for the inclusion of these populations in criminal justice policy and violence prevention. ...
Qualitative researchers encounter obstacles related to publishing, acceptability, research self-disclosure, rapport development, feelings of guilt or vulnerability, and opportunity that quantitative scholars often do not. Here we discuss our experiences with these obstacles related to one queer qualitative study in hopes that it will provide knowledge to the next generation of queer qualitative scholars. We begin by discussing the state of the field in terms of qualitative scholarship and queer criminology, then we discuss our own experiences doing qualitative queer criminology. Our goal is to show why qualitative queer criminology matters, that it can be done despite its challenges, and to encourage the field of criminology and criminal justice to become more inclusive of qualitative methodologies.
... Much of the sociological research on transgender people has documented the myriad ways in which trans people experience extreme inequalities across all domains of social life. As the literature demonstrates, transgender people face rejection, discrimination, violence, uneven access to major institutions such as education and the law, bullying, stigma, and restrictive gender norms (Schilt and Lagos 2017). Contributing to the pervasive inequality that trans people experience is a durable dichotomous system that positions cisgender people as "normal" and transgender people as "other" (Schilt and Westbrook 2009). ...
... Joy, happiness, and pleasure are almost never mentioned in the foundational The Transgender Studies Reader and do not appear anywhere in its index (Stryker and Whittle 2006). Similarly, joy, happiness, and pleasure are not explicitly discussed in the Annual Review of Sociology article on transgender studies in sociology (Schilt and Lagos 2017) or in "The Transgender Issue" published by GLQ (Stryker 1998). What causes this lack of attention to joy in academic analyses? ...
Joy is a crucial element of people’s everyday lives that has been understudied by sociologists. This is particularly true for scholarship about transgender people. To address what we term a joy deficit in sociology, we analyze 40 in-depth interviews with trans people in which they were asked what they find joyful about being trans. Their responses demonstrate the methodological and theoretical importance of asking about joy. Four main themes emerged from the interviews. First, interviewees easily answered the question about joy. Second, contrary to common assumptions, we found that transgender people expressed joy in being members of a marginalized group and said that they preferred being transgender. Third, embracing a marginalized identity caused the quality of their lives to improve, increasing self-confidence, body positivity, and sense of peace. Finally, being from a marginalized group facilitated meaningful connections with other people. Our findings demonstrate a vital need to address the joy deficit that exists in the sociological scholarship on transgender people specifically, and marginalized groups more generally. Bridging the sociology of knowledge and narratives, we show how accentuating joy offers nuance to understandings of the lived experiences of marginalized people that has been absent from much of sociological scholarship.
... For Richard Jenkin (2003) "identity is our understanding of who we are and of whom other people are and reciprocally other person understands of themselves and of others." Non-binary individuals raised the question of gender variation as an integral phenomenon in each society for those people who privilege biological or social factors and invites the public to observe, to perceive and to think about transgender people (Schilt and Lagos, 2017). ...
... These research findings clearly placed transgender people in the male category rather than suggesting any category out/beyond binary. The findings of the present study strived to explain why the public giving the impression of being lazy to accept or even acknowledge those individuals who disobeyed the traditionally established categories of male and female (Broockman & Kalla, 2016;Powell et al., 2010;Powell, Quadlin & Pizmony-Levy, 2015;Schilt & Lagos, 2017;Stone, 2019;Westbrook & Saperstein, 2015) in our society, in spite of increasing discussions about transgender people for some years (Epps, 2018;Lambda, n.d.). Although a significant number of people, now identify as transgender in the United States, however, they have to face much resistance from the public. ...
The present study strived to explore the existing beliefs and perceptions of public regarding transgender people in Pakistani society. The major objectives of this study were to explore the perception of the general public about transgender and how they differentiate among men, women, and transgender people. The present study was quantitative survey research. By using simple random, 50 respondents were interviewed,followed by an interview schedule. The gathered data were processed and analyzed in descriptive manners. The study revealed that (100 Percent) of the respondents were familiar with transgender people as (82 Percent) met transgender in the street/roadside while beggaring. The present study also revealed that (78 Percent) of respondents perceived transgender as an in-between creature as they differentiated that transgender is male persons who adopted this disguise for attaining sexual attractions by other male persons/purposes (60 Percent). It was also suggested that transgender should be given education, healthcare, and employment opportunities (100 Percent).
... As mentioned above, transgender lives do have a history of being studied; however, researchers historically relied on frameworks of gender deviance or gender difference (for a detailed overview, see Schilt and Lagos 2017). Beginning with the writing of Garfinkel (1967), creating sociological understandings of trans and gender diverse lives often focused on presenting gender diverse people as deviants who illustrate the social construction of sex and gender (Sumerau 2020;Vidal-Ortiz 2008). ...
... instead, there emerged an interest in gender diverse as having subjective experiences and intellectual contributions of their own (Schilt 2018). A meta-analysis of the sociological literature on transgender people conducted by Schilt and Lagos (2017) showed that qualitative research emerging from this paradigmatic shift fell into two broad categories: research on The most recent research with gender diverse participants has begun to shift the focus yet again, using cultural lenses to explore issues around passing (Garrison 2018) and the medicalization of gender diverse lives (Johnson 2016(Johnson , 2019 particularly through the lens of both digital media including social media platforms (McInroy and Craig 2018) and uses of social media to crowdfund transition (Fritz 2018) as well as the role of YouTube in shaping trans communities and identity development (Miller 2017(Miller , 2018Raun 2015). Research into traditional media representations of gender diversity have included explorations of news media (Billard 2016) and television (Cavalcante 2017;Lovelock 2017). ...
Gender diversity has long been framed in pathologizing terms as an illness to be treated through medical intervention and transition technologies. The conceptualization of gender dysphoria as an illness creates a transnormative medical model that places the burden on the individual. Transnormativity is rooted in culturally hegemonic constructions of gendered embodiment that manifest as the emphasis on gender affirming medical interventions (GAMI) as the path to validity and legitimacy in gender identity. The research presented here used in-depth semi-structured interviews with thirteen trans and gender-diverse participants, to explore the ways participants both engage with and contest hegemonic understandings of transgender embodiment at the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society. Participants' experiences suggest a recursive model for understanding gender dysphoria, which frames it not as a product of the individual, but the result of a process by which gender euphoric desires are filtered through cisnormative cultural lenses resulting in dysphoric distress which manifests differently at each level; however, options to address it are culturally presented as GAMI undertaken in a linear journey from one cisgender category to the other, creating a transnormative material reality. Participant reactions to transnormative frameworks relied on gender euphoric self-imaginings of ideal possibilities. This focus on euphoria rather than dysphoria begins to shift the focus away from pathology and towards human dignity.
... She examines the mechanisms by which willfulness is attributed, and in doing so, she shifts attention away from individuals and toward broader social and political structures. A key feature of cisgenderist ideology is that it labels trans people as problematic (Kennedy, 2018), which was perpetuated by early research that pathologized gender nonconformity (Gill-Peterson, 2018;Schilt & Lagos, 2017). Through my use of Ahmed's notion of the willful subject, I turn my attention to the social mechanisms that regulate gender in schools and in teacher education and that, through doing so, attribute as willful those educators who do not ascribe to normative gender expectations. ...
... My membership in the Trans Educators Network, a closed group for trans PK-12 school educators, and my nonbinary gender may have lent me a kind of "insider" status, leading participants to share more than they might have with a researcher outside those communities. At the same time, that I appear to be White and I am associated with a university may have dissuaded others from participating; there can be a wide gap between the experiences of White and racialized trans people (Suárez et al., 2020) and there are long histories of researchers pathologizing and objectifying trans people (Schilt & Lagos, 2017). ...
Background/Context
In recent years, Canadian and U.S. schools have increased efforts to recognize gender diversity and reduce gender-based harassment, in large part because a growing number of young people are coming out as transgender or nonbinary in adolescence. However, little research explores nonbinary teachers’ experiences or investigates barriers to their entry into the profession.
Purpose
This article begins to fill this gap by showing how six nonbinary beginning teachers navigated gender expectations, worked to appear professional, and negotiated racial and gendered power dynamics in their initial teacher education and preservice teaching.
Participants
Participants include six nonbinary preservice teachers of diverse gender expression and racial and class backgrounds who were enrolled or had recently completed teacher education in North America when the study was conducted in 2018.
Research Design
This qualitative study employed in-depth, phenomenological interviews. This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “willful subject” to consider how participants negotiated the relationship between their gender identities as nonbinary people and their nascent professional identities as teachers.
Conclusion
These beginning teachers expressed concern about succeeding in their teacher education programs and worried about how others perceived them because of the expectation of normative gender implicit in teaching’s professional norms. This expectation was enforced by the profession’s gatekeepers more than by K–12 students and their families, who participants generally described as hospitable or indifferent to having a nonbinary teacher. If the profession is to genuinely welcome gender diversity, it must recognize and work to deconstruct its own gender normativity.
... The term "gender diverse" includes "people who identify as agender (having no gender), as bigender (both a woman and a man) or as non-binary (neither woman nor man)" (Gavriel Ansara, 2013, p. 1). The term "transgender", commonly shortened to "trans", is a collective term used to describe individuals whose gender identity and expression is at variance with the biological sex they were assigned at birth (Levitt & Ippolito, 2014;Schilt & Lagos, 2017). The term "trans'" means "across from", with "trans women" referring to individuals who were assigned male at birth, but now identify as feminine, taking up a range of gender identity descriptors that may include woman, feminine, fa'afafine, Sexual violence is everywhere. ...
... As far as the methodological approaches used are concerned, the fact that with the 8 original articles, there is a parity between qualitative (Pinto, Melendez and Anya, 2008;Perez-Brumer et al.,2017;Hwahnga et al., 2021;Li, Fabbre and Gaveras, 2022); and quantitative (Hamann and Sherblom, 2014;Erosheva, Emlet, and Fredriksen-Goldsen., 2015;Tan et al. 2021;Zarwell et al. 2021) approaches, is a significant step forward compared to what was the trend until some time ago (Schilt and Lagos, 2017) because before 2010, there were no quantitative data on TGD people, because all questionnaires used up to then only provided a binary view in the choice of gender (male and female) (Westbrook & Saperstein 2015). ...
This article aims to analyze the current literature on the social capital of transgender and gender diverse(TGD) people, given their fragility in social and health terms. The paper followed the guidelines developed by Tricco, Langlois, and Straus. The results of this paper reveal significant gaps in the literature relating to the social capital of TGD people and highlight how the various types of shared capital are for sexual health to be considered in future research on transgender health. This is the first article that analyzes in detail the relationship between social capital and TGD individuals. To date, there is no other scientific evidence in the literature in this regard. The paucity of scholarly evidence available for paper limits our ability to make conclusive statements about social capital of TGD people. Small sample sizes in the included studies warrant caution when deriving generalized conclusions about social capital.
... It is apparent that the documentary emphasises and upholds a rigid ideological reasoning that assumes cisnormativity; an assumption and expectation that all people are and should be, by default, cisgender (Sumerau et al., 2016), which obviously privileges cisgender individuals' experiences while disadvantaging others whose gender identity does not fit the binary. Instead of shedding light on the media's symbolic annihilation of the trans community (Abdellatif et al., 2021), the silencing, discrimination, harassment and violence that transgender and gender nonconforming people experience (see Schilt and Lagos, 2017), or offering a safe inclusionary space for the trans community for their stories to be told, voices to heard and included, the documentary explicitly states that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals should be denied access to existence, let alone defining their own reality or choosing their own pronouns. Such flawed ideological assumptions and toxic logic that seeks to devalue 'othered' bodies' experiences and erase trans and nonconforming people's basic human right to live is harmful to the experiences of sexual and gender minorities within organisations and have implications on organisational equity, diversity and inclusion policies. ...
An artifact review of 'What is a Woman?' documentary.
... Research explicitly concerned with gender and sexual minorities has been and remains marginal in criminology and the social sciences (Dwyer, Ball and Crofts 2016;Schilt, Meadow and Compton 2018). This is especially true for research concerned with TGD people and the issues that affect them (Namaste 2000;Schilt and Lagos 2017). Worse still, criminology has played and continues to play a role in strengthening and legitimising institutions and practices that harm TGD people (Valcore et al. 2021). ...
Trans and gender diverse (TGD) people are disproportionately criminalised and face unique vulnerabilities when interacting with the criminal legal system. However, very little is known about TGD people’s experiences of criminalisation in Australia or the strategies TGD people and their advocates use to navigate the criminal legal system. Based on survey responses from TGD people with lived experience of criminalisation and lawyers with experience representing TGD clients, this article identifies several critical issues with the criminal legal system’s treatment of TGD people and outlines the strategies TGD people and their representatives suggest to address these issues. On this basis, we argue that criminologists and criminal legal practitioners urgently need to interrogate and work towards ameliorating the criminal legal system’s treatment of gender diversity. These insights will be crucial in informing future advocacy efforts and reform agendas, given that knowledge in this area is severely lacking.
... For example, the extent to which someone is deemed prototypical of their gender is influenced by race(Wong & McCullough, 2021). Thus, a ripe area for future research might include how transition experiences in the workplace may vary depending on the combination of multiple identities(Schilt & Lagos, 2017).Third, our findings show the importance of how gender expressions and reactions of others evolve over time. This temporal element could be explored further in future research. ...
... Our well-being anal y sis is one of the first to har ness Gallup's unpar al leled SGM sam ple. We include sex ual minor i ties who iden tify as queer, same-gen der lov ing, or more than one sexual iden tity, in addi tion to gay, les bian, and bisex ual; we also include trans gen der men, trans gen der women, and gen der non bi nary/genderqueer indi vid u als (Schilt and Lagos 2017). Our study improves on past work that relied on lim ited sex ual identity categories (e.g., les bian, gay), inferred sex ual iden tity from part ner ship sta tus, or used binary mea sures of sex and gen der, which con flate sex and gen der and pre clude iden ti fi ca tion of trans gen der and other gen der minor ity pop u la tions (Westbrook et al. forth com ing;Westbrook and Saperstein 2015). ...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations experience disadvantages in physical health, mental health, and socioeconomic status relative to cisgender heterosexual populations. However, extant population research has tended to use objective measures and ignore subjective measures, examined well-being outcomes in isolation, and lacked information on less well studied but possibly more disadvantaged SGM subgroups. In this study, we use Gallup's National Health and Well-Being Index, which permits identification of gay/lesbian, bisexual, queer, same-gender-loving, those who identify as more than one sexual identity, transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary/genderqueer populations. We estimate bivariate associations and ordinary least-squares regression models to examine differences along five dimensions of well-being: life purpose, residential community belonging, physical and mental health, financial well-being, and social connectedness. The results reveal that most SGM groups experience stark disadvantages relative to heterosexuals and cisgender men, which are most pronounced among bisexual, queer, and nonbinary/genderqueer populations. Intergroup and intragroup variations illuminate even greater disparities in well-being than prior research has uncovered, bringing us closer to a holistic profile of SGM well-being at the population level.
... Trans people's access to health insurance and health care is crucial because while so many people depend on it to live and be seen by others as they are, navigating the gatekeeping and hoop-jumping of medical requirements can be exhausting and damaging. 2 Transgender studies research, nearly all of which investigates intersections of law and health in one way or another, is a burgeoning area of research across the social sciences (Pearce et al., 2019;Schilt & Lagos, 2017). Sociologists and political scientists have documented the wide array of social movement strategies, interest group mobilization, and legal change from the local to the national level that have transformed transgender rights in the United States (Taylor et al., 2018;Taylor & Haider-Markel, 2014). ...
Health care rights for transgender and/or nonbinary people have dramatically expanded in recent years, including in insurance coverage for the treatments and procedures they need. Yet, trans people themselves still identify health insurance problems as a top priority for research and policy change because of significant difficulties gaining and using coverage. Wrangling over coverage determinations happens through multiple types of interactions, bureaucratic, interpersonal, and medical. When these interactions become difficult, it is because key terms such as medical necessity are both powerful and indeterminate. This study examines how trans people and health care intermediaries navigate the health insurance process and contest the meaning of medical necessity in coverage determinations. These disputes constitute the ground-level reality for instantiating health care rights to gender affirming care. Relying on analysis of contract language and 32 interviews with people who sought gender-affirming care and allied professionals, we find that health insurance policy language, interpretation, and implementation often create disadvantages and barriers for trans people who attempt to access care. Our study highlights how the contested life of insurance policy terminology produces a reality for rights but also details the mechanisms through which insurance-mediated care is a socially contested and negotiated process
... Following the model proposed by Cutrona and Suhr (1992), we consider that these online communities have provided over time five types of social support: informational, emotional, esteem-related, networking-related, and tangible support. this model could be combined with other findings within trans studies that have highlighted how social media renews the practices of trans people (Schilt & lagos, 2017;Stryker & aizura, 2013;Stryker & whittle, 2006), showing for example how trans vloggers (raun, 2016), who often present themselves as experts, share their experiences, difficulties, and advice (dame, 2013; horak, 2014; raun, 2012, 2016). in this chapter, we extend this research by focusing on the social solidarity among trans people using Facebook. this research perspective extends previous work on the social support available to trans people in accessing to limited resources require by trans pathways (medical information, specific material, etc.), avoiding social isolation and discrimination, and helping to combat the high suicide rate related to the trans population (hendricks & testa, 2012;James et al., 2016). ...
This chapter aims to analyze the sociabilities, information-sharing behaviors, and types of social support among users of French non-mixed trans Facebook groups. First, our national survey (N = 405) reveals that the different uses of these groups (information retrieval, emotional support, etc.) vary according to the age and education levels of their trans users, or according to their progress on the transition pathways. Second, we perform a lexical analysis of the messages (N = 70,488) posted, since 2013, in a sample of 24 groups, in order to identify the main topics of discussion. This analysis leads us to emphasize the diversity of social support provided by trans people to one another, via posts and comments. These findings deemphasize the benefits of institutional support because they suggest, alternatively, that trans people are organizing themselves to avoid challenges associated with medical institutions and the French "thera-peutic shield. . Such individuals use Facebook to this end, sharing information or support in order to create a safe space managed with a transfeminist ethic, and allowing themselves to make gender-related choices more autonomously, far away from normative judgements (in particular those expressed by the medical profession).
... While anyone can experience sexual violence, it is largely perpetuated by cisgender men against cisgender and transgender women (Stotzer, 2009;WHO, 2013b). Transgender (trans) individuals are those whose gender identity and expression is different to the sex they were assigned at birth; cisgender people identify with the sex assigned at birth (Schilt & Lagos, 2017). International research demonstrates that trans people are more likely to be victims of physical and sexual violence than the cisgender population (Langenderfer-Magruder et al., 2016;Peitzmeier et al., 2020;Stotzer, 2009). ...
Despite experiencing high rates of sexual violence, there is limited research that explores coping and support needs among trans women of color and those from migrant backgrounds. This article examines the impact of sexual violence, as well as responses and support needs in relation to sexual violence, among 31 trans women of color, aged between 18–54 years, living in Australia. Women were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling, local LGBTQI + networks, and social media. Study advertisements invited participation from people 18 years and older, who identified as a “trans woman of color” or “trans woman from a non-English speaking background,” to take part in a study about their lives as trans women of color and experiences of sexual violence. In-depth interviews and photovoice took place between September 2018 and September 2019. Findings were analyzed through thematic analysis, drawing on intersectionality theory. Sexual violence was reported to be associated with fear, anxiety, and depression, and, for a minority of women, self-blame. While women reported hypervigilance and avoiding going out in public as measures to anticipate and protect themselves from sexual violence, they also demonstrated agency and resilience. This included putting time and effort into appearing as a cisgender woman, naming violence, seeking support, rejecting self-blame, and engaging in self-care practices to facilitate healing. Trans women highlighted the need for multi-faceted sexual violence prevention activities to encourage education, empowerment and cultural change across the general population and support services, in order to promote respect for gender, sexuality and cultural diversity.
... Among the key arguments that Burt (2020) makes, without evidence, is the notion that the reforms brought about by the Equality Act would place "females" at greater risk in public accommodations (e.g., bathrooms, locker rooms, shelters), even though research demonstrates that this is unfounded (Hasenbush et al. 2019). Burt ignores the substantial evidence that suggests transgender people, themselves, often experience higher rates of violence and discrimination in public spaces than their cisgender counterparts-especially for Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are transgender (Meyer 2012;Schilt and Lagos 2017). In fact, studies show that gender nonconforming trans people face greater discrimination in social settings than transgender people who are more gender conforming (Miller and Grollman 2015). ...
This article responds to claims advanced by “gender critical” feminists, most recently expressed in a criminological context by Burt (2020) in Feminist Criminology, that the Equality Act—a bill pending in the United States Congress—would place cisgender women at risk of male violence in sex-segregated spaces. We provide legal history, empiri- cal research, and conceptual and theoretical arguments to highlight three broad errors made by Burt and other trans-exclusionary feminists. These include: (1) a misinterpretation of the Equality Act; (2) a narrow version of feminism that embraces a socially and biologi- cally deterministic view of sex and gender; and (3) ignorance and dismissal of established criminological knowledge regarding victimization, offending patterns, and effective meas- ures to enhance safety. The implications of “gender critical” arguments for criminology, and the publication of such, are also discussed.
... Currently, transgender research tends to examine identities within a social context, experiences within an institutional context and quantitative analyses of identities and experiences. (Schilt & Lagos, 2017). ...
In spite of a democratic governance model, due to cis-heteronormativity, the rights of incarcerated transgender women in Costa Rica are routinely undermined by pervasive direct, social and structural violence. In effect, their incarceration is often preceded by victimization in the public and private spheres. This paper will use in-depth interviews carried out with incarcerated transgender women to examine the social factors contributing to their vulnerability and the State’s responsiveness to their needs. This will be complemented by a socio-legal analysis of the current criminal justice framework. Finally, will examine if there is compliance with international human rights conventions
... In the past, however, these youth often remained silent, conforming to their designated binary gender category (Travers 2018). Importantly, the experiences and naming of gender diversity has and continues to differ across cultural and historical contexts (Meadow 2018;Schilt and Lagos 2017) including a recent rise in individuals identifying with nonbinary identities (Barbee and Schrock 2019;Meerwijk and Sevelius 2017). These changes provide opportunities to explore how macrosocial structures and gender-related minority stressors are associated with expressed gender identities and educational outcomes of youth. ...
Despite the growing population of youth identifying with a transgender or nonbinary gender identity, research on gender-diverse individuals’ educational outcomes is limited. This study takes advantage of the first nationally representative, population-based data set that includes measures of gender identity and educational outcomes: the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Using minority stress and structural symbolic interactionist frameworks, we examine the association between gender identity and high school and college educational outcomes. We compare the educational outcomes of gender-diverse youth—binary transgender, nonbinary, and gender unsure—with those of cisgender youth, and also examine differences within the gender-diverse population. Given the strong link between minority stress and educational experiences among gender-diverse youth, we examine differences in outcomes before and after accounting for school belonging and emotional distress. We also account for individuals’ social-structural location, arguing that social positionality shapes both gender identity and educational outcomes. Results indicate important differences in educational outcomes within the gender-diverse population: Whereas binary transgender and gender-unsure youth exhibit educational disadvantage, relative to cisgender youth, nonbinary youth do not. The gender-unsure disadvantage remains even after accounting for differences in social-structural location and social-psychological factors associated with minority stress.
... The majority of research addressing the experiences of trans children and youth has been conducted within medicine and psychology (Chang et al. 2018;Lombardi 2001), and, to a lesser extent, education, social work, and sociology (Burdge 2007;Schilt and Lagos 2017;Vidal-Ortiz 2008). In the USA and Western Europe, for much of the twentieth century, children's gender nonconformity was considered the purview of medicine. ...
... Following in this vein, a related limitation is that the data could not be analyzed with respect to intersectionality, meaning how aspects of identity and social locations (e.g., class, race, ability, age, etc), and the intersections thereof shape TGNC people's lived experiences (Juang, 2006;Schilt & Lagos, 2017). The convergence of multiple minority statuses renders individuals invisible through a process Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach (2008) termed intersectional invisibility. ...
The number of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) individuals who are presenting for counseling is increasing; yet counselors receive little to no exposure to gender-diversity throughout their education and training. TGNC individuals have reported receiving discriminatory experiences within therapy and ineffectual outcomes. Consistent with social-justice practice, knowledge of how clients understand themselves is necessary to enhance the outcomes of counseling. A key resource TGNC individuals are using to engage in identity exploration is online communities. We applied discourse analysis to analyze the talk and text of three such online communities, and explored: “How do self-identifying TGNC individuals construct their identity when they discuss their related experiences online?” We identified that individuals made sense of their identity using three discourses: (a) felt sense, (b) authenticity, and (c) legitimacy. Individuals constructed their identity using linguistic resources to resist systemic oppression and claim their identities as valid and real. We offer suggestions for infusing this insight into trans-affirmative practice.
... Many LGB immigrants may end up embracing and continuing or developing their own type of spirituality, whether affiliated with a religious institution or not. Similarly, scholars are beginning to investigate transgender individuals' experiences in relation to how they navigate discriminatory religious institutions (Schilt and Lagos 2017); however, little is known about experiences of trans individuals' relationship to spirituality (Padron 2015;Westerfield 2012). ...
Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews with trans Latinxs in Los Angeles, I argue that spirituality is a source of resilience when trans immigrants face marginalization stemming from racism, xenophobia, and transphobia precipitated by factors rooted in cisgendered policy and social norms. Trans Latinxs embrace spirituality by (1) identifying as Christian or Catholic and/or engaging in Latino popular religion; (2) engaging in nontraditionally Latinx spaces such as other community groups, spaces, and religions to embrace their faith and spirituality; and even (3) exploring and creating their own type of spirituality. Taking a grounded theory approach, the author offers the concept of trans*formative spirituality, which is defined as a spirituality that trans Latinxs perform as an embodied knowledge that in living their truth in their bodies, and also in their journey to their own truth, they are able to transform and convert others around them.
... Examples include mixed-race individuals who are considered neither truly Black nor White by members of either group, and political independents considered as "other" by both Democrats and Republicans. With demographic shifts, such as over ten million in the U.S. who identify with two or more races [15] and the increasing gender non-binary population [16], understanding how individuals fall through the cracks of categorization and the subsequent consequences are increasingly important. The existence of inbetweeners can be accommodated in existing models of social categorization by simply assuming that inbetweeners is a separate category. ...
Social categorizations divide people into “us” and “them”, often along continuous attributes such as political ideology or skin color. This division results in both positive consequences, such as a sense of community, and negative ones, such as group conflict. Further, individuals in the middle of the spectrum can fall through the cracks of this categorization process and are seen as out-group by individuals on either side of the spectrum, becoming inbetweeners . Here, we propose a quantitative, dynamical-system model that studies the joint influence of cognitive and social processes. We model where two social groups draw the boundaries between “us” and ‘them” on a continuous attribute. Our model predicts that both groups tend to draw a more restrictive boundary than the middle of the spectrum. As a result, each group sees the individuals in the middle of the attribute space as an out-group. We test this prediction using U.S. political survey data on how political independents are perceived by registered party members as well as existing experiments on the perception of racially ambiguous faces, and find support.
Focusing on trans and gender-diverse people in five European countries (Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden), the Transrights research addressed one of the most challenging transformations of the institutional order of gender that thus far still reproduces the normative opposition between male and female. Rather than proposing a descriptive monograph, our angle of analysis emphasized the workings of gender through the ‘voices’ of trans people (within and beyond Europe) and their complex forms of self-identification vis-à-vis the institutional apparatus (whether legal, medical, political or even social-scientific). Drawing on an extensive empirical research that combined document analysis of legal and medical developments, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, we investigated the doings of gender and gender politics. Three major findings are highlighted and summarized through a comparative strategy: trans/gender identifications, creative agency and embodiments; institutional and legal recognition vis-à-vis the medical apparatus and the “marketization” of trans-related healthcare; and discrimination, oppression and violence.
Little sociological research has examined how cis people might be accepting or not of trans people on an intimate level. To begin to fill this gap, the author analyzes over 200 online discussion board posts and threads on Reddit by cis heterosexual men who discuss their romantic and sexual desires for trans women. The author coins the concept of transamorous misogyny to capture the paradoxical process of how cis heterosexual men’s desires for trans women is in and through their contempt of all women. Specifically, the author shows how the cis heterosexual men expand ideas of sexual identity as attraction toward gender expression. However, the men expand the definition of heterosexuality in ways that construct trans women as hyper-feminine, hyper-submissive, and as not real women. The men also discursively work to reassert their cis heterosexual masculinity through discussing how trans women are better than cis women. Ultimately, transamorous misogyny works to devalue all women and allows cis heterosexual men to desire trans women in ways that help the men invest in their own cis heterosexual masculinity.
Academic research hinges on the role of epistemic peers in order to evaluate newly presented claims and evidence. As social work research is often focused on social problems and systems of oppressions, scholars from the margins most impacted are even better poised to conduct and evaluate said research. Throughout the past few decades, social work scholars have adjusted the ways we teach about and conduct research in order to be increasingly critical of the status quo and more culturally attuned. However, many of the adjustments that are recommended (e.g., community advisory boards) assume that the researcher is an outsider to the community being researched. Trans-focused research is an area where this impact is especially glaring, as an influx of out-trans researchers are able to join the field. This article provides an overview of the concepts of epistemic peers and standpoint theory before describing community-engaged research processes in order to illuminate how these practices (re)produce harm and/or are built on assumptions that the researchers themselves are not trans/nonbinary. In order for trans scholarship to continue to grow and produce the most culturally attuned results, social work academia must foster and prioritize trans epistemic peerhood.
Este texto é uma tradução do trabalho de conclusão de curso de Lori Puopolo. (PUOPOLO, 2018) Em seu estudo, e autore se baseia em pesquisas que analisam como profissionais da medicina e da saúde mental utilizam a visão transmedicalista para limitar o acesso de pessoas trans a tratamentos de afirmação de gênero, com a finalidade de compreender como os discursos propagados por eles afetam, especificamente, o acesso de pessoas não binárias ao processo transexualizador. Desse modo, Puopolo observa que enquanto esses especialistas usam um discurso dominante sobre indivíduos transvestigeneres para regular os corpos de sujeitos não binários, esses sujeitos internalizam essas mesmas falas e, por isso, também atrasam seus próprios tratamentos. Puopolo descobre que a internet é o meio de comunicação usado por essas pessoas não binárias para discutir e se informar sobre as possibilidades da transição, notando que à medida que elas têm acesso a mais explicações, elas se tornam mais dispostas a procurar pelos tratamentos desejados.
Gender diverse youth and emerging adults in the U.S. experience alarmingly high rates of suicidality. In this chapter we use data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest national sample of gender diverse individuals in the U.S., to examine variation in suicidality and correlates of suicidality among gender diverse individuals aged 18–24. Theoretically guided by the ideation-to-action suicide framework, we examine differences in socio-demographic factors, external minority stressors, gender-affirming and transition-related variables, social support, and physical/psychiatric comorbidities, across four gender identity groups: transgender men (n = 3,737), transgender women (n = 2,090), nonbinary individuals assigned male at birth (AMAB) (n = 838), and nonbinary individuals assigned female at birth (AFAB) (n = 5,099). We examine suicide ideation (lifetime and past year) and suicide attempt (lifetime and past year) among those who reported ideation. Our findings corroborate high rates of suicidality among gender diverse emerging adults, including higher rates of suicidality among respondents assigned female at birth. In multivariable models, psychiatric comorbidity is a strong independent correlate of ideation but not attempt, while external minority stressors associated with suicide capacity are strong independent correlates of attempt. We discuss both the theoretical and methodological implications of our results for future research on suicidality among the gender diverse population.KeywordsSuicidalityGender diverseIdeation-to-action framework
Several polls have documented Americans’ general attitudes toward transgender people, yet we know little about Americans’ willingness to grant broader rights and privileges to this growing population. Using data from a nationally representative survey experiment, we distinguish between formal rights—rights that are legally conveyed—and informal privileges—those that are not as consistently tied to the law, but nonetheless can have wide-ranging implications for people’s lives. We consider (1) how respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics are associated with attitudes toward rights and privileges; and (2) how a transgender person’s characteristics affect people’s willingness to grant these rights and privileges. Overall, we find that respondents are much more likely to grant formal rights (i.e., employment protections, right to service) than informal privileges (i.e., bathroom access) to transgender people. This pattern implies that even if people are willing to offer legal protections to transgender people, more subtle forms of prejudice may persist. These beliefs are patterned along demographic lines such as respondent sex, respondent age, and respondent sexual orientation. Moreover, respondents are less willing to grant both formal rights and informal privileges to transgender people who are described as gender non-conforming. Implications for demographic research on transgender populations are discussed.KeywordsTransgenderFormal rightsInformal privilegesAttitudesExperiment
The institutionalization of transgender studies as a field comes just as the academy has decided that “fields” are a less relevant and more cumbersome aspect of professional academic organization that prevents the kind of theoretical and empirical work needed to make scholarship relevant to contemporary society. A number of areas of intellectual inquiry have, accordingly, shifted to a “post-discipline” model of academic organization. But what would it mean to think of transgender studies as a post-discipline? First, it would mean a turn away from a focus on field-building within the humanities. Second, it would mean insisting upon transdisciplinary collaboration despite the academy’s failure to encourage such collaboration. But perhaps most importantly, it would mean a turn toward addressing the material conditions of transgender existence and the issues transgender people face in the world. In short, it would mean reorienting ourselves toward an applied transgender studies.
Transgender and nonbinary people’s life experiences are highly heterogenous and shaped by broader structural and cultural forces. We analyze experiences identified on lifeline interviews from 87 transgender and nonbinary adults in Atlanta, New York City, and San Francisco. We find that the type, timing, and relative importance of these experiences varied across categories. For example, experiences related to “Rejection and violence” were more often identified in childhood and in the past, whereas experiences related to “Gender-affirming medical interventions” were more often in adulthood and anticipated futures. Experiences related to “Community involvement,” “Extracurriculars,” “Gender exploration and revelation,” and “Gender-affirming medical interventions” were labeled by respondents as relatively more important compared to other experiences, whereas experiences related to “Family of origin relationships,” “Place of residence,” “Rejection and violence,” and “Sexuality” less important. These experiences were patterned according to the respondents’ gender, birth cohort, race/ethnicity, and geographic location. In analyzing these lifeline data, we advance theoretical understandings of the salience of a variety of key experiences for transgender and nonbinary people at different points in the life course. Our life course approach provides empirical analyses of intra-individual processes over time for transgender and nonbinary people and provides insight into the usefulness of a lifeline method for life course studies more generally as it draws attention to within-person assessments of the distribution and importance of events over the course of a lifetime.
This chapter contests the liberatory presumption of greater media visibility. Despite publicized assertions to the contrary, false assumptions about cisnormativity and the sex/gender binary remain as indicated by representative examples of trans characters from different television genres aired in 2015. The significance of this study’s close attention to genre and methodology beyond typical protagonists and texts is then supported using other queer studies scholarship which specify the usefulness of “cross-textual seriality” which creates a “developmental narrative” of minority identity (Wlodarz). This chapter also introduces the relevance of “transnormativity” to expose the hierarchical differentials based on gender, race, and class that create a white feminine standard representation and conflate relevant differences between trans identities. The chapter concludes with an explanation regarding why neither LGBQ nor feminist media scholarship alone can elucidate the complexity of transphobic representations. It ends with a brief overview of the chapters.
Between one-fifth and a third of people who are transgender have been refused treatment by a medical provider due to their gender identity. Yet, we know little about the factors that shape public opinion on this issue. We present results from a nationally representative survey experiment ( N = 4,876) that examines how common justifications issued by providers for the denial of healthcare, and the race and gender identity of the person being denied care, intersect to shape public opinion concerning the acceptability of treatment refusal. We find that religious objections are viewed as less acceptable compared to a medical justification, in this case, inadequate training. However, the difference between religious objections and inadequate training is larger when the person being denied healthcare is White or Asian than when the person is Black or Latinx. Analysis of open-ended responses indicates the modest effect of doctor’s rationale on attitudes toward treatment refusal with respect to Black and Latinx patients is partially attributable to a racialized, free-market logic. Respondents were more likely to advocate for a doctor’s fundamental right to refuse service when evaluating Black and Latinx patients compared to White patients. We discuss the implications of these findings for intersectional approaches to trans studies and future public opinion research.
In this commentary, I argue that attention to intersecting social inequalities is crucially important for any scholarly analysis of the relationship between transhumanism, markets, and consumption. Drawing on my sociological research about egg and sperm donation, genetic testing, and men’s reproductive health, I discuss how social beliefs – particularly those around gender, race, class, and sexuality – become embedded in biological, technological, and medical approaches to human bodies, profoundly shaping how they are categorised, studied, treated, and commodified. On their own and in combination, these social processes both reflect and produce devastating inequalities. This is where futuristic flights of transhumanist fancy meet sociological realities, and debates about transhumanism must grapple with the persistence of such inequalities.
Research on the social dimensions of health and health care among sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) has grown rapidly in the last two decades. However, a comprehensive review of the extant interdisciplinary scholarship on SGM health has yet to be written. In response, we offer a synthesis of recent scholarship. We discuss major empirical findings and theoretical implications of health care utilization, barriers to care, health behaviors, and health outcomes, which demonstrate how SGMs continue to experience structural- and interactional-level inequalities across health and medicine. Within this synthesis, we also consider the conceptual and methodological limitations that continue to beleaguer the field and offer suggestions for several promising directions for future research and theory building. SGM health bridges the scholarly interests in social and health sciences and contributes to broader sociological concerns regarding the persistence of sexuality- and gender-based inequalities.
In this article, we examine vocabularies of motive concerning the possibility of transgender partners and children. Data from 20 in‐depth interviews with (mostly white) cisgender college‐aged women in the southeastern United States were analyzed to determine how they construct familial ideals predicated upon cisgender norms and assumptions. Participants respond to the possibility of transgender family members by mobilizing vocabularies of (1) claiming exemptions and (2) emphasizing difficulty. We draw out implications for understanding vocabularies of cisgendering family that create the conditions for transgender marginalization within families, and the consequences cisgendering family has for the reproduction of inequality.
This study analyzes how U.S. healthcare organizations implemented legal requirements to treat patients in a manner consistent with their gender identity under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. The ways that healthcare organizations determine gender and track complaints constitute socio-technical systems for compliance, and they shape what discrimination protections look like on the ground. We interviewed grievance handlers about how they use information technologies to process possible civil rights claims from patients and argue that their work demobilizes and erases civil rights, especially claims such as transgender harassment. Mobilized physician-led implementation groups, by contract, enacted a version of gender identity recognition by tracking identities and bodies in electronic medical records and material objects such as specimen labels. Default structures—the dropdown menus of healthcare software—both shape and are shaped by professional norms, financial incentives, and conceptions of justice and deservingness. These socio-technical structures allow conflicting stories of transgender rights to continue on in different parts of the healthcare organization, making it difficult for law to transform healthcare delivery.
This chapter is an invitation to take Black trans lives seriously; to move
beyond hashtags and retweets to consider the experiences of Black trans women and femmes like ourselves. We aim to transform the shade of existing, as Juliana Huxtable discusses, into a political and social framework for transformation. Emerging from a conversation between two Black femme nonbinary scholars, this chapter charts the geographies of Black trans feminism and its theoretical interventions into the way we practice and theorize sociological knowledge. We draw from one part of the Black trans experience, from our roots as nonbinary femmes, but we hope it will open the door to a wider conversation with other Black trans community members who share an investment in our collective liberation. What can we learn through the lineages that weave their way through Black trans stories? What new interventions and insights can these perspectives bring to the potential un- or redoing of sociology?
This paper uses the 2015 United States Transgender Survey of 27,715 transgender respondents to study the relationship between minority gender identity status and income, employment, and poverty rates. All transgender groups have significantly lower incomes and are more likely to be in poverty, unemployed or working part-time, when compared with men in the American Community Survey. Within the transgender sample, those who were assigned female at birth have significantly lower incomes and are more likely to work part-time than those assigned male at birth. These income results are sensitive to the degree to which respondents have socially transitioned. The younger transgender people transition and the greater their ability to ‘pass’, the more their income profiles reflect that of their gender identity rather than the sex they were assigned at birth. Together, these findings provide descriptive evidence in support of a traditional cisgender income gap, with ‘maleness’ being associated with an income premium in the workplace over ‘femaleness’.
Two widely recognized transgender identity formations—the medical model,
which emerged from the findings of mid-twentieth-century sexologist Harry
Benjamin and is reliant on incremental hormonal and surgical interventions,
and the social construct model, which relies on experiential standpoint
within a poststructural frame—are often considered dichotomous, even
oppositional, categories within the transgender social movement. Such political
positioning suggests that they operate for their adherents as adversarial
Foucauldian “regimes of truth.” This is demonstrated in the following recent
study of transgender persons in Poland. The findings suggest elevated
fracturing tensions that may find relief through a more inclusive community
model that recognizes the widest diversity of variant gender identities
through an encompassing of both, and all, gendered subdivisions.
Despite their acknowledgement in 2013 as a separate gender and as they have been increasingly referred to as third gender, transwomen in Bangladesh continue to lack employment opportunities and remain among the most vulnerable segments of the population. This chapter puts the spotlight on the crucial contribution of Bandhu to creating transwomen inclusion. Founded in 1996 in Dhaka, Bandhu is a human rights and non-governmental organization whose mission lies in the provision of services for sexual and reproductive health and rights while also ensuring the well-being of the gender diverse population of Bangladesh. This chapter specifically unpacks Bandhu’s contribution by analyzing its leading and implementing function in a corporate social responsibility (CSR) project for transwomen inclusion through the lived experiences of Shima and Dilruba. They are the first two transwomen involved in the CSR project and its primary beneficiaries. By particularly stressing the challenges of Shima and Dilruba after finding employment and Bandhu’s approach to navigate these challenges, this chapter represents an important learning tool for industry practitioners, government professionals, activists, and educators who are interested in human rights and in understanding how to better create inclusion for transwomen at work in South Asia.
It has been acknowledged that more research into the health and well-being of trans people is needed in order to identify important health issues. While recent studies have suggested using a two-question gender status measure to assess assigned sex at birth and gender identity, it is not well understood how participants understand and subsequently answer the questions. The study recruited a convenience sample of 50 people (25 trans and 25 cis) from the general population of Cleveland and Akron, OH. The study used cognitive interviewing methods with scripted, semi-structured and spontaneous probes when appropriate. Participants were asked to read questions out-loud, answer the questions, and explain why they answered the way they did. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed prior to analysis. The gender status questions were found to be easy to use and understood by both trans and cis participants. The two-question gender status measure was able to encompass a diversity of identities within a trans sample and be consistently answered by the study’s cis participants. The measures were able to differentiate between trans and cis groups. The two-step gender measure can be a useful tool in examining gender diversity within general population studies.
This article outlines a generic process in the reproduction of inequality we name cisgendering reality. Based on 114 responses from transgender Mormons and systematic reviews of religious, transgender, and inequalities scholarship, we demonstrate how contemporary American religions cisgender reality by (1) erasing, (2) marking, and (3) punishing transgender experience in ways that reproduce conceptions of reality predicated on cisnormativity. In conclusion, we argue that examining processes of cisgendering reality may provide insight into (1) transgender religious experience, (2) transgender secular experience, and (3) cisnormativity embedded within many contemporary religions.
Recently, scholars and activists have turned their attention toward improving the measurement of sex and gender in survey research. The focus of this effort has been on including answer options beyond “male” and “female” to questions about the respondent’s gender. This is an important step toward both reflecting the diversity of gendered lives and better aligning survey measurement practice with contemporary gender theory. However, our systematic examination of questionnaires, manuals, and other technical materials from four of the largest and longest-running surveys in the United States indicates that there are a number of other issues with how gender is conceptualized and measured in social surveys that also deserve attention, including essentialist practices that treat sex and gender as synonymous, easily determined by others, obvious, and unchanging over the life course. We find that these understandings extend well beyond direct questions about the respondent’s gender, permeating the surveys. A hyper-gendered world of “males” and “females,” “brothers” and “sisters,” and “husbands” and “wives” shapes what we can see in survey data. If not altered, surveys will continue to reproduce statistical representations that erase important dimensions of variation and likely limit understanding of the processes that perpetuate social inequality.
This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept “purple-collar labor” to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women—are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how “trans” should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women’s gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies.
Prior research has reported that many Americans hold prejudicial attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities. Most of this research analyzed attitudes toward target categories in isolation and not in relation to attitudes toward heterosexuals. In addition, most previous research has not examined attitudes of members of sexual and gender minority categories toward other categories. While some research has examined the influence of religiosity on attitudes toward sexual and gender minorities, none of these studies has examined religiosity while also examining the influence of spirituality. In this article we drew on insights from queer theory to examine attitudes toward heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, as well as individuals who practice polygamy, among college students. Three samples gathered over a four-year period (2009, 2011, 2013) at a private, nonsectarian, midsized urban university in the Southeastern United States were used. We found that heterosexuals had the most positive rating, followed in order of rating by gay/lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, and then those who practice polygamy. Regression analyses revealed gender and race were significant predictors of attitudes toward various sexual and gender categories. Holding a literalistic view of the Bible and self-identifying as more religious were related to more negative views toward sexual minorities, while self-identifying as more spiritual was related to more positive views.
Queer spaces are significant for understanding transgender inclusion as "queer spaces were places where individuals were expected to be attentive to or aware of alternative possibilities for being, including non-normative formulations of bodies, genders, desires and practices" ( Nash, 2011 , p. 203). Indeed, in this interview study of members of a queer leather group called the Club, members described a flexible "sexual landscape" that easily includes transgender members. However, these same queer spaces have been criticized for the way they regulate queer bodies and organize queer subjectivities. In this study, queer members of the Club also contrasted playful queer flexibility with serious transgender bodies. This article argues that, although there is a reiterative relation between transgender inclusion and queer spaces, the idealization of flexibility within queer spaces can also serve to marginalize and regulate transgender bodies.
To alleviate uncertainty in the specialized field of transgender medicine, mental and physical healthcare providers have introduced the rhetoric of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in clinical guidelines to help inform medical decision making. However there are no diagnostic tests to assess the effectiveness of transgender medical interventions and no scientific evidence to support the guidelines. Using in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of 23 healthcare providers, I found that providers invoked two strategies for negotiating the guidelines. Some used the rhetoric of EBM and closely followed clinical guidelines to contain uncertainty. Others flexibly interpreted the guidelines to embrace uncertainty. These findings raise questions about the effectiveness of EBM and guidelines in medical decision making. While trans medicine involves an identity and not a biomedical illness, providers use the same strategies to respond to uncertainty as they may in other medical arenas.
Both scholarly and everyday understandings of transgender people tend to assume that they can only live well in urban places, yet there is little research on the transgender people actually living in rural communities. This article uses an intersectional analysis of 45 interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with transgender men living in the Southeast and Midwest United States to understand how some rural transgender people may not necessarily and automatically fare worse than those in cities. Indeed, these data demonstrate that a more productive question might be, which transgender people integrate into rural communities? The reported experiences of trans men suggest that the claims to sameness that are crucial to inclusion in rural communities are articulated centrally through whiteness and enacting appropriate rural working-class heterosexual masculinities. The claim to sameness allows for a measure of acceptance in rural communities under economic and demographic strain in the twenty-first century.
This conversation explores emerging debates concerning teaching to and about marginalized populations often left out of “representative” data sets. Based on our experiences studying, teaching, and belonging to some of these unrepresented populations, we outline some strategies sociologists may use to transform the limitations of data sets traditionally labeled as representative into tools for delivering core sociological concepts. In so doing, we argue that sociologists may respond to increasing critiques of “representative” data by using these critiques to facilitate critical thinking skills and methodological awareness among students. In closing, we encourage sociologists to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by increasing awareness of unrepresented populations within our classrooms and the broader social world.
Feminists have made important contributions to sociology, but we have yet to transform the basic conceptual frameworks of the field. A comparison of sociology with anthropology, history, and literature–disciplines which have been more deeply transformed–suggests factors that may facilitate or inhibit feminist paradigm shifts. The traditional subject matter of sociology fell into a co-optable middle ground, neither as thoroughly male centered as in history or literature, nor as deeply gendered as in anthropology. In addition, feminist perspectives have been contained in sociology by functionalist conceptualizations of gender, by the inclusion of gender as a variable rather than as a theoretical category, and by being ghettoized, especially in Marxist sociology. Feminist rethinking is also affected by underlying epistemologies (proceeding more rapidly in fields based on interpretive rather than positivist understanding), and by the status and nature of theory within a discipline.
Although medical providers rely on similar tools to “treat” intersex and trans individuals, their enactment of medicalization practices varies. To deconstruct these complexities, we employ a comparative analysis of providers who specialize in intersex and trans medicine. While both sets of providers tend to hold essentialist ideologies about sex, gender, and sexuality, we argue they medicalize intersex and trans embodiments in different ways. Providers for intersex people are inclined to approach intersex as an emergency that necessitates medical attention, whereas providers for trans people attempt to slow down their patients’ urgent requests for transitioning services. Building on conceptualizations of “giving gender,” we contend both sets of providers “give gender” by “giving sex.” In both cases too, providers shift their own responsibility for their medicalization practices onto others: parents in the case of intersex, or adult recipients of care in the case of trans. According to the accounts of most providers, successful medical interventions are achieved when a person adheres to heteronormative gender practices.
Research suggests that transgender people face high levels of discrimination in society, which may contribute to their disproportionate risk for poor health. However, little is known about whether gender nonconformity, as a visible marker of one's stigmatized status as a transgender individual, heightens trans people's experiences with discrimination and, in turn, their health. Using data from the largest survey of transgender adults in the United States, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (N = 4,115), we examine the associations among gender nonconformity, transphobic discrimination , and health-harming behaviors (i.e., attempted suicide, drug/alcohol abuse, and smoking). The results suggest that gender nonconforming trans people face more discrimination and, in turn, are more likely to engage in health-harming behaviors than trans people who are gender conforming. Our findings highlight the important role of gender nonconformity in the social experiences and well-being of transgender people.
In this autoethnography, I elaborate an analysis of interpersonal aspects of transgender life by narrating my everyday interactions living in a gender-ambiguous body as I begin a sexed transition from female to more masculine. I analyze my affective experiences in moments when I am in geographic and gendered transit, encountering social rejection, and connection. Analyzing my fundamentally relational transgender journey in light of the monster’s life in Shelley’s Frankenstein, I show how indignities I encounter in everyday life feel and how my transgender positionalities are complex. Following Susan Stryker, I proclaim “monstrosity” a tool of resistance and reconnection that can help us build connections across difference—that people of all genders might see ourselves in each other, and that, together, we might work against gender injustice and social distance, and toward a deeper kind of intimacy and freedom for us all.
Until recently, raising a young child as transgender was culturally unintelligible. Most scholarship on transgender identity refers to adults’ experiences and perspectives. Now, the increasing visibility of gender-variant children, as they are identified by the parents who raise them, presents new opportunities to examine how individuals confront the gender binary and imagine more gender-inclusive possibilities. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “truth regime” to conceptualize the regulatory forces of the gender binary in everyday life, this work examines the strategies of 24 such parents, who represent 16 cases of childhood gender variance. Specifically, I analyze three practices—“gender hedging,” “gender literacy,” and “playing along”—through which these parents develop a critical consciousness about gender binary ideology and work to accommodate their children’s nonconformity in diverse discursive interactions. Taken together, their newfound strategies and perspectives subvert traditional conceptions of “gender-neutral” or “feminist” parenting, and reveal new modes of resistance to the normative transmission and regulation of gender practices.
Sexuality research has a long history of controversy in the USA. This article examines sexuality research as a form of dirty work, an occupation that is simultaneously socially necessary and stigmatized. Using survey data of contemporary sociologists engaged in sexuality research, historical data on 20th century sexologists, and content analysis of top-tier sociology journals, I focus on the university system and its related functions of publishing, funding, and ethical review boards. I argue that sexuality research is constructed as dirty work by systematic practices of the university system, and further suggest that these practices impose stigma effects that are not simply individual but represent persistent patterns of institutional inequality. Further, I show how these institutional practices are shaped by cultural schemas regarding sexuality, enacted through cognitive and affective bias of institutional actors. The construction of sexuality research as dirty work affects not only researchers themselves but shapes the broad production of sexual knowledge.
Concepts of time are ubiquitous in studies of aging. This article integrates an existential perspective on time with a notion of queer time based on the experiences of older transgender persons who contemplate or pursue a gender transition in later life. Interviews were conducted with male-to-female identified persons aged 50 years or older (N = 22), along with participant observation at three national transgender conferences (N = 170 hr). Interpretive analyses suggest that an awareness of "time left to live" and a feeling of "time served" play a significant role in later life development and help expand gerontological perspectives on time and queer aging.
Abstract In this article, Schilt & Windsor consider how trans men's decisions about physical body modifications impact their sense of themselves as gendered and sexual actors. Based on interviews with 74 trans men, the authors explore how their embodiment, gender identity, erotic ideation, lifetime of sexual practices and domain of potential partners-what the authors term "sexual habitus"-can be affirmed, transformed, or challenged as their embodiment changes. These changes underscore the dynamic relationship between gender and sexuality, and illustrate how bodies matter in sexual trajectories across the life course.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. This article argues that the IOC policy on sex reassignment does not operate to guard against discrimination and harassment against transsexual athletes but that it operates to maintain the popular illusion that there are two, binary gender designations. While both transsexual and Olympic bodies have unique histories and vastly different experiences in the social and political realms, using psychoanalysis we contend that the need to test gendered bodies is incited by an anxiety about bodily deterioration, aging, and, ultimately, mortality.
The pseudonymous Sheila Larson is well known among sociologists of religion for hating coined the term "Sheilaism" to refer to her personal belief system - an individualistic religiosity that has concerned many social commentators. Recently, however, authors such as Wuthnow (1998) and Roof (1999) have suggested that the various forms of religious individualism may be advantageous for some. Working from interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians and former Christians, this article contributes two new angles to such discussions by 1) arguing for a more nuanced understanding of individualism as a toot or tactic rather than as the diametric opposite of religious communalism and 2) exploring the role of such individualism in the lives of those who are forced into it.
This article examines shifts in the legal, medical, and common sense logics governing the designation of sex on birth certificates issued by the City of New York between 1965 and 2006. In the initial iteration, the stabilization of legal sex categories was organized around the notion of "fraud"; in the most recent iteration, "permanence" became the indicia of authenticity. We frame these legal constructions of sex with theories about the "natural attitude" toward gender.
For nearly twenty years, Anglo-American feminist theory has posed its own epistemological questions by looking at the lives and bodies of transsexuals and transvestites. This paper examines the impact of such scholarship on improving the everyday lives of the people central to such feminist argumentation. Drawing on indigenous scholarship and activisms, I conclude with a consideration of some central principles necessary to engage in feminist research and theory—to involve marginal people in the production of knowledge and to transform the knowledge-production process itself.