5. Theorizing on the Roots of Transgender Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention education, batterer intervention programs, and victim treatment services are often designed in part to help participants identify and undermine the causes of IPV so as to facilitate rehabilitation and limit future perpetration. Thus, understanding the causes of transgender IPV (T-IPV) is of vital importance to ending it. By drawing on both the T-IPV and the broader cisgender IPV research literatures, this chapter reviews emerging theories of the causes of T-IPV. These theorized causes include many that also have been identified in the cisgender IPV literature—including rationalizing abuse, socialization into IPV-condoning attitudes, and power imbalances—in addition to several causes unique to T-IPV, including transphobia-related perpetration theories and transphobia-related victimization vulnerability theories. Supporting evidence for and gaps in our knowledge about these causes also are reviewed.