A Catholic Sister’s Quarter-century of Walking in Faith with Trans People

“Split It Open and Count the Seeds”

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

BackgroundTrans and gender-diverse people face multiple barriers within health care. Primary care practitioners are key to providing health care to trans and gender-diverse people but they often lack training in, and understanding of, trans identities and healthcare options. Few studies have examined health professionals’ understanding of the barriers that exist in health care for trans and gender-diverse people.AimTo map out barriers to providing good-quality health care to trans and gender-diverse people, and explore ways to address them.Design and settingA qualitative interview study involving 20 health professionals working with young trans and gender-diverse people.MethodParticipants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. Data were generated using semi-structured qualitative interviews. A thematic analysis involved coding and categorising data using NVivo (version 12) software and further conceptual analysis in which developing themes were identified.ResultsFour barrier domains to good-quality care for trans and gender-diverse people were identified: structural (related to lack of guidelines, long waiting times, and shortage of specialist centres); educational (based on lack of training on trans health); cultural and social (reflecting negative attitudes towards trans people); and technical (related to information systems and technology).ConclusionThere is an urgent need to address the barriers trans and gender-diverse people face in health care. Structural-level solutions include health policy, professional education, and standards; at the practice level, GPs can act as potential drivers of change in addressing the cultural and technical barriers to better meet the needs of their trans and gender-diverse patients.

Reviewed by: Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920 by Anne M. Butler David S. Bovee Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920. By Anne M. Butler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xxi + 424 pp. Photographs, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. When thinking of the women of the American West, one may imagine cow town prostitutes, Annie Oakley with her gun, or more prosaically, hardworking farmwives and mothers. But Roman Catholic nuns? Indeed, historian Anne M. Butler presents the unlikely juxtaposition of Catholic sisters and the western frontier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In researching the book—the fruit of twenty years of study—Butler examined congregational histories as well as letters, diaries, and other primary sources. These provide a fascinating inside look at the sisters’ encounter with the West. In her analysis, Butler places the western sisters (many of whom resided in the Great Plains) into the contexts of feminist history and the “new” western history. Butler organizes her book topically with [End Page 195] chapters on the sociological origins of the nuns, their travels to and in the West, their labor, their finances, struggles for control with male priests and bishops, the educational work among Native Americans of Mother Katharine Drexel, intersections with various ethnic groups, and a summary on how the West changed the sisters. Although Butler thoroughly describes the manifold secular activities of the western sisters, she does little to reveal the spiritual side of their motivations and preoccupations. Nor does she have a firm grasp of the terminology and processes of the Catholic Church. Butler views the sisters mainly through the categories of her feminist and “new” western history perspective; nonetheless, her secular view of the sisters is frequently insightful. The greatest strength of Across God’s Frontiers is the many well-told stories of particular circumstances encountered by the sisters in the West. The variety of fascinating instances described by Butler is myriad: a perilous raft crossing of a turbulent river, a long, snowy trek to an isolated cabin to administer confession to a dying Native American man, the nuns’ efforts to maintain their original missions of teaching or nursing despite demands by parish priests that they perform domestic tasks, their battles with local bishops over the financial control of schools, and more. These examples give substance to Butler’s claim that sisters in the West were not stereotypically fragile, cloistered women retired from reality, but rather, vigorous participants in practically every aspect of the strenuous work of bringing Anglo-European civilization to the trans-Mississippi frontier. David S. Bovee Department of History Fort Hays State University Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

This article explores the confluence of trans identity and sexuality drawing on the concept of translocational positionality. In this discussion, a broad spectrum of gendered positionalities incorporates trans identity which, in turn, acknowledges normative male and female identities as well as non-binary ones. It is also recognised, however, that trans identity overlaps with other positionalities (pertaining to sexuality, for example) to shape social location. In seeking to understand subject positions, a translocational lens acknowledges the contextuality and temporality of social categories to offer an analysis which recognises the overlaps and differentials of co-existing positionalities. This approach enables an analysis which explores how macro, or structural, contexts shape agency (at the micro-level) and also how both are mediated by trans people's multiple and shifting positionalities. In this framing, positionality represents a meso layer between structure and agency. Four case studies are presented using data from a qualitative study which explored trans people's experiences of family, intimacy and domestic abuse. We offer an original contribution to the emerging knowledge-base on trans sexuality by presenting data from four case studies. We do so whilst innovatively applying the conceptual lens of translocational positionality to an analysis which considers macro, meso and micro levels of influence.

Access to physically, psychologically, and emotionally safe spaces is of critical importance for those experiencing the stress and stigmatisation of homelessness. Nightshelters, hostels and day centres provide material resources and respite from dangerous, stigmatising, public space. Yet these spaces also reinscribe a binarised, essentialist understanding of gender by selectively permitting hegemonic masculine behaviours. Structural and economic inequalities translate to significantly elevated homelessness risks among trans people, yet trans people are often under-represented among homelessness service users. Based upon interviews with 28 trans people about their experiences of homelessness spaces, I argue that a hegemonic centring of masculinities results in the physical and emotional safety of trans people of all genders becoming deprioritised. While trans people were not excluded from hostels, trans identity was seen as presenting risk. Thus, trans people are not regarded as normative occupants in mainstream homelessness spaces. Trans people were routinely subject to intense surveillance, and it was trans people, not cis perpetrators, who were relocated when violence occurred. Further. staff tacitly condoned transphobic marginalisation by cis service-users: violence from cis men was understood as inevitable, and normalised, with trans people responsibilised for conducting themselves in space to avoid provoking attack. This research extends hegemonic masculinity by considering spatiality, specifically through attending to the tension between the perceived needs of homeless cis men and the consequent exclusion of trans people from homelessness services. It identifies some specific areas where provision might improve, yet cautions that this must also avoid further disempowerment of homeless trans people.

It has been speculated for several years that trans identity and parenthood could be incompatible. However, studies investigating the parental intentions of trans individuals stress that they have motivations and parental intentions similar to cis people. Fertility preservation is a way for trans people to achieve parenthood; still, information about these procedures is not always provided, and implications on trans people well-being are not always discussed with health professionals. In this exploratory study, we looked at the parenthood intentions of 14 Portuguese trans and non-binary people and their experiences with health services. We conducted four focus groups and used thematic analysis to analyze the participants’ speeches. Half of the participants wanted to be parents, especially through adoption. Most of the remaining were undecided on the subject. Mixed experiences with the health services were reported, and only a few participants were informed by health providers about fertility preservation options. Trans individuals need to receive clear information about parenthood possibilities in order to make informed decisions about their future.

Unpacking Solidarities of the Oppressed:Notes on Trans Struggles in India Gee Imaan Semmalar (bio) Thirty-seven years after our black feminist sisters wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement, here I am, a Savarna, middle-class, undocumented trans man in India writing about the possibilities and impossibilities of certain solidarities. I draw strength from the resilient political courage of black sisters like Harriet Tubman and Miss Major, from anti-caste leaders like Jotirao and Savitribai Phule and Babasaheb Ambedkar. The questions raised by the Combahee River Collective Statement still resonate with the struggles of black and Dalit sisters, and they have been able to organize themselves through perseverance and stubborn determination, overcoming several attempts at exclusion and co-optation. As a trans man, I write about the structural exclusions, the institutional violence, the individual assaults on dignity and selfhood, the struggle for self-determination of gender of my community and what solidarity means to us. In the struggle against class, caste, race, gender, and heterosexist patriarchy, trans people, because of lack of resources and blatant exclusions in existing struggles, seem to be the least politically organized. The individual oppressions of trans persons, of course, vary according to particular positions of class, gender, race, and the geographical area that we occupy, but collectively, trans communities face exclusions of such enormous proportions that most of us find it reason enough to celebrate that we are alive. Trans communities in India are diverse and have local terms of reference that include hijra, thirunangai, kinnar, mangalamukhi, Aravani, kothi, jogappas, shiv shaktis, thirunambis, bhaiyya, and paiyyan. In India, trans women have historically organized themselves into gharanas (houses). [End Page 286] There are seven major gharanas spread across India that act as support systems for the hijra community. The guru-chela (mother-daughter) relationship in hijra communities is set up to provide mutual care. Young trans women who face intense familial and public violence in childhood leave their homes and live in hijra houses after choosing their gurus and being accepted by them as chelas. Our trans sisters have admirably organized themselves so they have their own internal legal system called Jamaats, where senior hijras play the role of judges and solve disputes between them. I will be unable to go into a long description of the hijra system for several reasons, among which is the complexity of the system, not easily explained, but more importantly, out of respect for the system as something that is internal to the trans community and that I see no reason to be made more legible to the outside world. It is only to contextualize trans politics and communities in India as radically different from those in the West that I felt the need for this short introduction. Trans women in India live, work, and occupy public space together. This is a strategy for survival arrived upon out of a deep understanding of public violence, discrimination, and vulnerability. Most trans people in India come from poor families (one of the reasons for this may be that trans people who are from economically well-off families might be concerned about inheritance issues and losing out on financial support if they were to assert their gender openly), or if they are not from poor families, they become economically, socially, and politically dispossessed as a result of their trans identity. Dalit trans activist and artist Living Smile Vidya talks about transphobia as a type of brahmanism, with the hijra becoming the untouchable subject. Because of transphobia, even hijras and trans men who come from well-off, Savarna families are unable to pursue their education or procure jobs. It is only in Dalit colonies that trans people are able to rent out houses. This might be the result not of an acceptance of our trans identity but rather of the economic necessity of the poorer house owner to rent out his or her house. The fact that there is more visibility of hijras in Dalit colonies has to a certain extent normalized their presence, though they are still ridiculed on an everyday basis. Heteropatriarchal boxes of acceptable gender categories are disrupted by our very presence. Unlike sexuality, which can be a private identity that...

In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson offers the first extensive critical account of the role of vowed religious women (Roman Catholic and Anglican nuns and Protestant deaconesses) in the development of nursing in the West. Nelson's impressive synthesis of primary and secondary literature on religion, gender, medicine, and politics ranges across three continents and four religious traditions, opening up significant new directions for scholarship on women and work in the modern world. Organized nursing by religious women began in seventeenth-century France, but Nelson's study rightly focuses on the nineteenth century, when vowed women—particularly Roman Catholic sisters—contributed significantly to the growth of institutional health care through their work in hospitals they owned and managed. Their work has been ignored or underappreciated by most historians, and Nelson offers a persuasive analysis of the scholarly biases that have discouraged attention to religious women. It is the failure of women's history to take serious notice of vowed women that most disturbs Nelson, and her own study has much in common with early work in that field. Her burden is to recover silenced voices and establish their relevance as historical actors. Although she works within a more sophisticated critical apparatus than did early historians engaged in similar recovery projects, Nelson is hobbled by some of the same constraints. Confronted with an overabundance of stories to tell, she takes an expansive approach that forces some sacrifice of detail and analytical depth. Her five case studies highlight the work of different religious communities in North America, Britain, and Australia, suggesting, quite fairly, that the geographical reach of their work is reason enough for scholars to take a closer look at vowed women.

Undermining Identities in Johnny Blazes’ Check One PleaseThe Ambiguous Body as Feminist Performance Tool Kellyn Johnson (bio) Ambiguity generates uncertainty. It thwarts classification through resisting definition. As defined by Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo, ambiguity refers to “both … and” rather than “either … or.”1 Ambiguity thus suggests plurality and resists categorical definition. These qualities make ambiguity a useful performance tool for feminist intervention in gender and sexual hierarchies that have originated from the male/female binary—particularly when it is deployed on and through the body itself. An ambiguous body cannot be clearly sexed as either male or female but rather exists in between these sexual identities. Performing an ambiguous body positions identity as a process and challenges the materiality of corporeality. While the body can be seen, touched, smelled, and heard, rendering it very much physically actual, the ambiguous performing body creates a slipperiness of that actuality through crafting a fiction in which corporeal experience intersects with social discourse. Performances of sexual ambiguity, such as Johnny Blazes’ Check One Please, use the body as a disruptive force in order to explore the connection between material sex and the discursive performance of gender and sexuality. Using costuming and physicality, Blazes crafts an ambiguous body, forcing the spectators to ground their performance analysis in a theatrical body without trustworthy physical indications of Blazes’ “actual” sex. As a theatrical body, the body becomes discursive, a construction manipulated to fit the interests and needs of the performer. By rendering the material discursive, I argue, Blazes presents an effective method of using theatricality to challenge identitarian categories. Through a close analysis of the performance, I examine how the ambiguous body Blazes creates both resists definition and reveals the continued dependence upon sex in determining gender classification. The average audience member does not know Blazes and cannot be certain of the performer’s biologic or gendered identity. Their inability to determine sex and relate it to the gender roles with which Blazes plays creates a crisis of definition [End Page 72] that reveals the need for a more expansive understanding of, and vocabulary for, gender rooted in individual expression versus categorial expectations. Indeed, Blazes reveals definitions for trans and queer identity as equally restrictive as the rigid expectations of masculine and feminine. The performance consists of two distinct parts. As described by Blazes, The first part creates a simple visual metaphor for the dilemma faced daily by trans, genderqueer, and other gender variant people: which box do I check? The second looks at the tendency of communities to demand “proof” of one’s trans identity and history as a transperson. Both sections use humor, props, and vibrant physicality to position Femme as part of a larger, complicated identity.2 In so positioning Femme, Blazes critiques rigid definitions of trans and queer identity to a predominantly queer and queer allied audience. The performance empowers the spectators through its depiction of their experiences and perspective while challenging them to think critically about the implications of “demands for proof” of belonging. Although Check One Please was originally created in 2008 for the Femme Show, a production of “queer art for queer people” that toured the northeastern United States, Blazes subsequently posted the entire performance to the websites YouTube and Trans-Genre, expanding the piece’s reach and extending its “run” indefinitely through digital accessibility.3 While the video has not gone “viral,” part 1 on YouTube has been viewed more than thirteen hundred times since November 2008 by individuals and groups.4 Thus, while Check One Please originally served as an act within the variety performance of the Femme Show, it has assumed an independent existence on the internet. As such, I am most interested in how spectators react to the piece as a singular performance and its social justice potential as a freely available and widely viewed video. Blazes’ intentional posting of the piece functions as a moment of digital activism by raising consciousness and spurring conversation. A Boston-based drag artist committed to undermining binaries, expanding queer identities, and challenging identity based oppressions, Blazes seemingly takes pleasure in ambiguity on and offstage. Indeed, Blazes’ Facebook profile features an anonymous quote asking “Are you supposed to be a...

Even though the lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in trans populations is around 50 percent (Messinger and Guadalupe-Diaz 2020), there is an alarming absence of trans-specific and trans-inclusive research and interventions to address IPV. For sociologist Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz, this absence raises two important questions: 1) Under what conditions are trans people's experiences of IPV erased? and 2) To what extent does intimate partner violence produce “genderist” systems? Answering these questions first requires a historical tracing of social scientific understandings of IPV, which stem from 1970s feminist activism and scholarship that understood gender in binary-essentialist terms. This work resulted in legal and institutional adoption of cis- and heteronormative approaches to domestic violence work (as it was called at the time) that continue to center white cisgender women in discourses on the gendered nature of violence in romantic relationships. Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives invites us to examine the ways that systems of power foster IPV while also examining the ways that IPV replicates and reinforces systems of power, namely, genderism.Transgressed is a sociological study that uses a modified grounded theory framework to expand our knowledge of the relationship between interpersonal violence and structural, institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal genderism. The text begins from the assumption that little scholarship in trans studies has focused on IPV and little criminological scholarship has focused on trans survivors. Transgressed is based on data from thirteen personal interviews and five online free-write questionnaires with eighteen trans survivors of IPV. This study contributes to our knowledge about trans survivors of IPV by providing empirical evidence for existing claims made by activists and scholars, most notably that genderist social and legal structures erase trans people from social institutions meant to reduce the incidence of IPV. Contemporary interventions within health care, in schools, on college campuses, and in the workplace thus often only account for cis people, leaving behind fertile grounds for intimate abusers to disproportionately harm trans people.Throughout the book, Transgressed includes vivid descriptions of abuse by contextualizing survivors' experiences in terms of genderist systems that assume that only cisgender men are perpetrators of abuse and only cisgender women are victims of abuse. Guadalupe-Diaz frames individual stories within broader genderist systems to paint a picture of the ways that understandings of trans IPV both converge with and diverge from patterns of violence represented in mainstream victimology. Abuser attacks reflect genderist systems in that they “regulate the boundaries of appropriateness as defined by a genderist culture and the abuser” (77), while “positive attacks” reinforce “a limited conception of the victim's gender expression” through positive reactions to gender conformity (77). Transphobic attacks, on the other hand, are aimed at trans survivors' trans identities by “belittling bodies, making victims feel that the abuser was doing them a favor in staying, stereotyping and misunderstanding their transition processes, or threatening to ‘out’ them” (79). In effect, these attacks work only in societies and cultures where trans identities are institutionally antagonized, including through cultural scripts, lack of legal protections, and unequal access to health care.In his richest chapter, Guadalupe-Diaz moves beyond documenting abuse and toward participants' understandings of their experiences. Most participants “saw many of their experiences with abuse as attempts by abusers to control [gender] transition and define them on the abusers' own terms” (87). That is, abusers manipulate and limit survivors' ongoing gender embodiments and imaginaries, fostering a dynamic and mutually constitutive disempowerment loop. This inter- and intrapersonal entrapment leads us to ask not only when this loop is maintained, but also how it is broken. When describing victim identities in the help-seeking process, participants appropriated the notion that victims were “submissive, traditionally feminine, and . . . did not fight back” (121). Paired with their abusers' genderist and transphobic attacks, as well as awareness that resources such as police and shelters often benefit only cis people, participants struggled to see themselves as victims able to access formal resources. While some did access formal resources, queer kinship structures, informal resources, and fighting back more often fostered avenues for trans IPV victims to move toward survivorship.Although topics like immigration are alluded to in the text, intersectional factors (e.g., ableism, classism, racism) do not receive the attention I crave. Guadalupe-Diaz correctly avers that failure to adopt intersectional frameworks results in goals that remedy individual problems but “merge with the neoliberal state” (49). Transgressed at times centers some narratives of multiply marginalized participants, yet the extent to which gendered understandings of IPV otherize multiply marginalized people goes unremarked. For instance, how are gendered understandings of IPV artifacts of class privilege that collude with structures of class domination? Limitations notwithstanding, Guadalupe-Diaz has crafted an engaging and valuable study that synthesizes, contextualizes, and elevates the voices of privileged trans populations who have sustained violence from intimate partners. This study would fare well for courses in criminology and victimology, gender studies, and social science approaches to trans studies. Transgressed invites us all to examine and challenge genderist systems that facilitate IPV.

Trans people1 – those whose gender identity does not match that assigned to them at birth – are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, reflecting their marginalized legal, bureaucratic and socio-economic status2. Recent substantial international expansion to the medico-legal rights afforded them operates in tension with cisnormative welfare structures. Based upon a Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with 35 trans people with experience of homeless in Wales, UK, alongside 12 workers in the system, I argue that anti-discrimination legislation is insufficient in its current form to prevent discrimination against trans people. I suggest that, without addressing deeper structural cisnormativity, service provision for trans people experiencing homelessness and other forms of social marginalisation will remain inadequate. This argument rests upon the following findings. (1) Failing to consider exclusion at a structural level leads to system-gaps and misunderstandings, producing poor service experiences. (2) The specific needs of trans applicants are under considered in system planning, reducing scope for meaningful homelessness interventions. (3) An equalities approach can produce a reductive and potentially pathologizing focus upon trans identity, diverting from specific individual needs. I conclude that provision of inclusive services necessitates consideration of the impact of deep cisnormative assumptions in service design and delivery, and their resultant exclusion of trans people.

This study explores the health-seeking process for queer and/or trans people, and factors involved in their healthcare negotiations and decisions to seek care. The data included 20 semi-structured interviews of people who identify as queer and/or trans in the southeastern United States. Qualitative analysis was conducted using constructivist grounded theory to inductively analyze accounts of healthcare events, behaviors, and experiences of queer and/or trans people. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 57, with a majority identifying as trans/gender nonconforming (65%) and those remaining identifying as queer, cisgender individuals (35%). Both queer and trans identities can overlap, therefore, I use the term “queer and/or trans.” Categories generated through the coding process were as follows: (1) mental health concerns, (2) negotiating gendered and heteronormative assumptions, and (3) significance of participants creating a bed of knowledge. My analysis asserts that these data indicate that queer and/or trans participants manage not just healthcare decisions, but the hopelessness attached to seeking this type of help.

Trans people often use social media to connect with others, find and share resources, and post transition-related content. However, because most social media platforms are not built with trans people in mind and because online networks include people who may not accept one's trans identity, sharing trans content can be difficult. We studied Trans Time, a social media site developed particularly for trans people to document transition and build community. We interviewed early Trans Time users (n = 6) and conducted focus groups with potential users (n = 21) to understand how a trans-specific site uniquely supports its users. We found that Trans Time has the potential to be a safe space, encourages privacy, and effectively enables its users to selectively view content using content warnings. Together, safety, privacy, and content warnings create an online space where trans people can simultaneously build community, find support, and express both the mundanity and excitement of trans life. Yet in each of these areas, we also learned ways that the site can improve. We provide implications for how social media sites may better support trans users, as well as insular communities of people from other marginalized groups.

This article maps an overlooked cultural history of Italy by exploring the literary notion of ‘trans geographies’ – a subgenre at the crossroads of autobiography, memoir, and travel narrative – through the memorialist work of sociologist and trans activist Porpora Marcasciano. Her narratives of people and place have repositioned trans identities within public spaces, while illustrating a larger phenomenon that remains underexplored within Italian Studies, namely, how places have shaped trans identities and how trans identities have, in turn, (re)shaped places. This article situates Marcasciano’s stories of gender self-determination in relation to: (1) interdisciplinary approaches to trans geographies; and (2) the writings of two very different Italian LGBT+ icons, Romina Cecconi and Mario Mieli. As a bard of the trans movement, Marcasciano has narrated concealed trans/cultural landscapes across the Italian peninsula, including Naples and the centuries-old culture of the femminielli; Rome’s dolce vita during the 1970s and 1980s; and the achievements of the trans movement in Bologna during the 1980s and the 1990s. This remapping ultimately unveils subaltern spaces that have remained at the margins of Italian collective memory as well as spaces where trans people have successfully explored new modes of inhabiting and sharing places, beyond taken-for-granted notions of normativity and transgression. The goal of this article is to outline how Marcasciano’s trans geographies have generated creative and critical sites while fostering more inclusive ways of narrating and sharing cultural history.