Trans Identities Research Articles

“It’s like we are not human”: discourses of humanisation and otherness in the representation of trans identity in British broadsheet newspapers

ABSTRACT This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain’s so-called “quality” newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or “other” transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both “pro-trans” and “anti-trans” articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either “progressive” or “conservative”.

Crafting the Intimate Body

The intimate body—essentialized in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, complicated in Helen Chadwick’s Eat Me—is revisited through discourse on intersex, debate around trans identities and contemporary feminisms, via the subversive actions of radical crafting and visual, textual, material and performic queering.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Liveability, environment and policy: Reflections on trans student experience of entering UK higher education

This article examines the intersection of lived experience and equality policy in UK Higher Education (HE), focusing on trans students’ experiences of planning for and applying to University. The research is based on participatory research with an lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer / questioning (LGBTQ+) youth project in Brighton, UK. We frame the relationship between trans identities and equalities in education in terms of liveability. The article contributes to gender and education research by foregrounding the experience of trans students on the cusp of entering HE, illustrating how they navigate challenges around environment, bureaucracy and policy.

Exploring cisgender therapists' attitudes towards, and experience of, working with trans people in the United Kingdom

AbstractObjectivesResearch suggests therapists may be lacking the skills and experience to work with the trans population and may hold a range of personal and professional views about trans people, in line with wider society. The aim of this study is to understand attitudes that qualified cisgender UK therapists have towards this client group, how equipped they feel to work with them and to identify gaps in training and experience.DesignA mixed‐methods, concurrent nested design was used.MethodsData were generated via an online survey. Quantitative data were analysed alongside a reflexive thematic analysis.ResultsThe politicisation of trans identities has created a toxic debate that has left therapists confused about their professional and personal stance, but there is an earnest attempt to understand this. Therapists are generally supportive of trans people and a majority have worked with this community, but a significant minority of these therapists could be said to hold transphobic views or working practices. Therapists feel ill‐equipped to work with the trans community and are fearful of getting things wrong. Younger, more recently trained therapists are more comfortable working with gender identity, with older, “gender critical” and psychoanalytic therapists struggling the most.ConclusionsThe politicisation of trans identities has created a split in UK therapists, and work is necessary to ensure adequate training and ongoing reflexivity regarding personal biases. Clarity and reassurance are needed on the implications of the proposed conversion therapy ban, particularly on exploratory therapeutic work within an affirmative stance.

Re-Presenting the Gender-Queer Figure

A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints was an exhibition curated by Asato Ikeda for the Royal Ontario Museum which included many prints and artifacts depicting the wakashu in Edo Japan. The wakashu, male youth who were distinguished from both adult men and women to be represented as “a third gender”, were depicted by the exhibition in conformity with contemporary queer aesthetics and trans identities. This paper explores the curatorial practices involved in the representation of the wakashu as a third gender or gender-queer figure, elucidating the many (re)appropriations involved in the production of a postcolonial queer visual imaginary. I begin by walking through Ikeda’s A Third Gender exhibition, and recounting the representational practices therein, to examine the construction of the wakashu as an essentially gendered figure and exhume the historical and cultural characteristics that are elided by this re-presentation. I then explore the incommensurability of the wakashu with contemporary queer and trans representational practices as a fundamentally queer failure, which may precipitate other affective relations with this figure that transcend our spatial and temporal differences. Finally, I question how these inappropriate/d re-presentations might produce an affective rupture within the queer visual imaginary that invites us to interrogate the postcolonial and transnational structuring of sexuality and gender.

“Transsexuality” and gender ratio in Poland: A case study on the East/West dichotomy

ABSTRACT The article investigates scientific and journalistic discourses around differences in gender ratio among trans persons. The disparity between Poland and many other countries that was first noted in the 1980s was repeatedly associated with the different gender politics in the capitalist West and the (post) state-socialist East. Using Foucauldian methodology, the article claims that this discourse was constructed such that Poland’s ratio—and consequently Poland’s gender order—would always appear problematic, while Western countries were considered an invisible standard. Discourses around this ratio elucidate the role of heteronormativity and biological essentialism in the construction of the category of “transsexuality” in state-socialist Poland. The analysis also reveals that chronologies of LGBT and feminist movements had direct consequences for the theoretical and cultural spaces of trans identities.

The ‘Correct’ Trans


 
 
 The purpose of this essay was to explore my own personal experience as a transwoman through the frameworks I had been introduced to during my time at the Faculty of Information. This article seeks to (1) take a critical look at gender from the perspective of someone who has embodied multiple perceived gendered identities and has successfully begun passing without effort and (2) examine the knowledge that personal experience provides for analyzing current trends in data collection technologies. The essay focuses on transwomen, with much attention paid to non-binary, and the socioeconomic situations trans individuals find themselves in—the pressures pushed upon us by a society that desperately wants to categorize us. The essay comes to the conclusion that in response to trans identities gaining validity, our society has crafted a correct version of being transgender, one which continues to serve a neoliberal mindset, being understood by clear binaries within data collection and categorization. Ultimately, I provide a critical perspective on the trans experience within a society that corrals individuals toward A or B and the resulting sociological violence trans people suffer, both gender conforming and non-binary.
 
 

Strange Tensions

AbstractThis article analyzes the history of trans identities and intersex subjectivities to understand intersex and trans intercommunity relations and identify coalitional strategies. Citing Black and postcolonial studies scholars such as C. Riley Snorton and Zine Magubane, it concludes that trans identity and intersex subjectivity share a colonial racial history. Specifically, it builds on Snorton's “analysis of gender as a racial arrangement wherein the fungibility of captive flesh produced a context for understanding sex and gender as mutable and subject to rearrangement in medicine and law” to account for how the same racial arrangement of gender also formed intersex subjectivity. Trans identity and intersex subjectivity, then, have roots in colonialism and slavery, and the ungendering of Black flesh made interchangeable goods. This history has left a legacy of intercommunity tension in the form of whiteness. Consequently, addressing sex/gender as a racial arrangement is necessary to address tensions and build coalitions.

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

The Consequences of Conflating Trans-ness and Vulnerability

Trans Theory and Intimate Partner Violence

The limitations of feminist frameworks to conceptualize trans people’s unique experiences have led to an emerging trans theoretical framework, seeking to complicate theoretical understandings of gender to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary identities. In this paper, I provide support to this emerging theoretical framework by first illustrating how Black, Indigenous and queer feminist frameworks conceptualize engendered violence, highlighting the theoretical limitations when applied to trans experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). Subsequently, I re-examine trans IPV through a trans theory lens, demonstrating how complexities of trans identities and embodiment of gender necessitates a more comprehensive theoretical understanding of gender, and how trans theory can provide nuanced understanding.

Not Just Checklists and Rainbows: Exploring Canadian Dietitians' Beliefs, Values, and Knowledge of Transgender Nutritional Care.

Many transgender (short form: trans) people are experiencing disparities within Canadian health care systems, including nutritional and dietetic health care systems. This research explores the views, beliefs, and experiences of Canadian dietitians about trans nutritional care and seeks to understand how dietitians can better address the nutritional needs of trans individuals. Semistructured online interviews were conducted with 16 Canadian dietitians. Interviews were transcribed and the data were analyzed thematically. Three main themes were created; (1) There's an Unjust System, (2) We've Come a Long Way, and (3) Not Just Checklists and Rainbows. The participants explored the historic nature of the Canadian dietetic profession and noted the connection between cis-normativity and the erasure of trans identities. They also explored how dietitians could better address the health needs of trans people, including moving beyond the acknowledgement of trans identities to changing the way gender is viewed in the profession. The dietetic profession must move beyond surface-level activities and rethink gender. Recommendations include adding trans-focused care training into the profession, creating safer spaces for trans individuals, advocacy and allyship, and recruiting trans people to the profession.

Autism and Trans Identity

Much discussion of the documented link between autism and transgender identity focuses on identifying a reason behind this link, with the implication that if a cause were to be identified, this would justify disregarding or questioning the trans identity of autistic people to a greater extent than is already the case. I focus instead on the commonalities between the trans and autistic experiences, including pathologisation, medical gatekeeping and a lack of representation in public discourse about both autism and trans identity, which tend to be dominated by non-autistic and cisgender people respectively.

Prevalence and prediction of medical distrust in a diverse medical genomic research sample

PurposeMedical distrust has been identified as a persistent barrier to medical care, affecting preventative screening, treatment uptake, and treatment adherence. Despite this, little research to date has examined medical distrust in a genomic medicine context. The goal of this work was to assess the prevalence of medical distrust in a genomic medicine research study and examine patient-level demographic, access-related, and health-status characteristics that predict medical distrust. MethodsWe assessed medical distrust in a research sample of adults (N = 967) receiving genomic sequencing to screen for hereditary risk of cancer syndromes in the United States. We used multiple predictive variable selection models to determine predictors of medical distrust followed by marginal mean analyses to characterize the relationships. ResultsThe prevalence of medical distrust was 32%. The final model indicated that Black and African American race/ethnicity; trans, nonbinary, or nonidentifying gender identity; high education; low income; low access to health care; and poor Short Form 12 mental health composite scores predict medical distrust. ConclusionMedical distrust may pose similar challenges to genomic sequencing, as it does in other medical contexts. The pattern of variables that predict distrust suggest that increasing access and accommodation for stigmatized and underserved communities may help overcome the negative effects of medical distrust.

The social life of data: strategies for categorizing fluid and multiple genders

ABSTRACT Accurate data collection from LGBTIQ+ communities is crucial for public health research and the provision of equitable services. Emergent fluid, multiple, trans and non-binary gender identities complicate data collection in ways that make an excellent case-study for rethinking the categorization of such data. In this article, we explore some of the obstacles to collecting data from trans, gender-diverse and non-binary (TGD) communities, and the difficulties in synthesizing meaning about fluid or multiple identity categories. We review a selection of international surveys from the last 10 years and then present a case-study of data collection in an Australian mixed-methods study of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of social media. In doing so we draw upon trans and gender diverse people’s lived experiences to reinterpret our survey dataset in which responses that ‘refused categorisation’ were initially removed. We argue that theorizing the ‘social life of data’ – that is analysing the disciplinary orientation and purpose of research, while also acknowledging the moment and site of data collection, the methods used, and the mutable meanings in play – better accounts for the lived experiences of gender beyond binary and static identities.

A Trans Way of Seeing

Abstract This autoethnographic piece, cowritten through letters exchanged between Kitty Rotolo, currently incarcerated in New York State, and Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, an abolitionist organizer and graduate student in New York City, explores elaborations of trans identity, affinity, and community across prison walls. Reflecting on the authors’ friendship and the possibilities for mutual recognition that queer kinship has afforded them—even across the distance and disposability produced by incarceration—these letters reveal transness as a practice of seeing. Through letter writing and storytelling, the authors explore how Rotolo has negotiated incarceration in men's prisons, including the transphobic violence of prison, in order to articulate and live transness—as individual identity, as resistance, as affinity, as collectivity, and as practice—inside.

‘It’s Not Just About a Rainbow Lanyard’: How Structural Cisnormativity Undermines the Enactment of Anti-Discrimination Legislation in the Welsh Homelessness Service

AbstractTrans 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.

Violence against homeless gay and transgender youth in Pakistan – a short report

ABSTRACT Violence against youth with diverse sexual and gender identities is an understudied area in Pakistan. This article explores how homeless gay and transgener youth (HGTY) experience multiple forms of violence and how social structural conditions produce contexts for violence against them. This study is based on qualitative interviews with fourteen HGTY, aged 16–25 years old. The interviews suggest that participants experienced multiple forms of violence simultaneously. Social structures like religion, ethnicity, and politics shaped broader cultural intolerance for sexual and/or gender diversity. Not being able to conform to social norms of gender and sexuality not only contributed to violence against participants but shaped their trajectories into homelessness and sex work. The ‘new’ identities of being homeless and being sex workers intersected with their gay and, trans identities, exacerbating their vulnerability. The findings indicate that there is an urgent need for law supportive of sexuality and gender diverse youth to mitigate experiences of violence.

‘If only I were a boy …’: Psychotherapeutic Explorations of Transgender in Children and Adolescents

This paper is based on the author’s experience of working with a particular group of female/male trans children and young people who present a similar clinical profile: a fragile ego prone to fragmentation and concrete thinking. Often, there is evidence of a grievance over the failed ideal object, which is internalized, projected into the body, and then attacked. Faced with the developmental challenge of sexuality at puberty, young adults withdraw to a psychic retreat designed to halt development. This paper focuses on the development of a trans identity in defence against an underlying fear of depressive anxieties and psychic collapse. It describes the ongoing assessment of Joanne, a 19‐year‐old biological female who wanted to be known as Luke in therapy and wished to transition in the belief that this was the only way she could have a life. The concrete nature of Joanne’s thinking created problems in the therapy, as thoughts were often experienced as physical actions. This paper describes the function of the phantasy that transitioning performs in creating a psychic retreat from the demands of psychological development.

Creating queer safe space: relational space-making at a grassroots LGBT pride event in Scotland

Queer safe space is commonly understood simply as space that is safe for queer people. In this paper we seek to develop a more nuanced conceptualisation of queer safe space attuned to how the process of creating space as simultaneously queer space and safe space can mean making compromises with both safety and queerness. Our research uses a case study of ‘Free Pride’ a grassroots LGBT Pride group in Glasgow, Scotland that sought to create a radical and inclusive event space, particularly for transgender people, but attracted controversy when it banned drag performers from the event, before reversing this decision. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the organizers of Free Pride, alongside online statements collected from those involved in the controversy, we show how the contradictions and complexities that arose from the group’s decision and its reversal highlights the contested political underpinnings of contemporary Pride events and the potentially fraught relations that can exist between certain identities within LGBT communities. Ultimately, Free Pride’s decision-making raised questions over how queer people relate to one another at Pride events, the inclusiveness of drag for trans identities, and the importance of seeing and being with one another in Pride spaces. We argue that although the process of queer space-making involved these complex and contradictory negotiations between safety and queerness, Free Pride ultimately created a queer safe space focused on queer collectivity.