Transgender Lives Research Articles

Transgender lives at the population level: Evidence from Danish administrative data

This paper provides the first rigorous account of the diverse characteristics of transgender individuals at the population level, using data from Danish population registers. We observe three transgender subpopulations within the same national setting: all who changed thier legal sex (T-Legal, n = 1,995), all who have been assigned trans-related diagnostic codes (T-ICD, n = 1,594), and those who self-identified as transgender in a representative survey (T-Survey, n = 197, weighted n = 44,958). Results show significant differences in the subpopulations’ backgrounds, family, education and labour market characteristics, and healthcare use. These differences extend beyond comparisons with the general population to great variations between each of the transgender subpopulations. Individuals with legal sex changes, and particularly those with trans-related diagnostic codes, face substantial disadvantages across various outcomes. Compared to the general population and the T-Survey subpopulation, the T-Legal subpopulation and the T-ICD subpopulation have significantly higher numbers of psychiatric hospital visits, lower educational attainment, lower annual earnings, and reduced employment rates, also when controlling for background characteristics. Earnings and employment rates remained significantly lower also when controlling for educational attainment. Our results show that the strategy chosen to identify trans individuals in population data has a great impact on the characteristics observed, and that trans individuals captured by surveys do not necessarily represent all transgender individuals, including those who seek to medically or legally transition. Furthermore, our results indicate that high numbers of trans individuals observed in surveys do not necessarily correspond to high demands for gender-affirming treatments or legal sex change. Finally, we show that transgender individuals who seek gender-affirming healthcare constitute a distinct and significantly disadvantaged group, also compared to other trans subpopulations.

El mundo es de las mujeres: trans life and maladjustment in Antonio Mercero’s El final del hombre

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a notable increase in representations of transgender individuals in Spanish popular culture, particularly in written and visual media. This study analyzes Antonio Mercero’s crime fiction novel El final del hombre (2017) in which transgender life functions as a metaphor for modern and progressive Spain, highlighting its successes and limitations regarding gender justice and representation. While the novel introduces a transgender detective as a prominent figure in mainstream fiction, it also perpetuates certain stereotypes that it aims to challenge. Drawing on the theory of trans maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich, here I explore how El final del hombre deviates from traditional narrative structures and delves into the experiences that define maladjustment. As the novel navigates various regulatory mechanisms and patriarchal institutions, such as the family, the healthcare system and the police, it also underscores the ongoing challenges in moving beyond limited portrayals and expanding the possibilities of transgender identities and experiences.

Transgender Imagining and the Danger of Normative Theory

ABSTRACT This paper looks at the harms of superimposing normative theorizing on communities who live and love outside the psychoanalytic norm, particularly transgender individuals. Writing in 2019/2023, an especially perilous period for transgender people’s rights and safety in the United States, McGleughlin critiques a published paper by Alessandra Lemma to illustrate the analytic tendency to rely on normative theory that may harm patients. Lemma’s pieces focuses on a patient called “Jane.” The 18-year-old wishes to pursue body modification to change their gender, but the analyst believes Jane is not “truly” transgender, and she creates a narrative of Jane’s repair. While Lemma’s rhetoric suggests that she does not believe that transgender life is inherently pathological, McGleughlin exposes a beneath-the-surface treatment rife with normative assumptions. Uncritically bringing these assumptions to clinical work has the potential to distort or even erase the story of the other, the author argues, harkening back to treatments in which the clinician is said to have “helped” the gay or lesbian patient show sexual restraint.

Homonormativity in Peripheral Spaces: LBT Women's Processes of Becoming Political Subjects

AbstractHomonormativity refers to the ratification and endorsement of heteronormative institutions and structures into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) lives, culture and discourse. While homonormativity is commonly manifested in (relatively) privileged, White, able‐bodied gay men, this paper focuses on lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LBT) women's experiences in Israeli peripheral and rural spaces. As a concept, homonormativity has the potential of reducing lived experiences into a widely criticized category. Instead, we voice the geographical, temporal and gendered potential of homonormative processes to articulate varied ways for leading a queer life under capitalism. Based on 61 qualitative interviews with LBT women living in the Israeli peripheries, we argue that LBT women employ two major homonormative processes of becoming political subjects to negotiate their sexualities in a space fraught with LGBTphobia. These homonormative processes are comprised of assimilation and contestation, revealing a nuanced mode of political subjectivity, shaped by ongoing experiences of LGBTphobia.

Trans/Locatability: Performing Public Appearance in Locative Media

The promises and perils of visibility dominate many contemporary conversations about transgender life; this essay considers the ways in which locatability works alongside visibility to regulate the sphere of public appearance, informing who can safely appear and in what spaces they can or cannot do so. The locative performance Appear to Me (2020), written by gender-expansive artist eppchez yo-sí yes for the Philadelphia company Swim Pony, shows how such performance can challenge dominant constructions of location that involve the violent displacement of marginalized populations, as well as locative technologies—such as the Global Positioning System—that help create and sustain these constructions. Through a smartphone app that uses GPS to trigger audio cues, Appear to Me guides listeners along the Delaware River Trail in South Philadelphia, where they encounter the voices of people displaced from the waterfront, including street queens, houseless queers, and the land’s Indigenous Lenape inhabitants. I discuss how the performance both engages the politics of appearance on the textual level and performs new possibilities for appearance through its appropriation of GPS technology. In doing so, it enacts a trans epistemology of location I name trans/locatability: a multiply-emplaced, gender-expansive position of safety and solidarity that asserts the right of all bodies to appear in public without harm.

Glitch as a Trans Representational Mode in Video Games

Following recent work by transgender studies scholars that has questioned the relationship between queer theory and trans studies, this essay considers how glitch video games, which have previously been considered to be part of the “queer games movement,” use the glitch as a way of representing transgender life. I survey three glitch games, Problem Attic (2013, Liz Ryerson), Strawberry Cubes (2015, Loren Schmidt), and Anatomy (2016, Kitty Horrorshow)—each of which uses the glitch as an expressive visual aesthetic, remediating the analog artifacts of signal noise or error as a sonic and visual quality, as well as a game design principle. These games place an emphasis on the body as that which glitches, exploring the bad feelings of trans embodiment, including dissociation and dysphoria, as well as demonstrating how the glitched body can be both desired and transformative. In the final section, this essay considers how transgender artists and the ways their work foregrounds glitch as an operation of the body are integral not only to glitch art history, but also to video game development more widely, exploring the influence of glitch aesthetics and game design in Pony Island (2016), a glitch video game by cisgender designer, Daniel Mullins.

Vietnamese Transgender Persons in Autobiography: An Analysis and Notes on a Transgender Woman’s Discourse and Politics

Vietnam in recent years has seen increased interest and research into the lives of transgender people. However, the majority of these pieces of research stem from outsider observations of transgender people and transgender lives. While they aim to contribute to advocacy work and empowerment of transgender people, they nevertheless fail to explore the societal and cultural factors influencing the way transgender persons perform their bodily practices. There is also a distinct lack of exploration of the way in which transgender people view, create, and represent their own selves and their subjectivities in their own words. Seeking to contribute to filling this gap, this paper uses phenomenology and content analysis to examine the autobiography of the transgender singer and celebrity Nguyen Huong Giang as an example of Vietnamese transgender life writing. Huong Giang’s construction and representation of her own identity as a trans woman through her autobiography reveal discourses on gender and womanhood and femininity in the Vietnamese context. In turn, this provides critical insights into how Vietnamese society views the role of women within society and the family, and how trans women must also transform themselves to fit this role as part of their transition and survival, in order to be successfully considered a woman.

Gender Is Carceral: On Racialized Gender Criminalization and Abolitionist Cis-Trans Coalitions

This brief essay reflects on the conjunctional histories of anti-black and anti-trans criminalization in the context of the contemporary moral panic aimed at eradicating transgender life. Within the last couple of years, conservatives have introduced and (and sometimes passed) legislation in thirty-four states criminalizing trans people (with an emphasis on trans healthcare and bathroom use) and the parents, doctors, and teachers who have sought to serve as trans allies. How is this wave of fascist panic and propaganda linked to broader histories of racial and gendered criminalization in the United States? And how might a more thorough understanding of the carceral dimensions of race and gender aid in solidarity efforts between cis and trans abolitionist organizers? This paper reflects on these questions and their stakes in our current political moment.

FENOMENA POLA KOMUNIKASI DAN GAYA HIDUP TRANSGENDER DI PEKANBARU (PENDEKATAN KONSTRUKSI REALITAS SOSIAL : PEMIKIRAN PETER L. BERGER TENTANG KENYATAAN SOSIAL)

This study aims to find out the phenomena in transgender life both in communication and social life. The application of supporting theory in this problem is by discussing communication patterns within the family (internal) scope and Peter L.Berger's approach of thinking which discusses the social reality of a transgender person. This research method uses a qualitative phenomenological approach, data collection techniques using free interviews addressed to informants based on criteria according to the researcher's assessment. The results of this study are the existence of communication patterns within the family as one of the factors in assessing one's identity towards the environment. As well as to explore this problem, a real-life thinking approach is needed, namely Peter L. Berger's approach in which in examining a person's life it is seen from several supporting factors, so that transgender people can describe the reality of their life based on these factors.

Tales of Triumph: An Analysis of Famous Transgender Personalities from India

Purpose: The journey of travelling for authentication of one’s own sexual or gender identity is never a rose paved path before transgender persons, as their journey is beyond or away from established ideologies proposed about gender. Being born with a particular sexual identity but later realizing that the birth sex is not the actual essence of own self is a serious traumatic phase in any transgender life. It is never a pleasant reality for any of the believer of heterosexuality. They can never accept the existence of a varied gender or sexual category apart from one assigned at the time of birth. Thus, transgenders are forced to hide or suppress own identity to get acceptance in a gender binary led society like India. But there are many who were able to triumph in spite of sufferings from the shackles of gender inequality. Their tales are of courage, willpower, and self-reliance held firmly even before whips of harsh gender otherness. Thus, the article titled “Tales of Triumph: An Analysis of Famous Transgender Personalities from India” is an earnest attempt to draw mass attention to such excellent personalities from a suppressed gender group. Design: The article is prepared by collecting information from secondary sources such as peer-reviewed journals and National and International Publications. Internet sources, and research sources like Google Scholar, Research Gate, SSRN, Elsevier, Academia, and Shodhganga are used for identifying the research gap. To highlight the key aspects of the research ABCD analysis is used. Data is acquired from research journals, doctoral theses, scholarly articles, and websites to carry out the research that has been proposed. Concentrating on the keywords Transgender, Transgender in India, Famous Transgender, Excellent Trans Person, Gender Fluidity, Gender Binaries, of the chosen topic, the methodology used depends mostly on collecting, analyzing, and interpreting previous knowledge. The textual analysis and comparative method will be used in the methodology. There will be a close reading of the select works of Transgender writers followed by discussions on related issues. Writing research papers and participating in conferences on the subject are also aimed at. While conducting the analyses of the study, APA Manual has been followed to adhere to its requirements. Findings: It has been found out that limited study is available regarding great transgender personalities from India, thus a paper discussing the triumph or victories of such a repressed gender minority in India is very essential for educating public about their achievements. Originality: The proposed study focuses primarily on transgender community in India and their priceless achievements in various realms of human knowledge, thus attempting to create awareness about transgender persons and their victories through various time frames. An awareness created about such a category is highly essential for a heterosexual society to reform their perspectives about third gender in India. Paper Type: Research Article

From Liberation To (Re)Criminalization: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Bodily Autonomy, and the Expansion of State Rights

For more than a generation, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutionally protected right to an abortion, and, in turn, the dignity-affirming power of reproductive autonomy and its role in designing one’s own destiny. The Court’s endorsement of the liberatory value of bodily autonomy in Roe v. Wade, as later affirmed in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, rejected attempts to justify restrictive prohibitions on abortion as valid exercises of state police powers. However, the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threatens to fundamentally redefine the boundaries between the rights of individuals and those of the state. Concluding that the decisions in Roe and Casey were “egregiously wrong,” Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs asserts that the Court’s recognition of an individual right to reproductive autonomy damaged our democratic infrastructure because the decision to grant or withhold such a right should be left to the states. This Article explores the Court’s broad abdication of abortion regulation to state legislatures within the context of the expansion of state regulation of bodily autonomy, specifically in the areas of transgender rights, gender expression, and access to gender affirming healthcare. Reproductive rights jurisprudence, including cases like Griswold, Casey, and Roe, undoubtedly provided a recognizable constitutional frame for the evolution of modern transgender rights challenges. Despite the inherent differences in the nature of the lived and legal realities of cisgender women and transgender people, both communities share common demands for dignity and self-determination informed by access to life-defining healthcare services and individual expression. The Court’s dismissal of a fundamental right to abortion in Dobbs sanctioned—if not invited—more restrictive state-level regulation of reproductive care and narrowed respect for individual autonomy in the abortion context. Given the legal and societal commonalities between access to gender-affirming care and reproductive care, it should be no surprise that state legislatures are waging similar lines of attack on the rights of transgender people. This Article proceeds in three parts. Part I explores the evolving judicial treatment of constitutional challenges to state regulation of transgender status and identity. This part positions the right to free gender expression and access to necessary gender-affirming care within the broader conversation regarding the right to bodily autonomy. Part II addresses the state legislative landscape regarding the regulation and attempted erasure of transgender lives immediately before and after the Dobbs decision. Finally, Part III examines the impact of Dobbs on the future viability of autonomy-based claims involving transgender rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Recognizing the importance of the “second founding,” this section argues that any reliance on the original design of structural federalism to realize dignity or individual autonomy would be misplaced today. Instead, this Article urges the use of a revolutionary lens that is faithful to the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment—a lens that is essential to understand the liberatory nature of the early transgender and reproductive rights cases, as well as the human cost of the impending retrenchment.

Prefiguring the Otokonoko Genre

This article examines two manga, Stop!! Hibari-Kun! and No Bra, which prefigure the increasingly popular anime and manga genre of "Otokonoko" from a queer studies perspective. Otokonoko is a term which translate to “boy-girl”, “boy-daughter”, or “boy-princess” and is often translated into English as “cross-dresser”. The genre emerged in the early 2000s and has since become a popular point of reference and conversation both within and outside of anime and manga communities. Both the genre, and its titular characters have become iconic within both Japanese and Western online culture. As with most genres, the otokonoko genre is trope heavy, so it was decided to look at works that prefigure the genre to better understand the appeal without the weight of the traditions of the genre weighing too heavily on the content. Both Stop!! Hibari-Kun! and No Bra follow the story of a boy who becomes increasingly attracted to a gender ambiguous character assigned male at birth, but who appears female to most. Both manga are centrally about this conflict between the love interests’ perceived maleness and the protagonists perceived heterosexuality. The article analyses the appeal of each work to both male and trans feminine readers, because what would later become the otokonoko genre is written and read by both male and trans feminine readers. It also argues that these manga offer something unique from Western depictions of transgender lives, based on the popularity of manga and anime among Western trans feminine readers.

Trans in Arcadia: Transgender lives in the countryside and expanding Philo's ‘rural others’ beyond the cis

This paper argues that Chris Philo's original 1992 call to recover the geographies of ‘rural others’, and the subsequent focus on marginalised lives that has emerged in rural studies in the three decades since, has yet to lead to a significant body of work on rural trans people. Whilst the straight white middle-aged male perspective dominating rural studies—Philo's ‘Mr Average’—has been interrogated on almost every other score, his likely cisgender identity has not. With the current prominence of the ‘gender-critical’ movement, and the recent decision by the UK government not to ban trans conversion therapy, transphobia in the UK is at fever pitch. Arguments against transgender rights typically claim that anti-trans beliefs are ‘common sense’ and held by most ‘average people’. UK polls indeed show that those most likely to be transphobic are male, over 50, and probably white—Philo's ‘Mr Average’ indeed. This suggests that transphobia is most rife in places where ‘Mr Average’ is concentrated, such as rural areas. So what happens when a trans person not only lives in the English countryside, but publicly transitions there? This paper tells the story of a woman named Valerie as seen through the eyes of the ‘Mr and Mrs Averages’ that otherwise populate her village community, using it both to critique the sweeping assumptions about ‘common sense’ that anti-trans activists rely on, and to demonstrate why rural studies, having explored marginalised lives for over 30 years, should now extend that curiosity and courtesy to trans people too.

TIPOLOGI PENERIMAAN TRANSGENDER DI DALAM KELUARGA (STUDI DI PONDOK PESANTREN WARIA AL FATAH DAN YAYASAN WARIA CRISIS CENTER YOGYAKARTA)

Transgender is often one of the groups who are vulnerable to living unfit. This is due to its limitations in accessing various things such as education and employment. In addition, their families often don't accept them, even though the family is the strongest fortress in protecting transgender people from violence and oppression. This study looks at how the acceptance of transgender families in the family and identifies the typology of families in accepting transgender family members. This research is qualitative research with data collection techniques and in-depth interviews. The research location was at the Al Fatah Transgender Islamic Boarding Home and the Waria Crisis Center Community in Yogyakarta.The result of this study is that the existence of transgender people is still considered a disgrace to the family so that evictions still occur. The family form is like doing Rukyah, forced marriage. So, many transgender people end up leaving their families. In addition, the typology of families who accept the existence of transgender people can be seen from three factors: education, economy, and religious understanding. Thus, family acceptance is very important in transgender life.

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Trans-Love, Cinematic Bodies, and Optical Desire Reimagined

Trans-Love, Cinematic Bodies, and Optical Desire Reimagined

Transgressing Criminology and Victimology

Transgressing Criminology and Victimology

Pink and blue in a yellow box: National Geographic’s special issue on gender identity

ABSTRACT National Geographic magazine’s January 2017 special issue focused on gender around the world, including the magazine’s first explicit discussion of gender identity and transgender lives. I argue that the issue enacts a colonizing rhetoric of new discovery to address gender identity, whereby the magazine obscures past and present understandings of gender identity from cultures around the globe to position itself (and the United States) as especially innovative and progressive. I name the phenomenon of talking about the present in ways that forecast a brighter tomorrow by deflecting other pasts and presents futurespective kainotēs.

The Radical Unreal

Much of the critical response to the post-truth condition has been to idealize the real and to call for the defense of reality against the corrosive effects of the unreal. To counter this tendency, Toby Lee offers up two recent nonfiction films that deploy what she calls the “unreality effect” as a vital strategy of political resistance. INAATE/SE/ (2016, Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil) spars with settler colonial history through a contemporary re-imagining of an ancient Ojibway prophecy, while Layer (2015, Ruth Jenrbekova and Maria Vilkovisky) tells a tale of human oviparity as an allegory for transgender life. Looking at how each film not only presents an alternative reality, but actually pushes back on the notion of reality itself, Lee argues that these works demonstrate the radical potential of the unreal—as experiential category, as representational strategy, and as a politics—and the necessity of reclaiming it as a strategy, both historically and today.

The Coming Out Process for Assigned-Female-at-Birth Transgender and Non-Binary Teenagers: Negotiating Multiple Identities, Parental Responses, and Early Transitions in Three Case Studies

In this study, I examined three case studies of Assigned-Female-At-Birth (AFAB) teenagers who came out to their families in the course of therapy; all cases are derived from private practice work from 2015 to 2018. These all have in common some of the important and distinct differences between “coming out” as LGB and “coming out” as transgender or nonbinary. Overall, these cases emphasize: (1) Specific needs of transgender teenagers and young adults, particularly with regard to appealing for permission to use hormones; (2) Race and class implications for coming out as transgender and non-binary; (3) The necessity of better general education about transgender lives; and (4) The impact of parents on transitioning experiences and self-identity. The different outcomes of gender identity outness, including different parameters for what parental approval and validation means, are explored. I conclude with clinical implications for doing work with transgender teenagers and their parents, along with advice to practitioners for how to work with a sample of parental responses in order to minimize trauma and harm to transgender and non-binary teens.