The Social Costs of Gender Nonconformity for Transgender Adults: Implications for Discrimination and Health

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.     

Transnormativity: A New Concept and Its Validation through Documentary Film About Transgender Men

While prior research has called attention to how medically based, normative understandings of sex and gender place undue restrictions on transgender people's autonomy, there has yet to be an attempt to consolidate this research into a recognizable concept that is situated within existing theoretical frameworks. This article uses documentary films focused on transgender men as an empirical example to develop the concept of transnormativity. Transnormativity describes the specific framework to which transgender people's presentations and experiences of gender are held accountable. Drawing on research specific to transgender community groups, medicalization, and legal transition, I argue that transnormativity structures transgender experience, identification, and narratives into a hierarchy of legitimacy that is dependent upon medical standards. This ideology, as I show via a content analysis of documentary films, circulates in media depictions of transgender people in ways that eclipse alternative explanations of gender non‐conformity. While medical transition is a central component of many transgender people's gender trajectory, I argue in this article that the privileging of the medical model over others creates a marginalizing effect for gender‐non‐conforming people who cannot or do not wish to medically transition.     

Normative Accountability: How the Medical Model Influences Transgender Identities and Experiences

The medicalization of gender variance is a key force in transgender people's experiences of embodiment, identity, and community. While most directly dictating experiences of diagnosis and medical classification, it is important to acknowledge that the effects of medicalization are widespread across social contexts and institutions. I explore the medical model of transgender identity, with special attention to its current diagnostic classification, in order to highlight how transgender people's interactional experiences of gender are shaped by medical authority. I review literature that highlights the operation of the medical model as a normative accountability structure in its influence across multiple institutions of social life including health and healthcare, transgender community groups, and legal classification.     

Finding Meaningful Support: Young People's Experiences of “Risky” Environments

This paper reports on the qualitative phase of a New Zealand study of young people who had been exposed to “risky” environments from a young age. These young people had experienced traumatic events such as abuse, violence, addictions, mental health issues, and many had been excluded from school. The young people (aged between 13 and 17) were users of multiple services (statutory and nongovernmental services including: child welfare, juvenile justice, remedial education, and mental health services). Qualitative interviews (n?=?109) explored young people's experiences in their families, communities, education, and their perspectives on support provided by services and their own support networks. Three thematic clusters emerged as central motifs in young people's experiences and are the focus of this article: navigating “risky” environments; services and support; and, working to find different pathways.     

Transgender student experiences in single‐sex colleges

This article reviews popular and scholarly literature on transgender students' experiences who are enrolled in single‐sex colleges. Because such colleges rely on bounded conceptions of sex/gender to determine who can and cannot be eligible for admission, the enrollment and matriculation of transgender students pose a challenge to the central organizing logic of the single‐sex environment. As such, I first draw upon theorizations of gendered and queer organizations to highlight the utility of sociology in analyzing the transing of organizations through transgender inclusion. Using this framework, I then address trans student experiences at the time of admission and during matriculation at single‐sex colleges. These perspectives frame transgender inclusion as a new organizational form but one that is rooted in the social construction of transnormativity rather than institutional transformation.     

Re-defining 'norms': D/deaf young people's transitions to independence

Traditionally, young people's transitions from a state of dependent childhood to an independent adult identity have been measured in terms of a developmental stage model. However, it is increasingly being recognised that young people are not a universal category and that their transitions need to be understood within the diverse context of peers, family, and communities. This paper draws on a rich body of work from the interdisciplinary field of Deaf studies and original research with D/deaf young people – a group generally overlooked by sociological research – to challenge and to advance conventional interdisciplinary debates about youth transitions in two ways. In the first half of the paper we examine D/deaf young people's conventional school‐to‐work, housing and domestic transitions and in doing so reflect upon the ways that their experiences shed a new light on understandings of these traditional markers of independent adulthood. In the second half of the paper we challenge conventional definitions of what marks an important transition by focusing on the transition that many D/deaf young people themselves define as the most significant in their lives, learning BSL and the transition to an independent D/deaf identity that this enables them to make. In doing so the paper mainstreams within sociology an important body of research about D/deaf people's experiences from Deaf studies.     

Examining concepts of power and agency in research with young people

Concepts of power and agency have become increasingly prominent in the youth studies literatures and related research. A focus of the research to date has been an examination of how a better understanding of young people's lived experiences can reveal possibilities for young people's agency to emerge. Despite increased interest in the term agency, much less has been said about how the concept is defined and recognized in research with young people, including what the concept may entail but crucially, how the term is linked to and underpinned by the related concept of power. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of power and agency as utilized in research with young people. The discussion that follows identifies the possible ways in which different theoretical positions shape our understanding of how power and agency are investigated and how these understandings inform the ways we interpret young people's perspectives and actions as holding potential for ‘agency’. Drawing on recent empirical examples, we consider how varying interpretations of power and/or agency shape not only the ways in which young people's agentic experiences are theorized (and the related ontological and epistemological assumptions these positions imply) but also the presumed effects of that agency.     

Contact Reduces Transprejudice: A Study on Attitudes towards Transgenderism and Transgender Civil Rights in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between Hong Kong Chinese people's contact with transgender/transsexual (TG/TS) people and attitudes toward transgenderism and transgender civil rights, based on Allport's Contact Hypothesis. The term transprejudice is introduced to refer to the negative valuing, stereotyping and discriminatory treatment of TG/TS people. Data are presented from a population-based survey with a random sample of 856 Hong Kong Chinese persons aged between 15 and 64, using the Chinese Attitudes towards Transgenderism and Transgender Civil Rights Scale (CATTCRS). Attitudes, assessed on both personal and institutional dimensions, are examined in relation to participants’ gender, age, educational level, religiosity, and previous contact with transpeople. Results suggest that previous contact with transpeople was significantly associated with attitudes reflected in the scale; decreased social distance, decreased social discrimination, and decreased transprejudice, increased awareness of discrimination against transpeople, increased support for equal opportunities, increased support for post-operative transsexual civil rights, and increased support for anti-discrimination legislation. Our findings support the contact hypothesis, that contact has a positive effect on attitudes towards TG/TS persons. We discuss the implications of these findings for public education interventions and public policy, as well as for research.     

The Power of Perceived Experience: Events That Shape Work as a Calling

Meaning plays an important role in many people's lives and work. A significant source of meaning derives from a greater sense of fulfilling one's calling, or purpose in work. This study examined the specific life experiences that shape people's perceptions of their calling and the characteristics of those experiences that make them so powerful. Fifty‐eight people who self‐identified as leaders responded to a questionnaire about the relevant experiences that shaped their perceptions of their work as a calling. Participants' responses were content‐analyzed to generate a taxonomy of themes in 4 overarching categories: (a) content of the event, (b) context of the event, (c) confirmation of one's call, and (d) the continuing effect that the event has had on the individual's life. By increasing knowledge about events that affect perceptions about one's calling, counselors may be more equipped to shed light on the potential, unexamined trajectories of a client's work and life.     

“We're the Normal Ones Here”: Community Involvement,Peer Support,and Transgender Mental Health

This article uses ethnographic methods to explore how peer support and community involvement influence the mental health and well-being of transgender (or, trans) people in the southeastern United States. The study builds on existing research that suggests that trans community involvement and peer support among trans people enhance mental health experiences and moderate the effects of stigma and discrimination on health outcomes. Through qualitative analysis of 158 hours of participant observation and 33 in-depth interviews with members of a trans community organization in the U.S. Southeast, this paper identifies three key processes through which peer support and community involvement enhance the mental health and well-being of trans people: (1) the normalization of trans identities and experiences; (2) the creation of a social support network; and (3) the empowerment of trans people.     

Transfer of Social Learning Across Contexts: Exploring Infants' Attribution of Trait‐Like Emotions to Adults

We explored whether 15‐month‐olds expect another person's emotional disposition to be stable across social situations. In three observation trials, infants watched two adults interact. Half the infants saw one of the adults (“Emoter”) respond negatively to the other adult's actions (Anger group); half saw the Emoter respond neutrally to the same actions (Neutral group). After a change in social context, infants participated in novel tasks with the (now‐neutral) Emoter. Infants in the Anger group were significantly more likely to relinquish desirable toys to the Emoter. We hypothesize that, in the initial observation trials, infants learned that the Emoter was “anger‐prone” and expected her to get angry again in a new social situation. Consequently, infants readily gave the Emoter what she wanted. These findings reveal three key features of infants' affective cognition: (1) infants track adults' emotional history across encounters; (2) infants learn from observing how people interact with others and use this to form expectations about how these people will treat them; and (3) more speculatively, infants use appeasement to cope with social threat. We hypothesize that infants form “trait‐like” attributions about people's emotional dispositions and use this to formulate adaptive responses to adults in novel social contexts.     

Making and Treating Trans Problems: The Ontological Politics of Clinical Practices

This essay investigates a divergence between medical and autobiographical accounts of transexuality. By analyzing a letter to the editor in the journal Aesthetic Plastic Surgery that defends trans patients as a “special case” (Selvaggi and Giordano, 2014), I examine how medicine produces trans patients as a separate category of patients. The differential treatment paths of trans and nontrans people who pursue “gender-enhancing” medical interventions demonstrate a double standard that undermines claims to act in the best interest of the patient. Using the evidence of trans men’s accounts of themselves as well as research into the experiences of trans people from across the United Kingdom, Australia, and North America, I critique the medical management of transexuality and call on clinicians to rethink the treatment practices of trans medicine.     

“Women's Work”? Women Partners of Transgender Men Doing Housework and Emotion Work

Despite increasing family studies research on same‐sex cohabiters and families, the literature is virtually devoid of transgender and transsexual families. To bridge this gap, I present qualitative research narratives on household labor and emotion work from 50 women partners of transgender and transsexual men. Contrary to much literature on “same‐sex” couples, the division of household labor and emotion work within these contemporary families cannot simply be described as egalitarian. Further, although the forms of emotion work and “gender strategies,”“family myths,” and “accounts” with which women partners of trans men engage resonate with those from women in (non‐trans) heterosexual and lesbian couples, they are also distinct, highlighting tensions among personal agency, politics, and structural inequalities in family life.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender Families

This article reviews new scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families. The past decade witnessed rapid expansion of data and strong research designs. The most notable advance was in studies on variation among mostly planned lesbian comother families. Cumulative evidence suggests that although many of these families have comparatively high levels of shared labor and parental investment, they may not be as “genderless” as previously depicted. Gay men's diverse paths to family formation and planned parenthood have also been explored, but almost no research studies their children's experiences. Conceptualizations of sexual orientation expanded to include bisexuals and others, and some understanding of the experiences of transgender people has begun to emerge. Future work should explore relationships among members of the families they create.     

Young People's Use and Perceptions of Emergency Contraceptives in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Existing Insights and Knowledge Gaps

Despite growing international attention to the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people, their uptake of modern contraceptive methods remains low, especially in Sub‐Saharan Africa. This article focuses on young people's use of a relatively new contraceptive method, emergency contraceptives (ECs). Emergency contraceptives can be used after intercourse and have been marketed to be used when other contraceptives fail or after unplanned, unprotected intercourse. This article reviews qualitative evidence from seven studies on young people's experiences with this contraceptive method. Many users of ECs were in their twenties, well‐educated, and either single or in a relationship. Repeated use was found in four of the studies, and ECs may fit within an existing range of post‐coital methods used to prevent pregnancies. While concerns about side effects were reported frequently among non‐users of ECs, other women preferred ECs above other hormonal contraceptive methods. Men were actively involved, for example, as providers of information to their partners, and as purchasers of ECs. Young people's understandings of ECs hence differ from the meanings inscribed to these pills at an international level. Further research on this topic is needed to ensure that young people's (emergency) contraceptive needs are well understood and responded to.     

Promoting resilience and emotional well-being of transgender young people: research at the intersections of gender and sexuality

Within lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) research there is increasing health-related scholarship on trans lives, with a growing awareness of the impact of health inequalities on trans well-being. The aim of the paper is to provide greater understanding of transgender young people’s views of what is needed to promote their emotional well-being and resilience by undertaking specific analysis of data collected as part of wider research with young people (n?=?97). The study utilised participatory qualitative methods with a cross sectional design generating data via a focus group with trans youth (n?=?5), followed by thematic analysis. Findings suggest that both individual and collective capacities or resources enable and sustain resilience and well-being for trans young people. The adversity trans youth face is present in school, the community and in healthcare, but they are able to find places where they feel safe and connected to others. Practitioners, teachers and school nurses are well positioned to facilitate structural change in alliance with trans youth to promote resilience. Research results were utilised to inform health improvement, commissioning and service delivery.     

Cisgendered Organizations: Trans Women and Inequality in the Workplace

This article responds to calls to better understand how intersecting “inequality regimes” operate in organizations. Through in‐depth interviews with 25 white trans women about their workplace experiences, my analyses highlight how trans women navigate relational practices that are simultaneously gendered and cisgendered—that is, practices that maintain cultural connections between sex and gender and maintain gender as immutable. Findings demarcate three distinct mechanisms by which cisgenderism, a system that devalues women and trans people, operates and strengthens hierarchical privileges at work: (1) double‐bind constraints; (2) fluid biases of cissexism and sexism; and (3) group practices of privilege and subordination. In the first regard, analyses reveal unique double binds that trans women face—binds that dictate contradictory feminine and masculine ideal worker expectations but also expectations of gender authenticity. Second, I find that trans women often hover between two subordinate statuses (i.e., gender and transgender status) in a given workday, a fact that prods a more fluid conception of cisgenderism. Finally, this study highlights how cis men collectively mobilize through group practices to repair cisgender system breaches. All three dimensions are critical for understanding the production of workplace inequality between not only trans women and cis men, but all feminine‐identified workers.     

Young people's time use and maternal employment in the UK1

This paper analyses the relationship between young people's time use and maternal employment in the United Kingdom (UK). Two dimensions of young people's time use are important for understanding the impact of maternal employment. The first of these is family context. This concerns the time young people are near their parents or not. The second relates to young people's activity patterns. Combining information from both dimensions is necessary to provide a comprehensive overview of the impact of maternal employment on young people's time use. The paper demonstrates that young people's time use is associated with maternal employment both in terms of activity patterns and family context. Young people with employed mothers spend more time alone with a father, and more time with neither parent. More specifically, young people with mothers employed fulltime (FT) spend significantly more time watching TV than those whose mothers are not employed, especially when they are not near any parents. There is a negative association between FT maternal employment and the time young people spend in achievement‐related activities, concentrated in time when alone with a mother. Unlike time in leisure activities or time watching TV, time in achievement‐related activities when in the presence of a father does not increase to compensate for the loss in time spent in achievement‐related activities when alone with a mother.     

Marital Status and Perceived Discrimination Among Transgender People

Despite calls for increased attention to the experiences of transgender people, scientific understanding of the stigma and discrimination this population experiences is limited. The authors integrate minority stress and marital advantage perspectives to assess marital status differences in transgender‐related perceived discrimination among transgender people in multiple life domains: the workplace, family, health care, and public accommodations. They analyze one of the first and most comprehensive large‐scale samples of transgender people in the United States (N = 4,286), the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. They find that married transgender respondents tend to report lower levels of perceived discrimination than their cohabiting and previously married transgender counterparts. Married transgender respondents do not, however, report lower levels of perceived discrimination than their never married counterparts, once all covariates are accounted for. These marital status differences appear primarily among transwomen but not transmen. Economic resources account for some, but not all, of these differences.