COMPARATIVE STUDY ON TRANSGENDER AND TRANSSEXUAL

INFLUENCE ON SOCIETY & ALSO IT’S FUTURE

Kuber Singh
B.A.LLB(1st year)
JLU06410@student.jlu.edu.in
2021BALLB021
Abstract

This article provides a general sense of transgender studies in sociology. It does so by looking
at the definitions and relationship between the terms transgender and transsexual, the history
of transsexual studies, sociology’s place in this development, and the active production (by
trans people) of transsexual and transgender studies. This review primarily focuses on US
sociological writing, including ethnomethodology, labeling, feminist, and symbolic
interactionist frameworks, while incorporating critical theory, queer theory, and other
interdisciplinary influences. The article explores various movements in the recent history of
this scholarship: for instance, while transsexual studies were mostly developed with a male-
to-female transsexual perspective, recent scholarship place female-to-male transsexual and
transgender identity centrally. I present current trends and future steps of sociological inquiry
in the area of transgender studies as a way of closing the discussion of sociology’s potential
contributions in the near future.

Introduction: Situating transgender/transsexual in the current cultural context

I want to start this article with a few notes on recent ‘developments’ on ‘the transgendered’,
transsexuality, and cross-dressing within the field of sociology and outside of it. During the
last couple of years encyclopedias that focus on gender and sexuality, general sociology, and
social science/ studies have included entries on ‘transgender, transvestism, and
transsexualism’ (see King and Ekins, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2007),
‘transgender studies’ (see Bryant, Encyclopedia of Gender & Society, forthcoming) or
‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’ (see Vidal-Ortiz, Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity,
and Society, forthcoming). The Sexualities journal opened up their publication with one of its
first issues focusing on ‘Transgender in Latin America’ in 1998 (Kulick 1998). ‘Gay and
lesbian’ newspapers and magazines are now much more keen to publishing editorial notes,
articles, and news on transgender people’s struggles – as well as their successes. And journals
like Gender & Society, through some of their articles, regularly address transgender
experiences, cross-dressing, and other gender variant aspects

(Gagné et al. 1997; Gamson 1997; Schilt 2006; Schrock et al. 2005; Shapiro 2007 – see also
Lucal 1999, for a nontransgender identity portrayal of a person’s movement between social
perceptions of gender). In the summer of 2006, Contexts, the oh-so-glossy and popular
magazine from the American Sociological Association, portrayed in their cover a (fabulous,
if you ask me) picture of drag queens and a featured article (Taylor and Rupp 2006) from the
study Taylor and Rupp published in 2003 (Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret). And the same
season saw the publication of The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Stryker and Whittle
(2006), a compilation of reprints and recent publications on transgender experience, identity,
medicalization, and mobilization. And yet as I write this article, in February of 2007,
breaking news about the firing of City Manager Steven Stanton by the City Commissioners of
Largo City, Florida, are front and center. After Stanton announced the beginning of hormone
therapy in preparation for sex reassignment surgery, city officials fired Stanton. A campaign
from the National Sexuality Resource Center demanded that the commissioners retract from
such decision, but little seems to point to a reinstitution of Stanton to the employment
position held for almost 15 years. It is quite a mixed bag of events that, in one way or
another, bring forth the topic of transgender studies. When thinking of transsexuality or
transgender people in popular media, several people come to mind. For us older people, there
are names such as Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, Silvia Rivera, and perhaps Divine
that represent a moment in history when transsexuality, transgender identity, and cross-
dressing were visible in US society. For younger generations, names like Calpernia Adams,
Gwen Araujo, Tyra Hunter, Fred Martínez, and Brandon Teena have become public names to
refer to transgender identity, experience, and behavior; if you turn to cable television, there
are movies on some of these transgender people, and stories told from various perspectives
(including harassment and death). Some of these individuals have reached national attention
as they have been killed (as in the case of Teena, Araujo, Hunter, Martínez), or have had
partners that have been killed in part because of a bias against transgender people (Adams).
Yet, portrayals of transgender and transsexual people have been evident since early on in the
twentieth century (Meyerowitz 2002), even if transgender studies, and ‘transgender’ as a
category of analysis did not emerge until the 1990s (Valentine 2007). This article provides a
general sense of the ‘state’ of transgender studies in sociology, although there are some
necessary first steps. By looking at the definitions and relationship of terms (e.g. between
transgender and transsexual, cross-dresser and drag queen), the history of
transsexual/transgender studies – and the processes through which transgender people were
central to the development of transsexuality narratives and more recent transgender studies –
I illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of this field. I then turn to specific sociological work
that contributed to the study of transsexual experiences. I close the article with recent trends
and future steps of sociological inquiry in the area of transgender issues. As I show briefly,
this focus recognizes a history where transsexuality was inherently a medicalized (and
pathologized) term in social scientific knowledge, and the various maneuverings where
‘trans’ people themselves begin to address the judgment (and thus tip the balance of power)
between the medicalized establishments, psychiatry, and their own life experiences. While
significant sociological scholarship has been developed in Australia (Lewins 1995), England
(King 1993), Brazil (Kulick 1998), and Canada/USA (Devor 1997; Namaste 2000; Rubin
2003), I will focus on sociological literature in the USA, in particular, research that has
incorporated the voices of transgender and transsexual people.

Understanding the meanings of (and differences between) the terms

What, exactly, does it mean to refer to someone (or oneself) as transgender, or transsexual, or
even trans? Kessler and McKenna (2000) have argued for three distinctive ways of
operationalizing the prefix ‘trans’ so often used in this scholarship. Meaning ‘change’,
‘across’, and ‘beyond’, ‘trans’ is utilized to refer to, in the first sense of the term,
‘transsexual’ (when the experience of sex reassignment surgery supports a person’s wish or
need to confirm their preferred gender identity), in the second, moving from a gender
category to another (but still within a two gender structure), and in the last, it means opening
up to a multiplicity of gender options, as in when a person considers life and experience
outside the boundaries of ‘male’ and ‘female’ (Kessler and McKenna explain it as when
gender ‘ceases to exist’). In academic and popular circles, transsexuality, a term that emerged
in the early/mid-twentieth century through a set of psychiatric and medical processes
(Meyerowitz 2002), is understood as an experience of those who wish to ‘change sex’ (i.e.,
identifying and transforming one’s body to ‘match’ one’s gender identity). This is a term
particularly associated to people transitioning from male-to-female, although female-to-male
trans people have used it too. For many trans people, the term transsexual has negative
connotations (Stone 1991; Stryker 1994, 2006; Wilchins 1997). Transgender, on the other
hand, refers to people who generally refuse to take the gender binary as a ‘given’ – because
of the pathologizing involved in naming one’s experience as transsexual. Variations on the
term transgender (transgenderal, transgenderist) are said to have been used by Prince in the
1970s (see, for example, 1979) but transgender does not achieve this very all encompassing
sense until the 1990s (Valentine 2007). Crossdressing and performing as female
impersonators (drag queens) or male ones (drag kings) are examples of experiences that were
once linked to transsexuality and are now related to transgender experience, expression, or
identity, as the term transgender gains more currency In fact, the meanings of these terms are
highly contested – and have changed within a very short period of time. Some have argued
that a transsexual does not change sex, but gender (given a person’s chromosomes, hormones
and surgery only change secondary characteristics – the argument goes), while others render
this desire to ‘change’ one’s public persona as a process that no longer requires surgical
transition. The transgender term, and its relationship to transsexuality, has been mediated in
the past by the use of surgical procedures. Halberstam (1998), for instance, has argued that
transgender identities respond to certain gender transitivity that ‘stops short’ of surgery. In
Halberstam’s most recent work, transgender also represents an embodiment that is not simply
about resisting gender, but about being noticed differently: ‘[t]ransgender proves to be an
important term not to people who want to reside outside of categories altogether but to people
who want to place themselves in the way of particular forms of recognition’ (2005, 49).
Within a very short lived 15 years or so, the term transgender has itself been used in
postmodern terms to break away from gender, and distance from transsexuality, and it is now
beginning to be confounded in some ways with transsexual embodiment, as implied in
Halberstam’s recent work. Thus, there are overlaps between these categories, even if they
have different historical origins. People ‘on the ground’ utilize these terms in strict policing,
especially around the use of ‘trans’ as a gender identity (or expression), and different from
sexual orientation (being lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, or gay), as evident in the history of
these terms. And as illustrated before (and in the rest of the article), transsexuality is
pathologized in the twentieth century; however, it is at present time being reconsidered as a
less stigmatized term to refer to current transitioning experiences and narratives.

How psychiatry, medicine, feminist writers, and transsexuals defined a field

Significant contributions have been made public in areas such as the history of transsexuality
(Meyerowitz 2002), social medicine (Hausman 1995), anthropology (Valentine 2007), the
law (Bower 1994), and political science (Currah et al. 2006). There have also been critical
writings by transgender and transsexual people about their experience in relation to these
categories (Stone 1991; Stryker 1994; Wilchins 1997); although most have been written by
male-to-female transgender people, some accounts have been provided by female-to-males as
well (Green 2004; Sullivan 1979/2006). The history of psychiatric, medical, and feminist
writing was fruitful in the mid-twentieth century, and transsexual people intercepted this
knowledge-in-the-making. This section will illustrate (i) a brief history of the (social)
scientific knowledge production of transsexuality, (ii) the involvement of transsexual people
in this endeavor, and (iii) some of the writings by transsexuals themselves. During the first 50
years of the twentieth century, ‘transsexual’ emerged as an identification label (Meyerowitz
2002) through a complex interplay between medical technologies and media coverage on
‘gender inverts’ – which often focused on intersex people (referred to as hermaphrodites in
the past – for related references, refer to Chase 1998; Dreger 1998; Kessler 1998; Preves
2003). These were also battles to demand sex change acquisition and legal acceptance on the
part of transsexuals themselves (Irvine 1990; Meyerowitz 2002). Sexological research, which
focused on medical explanations assuming causal relations on issues like transsexuality, was
significant in the advancement of transsexual categorizing as deviant (see Irvine 1990). The
very first publicly known transsexual transition was that of Christine Jorgensen, in 1952,
although research has identified surgical transitioning processes of mostly, but not
exclusively, male-to-female transsexuals, as early as two decades before Christine
Jorgensen’s (Bullough and Bullough 1993; Meyerowitz 2002). Why did this case achieve the
visibility it did, in relation to other nongender conformists? Christine Jorgensen, as some may
have argued, was the perfect poster transsexual – a very gender conforming military man who
wished to become a woman (as I have commented elsewhere, there were cultural elements of
eligibility: constructions of beauty linked to race and femininity, citizenship, and financial
support that made her transitioning as recognized as it was in the early 1950s – Vidal-Ortiz
n.d.). The visibility of Christine Jorgensen’s case shaped how social scientists approached
transsexuality, focusing on the reasons (or causal relation) between sociomedical factors
impacting transsexuality, and less on the experience (or meaning) of transsexuality. This
supported the trend in the work of sexologists, psychiatrists, and medical (surgical) providers
who were already offering services for those they might have called ‘true transsexuals’ who,
like Jorgensen, became heterosexual women after transitioning. The early second part of the
twentieth century provided for much study from a medical, psychiatric, psychological,
sociological, and anthropological angle (Billings and Urban 1982; Bolin 1988; Bullough and
Bullough 1993; Irvine 1990; Kessler and McKenna 1978; Risman 1982), especially after the
opening of ‘gender identity clinics’ that offered, although with some resistance, surgical
reconstruction to those who could convince medical providers of their ‘gender inversion’.
Even though those decades also provided a separation of ‘gender identity disorder’
(American Psychiatric Association 1994) in children and adults (Bryant 2006) and a clearer
distinction (or first break) between homosexuality and transsexuality (Meyerowitz 2002), the
distinctions themselves acted as boundary maintenance. Medicine in particular was keen to
develop a narrative of ‘true transsexuality’, where the medical and psychiatric gatekeepers
approved or disapproved of someone’s desire to transition. Often, narratives of their
sexuality, desire for heteronormative lives, and differentiation from homosexuals became
‘buzz words’ that would facilitate medical/surgical intervention. Subsequently, collapsing
these differences would be the source of rejection for treatment. A great example can be seen
in Billings and Urban’s work on the sociomedical construction of transsexuality; they
reported how in one clinic, doctors achieved consensus in not granting sex reassignment
surgery to Puerto Ricans, because ‘they don’t look like transsexuals, they look like fags’
(1982, 275). In the second half of the twentieth century, feminist scholarship also tended to
judge transsexuality – specifically in its inability to challenge the rigidity of gender, which
resulted many times in calling transsexuals ‘dupes’ of a gender system (for a most recent set
of conversations about trans people and feminism, see Scott-Dixon 2006). In the discussion
about the three meanings of ‘trans’ by Kessler and McKenna I shared earlier, the implication
of the third use (beyond or through) is that moving beyond two genders is revolutionary.
Some feminists place a greater responsibility on transsexual people to disrupt dual gender
systems, a responsibility I have argued elsewhere does not account for the responsibility all
people have in the project of undoing gender (Vidal-Ortiz 2002). But even in the presence of
discussions with the second-wave feminist scholarship about sexuality and gender,
transsexuality still carried with it the stigma of sexological, psychiatric, and medical/surgical
studies of the twentieth century, and remained a symbol of the type of gender rigidity that
needed to be dismantled. This judgment against transsexuality also emerges through the
challenges to the idea of transitioning and ‘passing’, which is conceptualized as a transsexual
narrative, because it is understood by some as a ‘buying into’ gender oppressive systems
[Raymond is one of the most serious proponents of this critique in her book The Transsexual
Empire (1979); a more recent attack to transsexuality on similar grounds has been posed by
Jeffreys (2003)]. Most of its defendants understand transsexuality as an error by people who
need to be educated about gender, and instead, be recruited as activists whose very own
transition should ‘change the world’. Not surprisingly, this new reading of the transgender as
liberating from gender often comes from the ranks of either academics, scholars, middle class
students, or often nontranssexual transgenders. A lot of autobiographical writing by
transsexual people helped to develop a transsexual narrative. Instead of interpreting this as a
manipulation of the institutions that offer surgical reconstructive services, this shows an
activation of networks of people who shared information with each other for attaining their
wishes (see Meyerowitz 2002, for historical illustrations and details on these group
responses). Among some classic autobiographies of transsexuals are Jorgensen’s A Personal
Autobiography (1967), Martino’s Emergence (1977), Feinberg’s Journal of a Transsexual
(1980), Richards’s Second Serve: The Reneé Richards Story (1983), and Sullivan’s From
Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland (1990) [for what seems to be an exception in
sociology, see the collaboration between a sociologist and a transsexual autobiographer in the
work by Fry (with Bogdan 1974). For a recent autobiography/historiography of the female-
to-male movement, see Green (2004)]. Multiple other autobiographies have been published
since the 1980s. These autobiographies have helped rethink anthropological and sociological
research conducted on transgender people. But as significant, two critical writings by male-
to-female transsexuals, Stone (1991) and Stryker (1994) have reframed the scope and study
of transsexuality, producing the emergence of transgender studies as we know them today.
Both Stone and Stryker force their brutal experience with the medical and surgical
establishments onto the reader in very productive ways that ‘reconstruct’ the transsexual as
more than what psychiatry, medicine, and surgery have wanted transsexuals to become.
While none of them are sociologists, their critical lens on transsexuality at the time of their
writing influenced the relationship between transsexuals in burgeoning fields such as queer
theory. (There were changes in social scientific knowledge production at the time as well. To
be sure, sociology and the social sciences were impacted in the 1980s and 1990s by
postmodernist writings and new frameworks for social thought beyond social constructionism
– transsexuality was but one of the topics that were impacted by the shift from
epistemological to ontological assumptions of identity and social life/experience – for more
on that, see Hird 2002.) But sociology did have an influence in the development of
transsexual theorizing – decades before – from the study of the social conditions and gender
structures, to the supporting of transsexuals writing their stories. This is the topic I turn to
next.

Sociology’s influence

While a bit invisible within the previous outline of transsexuality studies in the USA, several
sociologists developed a significant amount of scholarship that furthered questions and
discussions of gender (Billings and Urban 1982; Devor 1997; Garfinkel 1967; Gagné and
Tewksbury 1998, 1999; Kessler and McKenna 1978; Mason-Schrock 1996; Risman 1982;
Rubin 2003). I proceed to review their work, illustrating the benefits to the discipline and to
transgender and transsexual people and scholarship as well. I divide this section into two, not
so distinctive areas: looking at transgender and transsexual issues to explain social
phenomena, and writing about trans issues from a distance – in instances where the
sociologist is not transgendered, and (more recently) when the researcher has a transgendered
experience. What does transsexuality can tell us about society? Sociologists looking at trans
issues In general, this section discusses the early contributors to the study of transsexuality.
Some of them looked at a particular individual, while others discussed the general gender
(and sexuality) aspects they thought, at the time they wrote, transsexuals brought to the
surface (as judged by some of the autobiographical work, many transsexuals were quite
aware of the challenges they posed to the boundaries of gender and our rigid social
management of gender; social scientists were now ‘catching up’). In the 1950s and 1960s,
once the main ‘gender identity’ clinics began offering psychiatric, medical, and surgical
services to transsexuals (predominantly male-to-female ones), sociologists began to study the
experience of transsexuality. One of the earliest sociologists was Harold Garfinkel. He wrote
about the feminized experiences of Agnes, a male-to-female transsexual whom he was
interviewing as part of her procedures to achieve sex reassignment surgeries. According to
Garfinkel, Agnes was not an intersex person, as she claimed herself to be; she began to take
her mother’s hormonal medications since the age of 12 in order to produce bodily changes in
herself, such as developing breasts, and while this medication process did not alter in any
way her penis and scrotum, her testes were now carrying more estrogen. This last medical
aspect was one of the main reasons why Agnes gained recognition of herself as a woman by
the medical establishment; although they labeled her a hermaphrodite person, Garfinkel
describes how others treated her as a woman (and his writing also illustrates his own
treatment of her as such). He also asserted, through ethnomethodological accounts, how we
all experience sex as natural, or as a ‘given’. He called Agnes ‘the 120% woman’, in
recognition of her interest and intent to adhere to gender constructs. More importantly, he
used this phrase to acknowledge that there is a structural relevance to her need to perform
gender in accordance with a certain common knowledge or social referent of ‘what a woman
is’ or ‘how a woman behaves’. For Garfinkel, Agnes’s type of intense labor in ‘achieving and
making secure her rights to live as a normal, natural female while having continually to
provide for the possibility of detection and ruin carried on within socially structured
conditions I call Agnes’ “passing”’ (1967, 137). Passing was, therefore, an important aspect
in Garfinkel’s work about the presentation of gender for all of us – not just transsexuals –
which situated his work within a paradigm of learning about social norms through looking at
the people on the margins. Even when that is the case, Garfinkel’s writing about Agnes
continues to be cited in sociological scholarship today as a vivid, early exploration of a
transsexual person’s management of gender. The book Gender: An Ethnomethodological
Approach of Kessler and McKenna is another text focused on understanding various aspects
of gender as social. The authors spoke about the creation of gender attributions, by stating
how ‘everyone must display her or his gender in every interaction’ (1978, 126). They were
critical of the idea of passing, suggesting that it eliminates the ‘ongoing process of “doing”
gender in everyday interaction’ (1978, 126). They also wrote about the ‘taken-for-granted’
beliefs of a given sociocultural space, where the reification of two (and only two) genders,
takes place, and one can reinterpret verbal or visual cues in order to ‘confirm’ a person’s
gender. In that sense, gender does not change, which is how they explain that a trans person
has to fight medical, psychiatric, and other institutions that claim they cannot be ‘who they
say they are’ unless they have surgical reconstruction. Kessler and McKenna discussed the
experiences of both female-to-male and male-to-female transsexuals, which was uncommon
at the time their work was published. Taken together, Garfinkel’s and Kessler and
McKenna’s work framed the sociologists’ gaze of transsexuality from afar, yet it helped give
context to transsexuality within the sociocultural era when they were writing. [While West
and Zimmerman (1987) also use an ethnomethodological framework to look at gender, unlike
Garfinkel and Kessler and McKenna, they did not center discussions on transsexuality.
Indeed, their focus on insignia as the work all people did in order to be ‘read’ as male or
female could be said to loop back into oversimplified notions of passing – as in making an
effort to be read as someone one wants to be read as.] However, other sociologists would
more specifically look at the medical and psychiatric enterprises and their impact on
transsexuality. Risman (1982) also discussed the relationship of gender identity to what was
considered normative or deviant behavior, by using labeling theory. Moving through
discussions of biological, psychoanalytical, and psychological theories, Risman arrives at a
conclusion that perhaps definitions and notions of transsexuality are different for ‘the
psychologist, the sociologist, the psychoanalyst and the patient’ (p. 318). Her work also helps
to elucidate the relationship of ‘true’ transsexualism to surgical desire and how class, and
access to clinics or medical facilities, influenced the results of seeking sex reassignment
surgeries. She succinctly states: ‘the assumption that those who do not voluntarily seek
clinicians are not transsexuals seems problematic, even if convenient for research’ (1982,
319), thus turning the medical and psychiatric assumptions of their centrality in transsexual
experience upside down. Risman also notes cases where ‘patients’ do not conform to
dominant narratives of ‘having always felt’ that way, critically opposing the sampling and
logic that followed gender identity clinics at the time (and the almost prepackaged narrative
of ‘true transsexuality’ that allowed for people wishing to transition to be able to do so).
Closing with arguments against the presumption that to be male is to be macho and rough,
Risman not only criticizes the gender identity clinics and focus on transsexuality in adults,
but the cadre of professionals studying gender identity disorder in effeminate boys (for a
comprehensive social history of ‘gender identity disorder’ and the impact of traditional
readings of masculinity in such research, see Bryant 2006). Risman is another sociologist
who also pays attention to female-to-male transsexuals; although at the time, like many other
social scientists, she calls them ‘female transsexuals’. However, what may seem like a
linguistic slippage (to us in 2007) has to be contextualized: Risman was following the
standard academic language of that moment, which was established by sexologists. In the
end, her claim for a (mis)acquisition is that ‘the causality may flow in the opposite direction:
the societal reaction to gender role deviance may lead to a stereotype which involves self-
labeling as transsexual’ (1982, 323). Instead of reading this statement as a construction of the
transsexual as a gender ‘dupe’, I see Risman’s illustration as one of rigid social gender codes,
which influenced the main narrative of transsexuality – and the narrative meaning-making.
This ‘work’ to shape access to services was no small accomplishment; Billings and Urban
(1982) discuss it as well. In ‘The Socio-Medical Construction of Transsexualism’, Billings
and Urban (1982) showed how transsexuality existed ‘in and through’ medical practice. They
also denounced the phenomenon of constructing a cohesive narrative in the service of
surgical reconstruction (for instance, having transsexuals share knowledge to produce a very
particular history in intakes and psychiatric sessions in order to access treatment). Like
Meyerowitz (2002), Billings and Urban drew on the medical developments that permitted to
surgically operate on intersex people, especially children, and used that to illustrate how the
creation of a mental illness developed as a diagnosis that allowed for the medical
establishment to conduct surgeries. Billings and Urban are generally understood as critiquing
the choice of the transsexuals’ need for surgery as still within the paradigm of mental illness,
and illustrate the ‘coaching’ that took place in constituting a population that was ‘truly
deserving’ of these medical procedures (for a critique of their work, especially their use of
body ‘mutilation’ and their notion of apolitical transsexuals desperately seeking surgery, see
Spade 2006). The sociological work developed in the late 1960s, the 1970s, and early 1980s,
mostly from ethnomethodological and labeling perspectives, created a foundation for the
work to come in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. While their focus tended to be less
on transsexual experience itself, and more into the gendered society we live in, or the medical
or psychiatric components of the services transsexuals sought, it still provided a strong
background to understand the institutions surrounding mid-twentieth-century transsexuality.
The work that follows complicates ‘trans’ narratives, as their publications reached us at the
same time that ‘transgender’ (as such an all encompassing term) emerged. Writing about
transgender and transsexual issues Some of the most prolific writing about ‘trans’ issues
began in the latter part of the 1990s. A portion continued to explore transsexuality, but now,
as part of a series of individual ways of expressing gender or identifying through (or outside)
a gender binary. In his 1996 article ‘Transsexuals’ Narrative Construction of the True Self’,
Mason-Schrock offers a set of observations about main narratives of self. Even though this
argument comes out almost 15 years after Billings and Urban’s, and by then the term
transgender has already started to diversify, his argument is still crucial to understand the
weight of transsexuality in identity negotiation. His basic argument is that a primary narrative
often dominates a transgender space – in his research, he writes about how in support groups,
several transgender narratives appear in these forums, and identifies the specific steps
participants use in the active production of a main narrative (through the exclusion of the
others). Namely, he talks about four aspects that solidified that main narrative: naming,
‘modeling’, guiding each other through their past histories, and ignoring certain ‘facts’ about
each other’s past. When participants, for instance, redefined their history, others supported
their reinterpretation in order to make it fit into a transsexual model – often to the detriment
of other nontranssexual identities and experiences. Gagné and Tewksbury (1998, 1999 – see
also Gagné et al. 1997, and Tewksbury and Gagné 1996), are sociologists writing under an
influence of symbolic interactionism, critical theory, contemporary feminist theory, and queer
theory. They focused much of their work on the definition of a gendered self that most
closely matches one of the two genders for over 60 transgender people they interviewed.
Some of their research shows how transgender experience both reifies and challenges gender
scripts. As well, findings from their various publications argue that sexual relations were also
a site for validation of a transgender’s (female) identification (as they were interviewing
male-to-females). They argue for studying cultural referents beyond the genitalia referent
presumed to define a person’s gender. Much of their direction is to look at the relational
aspect of identities – that identities are defined not in the private individual space of the self,
but the self in interaction with others – strangers and closed ones alike. Taking a different
route and exploring drag queens’ experiences with gender, we have Schacht’s work (see, for
instance, 2002, 2004). His emphasis on drag queens for over a decade made him a prolific
writer on issues of performativity and female impersonation. Focusing on the drag queens’
deployments of masculinity and/or femininity, their female impersonation in relation to their
sexual orientation, and the dynamics emergent from their work as drag queens, Schacht’s
work interrupts the generally transgender/transsexual dichotomous work in social scientific
knowledge in the late 1990s and early 2000s [linked to his is the work by Taylor and Rupp
(2006), also looking at the relationship between gender and sexuality in the lives of drag
queens]. His contributions placed this work at the intersection of gender and sexuality
scholarship in sociological thinking (2002), yet he also addressed a very interdisciplinary
focus with his overall interests (2004). In the USA and Canada, sociologists who were self-
identified transgender men and women began to produce trans specific writings, including
Viviane Namaste, Holly (now Aaron) Devor, and Henry S. Rubin. Their writing, however,
expanded on previous transgender writing, because they employed empirical research instead
of writing from a autobiographical (or even autoethnographic) perspective. While Namaste
(2000) and Devor (1997) wrote about trans populations across the US/Canada border, the
work conducted by Rubin (2003) was with transgender men in the USA, which is the focus of
my discussion in this article. Rubin’s book is a critical look at the embodied and everyday
lived experiences of female-tomales. With a combination of phenomenological and
discursive analytics, Rubin discusses the experiences of 22 female-to-males from several US
cities, illustrating much more in-depth their upbringing experiences, current relationships,
and the meaning of being transgender men to them (some of these findings are similar to
those in my own writing based on the experiences of 6 female-to-males in the San Francisco
Bay Area – see Vidal-Ortiz 2002). Rubin’s research offers new insights into the transsexual
experiences of female-to-males, where the need to transition has been, in some instances,
redefined, to the point that the use of hormones are ‘enough’ as the basis for their physical
transition. In his research, female-tomales talked about experiences with manness, maleness,
and masculinities, broadening, again, the scope of the experiential from previous (US-based)
research. Rubin’s work also contributes through his discussions about the tension between the
body image and the material body of the transmen he interviewed. These more recent
writings on ‘trans’ issues offered a broader scope to the conception of the transsexual (and
certainly, of the ‘true’ transsexual); they also brought forth the tension between the cross-
dresser (early on called transvestite), the drag queen performer, the transgender (gender
bender), and the transsexual. Furthermore, while the previous research looked at institutions
and social rules broken/reified by trans people, these writings were looking at the issues
impacting trans people (even when also looking at relational identity maintenance, as in
Gagné and Tewksbury’s). And these writings offered a more interdisciplinary set of
frameworks than their predecessors.

Recent trends and future directions

In addition to this sociological scholarship of the last four decades, the work by Schilt (2006),
Schrock et al. (2005), and Shapiro (2007), among others, continue to add to the experiences
of trans people at work, in their everyday lives, embodiment, and in community formations.
For instance, Schrock et al. (2005) have raised questions of embodiment and subjectivity, for
instance, how redecorating the body brings forth different readings of gender, and authorize
the transwomen they interviewed. Similarly, Schilt (2006) focused on the experience of
female-bodied individuals who have transitioned at work as female-to-males, and the benefits
they seem to gain through that transition. Certainly, much more female-to-male specific
research is available in the last 10 years, most of it on their life and experiences (Devor 1997;
Rubin 2003; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). More academic research by and for female-to-male
transsexuals has taken place by scholars such as Devor (1997), Rubin (2003), Singer (2006),
Hale (1998), Prosser (1998), and Cromwell (1999). In fact, part of what might become an
issue in future research is to learn to balance male-to-female narratives in US academic
settings, because transgender studies are beginning to be dominated by female-to-male
scholars and theorists. Indeed, in the last 20 years, we moved from understandings of
transsexuality based primarily on male-tofemale narratives, to an emergence of female-to-
male specific research, and to a new female-to-male and female-bodied trans set of
perspectives that could be tainting and impacting (sometimes negatively) male-tofemale
experiences in data collection. These are serious exclusions (and misrepresentations) in
academic knowledge production settings that merit critical attention (Namaste 2005),
especially when issues of health and employment are so different between these groups.
Some of the future research issues might be: looking at the differences between male-to-
females and female-to-males in terms of socioeconomics, education, employment (whether in
the formal or street economies), housing, health, and networks, as well as within those
groups. The work by Emilia Lombardi (see, for example, Lombardi 2001 – for similar work
in Canada, see Namaste 2005), is but one example of the work sociologists are engaged in
that is not based on the premise of identity, but the social location and concrete influences in
the lives of trans people. Transgender studies scholarship, especially within sociology,
requires longitudinal studies on health (in general, as well as cancer and HIV in particular), a
better distribution of large-scale sampling and reporting (much of it takes place in San
Francisco or New York, and other metropolitan areas such as Boston and Philadelphia). We
desperately need comparative research that looks at ethnoracial minority female-to-males and
male-to-females outside studies of sex work and HIV, although sociologists need to continue
to support work in the areas of medical anthropology and public health. We also need
comparative work between countries, to empirically explore the lived experience and whether
it falls within the ‘transgender’ (and gender) constructs, or elsewhere. Similarly, engaging
with media representations of transgender people, sociological scholarship should look into
the challenges of master status/ categories and how the gender and sexual marginalized might
be creating nuanced ways of relating to their space and community in ways that do not
exclude male or female (I believe Halberstam’s 2005 book begins to do just that). While
critiques of media portrayals exist (Willox 2003), I am referring to exploratory studies that
interrogate gender identity and sexual orientation categories of people who identify in more
complex ways than transgender.

Concluding remarks

Transgender and transsexual narratives are now much more fractured in terms of racial, class,
gender, and sexual experiences (Broad 2002; Roen 2006). Medical and psychiatric
establishments do not hold as strong of a handle on transgender identities as they used to but,
as revealed in recent transgender research, some transgender people from racial minority
groups do not necessarily trust that their transitioning is taken as seriously as that of their
white counterparts, and point out to how these establishments fail to recognize the racialized
nature of their transition (Broad 2002). The utility of surgical (specifically, genital)
reconstructions in the shaping of transgender (or for that matter, transsexual) identities is
receding for both male-to-females and female-to-males. And, trans communities are now
much more vigilant of research invested in studying (and giving voice to) trans experiences
[one significant site that illustrates this is the ‘suggested rules’ for those researching trans
issues if they are nontrans (Hale n.d.)]. All of these are aspects that show the complexity of
transgender and transsexual communities in the USA today. Transgender studies, impacted as
it was by queer theory, will continue to grow in very interdisciplinary ways, and while
sociology has had a key place in the formative years of critiques to the medical and
psychiatric establishments in their dealings with transsexuality, and it continues to draw on
transgender experience to interpret the impact of these institutions, it is important to engage
with the challenges of nonsociological disciplines, their methods, and frameworks, in order to
offer a better interpretation of whatever gendering and nongender or sexual experiences
transsexuals face today. As well, a critical challenge to transgender studies will be to not fall
into the historical reinterpretation of events that scholars of nontranssexual homosexualities
have fallen into before, where the gender and sexual variant experiences in other cultures are
used to argue that ‘transgender’ has always existed (for a well-formulated critique, see
Towlen and Morgan 2002). The relationship between ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ as the
focus of study in the social science literature, queer theory, and an emergent ‘transgender
studies’ field is complex, has changed throughout the last decades, and will continue to be
reformulated. Part of the reason for the movement between ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’
terms resides on the meaning given to the categories themselves, and the unit of analysis we
choose to explore. Transgender studies focuses more on the everyday experience of trans
people, including embodiment and its impact on their social identities. Sociology can
continue to contribute to this field if we rethink social scientific knowledge production in
relationship to power, and begin to support more collaborative and participatory work that
challenges, but builds on, sociological theorizing.
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