Beards, Breasts, and Bodies

Abstract

Gender is commonly thought of as dependent on sex even though there are occasional aberrations. Interviews with female-to-male trans people, however, suggest that sex and sex characteristics can be understood as expressions of gender. The expression of gender relies on both behavior and the appearance of the performer as male or female. When sex characteristics do not align with gender, behavior becomes more important to gender expression and interpretation. When sex characteristics become more congruent with gender, behavior becomes more fluid and less important in asserting gender. Respondents also challenge traditional notions of sexual orientation by focusing less on the sex of the partner and more on the gender organization of the relationship. The relationship’s ability to validate the interviewee’s masculinity or maleness often takes precedence over the sex of the partner, helping to explain changing sexual orientation as female-to-male transsexual and transgendered people transition into men.

‘You must be thinking what a lesbian man teacher is doing in a nice place like Dipane Letsie School?’: enacting, negotiating and reproducing dominant understandings of gender in a rural school in the Free State, South Africa

“…The masculinities that women do not have such as aggressiveness and forcefulness, deny them the opportunity to be taken seriously. Thatho's gains in terms of male privilege supports recent academic work that show how trans men benefit at work to the detriment of women workers (Dozier 2005;Schilt 2006). Schilt (2006) argues that many of the trans men respondents in her study found themselves receiving more authority, respect and reward when they gain social identities as men.…”

The Intersection of Race, Sexual Orientation, Socioeconomic Status, Trans Identity, and Mental Health Outcomes

“…More recently, researchers have investigated the intersection between gender identity and other single social identities such as sexual identity (e.g., Bockting, Benner, & Coleman, 2009;Chivers & Bailey, 2000;Hill, 2007), racial/ethnic identities (e.g., Dozier, 2005;Erich, Tittsworth, Colton-Meier, & Lerman, 2010;Roen, 2001;Rosario, 2004;Schilt, 2006;Singh, 2013), or SES (e.g., Gehi & Arkles, 2007), individually. Conversely, literature similar to that of Dozier (2005) and Schilt (2006) examined more than one social identity of trans individuals (e.g., race/ethnicity, height, sexuality) but only focused on trans men. There is a lack of comprehensive research on the simultaneous influences and interrelatedness of different identities and mental health outcomes within the trans population.…”

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

“…transgender issues and lives. Since this time, published scholarship on transgender and transsexual individuals has slowly become more common (e.g., Dozier, 2005;Girschick, 2008;Hines, 2006;Rubin, 2004;Schilt, 2006;Shapiro, 2004). As focus on transgender and transsexual individuals emerges in sociology, partners of transgender and transsexual individuals have not yet appeared as intelligible subjects within published sociological research.…”