Since the publication of Moffitt's (1993) important research on adolescence-limited and life-coursepersistent offending, there has been a renewal of the often tacit goal of criminology of identifying the individual factors that facilitate and inhibit deviant behaviour. In focusing on early childhood biological, genetic and psychological development, and considering social environment only as a mediating factor, these approaches miss some of the queer pathways to crime. While queer criminology has done much to highlight how sexuality and gender diversity shapes victimisation, everyday offending by sexuality and gender diverse people remains opaque. We argue that examining offending by queer people inevitably destabilises takenfor-granted ideas about offending and desistance from offending. Moreover, given the increasing numbers of young people identifying as queer 1 , and that they are more likely to be sanctioned by criminal processing systems, we highlight the importance of exploring the experiences of queer young people. Here we suggest a critical criminological lens can queer 2 (Ault 1996) notions of desistance and offending and offer up an alternative, queer criminal career, which starts not with bio-psychological dysfunctioning, but with social exclusion and criminalisation of identity. Due to the preponderance of research in the United States and United Kingdom around these issues, we draw primarily on this research to contend that social exclusion and criminalisation are key factors that collide to produce a queer criminal career. Further, we suggest that any work on these queer experiences in Australia is also likely engaging with the social exclusion and criminalisation of non-white, specifically Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander, peoples.
CICJ 1 A QUEER CRIMINAL CAREER'Gender non-conforming' refers to people whose gender expression diverges from the norms expected for their gender, but still identify with the sex they were designated at birth (Irvine 2010).
9Cisgender is the opposite to transgender, and denotes those women who identify with their sex at birth.
