The Stories We Tell: Making Sense of Gender, Transition, and the Centrality of Relationships

Abstract

What does it mean to be trans? What brings some of us to medically transition? This thesis contributes to a better understanding of trans lives. More specifically, my work attends to how we situate ourselves within others' stories to determine validity and humanity.Motivated by my own experiences of making sense of gender and medically transitioning in my youth, my research considers how the dominant stories of gender inform how trans adults in North America make sense of their own genders and transition.These stories and orientations are enmeshed with relationships and relationships vary. This variation is not because of any one identifiable thing. These variations tell us things about the way we see and think about gender, as well as our orientations to it. This thesis is a call for research on transition to return to considering what gender means, starting from the perspective of trans lives and voices.