“I’m totally transariffic”: Exploring how Transgender and Gender-expansive Youth and Young Adults Make Sense of their Challenges and Successes

As transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) youth and young adults (YYA) navigate challenging environments, they often seek spaces for safety and acceptance. This study explores ways in which a group of TGE YYA who were engaged with a community-based service organization make sense of their experiences, challenges, and successes in ways that illuminate the factors and processes associated with resilience. Secondary data analysis was conducted on qualitative responses from 85 TGE YYA ages 13–24. The themes that emerged provide insight into the ways community-based programs and providers can understand and support the resilience of TGE YYA.     

Queer love economies: Making trans/feminist film in precarious times

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.     

WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GAYS IS GOOD FOR THE GANDER: MAKING HOMELESS YOUTH HOUSING SAFER FOR LESBIAN,GAY, BISEXUAL,AND TRANSGENDER YOUTH

Across the United States, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth are grossly overrepresented in the homeless youth population. These youth are at an increased risk of being victims of violence in homeless youth housing facilities. This Note examines the causes of the overrepresentation of LGBT youth in the homeless youth population. Additionally, this Note suggests the following changes to the regulation of homeless youth housing programs to make them safer for these youth: (1) placing low maximum limits on the occupancy capacity at which these programs may operate, (2) requiring that all showering facilities provide individual privacy, (3) prohibiting anti‐LGBT discrimination in the provision of services, (4) requiring nondiscrimination and sensitivity training, and (5) promoting the creation of LGBT‐specific homeless youth housing programs.     

Tranarchism: transgender embodiment and destabilization of the state

Transgender, in the simplest sense, is an umbrella term for individuals whose gender identities and/or expressions of those identities fall outside of binary sex/gender identification norms. Though some anarchists live gender-transgressive lives, and some transgender people would call themselves anarchists, literature formally connecting the two modes of being is scarce. Much existing anarchist literature discussing issues of transgender identity attempts to determine whether gender non-conformity itself is inherently anarchic. The state dictates that gender is a necessary means of categorization in order to classify and manage people. Gender transgressors, in undermining a fundamental tool of the state, must then be acting anarchically. I argue, however, that imbuing trans identification with innate anarchic meanings is problematic. As anarchism itself can be manifested and lived in a myriad of highly variant, even contradictory, ways, gender subversion acts as a tool, rather than embodiment, of anarchy. This study uses queer, anarcha-feminist, and post-structuralist frameworks to examine gender transgression as a means of destabilizing the state by challenging state reliance on binary gender classifications. By understanding how transgender people who often interact with state authority for survival and legitimization posses the power to undermine it, anarchism can both empower and be empowered by the movement for gender justice.     

Where the Margins Meet: A Demographic Assessment of Transgender Inmates in Men’s Prisons

Drawing on official data and original interview data on 315 transgender inmates in California prisons for men, this research provides the first empirical portrayal of a prison population in California that is unique by virtue of being both transgender and incarcerated. Situated at the nexus of intersecting marginalities, transgender inmates fare far worse on standard demographic and health measures than their non‐transgender counterparts in the US population, the California population, the US prison population, and the California prison population. With the possible exceptions of partnership status and educational attainment, these factors combine to reveal that transgender inmates are marginalized in heretofore undocumented ways. At a time in which an evidence‐based approach to corrections is increasingly embraced by corrections officials in the US, this article provides the first systematic profile of transgender prisoners. It reveals they can be regarded as a special population that, from a policy point of view, raises what Minow calls “the dilemma of difference”.     

Australian news media’s representation of Cate McGregor,the highest ranking Australian transgender military officer

To date, no academic analysis has investigated the representation of transgender individuals by Australia’s news media (ANM). This paper conducts a discourse analysis of ANM’s representation of Cate McGregor, the highest ranking Australian transgender military officer. The author offers this analysis as a case study in which 28 articles were selected from a three-year period, beginning November 2012, when McGregor ‘came out’. By employing a feminist and transgender theory framework the author concludes that, on the one hand, ANM reproduces traditional transgender tropes (e.g. publishing ‘before/after’ photographs). On the other hand, ANM gives voice to McGregor’s views pertaining to living as a woman and a transgender woman, which are aligned with transgender theory. Thus, this author argues that ANM engages in a remediation of transgender theory. McGregor acknowledges that she has enjoyed the privilege of being socialized as a man and therefore her life as a woman, a transgender woman is different to other women. Moreover, as an ‘out’ transgender woman she is refusing to ‘pass’ and hide her sex/gender history. Subsequently, McGregor views on what it means to be a man, a woman, and a transgender woman, are disruptive to sex/gender normativities and she thereby embodies a ‘gender fuck’.     

Overcoming resistance to resistance in public administration: Resistance strategies of marginalized publics in citizen‐state interactions

There has been a general resistance to resistance studies in public administration (PA) research. Although previous research has documented instances of selective policy implementation by PA practitioners that put minority groups at a comparative disadvantage, we still have a limited understanding of the different ways in which these groups contest discriminatory administrative practices especially within non‐western developing countries. To address this gap, in this article, I discuss the various strategic responses the Khawaja Sira—a genderqueer group of Pakistan—employ in their interactions with the frontline police workers to contest their hyper‐surveillance and moral policing. The discussion illustrates that while Khawaja Sira mostly rely on individual acts of contestation in their interactions with police officers, the emerging leadership of the Khawaja Sira is enabling emergence of new forms of resistance based on social capital and collective protests. In addition to contributing to the limited literature on citizen perspectives and LGBT issues in PA research, the theoretical framework of resistance presented here can serve as a good template to analyze citizen responses to discriminatory frontline practice in other sociopolitical contexts as well.     

Endless Sex: The Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Persistence of a Legal Category

This paper challenges a view of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 as involving an unequivocal shift from the concept of sex to the concept of gender in law’s understanding of the distinction between male and female. While the Act does move in the direction of gender, and ostensibly in an obvious way through abandoning surgical preconditions for legal recognition, it will be argued that the Act retains and deploys the concept of sex. Moreover, it will be argued that the concept of sex retained is not merely an anatomical understanding, but sex in a biological sense. In this respect the Gender Recognition Act can be viewed as embodying a tension between gender and sex. Further, it is contended that this tension is explicable in terms of irresolution of contrary legal desires to reproduce the gender order and to insulate marriage and heterosexuality from homosexuality in the moment of reform.     

LGBTQ Youth in the Child Welfare System: An Overview of Research,Practice, and Policy

LGBTQ youth are largely overrepresented in the child welfare system. The experiences of LGBTQ youth have largely been overlooked. LGBTQ youth often encounter a number of challenges and disparities as they navigate the child welfare system. Many report experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and an overall lack of acceptance. The permanency and placement options have historically been limited for many LGBTQ youth, often leading to an over reliance on congregate settings and aging out of foster are. The current article provides a synthesis of the existing research on the experiences and outcomes of LGBTQ youth in care, as well as an exploration of the policy and practice initiatives aimed at creating a more inclusive system of care.     

Sexual victimization against transgender women in prison: Consent and coercion in context

In this article, we conjoin two long‐standing lines of inquiry in criminology—the study of prison life and the study of sexual assault—by using original qualitative and quantitative data from 315 transgender women incarcerated in 27 California men's prisons. In so doing, we advance an analysis of the factors and processes that shape their experience of sexual victimization in prison. The results of qualitative analysis of 198 reported incidents of sexual victimization exhibit a range of types of sexual victimization experienced by transgender women in prison and reveal the centrality of relationships to their experiences of victimization. Findings from logistic regression models buttress the qualitative results, highlighting a factor that consistently and powerfully indicates vulnerability to sexual victimization is involvement in consensual sexual relationships with male prisoners. Together, the data demonstrate the prominence of intimate partner violence in prison, complicate the distinction between consent and unwanted sexual experiences in the lives of transgender women in prisons for men, and shine a light on the workings of gender in a total institution that privileges heteronormativity at the expense of the safety of transgender women in prisons for men. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of timely policy concerns.