Gender And Sexuality Diversity In A Culture Of Limitation PDF Download

Gender, sex, and sexuality diversity has become more visible both culturally and legislatively in the last decade in the United States. The rights of people to not experience discrimination based on gender identity and presentation as well as to marry those of their own sex and/or gender have been legislated in a fast growing number of states and are being hotly debated throughout the country. The medical and psychological guidelines for "treating" intersex, transgender, and sexually queer individuals are evolving to become more "patient-centered." Sex, gender and sexually queer people are being talked and written about, but not often heard from. This dissertation focuses on the lived experiences of gender variant people with regard to their complex identities, their interactions both with people they know and strangers, and the macro-social structures that deny their very existence. I collected data through forty-three semi-structured interviews with transgender, genderqueer, and other gender non-conforming people as well as spending more than two years in the field. I use a grounded theory approach and find a great deal of diversity in my sample. Research participants self-identified in multiple ways placing varying levels of importance on their gender identities. Notably, the narratives through which they explain their gender journeys bear little resemblance to the transnormative "I was born in the wrong body" medicalized story. Rather, participants recognize that Western culture and institutions are currently unwilling to accommodate their lived experience. This research argues for increased knowledge of human sex diversity as ignorance of the non-binary nature of human sex is in large part what fuels cultural understandings of binary gender and sexuality. Institutional rules and norms codifying these binaries will change through activism and scholarship designed to change cultural understandings in order to accommodate empirical diversity. I argue that an important component of this change process will be taking an interdisciplinary approach to correct binary assumptions of sex, gender, and sexuality in a wide variety of research on "sex differences" as well as in clinical practice.