[4/4] The Lives of Transgender People by Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin (Chapter 5, Appendixes & a few closing thoughts)

The Lives of Transgender People

Genny Beemyn & Susan Rankin

Columbia University Press, 2011

Chapter 5 "Transgender Youth and Implications for Higher Education"

I poached a bit of quoteage already in an earlier chapter about college and university issues. But this chapter is sort of about two things at once. One section is on 'identity formation among transgender youth' and includes this;

"Because they had known about and met others like themselves from an early age, most of the younger people we interviewed reported that they began to identify as transgender while still teenagers. (…) Yet few of the older participants indicated that they had acknowledged being transgender during adolescence, which suggests that these results reflect a shift in transgender identity formation and no merely survey bias"(161).

On the university theme, the authors note that "more than 90 percent of two- and four-year institutions in the United States have not taken any of these steps and remain completely inaccessible and inhospitable to transgender students"(163). The 'steps' they refer to are any of those things one imagines would be required to make transgender students welcome.

This chapter ends with this;

"By identifying themselves in multigendered ways, transgender and other gender-nonconforming youth are radically changing the definition of gender and how gender identity will be viewed in the future. Long gone are the days when gender could be limited to the categories of men and women. But so, too, is the time when transgender can be considered a catchall third option, creating a gender 'trinary.' We live in a world where gender is more complex and more fluid. It is not enough to dispense with the notion of a gender binary; we must embrace and celebrate the idea that gender is bound only by the limits of people's spirits."(166)

& ya know, I do respond to the hint of utopia at the end of that passage, I really do. I wish that we had the volunteeristic control of our gender which this might be read as implying. But I guess I've soaked up too much psychoanalysis or something, but it seems to me that while so much of that last paragraph is spot on, that if Beemyn & Rankin are implying that we can devise the gender that we desire to inhabit (which they may well not being saying at all), then I'd have to be skeptical. 

Any "identity" would be a montage of Symbolic and Imaginary components, would be better denoted (from my POV) not as an identity at all, but as an identification. Perhaps the primary identification or at the very least one of the most primary identifications, but still, nonetheless, an identification, not a guarantee of language having captured being.

The Appendixes, of which there are 3, which give us the survey itself, the interview protocols and a review of the stats. I got nothing much to say about any of that stuff. 

For a book with only 230 pages, this packs quite a punch. I was quite sparing above in my use of the stories and voices of the respondents, in part to make me focus a bit more on the stats and so that I don't give too many spoilers.  You should read it - this is my claim. 

I lack the experience to respond to the Milestones model but I'd be most interested to see any reviews of the book by trans people. There are probably a bunch of them out there already, but I've yet to search.

There have been many in recent months to either express an unparticularized curiosity about my interest in trans issues, or a blunt question along the lines of "what's with all this trans stuff you're writing about?"  I find myself listening to these questions and now and then trying, a bit at least, to answer. But, I cannot help but to suspect that there are other questions unspoken. That is, I am more than willing usually to try and speak to how thinking about trans issues is meaningfully linkable to my interests in psychoanalysis, queer theory, the body, voice, and much else. & if much that I am reading is not expressly theoretical, this is because I am leery about theorizing in this area without knowing a lot more than I know at present.

But having answered as above, I notice in many instances that there is a hint of my having failed to answer something. I do not know that anyone might be wondering if I am about to transition to woman, but the answer there is Yes, absolutely - I started hormones last month! The preceding claims are not true. I was hoping that you might have thought so for a second. Nor am I, by focusing on this literature, attempting to stake any sort of new or modified identity claim with regard to myself - though I suspect that realignments of my identifications are surely possible, and may in fact be on-going though at a snail's pace much of the time. Beyond that, I think I will remain silent, though acknowledging that the old chestnut from psychology programs does hold true here; "research is me-search" … though it remains to say exactly how that is the case for me.