Browsing by Subject "transgender"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity
    (2014-11) Vitulli, Elias
    "Carceral Normativities: Sex, Security, and the Penal Management of Gender Nonconformity" examines the history of the incarceration of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the US from the early twentieth century to the present. While rarely discussed in prison scholarship and activism, gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners have garnered intense scrutiny from prison administrators and have experienced persistent and pervasive violence. Through archival and legal research, I historicize this violence, arguing that for the last century prison administrators have labeled gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security or, as I call it, as queer dangerousness, which has structured penal practices and policies used to manage these prisoners and normalized violence against them. I argue that this construction of gender nonconformity as security threat is produced from a set of institutionalized logics, which I call racialized gender normativity. "Carceral Normativities" examines often overlooked and continually evolving prison policies and practices to trace the history of the construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness and institutional security threat as well as how racialized gender normativity has been constructed and reconstructed as a constitutive logic of the prison system. Chapter One examines the history of the construction of penal sex-segregation alongside newspaper stories from the mid-twentieth century of penal administrators "discovering" sexually "misclassified" prisoners in their institutions, in order to argue that the prison system's programmatic design and core understandings of rehabilitation and incorrigibility have been deeply shaped by racialized gender normativity, which produced the imperative to sex-segregate and constructed sexual ambiguity as administrative disorder. Chapter Two traces the history of the systematic segregation of gender nonconforming and transgender prisoners, which began in the early twentieth century and continues into the present, and argues that this segregation was created as a management tool as prison administrators began to identify gender nonconformity as a threat to institutional security, or as queer dangerousness. Chapter Three examines the relationship between dominant penological, social scientific, and legal narratives about sexual violence in penal institutions and the use of sexual violence as a tool of control--a practice I call carceral sexual violence. I argue that narratives, which portray prisons as sites of rampant sexual violence entirely perpetrated by prisoners, construct transgender and gender nonconforming prisoners as simultaneously unrapable and constantly subject to sexual violence, which justifies and obscures many quotidian forms of carceral sexual violence that target gender nonconformity. Chapter Four examines federal civil rights litigation regarding access to hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for transgender women and argues that carceral necropower, or the production of the prison as a space of death and prisoners as socially dead, and the racialized gender normative construction of gender nonconformity as queer dangerousness securitizes gender-affirming medical treatment in prisons, constructing security concerns as a primary factor determining access to such treatment. Most broadly, "Carceral Normativities" expands our understanding of how the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality shapes carceral constructions of deviance and dangerousness as well as penal policies and practices.
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    "Changes in Time": A Transgender Journey in Three Acts
    (2012-05-30) Boatner, Ethan
    "Changes in Time" is a trilogy of plays dramatizing three key moments in my transgender protagonist's life over a span of time from the mid-1950s to a somewhat unspecified present. In the first, "Wishes," Lorraine McGowan is a 14-year-old just beginning to see how different she is; in "Dresses," Lorraine is in her mid-30s, on the cusp of emerging into her self; while "Changes" introduces Laurence, now transitioned and in charge of his life. The plays are set in an earlier era to show how powerfully the strictures of culture and time affect a person's ability to seek - or to find - help. Each play casts just one other character - Lorraine's friend, mother, or father - so that each can bring out facets of Lorraine/Laurence's emotions and explore the difficulties involved in claiming his proper gender.
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    Connect [Fall 2016]
    (University of Minnesota: College of Education and Human Development, 2016-09) University of Minnesota: College of Education and Human Development
    Making democracy work: Two alumnae and a faculty member talk about their paths and passions as engaged citizens. A heritage of education: Schoolhouses are a window on the educational values that shaped the nation. Pause with paws: For social work doctoral student Tanya Bailey, animals are partners in creating a healthy campus.
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    Looking for Signs of Trans Life: Rejecting Transnormativity to Explore Genderfluidity as Both Identity and Relational Process
    (2023) Morrow, Quin
    Genderfluidity refers to having a gender that changes consistently and nonlinearly. For people who are genderfluid, change is the basis of gender identity cohesion; past genders are not rationalized as a phase, a misnaming, or confusion, future genders are anticipated, and one’s current gender experience is not upheld as more “true” or “real” than those past or future genders. It is a form of nonbinary gender, and is an aspect of some transgender people’s experience that has so far been understudied. The present research used hermeneutic phenomenology to explore 16 people’s experiences of genderfluidity. In their interviews, participants described genderfluidity as a relational experience, fundamentally informed by their interactions in community, rather than solely as an individualized identity. Major themes included the importance of gender euphoria (as opposed to dysphoria) for finding an authentic gender presentation; authentic gender embodiment as a prerequisite for building authentic and noncoercive relationships; genderfluidity as an experience which blurs the lines between masculinity, femininity, and androgyny and which is therefore treated as illegitimate under cisnormativity; White supremacy and ableism as defining features of cisnormativity and anti-transness; and fluidity-affirming community ties as permission to exist as a genderfluid person. Genderfluidity therefore provides a unique lens through which to understand connections between anti-transness, patriarchy, White supremacy, and ableism, as well as possibilities for resisting these forces through noncoercive, responsive, and authentic relationships.
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    Natural Mentoring Relationships And Parent-Child Attachment Among Queer Emerging Adults
    (2024-03) Burningham, Kaleb
    Queer youth and young adults often experience challenges in their familial relationships, particularly with their parents, related to their queer identity. Combined with the minority stress they already face and the added weight of other external stressors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dire need to examine methods of prevention and intervention to help them successfully transition to adulthood as their most authentic selves. Natural mentoring relationships are a type of nonparental adult support formed organically within the mentee’s existing social network (e.g., teachers or grandparents) that have been shown to be helpful despite risk status (Van Dam et al., 2018) and even posited to be a corrective attachment experience (Rhodes et al., 2006). The aims of the two studies in my dissertation were to a) examine the current state of natural mentoring among queer emerging adults using a new, original dataset focused on a contemporary sample representative of race and sexual and gender diversity (Study 1), and b) to determine if natural mentoring moderates the association between the parent-child relationship and suicidality, psychological distress, and the use of substances to cope during a particularly stressful time—the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 2). Participants were 413 emerging adults (ages 18-25, M = 21.53 years) in the United States. Approximately 35% (n = 146) were trans (i.e., participants who identify with a gender other than their sex-assigned-at-birth) and roughly 50% (n = 200) were emerging adults of color (non-exclusive categories). Data were collected at the height of the omicron variant outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were recruited on the Prolific research platform, and stratified sampling was used to recruit participants who identified as a gender other than their sex assigned-at-birth and racial and ethnic minorities. Using a descriptive design (Study 1), I examined the prevalence, characteristics, quality, and acceptance of natural mentoring relationships. Most study participants reported having natural mentors and these relationships were of relatively high quality. Additionally, most participants perceived that their mentor had at least a somewhat positive attitude toward their queer identity. Results also showed that natural mentoring relationships lasted longer when mentors and mentees shared the same race. Following the descriptive study, linear regression was used (Study 2) to explore whether the parent-child relationship predicted suicidality, psychological distress, and the use of substances to cope and then to determine if aspects of natural mentoring buffered those associations. Findings showed that parent-child attachment quality predicted psychological distress and suicidality but not the use of substances to cope. Furthermore, there were no significant moderating effects. Significantly, mentor acceptance of the mentee’s gender identity predicted lower psychological distress. Findings also showed that trans emerging adults experience higher psychological distress, a lesser likelihood of having a mentor, and lower parent-child attachment quality than their sexual minority cisgender peers. All in all, results of these two studies indicate that natural mentoring relationships are a relatively accessible resource for queer emerging adults and that these relationships tend to be high quality (i.e., emotionally close and that mentors were accepting of the mentee’s queer identity) but that there still needs to be considerable focus on the parent-child relationship, even if the youth are young adults. Natural mentoring can complement parenting, but it cannot supplant it. It is also crucial to connect queer emerging adults with mentors who share their identities and experiences, particularly for trans emerging adults and queer emerging adults of color. Future research should continue to examine natural mentoring in the context of other influential attachment relationships and attachment experiences. The implementation of longitudinal or mixed-methods designs is also needed. Importantly, there needs to be a higher emphasis on exploring natural mentoring relationships among trans emerging adults to connect them with mentors who can support them in a discriminatory sociopolitical landscape.
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    When you can’t go home: Associations between family environment and suicidality for transgender youth with histories of homelessness
    (2019-05) Morrow, Quinlyn
    Transgender youth who are or have been homeless are at an increased risk of suicide. To better understand risk and protective factors for suicide in this population, the present qualitative study analyzed interviews with 30 racially diverse transgender young people (ages 15-26) who had experienced homelessness. Inductive qualitative content analysis revealed that gender-based rejection from family members, other dysfunctional family dynamics (e.g., domestic violence, substance abuse), and mental illness appeared to increase risk of both homelessness and suicide, rather than homelessness itself increasing suicide risk. Results show that although homelessness was a stressor in these young people’s lives, conflict and rejection from family members could also be severe stressors. In these instances, participants managed conflictual relationships in ways that allowed them to maintain relationships when safe, and to create distance when relationships were not supportive. Findings suggest that clinicians and other service providers working with homeless transgender youth need to be mindful of the intersectional nature of potential familial stressors, wherein gender-based prejudice can interact with other family dysfunction to make the home unsafe, and to facilitate their clients’ agency in establishing appropriate boundaries with family members. Additionally, efforts to support trans youth may need to focus on advocating for the expansion of social safety net programs that provide access to basic necessities in order to proactively reduce harm to transgender people, regardless of their specific family circumstances.