Grieving Gender: Trans-identities, Transition, and Ambiguous Loss

Abstract

More and more families include a member who is trans-identified, and therefore, may be called to consider how sex and gender matter to identity and relationships. Previous research shows that for some family members this is not a simple matter. Often, family members experience transition as a living death, wherein the trans-identified person is perceived as somehow present and absent, the same and different, at once. The purposes of this study were to understand what it is about the transition of sex/gender that incites this meaning struggle and how meaning-making is connected to ambiguous loss. Relational Dialectics Theory was used to analyze how family members construct meanings for transition through competing discourses related to sex, gender, and personal identity. Findings suggest that family members' meaning making processes position them to endure, overcome, or avoid the feelings of grief related to transition.

Keywords:

• Transgender Identity
• Ambiguous Loss
• Relational Dialectics Theory

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the participants who shared their stories and, especially, Ellie Altman for her graciousness and help with recruitment. The author thanks Steve Duck, Leslie Baxter and Julia Wood for their guidance and insights regarding the dissertation from which this paper was written.

Notes

1. Butler (1993) argues this toward a different end. Sex, she says, is always gendered, and therefore a separation of sex and gender is not quite possible. Once sex is understood as socially constructed “there will be no way to understand ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex … ‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (p. 2).

2. Terms used to describe trans-identified persons are often contested and in flux. I present a list of terms and uses as an attempt to capture some trans identities, but by no means is this list definitive or exhaustive.

3. For the most part, I will use a slash to combine yet distinguish the terms sex and gender. I do this for several reasons: (1) to respect the ways participants discussed the concepts, which was most often as either one in the same or inseparable, (2) to respect a variety of identity transitions. For example, some persons might consider their transitions to concern sex, while others might consider their transitions to concern gender. Others still might consider transitions to concern both or might see the two concepts as indistinguishable (i.e., transition may constitute for them a change in materiality, behavior, signification, or all of these). Finally, the slash is fitting for both a biological essentialist view of these concepts as well as a Butlerian view, both of which are relevant here.

4. Although no culture is homogeneous, and certainly US culture is not, I am using US culture to refer to mainstream American culture. That is, the review of literature focuses on discourses to which most Americans have access (e.g., are present in popular media) and likely draw from in their meaning making, though the specifics of meaning making may vary by co-culture, class, race, education level, religious affiliation or other demographic characteristics.

5. Butler (1993) argues that although categories of male and female are taken to be strict and clean categories, in fact, sex is “an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized” (p. 1) and that “bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (p. 2). In other words, male and female are ideals that bodies only approximate. Therefore, all bodies represent variations in the manifestation of sex.

6. Butler (1993) complicates this distinction in Bodies that Matter arguing that by regarding gender as cultural it becomes too easy to regard sex as natural when, in fact, it too is a cultural construct (see footnote 1 for more detail). While I agree with this reading, I find that when a social constructionist discourse appears in scholarly or popular discourse it most often takes the form of the less nuanced view that sex is biological/material and gender is cultural/performative. That was the case in the talk of my study participants, as well, when they gave voice to social constructionism. Therefore, when I refer to social constructionist discourse, I am identifying talk that depicts gender as social, and may or may not address sex as such.

7. My analysis of participants’ discourse represents one interpretation of their experiences, and one that is unavoidably influenced by own identity as neither someone who is trans-identified, nor a relative or partner of someone who is. Not only does this fact affect my reading of the data, but also unavoidably influenced participants’ orientations toward me and, likely, their responses, since they were telling their stories not only to a researcher, but to one who is an outsider to the trans and SOFFA communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen Norwood

Kristen Norwood (PhD, University of Iowa, 2010) is a postdoctoral research fellow at Saint Louis University