Ageing Bodies that Matter: Age, Gender and Embodiment in Older Transgender People's Life Stories

Abstract

Within feminist and queer studies, age is rarely explored or theorized, and ageing is to a great extent ignored, while social gerontology tends to rest on assumptions of stable binary gender categories. This article starts with older trans people's life stories to explore intersections between (old) age, gender, and embodiment. The analysis, using a theoretical framework developed within critical gerontology, queer theory, and feminist theory, illustrates what ageing and old age may mean for transgender people. Bodily ageing is perceived very differently by trans people, depending on bodily conditions and on how they can and want to perform gender. While some experience what they perceive as the androgyny of age positively, other narratives illustrate how ageing can complicate the possibilities of performing linear gender. The ageing body can limit prospects for undergoing sex reassignment surgery (SRS). The analysis illustrates how older trans people may face ageist attitudes during the transition processes. Later life and the future might also bring fears about situations in which one will need care. For older trans people, this could mean fears of being discriminated against, having fewer possibilities to choose which contexts to be in, and which persons to have in one's home and close to one's body. A Baradian approach, in which bodies are seen as agential and performativity as material-discursive, offers complex understandings of older transgender people's experiences. The results trouble previous theoretical concepts, while highlighting the importance of broadening understandings of age, gender, and embodiment that do not take their starting-points in younger or middle age, linear gender, or abled congruent bodies.

Acknowledgements

This article was written during a guest visit to San Francisco State University. I would like to thank Rita Melendez and Brian deVries, with whom I worked there. I also thank Wibke Straube and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

¹ Here I use the term “transgender” to refer to a variety of identities and practices that take place outside norms and expectations of the two binary, legally, and socially acknowledged gender categories: male and female. This could encompass identities as transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, non gender, drag king, drag queen, non binary, genderbender among others (Stryker 2008).

² While I see ageing as a lifelong process during the life-course, I use old/er here as an analytical category to refer to a phase of later life. In Sweden, the age of 65 and older is commonly used to define older people within both state discourses and ageing research.

³ In many countries, within and outside the EU, a legal change of gender is still often tied to compulsory sterilization.

⁴ In relation to the feminist field, however, I do not want to deny the history of feminist engagement with materialism and the body. Sara Ahmed criticizes the tendency to construct the field of “the new materialism”, which implies that feminism was (previously) anti-biological or “social constructionist” and thereby offers a false and reductive historical understanding (Ahmed 2008).

⁵ The study was approved by the Regional Ethics Committee in Sweden (Dnr 2010/29–31). The ethical guidelines established by the Swedish Research Council in relation to informing participants of the aim of the study have been followed throughout the study. Consent was given by all participants, and confidentiality has been guaranteed (Swedish Research Council 2011).

⁶ I want to question Butler's choice of the word “becoming” here. It is unclear whether Butler is suggesting that, for example, a transsexual man is not a man until he transitions. I do want to emphasize the importance of respecting self-identification, regardless of pre-/post-transition status.

⁷ Younger people can, of course, also be met with ageist notions built upon perceptions of young people as immature and unable to make decisions regarding their identities and bodies. This is illustrated in many countries' laws setting lower age limits for starting gender transitions. In Sweden, for example, one has to be 18 or older to change one's legal gender.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for this study was provided by grants from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [2012–1062]; and from the Solstickan Foundation. These grants made it possible for me to be a guest scholar at San Francisco State University, where I wrote this article.

Notes on contributors

Anna Siverskog

Anna Siverskog is a PhD candidate in Ageing and Later Life at the National Institute for the Study of Ageing and Later Life (NISAL), Linköping University. Their PhD project focuses on LGBTQ ageing through life-story interviews with twenty LGBTQ-identified people aged 64–88. It explores how these stories relate to ideas of life-courses, time, and age ordering in relation to normativity, as well as intersections between gender, age, and sexuality in these stories.