Transitioning gender, transitioning race: Transgender people and multiracial positionality

Abstract

Background: While research on trans People of Color’s experiences has been increasing in recent years, this intersectional work has often not included a focus on the specificities of multiracial and multiethnic trans experiences.

Aims: This study explores shifts in racial identity by multiracial/multiethnic trans people as they transition gender and the ways Whiteness and nationalist ideology shape their racialized gender experiences.

Methods: This paper is based on six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with self-identified multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-heritage trans people in the USA. Data collection centered participants’ experiences of self-identification and interactions with others (e.g., family, acquaintances, and strangers).

Results: As participants transitioned gender and were acknowledged by others in their gender identity, shifts in their embodiment were used by others to ascribe a new racialized gender. This often resulted in participants reflecting on their sense of self and racialized gender identities in new ways.

Discussion: Multiracial and multiethnic transgender people’s experiences in transitioning race confirm the importance of intersectional analysis, reveal the intersectional fluidity of social categories, explicate how social understandings of one category (e.g., race) influence another category (e.g., gender), demonstrate that the meanings associated with racialized gender are based in relations of power, and show that, in transgender studies particularly, we must attend to the ways that the concept of transition implicates not only gender, but also other categories such as race and nationality.

Keywords:

• Critical mixed-race studies
• embodiment
• intersectionality
• multiethnic
• multiracial
• race
• transgender

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Drawing on Daniel et al., we use multiracial to refer to identities and mixed-race to refer to the field of study.

2 Participants chose their pseudonyms.

3 We use Latinx to be inclusive of a broad range of gender identities in discussing an ethnic and often racialized experience and identity as it is shaped by dominant culture (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019).

4 According to Manalansan (2015), “Bakla is a [previously pejorative] Tagalog sexual/gender category still prevalent in contemporary Philippines today” (p. 113).