Sociology Compass 2/2 (2008): 433450, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00086.

Transgender and Transsexual Studies:

Sociologys Influence and Future Steps
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz*
American University

Abstract

This article provides a general sense of transgender studies in sociology. It does

so by looking at the definitions and relationship between the terms transgender
and transsexual, the history of transsexual studies, sociologys place in this development, and the active production (by trans people) of transsexual and transgender
studies. This review primarily focuses on US sociological writing, including
ethnomethodology, labeling, feminist, and symbolic interactionist frameworks,
while incorporating critical theory, queer theory, and other interdisciplinary
influences. The article explores various movements in the recent history of this
scholarship: for instance, while transsexual studies were mostly developed with a
male-to-female transsexual perspective, recent scholarship place female-to-male
transsexual and transgender identity centrally. I present current trends and future
steps of sociological inquiry in the area of transgender studies as a way of closing
the discussion of sociologys potential contributions in the near future.

Introduction: Situating transgender/transsexual in the

current cultural context
I want to start this article with a few notes on recent developments on
the transgendered, transsexuality, and cross-dressing within the field of
sociology and outside of it. During the last couple of years encyclopedias
that focus on gender and sexuality, general sociology, and social science/
studies have included entries on transgender, transvestism, and transsexualism
(see King and Ekins, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2007), transgender
studies (see Bryant, Encyclopedia of Gender & Society, forthcoming) or lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (see Vidal-Ortiz, Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity,
and Society, forthcoming). The Sexualities journal opened up their publication
with one of its first issues focusing on Transgender in Latin America in
1998 (Kulick 1998). Gay and lesbian newspapers and magazines are now
much more keen to publishing editorial notes, articles, and news on
transgender peoples struggles as well as their successes. And journals
like Gender & Society, through some of their articles, regularly address
transgender experiences, cross-dressing, and other gender variant aspects
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434 Trans Studies, Sociologys Influence, and Future Steps

(Gagn et al. 1997; Gamson 1997; Schilt 2006; Schrock et al. 2005; Shapiro
2007 see also Lucal 1999, for a nontransgender identity portrayal of a
persons movement between social perceptions of gender). In the summer
of 2006, Contexts, the oh-so-glossy and popular magazine from the American
Sociological Association, portrayed in their cover a (fabulous, if you ask
me) picture of drag queens and a featured article (Taylor and Rupp 2006)
from the study Taylor and Rupp published in 2003 (Drag Queens at the
801 Cabaret). And the same season saw the publication of The Transgender
Studies Reader, edited by Stryker and Whittle (2006), a compilation of
reprints and recent publications on transgender experience, identity,
medicalization, and mobilization.
And yet as I write this article, in February of 2007, breaking news
about the firing of City Manager Steven Stanton by the City Commissioners of Largo City, Florida, are front and center. After Stanton
announced the beginning of hormone therapy in preparation for sex
reassignment surgery, city officials fired Stanton. A campaign from the
National Sexuality Resource Center demanded that the commissioners retract
from such decision, but little seems to point to a reinstitution of Stanton
to the employment position held for almost 15 years. It is quite a mixed
bag of events that, in one way or another, bring forth the topic of
transgender studies. When thinking of transsexuality or transgender
people in popular media, several people come to mind. For us older
people, there are names such as Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, Silvia
Rivera, and perhaps Divine that represent a moment in history when
transsexuality, transgender identity, and cross-dressing were visible in US
society. For younger generations, names like Calpernia Adams, Gwen
Araujo, Tyra Hunter, Fred Martnez, and Brandon Teena have become public
names to refer to transgender identity, experience, and behavior; if you
turn to cable television, there are movies on some of these transgender
people, and stories told from various perspectives (including harassment
and death). Some of these individuals have reached national attention as
they have been killed (as in the case of Teena, Araujo, Hunter, Martnez),
or have had partners that have been killed in part because of a bias against
transgender people (Adams). Yet, portrayals of transgender and transsexual
people have been evident since early on in the twentieth century
(Meyerowitz 2002), even if transgender studies, and transgender as a
category of analysis did not emerge until the 1990s (Valentine 2007).
This article provides a general sense of the state of transgender studies
in sociology, although there are some necessary first steps. By looking at
the definitions and relationship of terms (e.g. between transgender and
transsexual, cross-dresser and drag queen), the history of transsexual/transgender studies and the processes through which transgender people were
central to the development of transsexuality narratives and more recent
transgender studies I illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of this field.
I then turn to specific sociological work that contributed to the study of
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transsexual experiences. I close the article with recent trends and future
steps of sociological inquiry in the area of transgender issues. As I show
briefly, this focus recognizes a history where transsexuality was inherently
a medicalized (and pathologized) term in social scientific knowledge, and
the various maneuverings where trans people themselves begin to address
the judgment (and thus tip the balance of power) between the medicalized
establishments, psychiatry, and their own life experiences. While significant
sociological scholarship has been developed in Australia (Lewins 1995),
England (King 1993), Brazil (Kulick 1998), and Canada/USA (Devor
1997; Namaste 2000; Rubin 2003), I will focus on sociological literature
in the USA, in particular, research that has incorporated the voices of
transgender and transsexual people.
Understanding the meanings of (and differences between)
the terms
What, exactly, does it mean to refer to someone (or oneself) as transgender,
or transsexual, or even trans? Kessler and McKenna (2000) have argued for
three distinctive ways of operationalizing the prefix trans so often used
in this scholarship. Meaning change, across, and beyond, trans is
utilized to refer to, in the first sense of the term, transsexual (when the
experience of sex reassignment surgery supports a persons wish or need
to confirm their preferred gender identity), in the second, moving from
a gender category to another (but still within a two gender structure), and
in the last, it means opening up to a multiplicity of gender options, as in
when a person considers life and experience outside the boundaries of male
and female (Kessler and McKenna explain it as when gender ceases to exist).
In academic and popular circles, transsexuality, a term that emerged in
the early/mid-twentieth century through a set of psychiatric and medical
processes (Meyerowitz 2002), is understood as an experience of those who
wish to change sex (i.e., identifying and transforming ones body to
match ones gender identity). This is a term particularly associated to
people transitioning from male-to-female, although female-to-male trans
people have used it too. For many trans people, the term transsexual has
negative connotations (Stone 1991; Stryker 1994, 2006; Wilchins 1997).
Transgender, on the other hand, refers to people who generally refuse to
take the gender binary as a given because of the pathologizing involved
in naming ones experience as transsexual. Variations on the term transgender (transgenderal, transgenderist) are said to have been used by Prince
in the 1970s (see, for example, 1979) but transgender does not achieve
this very all encompassing sense until the 1990s (Valentine 2007). Crossdressing and performing as female impersonators (drag queens) or male
ones (drag kings) are examples of experiences that were once linked to
transsexuality and are now related to transgender experience, expression,
or identity, as the term transgender gains more currency.
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In fact, the meanings of these terms are highly contested and have
changed within a very short period of time. Some have argued that a
transsexual does not change sex, but gender (given a persons chromosomes,
hormones and surgery only change secondary characteristics the argument
goes), while others render this desire to change ones public persona as
a process that no longer requires surgical transition. The transgender term,
and its relationship to transsexuality, has been mediated in the past by the
use of surgical procedures. Halberstam (1998), for instance, has argued
that transgender identities respond to certain gender transitivity that stops
short of surgery. In Halberstams most recent work, transgender also
represents an embodiment that is not simply about resisting gender, but
about being noticed differently: [t]ransgender proves to be an important
term not to people who want to reside outside of categories altogether
but to people who want to place themselves in the way of particular forms
of recognition (2005, 49).
Within a very short lived 15 years or so, the term transgender has itself
been used in postmodern terms to break away from gender, and distance from
transsexuality, and it is now beginning to be confounded in some ways with
transsexual embodiment, as implied in Halberstams recent work. Thus,
there are overlaps between these categories, even if they have different historical
origins. People on the ground utilize these terms in strict policing, especially
around the use of trans as a gender identity (or expression), and different
from sexual orientation (being lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, or gay), as
evident in the history of these terms. And as illustrated before (and in the
rest of the article), transsexuality is pathologized in the twentieth century;
however, it is at present time being reconsidered as a less stigmatized term
to refer to current transitioning experiences and narratives.
How psychiatry, medicine, feminist writers, and transsexuals
defined a field
Significant contributions have been made public in areas such as the
history of transsexuality (Meyerowitz 2002), social medicine (Hausman
1995), anthropology (Valentine 2007), the law (Bower 1994), and political
science (Currah et al. 2006). There have also been critical writings by
transgender and transsexual people about their experience in relation to
these categories (Stone 1991; Stryker 1994; Wilchins 1997); although
most have been written by male-to-female transgender people, some
accounts have been provided by female-to-males as well (Green 2004;
Sullivan 1979/2006). The history of psychiatric, medical, and feminist
writing was fruitful in the mid-twentieth century, and transsexual people
intercepted this knowledge-in-the-making. This section will illustrate (i)
a brief history of the (social) scientific knowledge production of transsexuality,
(ii) the involvement of transsexual people in this endeavor, and (iii) some
of the writings by transsexuals themselves.
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During the first 50 years of the twentieth century, transsexual emerged

as an identification label (Meyerowitz 2002) through a complex interplay
between medical technologies and media coverage on gender inverts
which often focused on intersex people (referred to as hermaphrodites in
the past for related references, refer to Chase 1998; Dreger 1998; Kessler
1998; Preves 2003). These were also battles to demand sex change acquisition and legal acceptance on the part of transsexuals themselves (Irvine
1990; Meyerowitz 2002). Sexological research, which focused on medical
explanations assuming causal relations on issues like transsexuality, was
significant in the advancement of transsexual categorizing as deviant (see
Irvine 1990).
The very first publicly known transsexual transition was that of Christine
Jorgensen, in 1952, although research has identified surgical transitioning
processes of mostly, but not exclusively, male-to-female transsexuals, as
early as two decades before Christine Jorgensens (Bullough and Bullough
1993; Meyerowitz 2002). Why did this case achieve the visibility it did,
in relation to other nongender conformists? Christine Jorgensen, as some
may have argued, was the perfect poster transsexual a very gender
conforming military man who wished to become a woman (as I have
commented elsewhere, there were cultural elements of eligibility: constructions of beauty linked to race and femininity, citizenship, and financial
support that made her transitioning as recognized as it was in the early
1950s Vidal-Ortiz n.d.). The visibility of Christine Jorgensens case
shaped how social scientists approached transsexuality, focusing on the
reasons (or causal relation) between sociomedical factors impacting
transsexuality, and less on the experience (or meaning) of transsexuality.
This supported the trend in the work of sexologists, psychiatrists, and
medical (surgical) providers who were already offering services for those
they might have called true transsexuals who, like Jorgensen, became
heterosexual women after transitioning.
The early second part of the twentieth century provided for much study
from a medical, psychiatric, psychological, sociological, and anthropological
angle (Billings and Urban 1982; Bolin 1988; Bullough and Bullough 1993;
Irvine 1990; Kessler and McKenna 1978; Risman 1982), especially after
the opening of gender identity clinics that offered, although with some
resistance, surgical reconstruction to those who could convince medical
providers of their gender inversion. Even though those decades also
provided a separation of gender identity disorder (American Psychiatric
Association 1994) in children and adults (Bryant 2006) and a clearer
distinction (or first break) between homosexuality and transsexuality
(Meyerowitz 2002), the distinctions themselves acted as boundary
maintenance. Medicine in particular was keen to develop a narrative of
true transsexuality, where the medical and psychiatric gatekeepers
approved or disapproved of someones desire to transition. Often, narratives
of their sexuality, desire for heteronormative lives, and differentiation from
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homosexuals became buzz words that would facilitate medical/surgical

intervention. Subsequently, collapsing these differences would be the
source of rejection for treatment. A great example can be seen in Billings
and Urbans work on the sociomedical construction of transsexuality; they
reported how in one clinic, doctors achieved consensus in not granting
sex reassignment surgery to Puerto Ricans, because they dont look like
transsexuals, they look like fags (1982, 275).
In the second half of the twentieth century, feminist scholarship also
tended to judge transsexuality specifically in its inability to challenge
the rigidity of gender, which resulted many times in calling transsexuals
dupes of a gender system (for a most recent set of conversations about
trans people and feminism, see Scott-Dixon 2006). In the discussion
about the three meanings of trans by Kessler and McKenna I shared
earlier, the implication of the third use (beyond or through) is that
moving beyond two genders is revolutionary. Some feminists place a
greater responsibility on transsexual people to disrupt dual gender systems,
a responsibility I have argued elsewhere does not account for the responsibility all people have in the project of undoing gender (Vidal-Ortiz
2002). But even in the presence of discussions with the second-wave
feminist scholarship about sexuality and gender, transsexuality still carried
with it the stigma of sexological, psychiatric, and medical/surgical studies
of the twentieth century, and remained a symbol of the type of gender
rigidity that needed to be dismantled. This judgment against transsexuality
also emerges through the challenges to the idea of transitioning and
passing, which is conceptualized as a transsexual narrative, because it
is understood by some as a buying into gender oppressive systems
[Raymond is one of the most serious proponents of this critique in her
book The Transsexual Empire (1979); a more recent attack to transsexuality
on similar grounds has been posed by Jeffreys (2003)]. Most of its
defendants understand transsexuality as an error by people who need to
be educated about gender, and instead, be recruited as activists whose
very own transition should change the world. Not surprisingly, this
new reading of the transgender as liberating from gender often comes
from the ranks of either academics, scholars, middle class students, or
often nontranssexual transgenders.
A lot of autobiographical writing by transsexual people helped to
develop a transsexual narrative. Instead of interpreting this as a manipulation
of the institutions that offer surgical reconstructive services, this shows an
activation of networks of people who shared information with each other
for attaining their wishes (see Meyerowitz 2002, for historical illustrations
and details on these group responses). Among some classic autobiographies
of transsexuals are Jorgensens A Personal Autobiography (1967), Martinos
Emergence (1977), Feinbergs Journal of a Transsexual (1980), Richardss
Second Serve: The Rene Richards Story (1983), and Sullivans From Female
to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland (1990) [for what seems to be an
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exception in sociology, see the collaboration between a sociologist and a

transsexual autobiographer in the work by Fry (with Bogdan 1974). For
a recent autobiography/historiography of the female-to-male movement,
see Green (2004)]. Multiple other autobiographies have been published
since the 1980s. These autobiographies have helped rethink anthropological and sociological research conducted on transgender people. But as
significant, two critical writings by male-to-female transsexuals, Stone
(1991) and Stryker (1994) have reframed the scope and study of transsexuality, producing the emergence of transgender studies as we know
them today. Both Stone and Stryker force their brutal experience with
the medical and surgical establishments onto the reader in very productive
ways that reconstruct the transsexual as more than what psychiatry, medicine, and surgery have wanted transsexuals to become.
While none of them are sociologists, their critical lens on transsexuality
at the time of their writing influenced the relationship between transsexuals
in burgeoning fields such as queer theory. (There were changes in social
scientific knowledge production at the time as well. To be sure, sociology
and the social sciences were impacted in the 1980s and 1990s by postmodernist writings and new frameworks for social thought beyond social
constructionism transsexuality was but one of the topics that were
impacted by the shift from epistemological to ontological assumptions of
identity and social life/experience for more on that, see Hird 2002.)
But sociology did have an influence in the development of transsexual
theorizing decades before from the study of the social conditions and
gender structures, to the supporting of transsexuals writing their stories.
This is the topic I turn to next.
Sociologys influence
While a bit invisible within the previous outline of transsexuality studies
in the USA, several sociologists developed a significant amount of scholarship
that furthered questions and discussions of gender (Billings and Urban 1982;
Devor 1997; Garfinkel 1967; Gagn and Tewksbury 1998, 1999; Kessler
and McKenna 1978; Mason-Schrock 1996; Risman 1982; Rubin 2003). I
proceed to review their work, illustrating the benefits to the discipline and
to transgender and transsexual people and scholarship as well. I divide this
section into two, not so distinctive areas: looking at transgender and
transsexual issues to explain social phenomena, and writing about trans issues
from a distance in instances where the sociologist is not transgendered,
and (more recently) when the researcher has a transgendered experience.
What does transsexuality can tell us about society? Sociologists looking at trans issues
In general, this section discusses the early contributors to the study of
transsexuality. Some of them looked at a particular individual, while
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others discussed the general gender (and sexuality) aspects they thought,
at the time they wrote, transsexuals brought to the surface (as judged by
some of the autobiographical work, many transsexuals were quite aware
of the challenges they posed to the boundaries of gender and our rigid
social management of gender; social scientists were now catching up).
In the 1950s and 1960s, once the main gender identity clinics began
offering psychiatric, medical, and surgical services to transsexuals (predominantly male-to-female ones), sociologists began to study the experience
of transsexuality. One of the earliest sociologists was Harold Garfinkel. He
wrote about the feminized experiences of Agnes, a male-to-female transsexual
whom he was interviewing as part of her procedures to achieve sex
reassignment surgeries. According to Garfinkel, Agnes was not an intersex
person, as she claimed herself to be; she began to take her mothers
hormonal medications since the age of 12 in order to produce bodily
changes in herself, such as developing breasts, and while this medication
process did not alter in any way her penis and scrotum, her testes were
now carrying more estrogen. This last medical aspect was one of the main
reasons why Agnes gained recognition of herself as a woman by the
medical establishment; although they labeled her a hermaphrodite person,
Garfinkel describes how others treated her as a woman (and his writing
also illustrates his own treatment of her as such). He also asserted, through
ethnomethodological accounts, how we all experience sex as natural, or
as a given. He called Agnes the 120% woman, in recognition of her
interest and intent to adhere to gender constructs. More importantly, he
used this phrase to acknowledge that there is a structural relevance to her
need to perform gender in accordance with a certain common knowledge
or social referent of what a woman is or how a woman behaves. For
Garfinkel, Agness type of intense labor in achieving and making secure
her rights to live as a normal, natural female while having continually to
provide for the possibility of detection and ruin carried on within socially
structured conditions I call Agnes passing (1967, 137). Passing was,
therefore, an important aspect in Garfinkels work about the presentation
of gender for all of us not just transsexuals which situated his work
within a paradigm of learning about social norms through looking at the
people on the margins. Even when that is the case, Garfinkels writing
about Agnes continues to be cited in sociological scholarship today as a
vivid, early exploration of a transsexual persons management of gender.
The book Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach of Kessler and McKenna
is another text focused on understanding various aspects of gender as
social. The authors spoke about the creation of gender attributions, by
stating how everyone must display her or his gender in every interaction
(1978, 126). They were critical of the idea of passing, suggesting that it
eliminates the ongoing process of doing gender in everyday interaction (1978, 126). They also wrote about the taken-for-granted beliefs
of a given sociocultural space, where the reification of two (and only two)
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genders, takes place, and one can reinterpret verbal or visual cues in order
to confirm a persons gender. In that sense, gender does not change,
which is how they explain that a trans person has to fight medical,
psychiatric, and other institutions that claim they cannot be who they say
they are unless they have surgical reconstruction. Kessler and McKenna
discussed the experiences of both female-to-male and male-to-female
transsexuals, which was uncommon at the time their work was published.
Taken together, Garfinkels and Kessler and McKennas work framed the
sociologists gaze of transsexuality from afar, yet it helped give context to
transsexuality within the sociocultural era when they were writing. [While
West and Zimmerman (1987) also use an ethnomethodological framework
to look at gender, unlike Garfinkel and Kessler and McKenna, they did
not center discussions on transsexuality. Indeed, their focus on insignia as
the work all people did in order to be read as male or female could be
said to loop back into oversimplified notions of passing as in making an
effort to be read as someone one wants to be read as.] However, other
sociologists would more specifically look at the medical and psychiatric
enterprises and their impact on transsexuality.
Risman (1982) also discussed the relationship of gender identity to
what was considered normative or deviant behavior, by using labeling
theory. Moving through discussions of biological, psychoanalytical, and
psychological theories, Risman arrives at a conclusion that perhaps
definitions and notions of transsexuality are different for the psychologist,
the sociologist, the psychoanalyst and the patient (p. 318). Her work also
helps to elucidate the relationship of true transsexualism to surgical desire
and how class, and access to clinics or medical facilities, influenced the
results of seeking sex reassignment surgeries. She succinctly states: the
assumption that those who do not voluntarily seek clinicians are not
transsexuals seems problematic, even if convenient for research (1982, 319),
thus turning the medical and psychiatric assumptions of their centrality
in transsexual experience upside down. Risman also notes cases where
patients do not conform to dominant narratives of having always felt
that way, critically opposing the sampling and logic that followed gender
identity clinics at the time (and the almost prepackaged narrative of true
transsexuality that allowed for people wishing to transition to be able to
do so). Closing with arguments against the presumption that to be male
is to be macho and rough, Risman not only criticizes the gender identity
clinics and focus on transsexuality in adults, but the cadre of professionals
studying gender identity disorder in effeminate boys (for a comprehensive
social history of gender identity disorder and the impact of traditional
readings of masculinity in such research, see Bryant 2006). Risman is
another sociologist who also pays attention to female-to-male transsexuals;
although at the time, like many other social scientists, she calls them
female transsexuals. However, what may seem like a linguistic slippage
(to us in 2007) has to be contextualized: Risman was following the
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standard academic language of that moment, which was established by

sexologists. In the end, her claim for a (mis)acquisition is that the causality
may flow in the opposite direction: the societal reaction to gender role
deviance may lead to a stereotype which involves self-labeling as transsexual
(1982, 323). Instead of reading this statement as a construction of the
transsexual as a gender dupe, I see Rismans illustration as one of rigid
social gender codes, which influenced the main narrative of transsexuality
and the narrative meaning-making. This work to shape access to
services was no small accomplishment; Billings and Urban (1982) discuss
it as well.
In The Socio-Medical Construction of Transsexualism, Billings and Urban
(1982) showed how transsexuality existed in and through medical practice.
They also denounced the phenomenon of constructing a cohesive narrative
in the service of surgical reconstruction (for instance, having transsexuals
share knowledge to produce a very particular history in intakes and
psychiatric sessions in order to access treatment). Like Meyerowitz (2002),
Billings and Urban drew on the medical developments that permitted to
surgically operate on intersex people, especially children, and used that
to illustrate how the creation of a mental illness developed as a diagnosis
that allowed for the medical establishment to conduct surgeries. Billings
and Urban are generally understood as critiquing the choice of the
transsexuals need for surgery as still within the paradigm of mental illness,
and illustrate the coaching that took place in constituting a population
that was truly deserving of these medical procedures (for a critique of
their work, especially their use of body mutilation and their notion of
apolitical transsexuals desperately seeking surgery, see Spade 2006).
The sociological work developed in the late 1960s, the 1970s, and early
1980s, mostly from ethnomethodological and labeling perspectives, created
a foundation for the work to come in the 1990s and early twenty-first
century. While their focus tended to be less on transsexual experience
itself, and more into the gendered society we live in, or the medical or
psychiatric components of the services transsexuals sought, it still provided a strong background to understand the institutions surrounding
mid-twentieth-century transsexuality. The work that follows complicates
trans narratives, as their publications reached us at the same time that
transgender (as such an all encompassing term) emerged.
Writing about transgender and transsexual issues
Some of the most prolific writing about trans issues began in the latter
part of the 1990s. A portion continued to explore transsexuality, but now,
as part of a series of individual ways of expressing gender or identifying
through (or outside) a gender binary. In his 1996 article Transsexuals
Narrative Construction of the True Self, Mason-Schrock offers a set of observations about main narratives of self. Even though this argument comes out
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almost 15 years after Billings and Urbans, and by then the term transgender
has already started to diversify, his argument is still crucial to understand
the weight of transsexuality in identity negotiation. His basic argument is
that a primary narrative often dominates a transgender space in his
research, he writes about how in support groups, several transgender
narratives appear in these forums, and identifies the specific steps participants
use in the active production of a main narrative (through the exclusion of
the others). Namely, he talks about four aspects that solidified that main
narrative: naming, modeling, guiding each other through their past
histories, and ignoring certain facts about each others past. When
participants, for instance, redefined their history, others supported their
reinterpretation in order to make it fit into a transsexual model often
to the detriment of other nontranssexual identities and experiences.
Gagn and Tewksbury (1998, 1999 see also Gagn et al. 1997, and
Tewksbury and Gagn 1996), are sociologists writing under an influence
of symbolic interactionism, critical theory, contemporary feminist theory,
and queer theory. They focused much of their work on the definition of
a gendered self that most closely matches one of the two genders for over
60 transgender people they interviewed. Some of their research shows
how transgender experience both reifies and challenges gender scripts. As
well, findings from their various publications argue that sexual relations
were also a site for validation of a transgenders (female) identification (as
they were interviewing male-to-females). They argue for studying cultural
referents beyond the genitalia referent presumed to define a persons
gender. Much of their direction is to look at the relational aspect of
identities that identities are defined not in the private individual space
of the self, but the self in interaction with others strangers and closed
ones alike.
Taking a different route and exploring drag queens experiences with
gender, we have Schachts work (see, for instance, 2002, 2004). His
emphasis on drag queens for over a decade made him a prolific writer on
issues of performativity and female impersonation. Focusing on the drag
queens deployments of masculinity and/or femininity, their female
impersonation in relation to their sexual orientation, and the dynamics
emergent from their work as drag queens, Schachts work interrupts the
generally transgender/transsexual dichotomous work in social scientific
knowledge in the late 1990s and early 2000s [linked to his is the work by
Taylor and Rupp (2006), also looking at the relationship between gender
and sexuality in the lives of drag queens]. His contributions placed this
work at the intersection of gender and sexuality scholarship in sociological
thinking (2002), yet he also addressed a very interdisciplinary focus with
his overall interests (2004).
In the USA and Canada, sociologists who were self-identified transgender
men and women began to produce trans specific writings, including Viviane
Namaste, Holly (now Aaron) Devor, and Henry S. Rubin. Their writing,
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444 Trans Studies, Sociologys Influence, and Future Steps

however, expanded on previous transgender writing, because they employed

empirical research instead of writing from a autobiographical (or even
autoethnographic) perspective. While Namaste (2000) and Devor (1997)
wrote about trans populations across the US/Canada border, the work
conducted by Rubin (2003) was with transgender men in the USA,
which is the focus of my discussion in this article. Rubins book is a
critical look at the embodied and everyday lived experiences of female-tomales. With a combination of phenomenological and discursive analytics,
Rubin discusses the experiences of 22 female-to-males from several US
cities, illustrating much more in-depth their upbringing experiences,
current relationships, and the meaning of being transgender men to them
(some of these findings are similar to those in my own writing based on
the experiences of 6 female-to-males in the San Francisco Bay Area see
Vidal-Ortiz 2002). Rubins research offers new insights into the transsexual
experiences of female-to-males, where the need to transition has been, in
some instances, redefined, to the point that the use of hormones are
enough as the basis for their physical transition. In his research, female-tomales talked about experiences with manness, maleness, and masculinities,
broadening, again, the scope of the experiential from previous (US-based)
research. Rubins work also contributes through his discussions about the
tension between the body image and the material body of the transmen
he interviewed.
These more recent writings on trans issues offered a broader scope to
the conception of the transsexual (and certainly, of the true transsexual);
they also brought forth the tension between the cross-dresser (early on
called transvestite), the drag queen performer, the transgender (gender
bender), and the transsexual. Furthermore, while the previous research
looked at institutions and social rules broken/reified by trans people, these
writings were looking at the issues impacting trans people (even when also
looking at relational identity maintenance, as in Gagn and Tewksburys).
And these writings offered a more interdisciplinary set of frameworks than
their predecessors.
Recent trends and future directions
In addition to this sociological scholarship of the last four decades, the
work by Schilt (2006), Schrock et al. (2005), and Shapiro (2007), among
others, continue to add to the experiences of trans people at work, in
their everyday lives, embodiment, and in community formations. For
instance, Schrock et al. (2005) have raised questions of embodiment and
subjectivity, for instance, how redecorating the body brings forth different
readings of gender, and authorize the transwomen they interviewed.
Similarly, Schilt (2006) focused on the experience of female-bodied individuals who have transitioned at work as female-to-males, and the benefits
they seem to gain through that transition.
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445

Certainly, much more female-to-male specific research is available in

the last 10 years, most of it on their life and experiences (Devor 1997;
Rubin 2003; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). More academic research by and for
female-to-male transsexuals has taken place by scholars such as Devor
(1997), Rubin (2003), Singer (2006), Hale (1998), Prosser (1998), and
Cromwell (1999). In fact, part of what might become an issue in future
research is to learn to balance male-to-female narratives in US academic
settings, because transgender studies are beginning to be dominated by
female-to-male scholars and theorists. Indeed, in the last 20 years, we
moved from understandings of transsexuality based primarily on male-tofemale narratives, to an emergence of female-to-male specific research,
and to a new female-to-male and female-bodied trans set of perspectives
that could be tainting and impacting (sometimes negatively) male-tofemale experiences in data collection. These are serious exclusions (and
misrepresentations) in academic knowledge production settings that merit
critical attention (Namaste 2005), especially when issues of health and
employment are so different between these groups.
Some of the future research issues might be: looking at the differences
between male-to-females and female-to-males in terms of socioeconomics,
education, employment (whether in the formal or street economies),
housing, health, and networks, as well as within those groups. The work
by Emilia Lombardi (see, for example, Lombardi 2001 for similar work
in Canada, see Namaste 2005), is but one example of the work sociologists
are engaged in that is not based on the premise of identity, but the social
location and concrete influences in the lives of trans people. Transgender
studies scholarship, especially within sociology, requires longitudinal studies
on health (in general, as well as cancer and HIV in particular), a better
distribution of large-scale sampling and reporting (much of it takes place
in San Francisco or New York, and other metropolitan areas such as
Boston and Philadelphia). We desperately need comparative research that
looks at ethnoracial minority female-to-males and male-to-females outside
studies of sex work and HIV, although sociologists need to continue to
support work in the areas of medical anthropology and public health. We
also need comparative work between countries, to empirically explore the
lived experience and whether it falls within the transgender (and gender)
constructs, or elsewhere.
Similarly, engaging with media representations of transgender people,
sociological scholarship should look into the challenges of master status/
categories and how the gender and sexual marginalized might be creating
nuanced ways of relating to their space and community in ways that do
not exclude male or female (I believe Halberstams 2005 book begins to
do just that). While critiques of media portrayals exist (Willox 2003), I
am referring to exploratory studies that interrogate gender identity and
sexual orientation categories of people who identify in more complex
ways than transgender.
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Concluding remarks
Transgender and transsexual narratives are now much more fractured in
terms of racial, class, gender, and sexual experiences (Broad 2002; Roen
2006). Medical and psychiatric establishments do not hold as strong of
a handle on transgender identities as they used to but, as revealed in
recent transgender research, some transgender people from racial
minority groups do not necessarily trust that their transitioning is taken
as seriously as that of their white counterparts, and point out to how
these establishments fail to recognize the racialized nature of their
transition (Broad 2002). The utility of surgical (specifically, genital)
reconstructions in the shaping of transgender (or for that matter, transsexual)
identities is receding for both male-to-females and female-to-males.
And, trans communities are now much more vigilant of research
invested in studying (and giving voice to) trans experiences [one significant
site that illustrates this is the suggested rules for those researching
trans issues if they are nontrans (Hale n.d.)]. All of these are aspects that
show the complexity of transgender and transsexual communities in the
USA today.
Transgender studies, impacted as it was by queer theory, will continue
to grow in very interdisciplinary ways, and while sociology has had a key
place in the formative years of critiques to the medical and psychiatric
establishments in their dealings with transsexuality, and it continues to
draw on transgender experience to interpret the impact of these institutions,
it is important to engage with the challenges of nonsociological disciplines,
their methods, and frameworks, in order to offer a better interpretation
of whatever gendering and nongender or sexual experiences transsexuals
face today. As well, a critical challenge to transgender studies will be
to not fall into the historical reinterpretation of events that scholars of
nontranssexual homosexualities have fallen into before, where the
gender and sexual variant experiences in other cultures are used to
argue that transgender has always existed (for a well-formulated critique,
see Towlen and Morgan 2002).
The relationship between transgender and transsexual as the focus of
study in the social science literature, queer theory, and an emergent
transgender studies field is complex, has changed throughout the last
decades, and will continue to be reformulated. Part of the reason for
the movement between transgender and transsexual terms resides on
the meaning given to the categories themselves, and the unit of analysis
we choose to explore. Transgender studies focuses more on the everyday
experience of trans people, including embodiment and its impact on their
social identities. Sociology can continue to contribute to this field if we
rethink social scientific knowledge production in relationship to power,
and begin to support more collaborative and participatory work that
challenges, but builds on, sociological theorizing.
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447

Acknowledgments
Some of my thoughts in this article are influenced by conversations with
scholars such as Judith Lorber, Karl Bryant, Patricia Clough, Viviane
Namaste, and Susan Stryker, to whom I am very thankful. I also appreciate
the constructive criticisms offered by the Sociology Compass blind reviewers,
as well as Kathryn Fox, for editorial suggestions to improve this article.
Lastly, thanks to Elizabeth Bernstein for the encouragement to engage
this topic for the journal.
Short Biography
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz received a PhD in Sociology from the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. Currently Assistant Professor
of Sociology at American University, his research interests include the
sociology of sex, gender, and sexuality (with a focus on transgender/
transsexual studies), race and ethnic studies (with a focus on Puerto Rican,
US Latino, and Latin American populations), and Santera as a religious
cultural practice. Some of his recent publications can be found in books
like Gay Religion and Latinas/os in the U.S.: Changing the Face of Amrica,
other peer-reviewed electronic journals such as Sexuality Research and
Social Policy and The Qualitative Report, and printed journals such as
Sexualities, Qualitative Sociology, and Latino Studies. He has coedited (with
Nancy Naples) the work of late sociologist Lionel Cant, Jr. the book
Border Crossings is forthcoming with New York University Press.
Note
* Correspondence address: American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington,
DC 20016-8072, USA. Email: vidalort@american.edu.

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