Gender: M/F/It's Complicated

[Shana A]

Gender: M/F/It's Complicated
January 25, 2012 - 4:00am
By Scott McLemee

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/25/review-genny-beemyn-and-susan-rankin-lives-transgender-people

The good doctor is absent from the pages of Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's The Lives of Transgender People (Columbia University Press), and in a way that is understandable. Cauldwell was not what anyone would call a careful researcher or deep thinker, and his work veers oddly between the sensible and the sensationalistic. Beemyn and Rankin, by contrast, have gathered an enormous amount of data, much of it statistical, and they exhibit all the probity that being vetted by an institutional review board would demand. They are contributing to an established and developing body of knowledge. (Beemyn is the director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts. Rankin is an associate professor of education at Penn State.)

[...]

In any case, Beemyn and Rankin are far more methodical than their somewhat erratic predecessor. In 2005 and '06, they conducted a large-scale survey of transgender people by preparing a detailed questionnaire that they circulated online via appropriate listservs, support groups, and the like. Not quite 3,500 individuals completed the survey, of whom 400 agreed to detailed follow-up interviews by phone or  e-mail, or in person. Interview subjects were asked to review the transcripts "to make sure their responses were presented accurately and in their own words."

[Jamie D]

Good short article.  Thanks for posting it.

I saw a key paragraph as:

The term "transgender," they explain, subsumes those undergoing or considering sex-reassignment surgery, but is "a general term for all individuals whose gender histories cannot be described as simply female or male, even if they now identify or express themselves as strictly female or male." Such is the common usage now. But it only serves to underscore the originality of [Dr. D. O.] Cauldwell's work, since he meant "transsexual" in roughly the same sense and regarded it and cross-dressing as just part of the continuum of human behavior.

It seems that many people here have anxiety about the use of terms, especially pronouns (i.e. "misgendering")  The article provides more insight, from the book, into how transgendered person see themselves.