Transgender Studies

Transgender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that focuses on transgender phenomena and the lives and experiences of transgender, transsexual, and gender variant people. In its broadest sense, the field of transgender studies encompasses any and all work that challenges the presumed congruence between biological sex, social gender role expectations, and individual gender identity. While the primary focus of transgender studies is the creation of work that interrogates the traditional, naturalized sex/gender binary and affirms the self-determined identities of transgender people, collections of work from the field have also included early historical work that [Page 1725]pathologized transgender lives. Though the field originated from the key labor of activists and scholars from the Global North, the field also incorporates transnational frameworks, scholarship, and events of organization ...