Transgender Studies

Transgender studies as an area of interdisciplinary research is relatively new and is still evolving. It was not until the early 1990s that the term transgender even appeared in scholarship. In general, transgender studies focus on people who are medically deemed ambiguous in sex at birth or later, on the surgical reassignment or changing of identity categories of gender and sex that a person is assigned at birth, and/or on how media and society perceive people who transition gender, sex, or both. Transgender persons include people who have been called, at various times throughout history, the following names: hermaphrodites, intersex persons, transsexuals, females-to-males (FTMs), males-to-females (MTFs), transvestites, transgenders, cross-dressers, drag kings or drag queens, and queers, among other names. In turn, transgender studies seek to explain, evaluate, and challenge medical, legal, media, and public discourses about people transgressing gender, sex, and sexuality. Political activism that advocates for the social acceptance and civil rights of this diverse group of people is typically another major goal of this area of research.

Transgender studies have roots in feminist studies of gender and sex and in gay and lesbian studies of sexuality. Traditionally, the main subjects of feminist scholarship are the oppression of heterosexual women and the social construction of femininity and the female body, while the main subjects of gay and lesbian scholarship are the oppression of gay men and lesbian women and the social construction of homosexuality. Both research traditions highlight the influence of mass media (ranging from artwork and print media to moving pictures on film, television, and online media) on public perceptions and legal policies about women, on one hand, and about gays and lesbians, on the other hand. Furthermore, these scholarly traditions are activist in aim, due in a large part to their origins in the struggle for women's civil rights (in the late 1800s and the early to mid-1900s in the United Kingdom and the United States) and in the gay liberation movement (which began in the 1970s in the United States). Transgender studies share many of these same concerns about the problems of mass-mediated representations of gender and sexuality, and likewise advocate for social and political change.

However, transgender studies can be differentiated from feminist and gay and lesbian scholarship because transgender studies are also a direct response to two other bodies of knowledge: medical conceptions of transsexuals and queer theory. For much of the 20th century, transsexuality was a medicalized term for the pathologization of gender deviance, such as when a person cross-dressed or modified the body through sex reassignment surgery. This line of thinking was problematic for a number of reasons, including how it biologically reinforced and made normal the identity categories of being heterosexual and male/masculine or female/feminine, while denouncing anything other as a disease. Thus, transgender studies explicitly developed as a counter to these initial oppressive medical conceptions of transsexuals. For example, Sandy Stone deployed the term posttranssexual in her early activism and scholarship to resist the medical establishment's pathological terminology and treatment of people, such as herself, who changed the gender and/or sex [Page 397]that they had been assigned at birth. Eventually “transgender” became the preferred and nonpejorative umbrella term used by scholars and social activists for anyone who does not fit the gender binary that for the most part is still maintained in medicine and legislation, as well as in media messages and society at large. Transgender studies was named as such on similar grounds.

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