Collection: LGBTQ+ Rights Collection
As a taster of our publishing in LGBTQ+ Rights, we put together a collection of free articles, chapters and Open Access titles. If you are interested in trying out more content from our Sociology Collection or Global Social Challenges themes, ask your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
LGBTQ+ Rights Collection
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This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. This book asks two key questions about discourses of trans health: (1) How are ‘trans’ possibilities produced, reified and legitimated through health discourses and practices? (2) How are discourses of trans health negotiated within and between trans community groups, trans activists and health professionals? How are they disseminated, and how are they contested? These questions aim to uncover how trans identities and experiences, along with conceptualisations of trans health, are understood in multiple contexts. The purpose is to grasp the social processes at play in encounters where trans patients feel marginalised, misunderstood, and/or discriminated against.
This chapter sets the stage for the volume by providing insights into the ways in which the intensification of trans-related activist engagement has manifested itself in the politically dynamic post-Yugoslav region. We start by entwining our biographical positionalities with major conceptual instruments of contemporary transnational trans studies to both account for the processes that brought us together and carve a niche for our book in Eastern European social sciences and humanities and, in particular, feminist research and queer and trans studies. We then outline the most important political developments through which trans activisms across the region have gained visibility and emancipated themselves from the more generic LGBT initiatives, also shedding a new light on trans lives and artistic endeavours. This has opened a field of political contention that both encompasses and goes beyond activist circles. As we introduce the central arguments of the ensuing chapters, we reflect upon the challenges of conceptual translation within a global economy of knowledge that centralises the Global North and especially Anglo-American trans studies. Facing an intellectual and political scene in which understanding global social relations becomes important for taking trans intellectual work forward, we argue in favour of transnationally informed, but locally embedded and intersectionally sensitive, empirical analysis.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the contemporary issues and topics in trans ageing and care and outlines the book’s contribution to enhancing understanding, navigating more confidently and improving practice with trans older adults. The chapter includes an overview of the trans and gender diverse ageing population in the context of the social and political landscape and introduces common terminology along with some of the themes and concepts that are followed through in subsequent chapters such as intimacy, family, community, accessing and using care and support services, and health disparities. It also provides an understanding of trans life trajectories, including the diversity and intersectionalities of the population, and the emerging emphasis on non-binary identities and what this means for later life.
With those existing models put to the side I then explore how sex and gender are actually attributed (Kessler and McKenna, 1978/2006; Blackless et al, 2000; Roughgarden, 2004/2013). I try, and fail, to concretely define male-bodiedness and female-bodiedness and so instead explore how sexes and genders are assigned, both in everyday and in healthcare settings. This relates to my research where participants described the barriers they faced in navigating a cisnormative healthcare system. I then challenge the need for attributing sex and gender to others in the first place and propose a model of sex and gender where these concepts are equally socially constructed and can only be determined and articulated by the individual. This model would improve access to care for people like my research participants.
Race, class, gender and gender identity, disability status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, migration status and faith remain salient markers of inequality in the UK, and in many ways increasingly so. Yet these inequalities have predominantly been addressed separately. Since little progress has been made by the separate single-issue approach in terms of achieving equality for the most marginalized, there is growing recognition that pursuing social justice requires policymakers and organizations to engage with intersectionality.
This chapter discusses the author’s positionality; outlines the context: UK equality policy, which has been an important driver engendering current policy and NGO sector interest in intersectionality; and describes the equality NGO sector. Then, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s core arguments, explains the research underpinning it and outlines the chapters.
The book locates promises of inclusion in a longer trajectory of neoliberal capitalist accumulation, gentrification, and the emergence of an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) industrial complex which seeks to extract the productive value of differences in pursuit of profit. Bringing together findings emerging from participant observation and open-ended interviews with queer activists and anti-gentrification campaigners, as well ‘career queers’ working in some of the world’s most powerful corporations, the book tells an ethnographic story unfolding across disparate queer worlds in London, offering a situated account of how queerness is currently becoming incorporated into the dominant institutions of capitalist modernity, and what goes into enabling certain inclusive openings for some while closing down others. Using the tension between new openings promised by LGBTQ-friendly corporations and the closure of LGBTQ+ spaces in London as its driving force, the book suggests that neoliberal promises of inclusion engender forms of gentrification – both of queer activism and of queer spaces – that are ultimately at odds with a genuinely transformative vision for queer leftist politics. In so doing the book joins discussions in queer studies, organization studies, urban planning, anthropology and LGBTQ+ studies on the relationship between queerness, identity politics and capitalism. It tries to convince critics of capitalism that following these queer discussions is important and urgent, and attempts to give radical, queer and LGBTQ+ activists the tools to locate opportunities for resistance, co-optation and doing inclusion otherwise in the pursuit of alternative (queer) futures.
This chapter introduces the Disney Princesses, defining them as a phenomenon and as inherently political. It outlines a new way of analysing the Disney Princesses through facet methodology.
Trans people have only recently been recognised as users of health and social care services (DH, 2008c). In comparison to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, they have been almost totally overlooked in social work theory or research (Kenagy, 2005; Davis, 2008; Alleyn and Jones, 2010). Previous studies have sometimes included trans people in their samples, but have failed to give separate consideration of their specific concerns. Existing research has focused largely on four main areas: theoretical understandings about sex and gender (Ekins and King, 1997; Kessler and McKenna, 2000); biomedical research (Feldman and Bockting, 2001); and, more recently, research into the barriers to accessing gender reassignment services; and policy-oriented work (Xavier et al, 2007). Knowledge about trans people’s access to social care services is often drawn from small-scale studies and narrative accounts (Davis, 2008).
Sex is considered to be a defining and enduring aspect of who we are. We think of it as unambiguous: the distinctions between the sexes are thought to be clear-cut with physical and biological characteristics that differentiate men and women. These sex differences are often believed to correspond to gender attributes; that is, the psychological, emotional and social roles associated with being female and male. Women and men are also believed to be distinguished from each other by their clothes, voice pitch, mannerisms and topics of conversation. Historically, these beliefs were so widely held that different jobs were deemed suitable for men (coalminer) and women (secretary). Moreover, the biological ability to have babies was associated with the social role of bringing up children.
The American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community is in a medical and political crisis. Prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, politics and widespread discrimination lead to significant disparities in LGBT medical rights and health care outcomes. These pre-existing LGBT health care disparities have since become exacerbated by the pandemic. Often overlooked in larger discussions about LGBT people and the pandemic is a larger social problem; LGBT health care disparities amplified by the pandemic are set to magnify LGBT social and political inequality on a national scale. In addition, the pandemic has contracted space in public discourse and media coverage—which is needed to advance LGBT equality—creating new opportunities for exploitation to advance anti-LGBT political agendas.
Prior to the advent of COVID-19, many LGBT people faced the detrimental effects of widespread discrimination. Before the pandemic, a majority of LGBT Americans also found themselves living in states without legal protection from job discrimination. LGBT people can be evicted from their homes or denied the right to adopt children for the “crime” of being who they are. Many LGBT people report being the targets of hate speech and hate crimes, to the point that many live in a constant state of fear of being attacked or murdered for walking down the street or engaging in public displays of affection with their loved ones. Research from the Williams Institute found that LGBT people are twice as likely to have experienced lifetime homelessness and earn as much as 32% less than their heterosexual counterparts.
The concept of self-determination has a lengthy scholarly history. The concept has motivated a range of bioethical concerns; as such, the interpretations and thus the effects that result from utilizing the concept vary. This book considers key personal, political and pedagogical approaches to trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex people in various policy fields such as sex/gender recognition legislation, medical diagnoses, medical interventions and educational policies. This book also contemplates how self-determination relates to sex/gender productions, transitions and expressions, and how they correspond to current debates around binary sex/gender embodiment. I will consider throughout how diverse cultural practices and systems may still be (de)limiting trans, sex/gender expansive and intersex trajectories to self-determination. These are not dead ends though but produce new virtualities. This is because trans people are always becoming-trans, sex/gender expansive people are always becoming-sex/gender expansive and intersex people are always becoming intersex-people. This is the same for cis people too, who are always becoming-cis people. The relevant qualities that everybody has are not inherent, archetypal or phylogenetic but are desired in specific assemblages of becoming-human and/or becoming-social (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004).
We will ask if (self-)determining sex/gender is an effect of desire connected to coercive effects, and what this looks like. We will explore how legal, medical and pedagogical policies have more in common with each other than we may think and ask does each of these policy areas co-produce and affect human and non-human bodies? The basic response from a new materialist perspective, which I draw on throughout, must be ‘of course’.
