Читать книгу Transgressed - Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz - Страница 7

For the transgender community, threats of violence, harassment, discrimination, and intimidation are aspects of daily existence. On any given day, violence directed at transgender people ranges from the interpersonal realm to the more broad ramifications of state policy (e.g., North Carolina’s House Bill 2) that marginalizes those who transgress the rigid boundaries of the gender binary (male/female).1 While media and our collective attention are placed primarily on hate-motivated biases and crimes toward transgender individuals, a broader problem remains largely unexplored: trans victimization by intimate partners. I use the term “trans” as shorthand to refer to a broader range of individuals whose gender identity or expression, as Danica Bornstein of the Northwest Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Survivors of Abuse and colleagues noted, “varies from the cultural norm for their birth sex.”2 This catchall term captures a range of gender identities beyond the biological sex-assigned definitions of cismale and cisfemale. Cisgender people are those whose assigned sex at birth matches their gender identity and expression.3

While various definitions of intimate partner violence exist, it is largely understood as a pattern of physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuses perpetrated by a current or former romantic partner.4 Almost all of the available generalizable studies on intimate partner violence focus exclusively on cisgender men and women. These studies typically find that women do experience higher lifetime rates of intimate partner violence when compared to men.5 Women victims, when compared to men, typically experience more severe injuries that result in hospitalization and more often suffer disproportionate negative outcomes from intimate partner violence such as economic insecurity and psychological trauma.6 Estimates show that at least a third of women murdered in the United States were killed by a former or current boyfriend or husband;7 overall, women are murdered by intimate partners at twice the rate of men.8 In looking at just murder-suicides in the United States, 74 percent involved intimate partners, with 96 percent of these involving women murdered by their current or former intimate partner.9 While much of the existing evidence shows that intimate partner violence and homicide are gendered phenomena, less is known about the patterns of transgender victimization. This study explores the distinct realities of those who identify as transgender and have survived intimate partner violence by examining phone and online chat interviews and written accounts for the project at the center of this book. Over the course of six months, I spoke with thirteen transgender survivors of intimate partner violence who agreed to allow me to record their experiences and received five additional anonymously written accounts.

Given the dearth of information on transgender survivor accounts of intimate partner violence, the stories in this book served as some of the earliest attempts to describe the dynamics of abuse for the trans community. In sociologist Lori Girshick’s compelling Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?, the author described this lack of information as a “complete lack of research on interpersonal violence among transgender people,” which she characterized as a “serious gap” in the literature.10 Psychologist Janice Ristock stated that the field of same-gender intimate partner violence research has been dominated by a focus on lesbian victimization and that still “very little work addresses trans experiences.”11 Further, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), which collects and annually reports data on violent victimization experienced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community at large, recently called upon researchers to “focus on increasing the amount of literature on how transgender and gender non-conforming people are affected by intimate partner violence and the unique barriers these communities face in trying to access resources.”12 In answering these and many more calls to action, this book centers on the stories of survival of eighteen trans-identified people.

About halfway through my research, Tom, a twenty-four-year-old black transman from Texas, contacted me to set up a phone interview. Like most of those who responded to the call to participate in the study, Tom e-mailed me with interest and curiosity before we decided on a date and time to speak. Our conversation was briefer than most; the background conversations that typically took around twenty to thirty minutes were shorter and to the point. Tom was raised in the South by a conservative, religious family with whom he sometimes had a contentious relationship but was, at the time we spoke, still in contact. Like the handful of survivors whom I had spoken with before him, Tom volunteered to share with me his experiences with intimate partner violence as a transgender person. He detailed abuse, violence, emotional torment, and public humiliation. This account was still raw. He jumped back and forth between the details of the incidents and how he was dealing with the trauma. Over the course of the interview, I asked Tom how he realized he was in an abusive relationship. He paused at length, giving a short response about how his abuser made him feel: “I knew it was abusive cuz like, she just made me feel ashamed of who I was and all.” As I was about to follow-up in the short pause, he added, “Like, every now and then I’ll think, just like, how lucky everyone is that they don’t have to think about their gender clashing with their bodies and I wish sometimes that I wasn’t trans but then I think, no, no, that’s what she would’ve wanted.”

It struck me that for Tom processing what made him think about the situation as abusive centered on his trans identity. He described one main aspect of what I would later learn transgender-identified survivors of intimate partner violence routinely faced. As a young transman, he had endured patterned emotional and physical brutalities similar to what many cisgender victims of intimate partner violence report. However, his trans identity made it front and center in the battle toward making sense of his abuse. As with many LGBTQ-identified people, the imagined possibility of being straight or cisgender may provide a temporary mental escape from the hardships of a marginalized existence; however, in Tom’s words, this is precisely what his abuser used as part of his abuse—manipulating the external cultural hostility that exists against those who transgress the gender binary in an effort to control Tom’s identity.

At the crux of this book’s analyses is the goal of detailing abusive intimate partner dynamics among a sample of transgender individuals in order to understand and generate theoretical interpretations about their experiences. How the participants’ identities framed the meanings and interpretations of violence and, subsequently, how the process of leaving an abusive relationship was structured for these trans survivors form the center of understanding how intimate partner violence is experienced by transgender people more generally.

Almost by default and continuing today, discussions of violence between intimate partners conjure images of abused ciswomen and abusive cismen: women and men who identify with their assigned sex and gender at birth. Even in a time when our culture has progressed toward the recognition of same-gender couples through either popular culture or the nationwide legalization of marriage equality, the compulsion to try to make sense of the world in rigidly gendered ways is still the convention. Take for example how the public imagines domestic victimization as distinctly feminine all the while conflating violence or aggression with masculine traits. While many efforts have been made to critically reconsider the gendered assumptions behind intimate partner violence, very little has challenged us to think about the experiences of those whose gender identities are more complex than the unquestioned labels we receive at birth.

While much debate exists about the social understandings of gender, it is understood to be more complicated than the decisions rendered at birth. Psychology scholars generally agree that our sense of what makes us feel like a man, a woman, or neither becomes deeply embedded by ages two to four; this is understood as our gender identity.13 Beyond the internalized sense of what makes human beings identify with a particular gender, externally we express such attributes in ways that are socially understood to signal masculinity, femininity, neither, or both. Humans engage in gender expression daily through the ways in which we carry our bodies and wear our hair, the clothing we select, and much more. Sociologists understand gender as a social construct: a concept that highlights how humans make social categories “real” by attributing meaning to bodies, reifying differences through structure (e.g., gendered bathrooms, sports teams, labor, and wages), and subsequently internalizing such messages. Generally, almost without question, gender has been central to how social scientists and many antiviolence activists have come to understand why intimate partner violence exists, how it manifests, the dynamics involved, and how it is experienced. Despite gender informing much of the understanding that exists around intimate partner violence, mainstream discussions have often taken a rather linear look at gender, mostly limiting the analysis to the two most recognized genders.