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Arguably, one of the best ways to begin an exploration of understudied social phenomena is to understand the trajectory of the problem to date. Today, intimate partner violence is viewed as a social problem largely as a result of the efforts of feminist activists and scholars of the 1970s who framed the social problem as violence against women: a phenomenon that exists directly as a result of a patriarchal power structure that fosters a hostile cultural climate against women and enables men to perpetrate violence against them as a means of maintaining control.19 Within this mode of thinking, the cultural construct of the gender binary is the primary facilitator of the existence of violence against women. In its most rigid application, women are the only potential victims while men are the only potential perpetrators. The response that emerged from these intellectual exchanges and theorizations about women’s place in society provided the foundation for the development of the sociopolitical or sociocultural explanations of the existence of domestic violence. This research generally concluded that violence against women was a “natural consequence of women’s powerless position vis-a-vis men in patriarchal societies and the sexist values and attitudes that accompany this inequity.”20

Though groundbreaking feminist perspectives provided a logical framework to understand a specific type of intimate partner violence, they were limited by an assumption of heterosexuality, or heterosexism, and the “normalization” of heterosexuality, which scholars often refer to as heteronormativity. Early theorization assumed the heterosexuality of victims and perpetrators without question; subsequently, diverse gender identities were also overlooked. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars began challenging these approaches and highlighted their inapplicability to the existence of same-gender intimate partner violence.21 Since then, a multitude of studies have indicated that intimate partner violence affects the lesbian, gay, and bisexual population at rates similar to those of heterosexual women, although more accurate and recent findings have pointed to higher prevalence among same-gender relationships.22

Over decades of research on same-gender intimate partner violence, several key themes have emerged. It is clear that regardless of gender, intimate partner violence exists across relationships and manifests similar dynamics of power and control. Physical, sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuses are well documented in patterns that are similar in both opposite-gender and same-gender intimate partner violence. However, important distinctions arise in regard to prevalence rates, dynamics of abuse, myths, and help seeking, among others. Gay and bisexual men typically report higher rates of psychological intimate partner violence when compared to heterosexual men, while gay men also report slightly lower rates of physical violence, rape, and stalking when compared to both bisexual and heterosexual men.23 Somewhat surprising to some, lesbian and bisexual women report higher lifetime rates of rape and psychological, physical, and stalking intimate partner violence when compared to heterosexual women. Victims of same-gender intimate partner violence also report different patterns of abuses than do their opposite-gender counterparts.

Among the distinctions are the role of homophobia and heterosexism as both tactic and context of abuse. While I elaborate more on this in the following chapter, victims of same-gender intimate partner violence report that abusers use coercive tactics based on sexual identity such as threatening to “out” them to friends, family, or work colleagues and manipulating beliefs in homophobic myths. In LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research, the only book to systemically review thirty-five years of existing research on LGBTQ intimate partner violence, sociologist Adam Messinger identified top myths, which in reductive shorthand can be categorized as the beliefs that LGBTQ intimate partner violence is rare and less severe (than heterosexual intimate partner violence), that abusers are masculine, that it is the same as all other intimate partner violence, and that it should not be discussed. The persistence of these myths often makes it more difficult for victims of same-gender intimate partner violence to recognize abuse or to identify as a victim. Additionally, widespread belief in these myths allows abusers to undermine the experiences of violence and entrap victims. For victims of same-gender intimate partner violence who do leave abusive relationships, help-seeking structures are generally best tailored for the needs of cisgender heterosexual women. Survivors of same-gender intimate partner violence often report experiences of misgendering and homophobia by responding police officers and a lack of inclusive shelter space, counseling, and resources. In addition, even informal help avenues such as friends and family may be less available to same-gender abuse survivors due to previous rejection.

Despite the fact that the literature exploring same-gender intimate partner violence and the experiences of gay and lesbian victims has expanded, transgender victims remain largely absent from the research. Decades of research in same-gender intimate partner violence oftentimes lumped trans experiences with those of cisgender gays and lesbians, and little attention has been given to how genderism structures trans victimization and presents barriers to help seeking or to the dynamics of abuse. In one of the earliest trans-specific studies available, transgender intimate partner violence experts Courvant and Cook-Daniels cited preliminary analyses from the Gender, Violence, and Resource Access Survey of trans and intersex individuals that found a 50 percent rate of victimization by an intimate partner.24 In 2006, the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence reported that of all their reporting agencies, too few had clientele who identified as transgender to garner any statistically relevant information. This difficulty in obtaining transgender samples has often led scholars to exclude trans responses in same-gender intimate partner violence studies or to use just “binary gender identity categories (i.e. only men or women),” which do not accurately represent the diversity of genders within the community.25

As a result of the lack of trans-inclusive studies, it is difficult to determine a prevalence rate of intimate partner violence for the trans community as a whole. Within recent NCAVP annual reports, transgender individuals were on average almost two times more likely to experience harassment, threats, and/or intimidation by an intimate partner.26 In a UCLA Williams Institute report that reviewed existing research on intimate partner and sexual violence within LGBTQ communities, Brown and Herman found lifetime prevalence rates between 31.3 percent and 50 percent.27

While feminist intimate partner violence research has critiqued patriarchy, more needs to be done to thoroughly examine patriarchy’s reinforcement of the system of two and only two genders and how this contextualizes experiences of abuse. Generally, feminist theorists have held that intimate partner violence is a gender asymmetrical occurrence, viewing men as overwhelmingly the perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Beyond the gendered pattern, feminists have typically described intimate partner violence as a phenomenon that exists directly as a result of a patriarchal power structure that fosters a hostile cultural climate against women and enables men to perpetrate violence against them as a means of controlling women in society.

From this cultural perspective, this violence was not “domestic violence” or “intimate partner violence,” but rather was conceptualized as “wife beating,” “wife abuse,” or “woman abuse.” Feminists’ efforts were primarily focused on highlighting the evident gendered pattern while shaping a political agenda that would ultimately change our systematic response to the needs of these women victims. In arguably one of the most cited pioneering works, sociologists Dobash and Dobash sought to examine the experiences of abused women in a battered women’s shelter through a feminist perspective.28 Commonalities in the women’s experiences led to the conclusion that batterers held rigid patriarchal family ideals. When these victims were perceived to be out of line by their abusers, the abusers would reassert their patriarchal authority in the relationship through violent means. The women expressed that their husbands had certain gender-specific expectations of them as wives and that their violence was a mechanism through which batterers regulated their lives.

While feminist perspectives were readily challenged by the more “gender-neutral” family violence scholars who sought to make oppositional arguments, feminist thoughts based on cultural power dynamics between genders shaped the early direction of inquiry and essentially all of the response systems (e.g., shelters, hotlines, etc.). As the subfield of domestic violence scholarship emerged, it framed the violence as a heterosexually cisgender phenomenon. The broader argument was that men committed the overwhelming amount of intimate partner violence and did so because of the larger patriarchal power structure that constructed women as property in marriage, along with a legal system that supported or tolerated this view and the gender socialization that fostered hostile beliefs against women in our society. While framing intimate partner violence through this perspective highlighted the gendered nature of the violence, it also limited the research to the context of heterosexual relationships with discussions of only ciswomen victims of cismen perpetrators.

Assumptions of intimate partner violence based on theoretical orientation paint the issue with a broad brush that can often prove problematic, particularly when applied to trans victims. The oversimplification of gender resulted in early work that assumed that gender was the primary form of oppression for all women, failing to consider the intersecting qualities of race, class, and sexual orientation. This undermined the experiences of women of color, lesbians, economically marginalized groups, and more.

Social theory has grown and developed with the addition of a wider scope of approaches to the scholarship. In particular, black feminist scholars, activists, and critical race theorists revolutionized various subfields by centering black women’s voices in social theorization.29 In particular, feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed the intersections of race and gender in how women of color experience violence and is often credited with coining the term “intersectionality.”30 Sociologist and criminologist Hillary Potter described intersectionality as “the concept or conceptualization that each person has an assortment of coalesced socially constructed identities that are ordered into an inequitable social stratum.”31 Within any singular identity-based community, there exist a multitude of various identities (i.e., race, class, gender, sexual orientation) that alter the standpoint and experience of any particular member.

Take, for example, the recent public gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner; her experiences show starkly different realities from those who may not share her unique social position. As a successful athlete and celebrity, Caitlyn has been afforded the ability to access the best health care and transition resources available. Caitlyn advocates for the visibility of trans communities by sharing her story as a transwoman and televising many aspects of her transition via her reality television show. Despite the connection she has established with the broader trans community, Caitlyn has continued to utilize her race and class position to subordinate entire aspects of the trans population. Her personal politics, largely informed by a life of privilege, have often seemed to clash with the broader trans experience.

For example, Caitlyn openly claimed that she “liked” Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Despite offering her reservations about him, she lauded his conservative principles as his most important qualities. Primarily motivated by her elite class position, Caitlyn first advanced the notion that economic policy should serve the needs of the rich (e.g., through tax cuts and incentives for the wealthy).32 Cruz, an openly transphobic candidate, showed no love in return for Caitlyn, buckling down on his stance to deny transgender people equal and safe access to public restrooms.33 Caitlyn went on to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and has recently stood by her decision with “no regrets” despite the administration’s roll back of Obama-era protections for transgender people, which she simply dismissed as “mistakes.”34 An intersectional perspective illustrates how Caitlyn can afford to support transphobic political candidates at relatively no expense or suffering on her behalf. While she openly identifies as a transwoman, Caitlyn’s race and class position allow her the privilege to avoid many unpleasantries and barriers in her life. In a similar way, countless other identities intersect and shape the ways in which social realities are experienced, especially experiences with intimate partner violence.

Building on the broader foundations of intersectionality, Bograd challenged many of the assumptions underlying the dominant feminist domestic violence theories.35 Applying intersectionality to intimate partner violence demonstrates the effectiveness of a form of theorizing that includes interlocking systems of oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism) that shape distinct social localities and ultimately mold interpersonal dynamics, experiences, and understandings of violence and help seeking. While much of the early intimate partner violence work centered gender in the lives of predominately white and exclusively cisgender samples, Bograd conceptualized that intersectionality within the study of intimate partner violence has the ability to “color the meaning and nature of domestic violence, how it is experienced by self and responded to by others, how personal and social consequences are represented, and how or whether escape and safety can be obtained.”36

Consider, for example, how race complicates earlier conceptualizations of gender. In many ways, womanhood in our society has constructed white femininity as pure and in need of protection, while women of color, particularly black women, have been socially stigmatized for centuries. Cultural narratives of the “Jezebel,” out-of-control sexuality, and the construction of “working bodies” have led to distinctly racialized genders experienced by communities of color. The hostile social climates and contexts that surround the violence that occurs for many victims add multiple layers of challenges and obstacles. Individuals are victimized not only in their homes, families, and intimate relationships but also in their own communities, workplaces, and beyond. The daily aggressions of systemic heterosexism, racism, and classism compound the context of the violent experiences between partners. The devaluation of marginalized existences in our culture is often internalized, further complicating the experiences of intimate partner violence. Without appropriate theoretical understandings, research will continue to fall short on adequately capturing the experiences of survivors within historically oppressed communities.

When the inclusion of same-gender intimate partner violence research had recently begun, Bograd argued that the “invisibility of certain populations reflects more their social importance in the eyes of the dominant culture than the absence of domestic violence in their midst.”37 Since then, the field has grown to include gay and lesbian experiences while remaining stagnant in the inclusion of bisexual and transgender populations. The broader invisibility of transgender individuals inevitably led to theorization that exclusively assumed cisgender identity. As a result of that invisibility, the subsequent policy advancements that have changed how our government addresses domestic violence at large have never truly considered the impact of intimate partner violence on transgender lives.