Cisnormative Empathy: A Critical Examination of Love, Support, and Compassion for Transgender People by their Loved Ones

Abstract

Supportive family members appear to be an important source of compassion and allyship for their transgender loved ones, and yet there is little research on the family members themselves. With growing recognition, researchers are increasingly focusing on these perspectives, yet there remains a dearth of literature that incorporates the perspectives of people with transgender parents. In this paper, I use 20 in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews to assess the empathetic self‐constructions of participants as they describe their love and support for their transgender parent, while examining potential dangers of support that is underpinned by traditional norms related to gender, sexuality, and family. I introduce cisnormative empathy to identify this phenomenon, acknowledging the importance of empathy as a precursor to support and acceptance, while exploring how empathetic self‐constructions combined with actions underpinned by cisnormativity may be counterproductive to the needs of transgender loved ones and the transgender community as a whole. I suggest that additional supports for transgender people’s loved ones are needed to help explore complicated emotions while also challenging cisnormative ideologies.

Affective obligations and obliged affections

“…As numerous studies demonstrate, relational family dynamics can be altered and reconfigured, at least temporarily, by the range of reactions to the transgender child's coming out (see, e.g., Catalpa and McGuire, 2018;Fuller and Riggs, 2018;Robinson, 2018;von Doussa, Power and Riggs, 2020;McDermott et al, 2021). Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, grief, sadness and ambiguous loss (Catalpa and McGuire, 2018) can circulate within the family, making way for affective reorientation among family members, not only towards each other but also towards the future temporality of the family, as roles, boundaries and meaning must be reconceptualised within family relationships (Alegría, 2018;Kelley, 2020). When the child's gender non-normativity is experienced as a deviation from the line and when this deviation is experienced as a threat to the family's 'idealisation of domestic privacy' (Ahmed, 2010: 90), the gender non-normative agent can become an affect alien, killing the 'joy of the family' and, by extension, 'killing the family by killing the association with joy' (49).…”