Expanding Transgender Studies in Sociology

Accounting for Cisnormativity: Understanding Transgender and Non-Binary Young People’s Strategies to Resist and Reduce Inequality in Healthcare

“…Mitigation strategies should draw on thoughtful research that explores how TGNB young people cultivate resilience, resourcefulness, and resistance when seeking gender-affirming medical interventions during this rapid increase in anti-trans legislation and policies. Only critical analyses of the ways TGNB patient communities endure cisnormative accountability (Lampe, 2019;Stallings et al, 2021)-and the consequences of such structures-will allow us to distinguish the theoretical potential of "gender accountability" from the real-world, direct impact of cisnormativity in American medicine (shuster, 2021;Sumerau, 2020).…”

“…Although TGNB populations occasionally showed up in the field as far back as the mid-1960s (Sumerau and Mathers, 2019), such studies typically assumed TGNB people were problematic and sought to make sense of such individuals through cisgender or binary-based frameworks (Westbrook and Schilt, 2014). In recent years, this focus has shifted to understanding gender inequalities more broadly, and how TGNB experiences may illustrate notable gaps in inequality sociological scholarship and operations of unequal gender systems (Sumerau, 2020). To this end, sociologists are continuing to map the ways cisgender assumptions have limited science (Nowakowski, Sumerau, and Mathers, 2016), public knowledge (Sumerau and Mathers, 2019), and the pursuit of more equitable gender relations in US society (Pfeffer, 2017).…”