Laurel Westbrook, <i>Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism</i>

Eliasson, Michelle N.

doi:10.1177/02685809211057669a

Cited by 6 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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Section: Gender Classification Is An Achievement Not An Attributementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gender is always already racialized (Pascoe 2005), and sociologists are beginning to document the particular racialized nature of transness, from the increased barriers to education, healthcare, and employment faced by trans people of color, to the epidemic of physical violence aimed most virulently at Black transwomen (see, e.g., James et al 2016;Westbrook 2020). Scholars such as Riley Snorton and Jin haritaworn (2013) describe a bifurcated trans politics, one that focuses on idioms of freedom and chosenness in relation to White trans lives (see, e.g., Brubaker 2016), while articulating the value of trans lives of color mostly through reports of their deaths (see Westbrook 2020). Indeed, gender attributions are themselves raced; social psychologists demonstrate, for example, that many people take longer to categorize the gender of people of color than they do White people (Lei, Leshin, and Rhodes 2020), and they exhibit biases toward viewing Black people as more masculine and Asians as more feminine than White people (Johnson, Freeman, and Pauker 2012).…”

Section: Gender Classification Is An Achievement Not An Attributementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Deviations from gender norms result in swift "negative assessments" (West and Zimmerman 1987) from peers (Pascoe 2007), parents (Kane 2006), and schools (Martin 1998). And negative assessments of gender behavior result in loss of social, economic, and even bodily security (Pascoe 2007;Schilt 2010;Westbrook 2020). But negative assessments can also change the very categories into which individuals are placed (Meadow 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Fragile Male: An Experimental Study of Transgender Classification and the Durability of Gender Categories

Khanna

Meadow

2023

Gender & Society

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Is maleness as durable a social classification as femaleness? Theories of gender suggest that men’s dominance in the gender hierarchy affords them greater privileges than women, whereas theories of status predict that men would be subject to greater scrutiny precisely because they occupy a higher-status position. We interrogate the nature of gender categories themselves by examining which theories hold in the context of gender nonconformity. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine how a child’s sex assigned at birth affects their likelihood of being reclassified as transgender for engaging in gender-nonconforming behavior. We find that people are more likely to reclassify boys exhibiting feminine behavior into an alternative identity category (transgender) than girls exhibiting analogous masculine behavior. Thus, membership in the “male” category is more fragile than in the “female” category. These findings suggest that gender nonconformity is itself a gendered process, and that the durability of membership in a social category depends on the status of that social identity. This study provides the first causal evidence of the effect of gender nonconformity on perceptions of both transgender and homosexual identity.

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Section: Gender Classification Is An Achievement Not An Attributementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gender Classification Is An Achievement Not An Attributementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Fragile Male: An Experimental Study of Transgender Classification and the Durability of Gender Categories

Khanna

Meadow

2023

Gender & Society

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“…As a result of these processes, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that violent transgender deaths may be at least 40 times greater than those reported in official crime statistics (see Momen & Dilks, 2021). The most common major data sources for homicides in the United States, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report data, do not include any information about whether the homicide victim was transgender (Westbrook, 2021;. Even the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which recently replaced the previous system as the primary source of national crime data (see Lantz, 2022a), offers very few opportunities for law enforcement agencies, and the personnel within them, to report a transgender identity outside of when a crime is explicitly motivated by bias (Stotzer, 2017).…”

Section: Transgender Homicide In the United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Descriptive Account of the Nature and Extent of Transgender Homicide in America, 2010 to 2021

Lantz,

Faulkner,

M. Mills

2023

J Interpers Violence

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There is a growing acknowledgment of transgender homicide as a serious social and public health issue; indeed, the American Medical Association has even referred to violence against transgender people as an “epidemic.” Addressing this issue, however, requires understanding the patterns associated with this violence. Yet, reliable data for doing so does not currently exist, especially in recent years. As such, the prevalence of these incidents and their key features are not easily understood. The current study addresses this issue using a comprehensive nationwide database on 305 instances of homicide directed against transgender people between 2010 and 2021, collected through extensive open-source data collection methods. The descriptive analyses of these incidents demonstrate pronounced increases in homicide victimization over time, and clear geographic clustering by state, such that roughly one in four incidents occurred in just three states: Texas, Florida, and California. After accounting for the estimated size of the transgender population, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri emerge as the most dangerous states with the highest risk of homicide victimization. The results also clearly demonstrate the intersectional nature of transgender homicide, in finding that most homicide victims are young Black or Hispanic transgender women. We conclude by emphasizing the need for multipronged policy responses to this issue that recognize the uniquely dangerous intersection of social problems that contribute to the vulnerable social position of many transgender people, including their vulnerability to homicide victimization.

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“…Engaging with other people, or their traces, is not just a formal, rational, professional task but also literally an "engagement with the other"; a confrontation with and recognition of different ways of being, and a reflexive comparison between those ways and one's own (Scott, 2019;Strauss, 2017). In a society with highly regularized and "wounded" (Westbrook, 2020) forms of trans life, it is easy to find not only an abundance of others' data, but a lack in one's self.…”

Section: Accounting For Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling fixes: Mess and emotion in algorithmic audits

Keyes

Austin

2022

Big Data & Society

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Efforts to address algorithmic harms have gathered particular steam over the last few years. One area of proposed opportunity is the notion of an “algorithmic audit,” specifically an “internal audit,” a process in which a system’s developers evaluate its construction and likely consequences. These processes are broadly endorsed in theory—but how do they work in practice? In this paper, we conduct not only an audit but an autoethnography of our experiences doing so. Exploring the history and legacy of a facial recognition dataset, we find paradigmatic examples of algorithmic injustices. But we also find that the process of discovery is interwoven with questions of affect and infrastructural brittleness that internal audit processes fail to articulate. For auditing to not only address existing harms but avoid producing new ones in turn, we argue that these processes must attend to the “mess” of engaging with algorithmic systems in practice. Doing so not only reduces the risks of audit processes but—through a more nuanced consideration of the emotive parts of that mess—may enhance the benefits of a form of governance premised entirely on altering future practices.

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Laurel Westbrook, Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism

Cited by 6 publications

References 4 publications

The Fragile Male: An Experimental Study of Transgender Classification and the Durability of Gender Categories

The Fragile Male: An Experimental Study of Transgender Classification and the Durability of Gender Categories

A Descriptive Account of the Nature and Extent of Transgender Homicide in America, 2010 to 2021

Feeling fixes: Mess and emotion in algorithmic audits

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