The push for transgender inclusion: Exploring boundary spanning in the gay–straight alliance

Abstract

Gay–straight alliance (or gender‐sexuality alliance; GSA) is a high‐school based club aimed at providing a safer environment for sexual and gender minority youth as well as their straight allies. Yet, as a club historically rooted in addressing sexual orientation‐related concerns, less attention has been given to understanding the changing relational dynamics of internal GSA activities aimed at expanding membership boundaries through the promotion of transgender inclusivity. I address this by bridging existing scholarship on GSAs, social movements, and the sociology of culture to showcase the impact boundary‐spanning strategies are having on GSA mobilization, in‐group solidarity, and external political and social activism. My findings reveal that membership boundary negotiations around gender diversity issues are shifting the social landscape of these clubs. Emerging barriers that impede boundary‐spanning efforts are also highlighted and discussed. More broadly, I generate new theoretical insights into how boundary spanning can shape political and social activism as well as offer promising future research directions in this area.

Beyond resilience: Resistance in the lives of LGBTQ youth

“…Transgender youth have actually pushed back against the title of Gay-Straight Alliances as erasing concerns of gender identity. Today, then, these clubs are now often called Gender-Sexuality Alliances, acknowledging the more expansive diversity of gender and sexuality (Sutherland, 2019). Youth can even resist LGBTQ spaces and clubs to expand and make them more inclusive.…”

Research on the Sustainability of the Enterprise Business Ecosystem from the Perspective of Boundary: The China Case

“…The three internal factors not only have different connotations, but also have different main functions. They are indispensable small subjects in the boundary spanning mode [37][38][39]. Therefore, we can find that the key factor in the Internet situation border crossing pattern, great changes have taken place, through the internal dynamic adaptation, had formed the border crossing pattern of the main body, fill in the simple generalization problems in the theory of boundary spanning, at the same time, also for the enterprise in the border crossing activities provides a reference sample.…”

Gen Z GSAs: Trans-Affirming and Racially Inclusive Gender-Sexuality Alliances in Secondary Schools

“…We employ several explanatory frames to analyze student experiences of how they learn about their own and other people's identities as GSA members. The first is the sociological theory of identity as conceptualized by the social movement scholar Mary Bernstein (2008) and elaborated in Sutherland's (2019) study of GSAs. Bernstein (2008) outlined three components of how identity is put to work in social movements: identity for empowerment (shared identity moves individual interests toward collective action), identity deployment (identity is used as a strategy to critique the existing cultural order and/or to gain legitimacy within it), and identity as goal (seeking recognition of identity and redistribution of resources).…”

“…Bernstein (2008) outlined three components of how identity is put to work in social movements: identity for empowerment (shared identity moves individual interests toward collective action), identity deployment (identity is used as a strategy to critique the existing cultural order and/or to gain legitimacy within it), and identity as goal (seeking recognition of identity and redistribution of resources). We build on Sutherland’s (2019) argument that GSAs are an in-school mechanism for LGBTQ movement identity work by analyzing how GSAs help forge a collective sense of identity to empower club members, deploy identity as a strategy of critique and education, and help students bid for recognition of their institutionally marginalized identities.…”