Transgressed. Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

      www.nyupress.org

      © 2019 by New York University

      All rights reserved

      References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

      ISBN: 978-1-4798-3294-1 (hardback)

      ISBN: 978-1-4798-2785-5 (paperback)

      For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress.

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      Also available as an ebook

      I dedicate this book to the brave trans voices who opened up to me and shared their stories with the broader world.

      I also dedicate this book to my late mother-in-law, Tona Sink, who was an avid supporter of LGBTQ communities and to the victims and survivors of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

      Contents

      1. Intimate Partner Violence outside the Binary

      2. The Contexts of Abuse for Transgender Survivors

      3. “No Man Is Going to See You as a Woman”: Transgender Accounts of Violence and Abuse

      4. Meanings of Violence: Controlling Transition through Discrediting Identity Work

      5. Processing Victim Identity: Walking the Gender Tightrope

      6. Conclusion: Moving toward Trans Inclusivity

      Acknowledgments

      Appendix A

      Appendix B

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      About the Author

      1

      Intimate Partner Violence outside the Binary

      For the transgender community, threats of violence, harassment, discrimination, and intimidation are aspects of daily existence. On any given day, violence directed at transgender people ranges from the interpersonal realm to the more broad ramifications of state policy (e.g., North Carolina’s House Bill 2) that marginalizes those who transgress the rigid boundaries of the gender binary (male/female).1 While media and our collective attention are placed primarily on hate-motivated biases and crimes toward transgender individuals, a broader problem remains largely unexplored: trans victimization by intimate partners. I use the term “trans” as shorthand to refer to a broader range of individuals whose gender identity or expression, as Danica Bornstein of the Northwest Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay Survivors of Abuse and colleagues noted, “varies from the cultural norm for their birth sex.”2 This catchall term captures a range of gender identities beyond the biological sex-assigned definitions of cismale and cisfemale. Cisgender people are those whose assigned sex at birth matches their gender identity and expression.3

      While various definitions of intimate partner violence exist, it is largely understood as a pattern of physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuses perpetrated by a current or former romantic partner.4 Almost all of the available generalizable studies on intimate partner violence focus exclusively on cisgender men and women. These studies typically find that women do experience higher lifetime rates of intimate partner violence when compared to men.5 Women victims, when compared to men, typically experience more severe injuries that result in hospitalization and more often suffer disproportionate negative outcomes from intimate partner violence such as economic insecurity and psychological trauma.6 Estimates show that at least a third of women murdered in the United States were killed by a former or current boyfriend or husband;7 overall, women are murdered by intimate partners at twice the rate of men.8 In looking at just murder-suicides in the United States, 74 percent involved intimate partners, with 96 percent of these involving women murdered by their current or former intimate partner.9 While much of the existing evidence shows that intimate partner violence and homicide are gendered phenomena, less is known about the patterns of transgender victimization. This study explores the distinct realities of those who identify as transgender and have survived intimate partner violence by examining phone and online chat interviews and written accounts for the project at the center of this book. Over the course of six months, I spoke with thirteen transgender survivors of intimate partner violence who agreed to allow me to record their experiences and received five additional anonymously written accounts.

      Given the dearth of information on transgender survivor accounts of intimate partner violence, the stories in this book served as some of the earliest attempts to describe the dynamics of abuse for the trans community. In sociologist Lori Girshick’s compelling Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape?, the author described this lack of information as a “complete lack of research on interpersonal violence among transgender people,” which she characterized as a “serious gap” in the literature.10 Psychologist Janice Ristock stated that the field of same-gender intimate partner violence research has been dominated by a focus on lesbian victimization and that still “very little work addresses trans experiences.”11 Further, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), which collects and annually reports data on violent victimization experienced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community at large, recently called upon researchers to “focus on increasing the amount of literature on how transgender and gender non-conforming people are affected by intimate partner violence and the unique barriers these communities face in trying to access resources.”12 In answering these and many more calls to action, this book centers on the stories of survival of eighteen trans-identified people.

      About halfway through my research, Tom, a twenty-four-year-old black transman from Texas, contacted me to set up a phone interview. Like most of those who responded to the call to participate in the study, Tom e-mailed me with interest and curiosity before we decided on a date and time to speak. Our conversation was briefer than most; the background conversations that typically took around twenty to thirty minutes were shorter and to the point. Tom was raised in the South by a conservative, religious family with whom he sometimes had a contentious relationship but was, at the time we spoke, still in contact. Like the handful of survivors whom I had spoken with before him, Tom volunteered to share with me

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