person. He detailed abuse, violence, emotional torment, and public humiliation. This account was still raw. He jumped back and forth between the details of the incidents and how he was dealing with the trauma. Over the course of the interview, I asked Tom how he realized he was in an abusive relationship. He paused at length, giving a short response about how his abuser made him feel: “I knew it was abusive cuz like, she just made me feel ashamed of who I was and all.” As I was about to follow-up in the short pause, he added, “Like, every now and then I’ll think, just like, how lucky everyone is that they don’t have to think about their gender clashing with their bodies and I wish sometimes that I wasn’t trans but then I think, no, no, that’s what she would’ve wanted.”
It struck me that for Tom processing what made him think about the situation as abusive centered on his trans identity. He described one main aspect of what I would later learn transgender-identified survivors of intimate partner violence routinely faced. As a young transman, he had endured patterned emotional and physical brutalities similar to what many cisgender victims of intimate partner violence report. However, his trans identity made it front and center in the battle toward making sense of his abuse. As with many LGBTQ-identified people, the imagined possibility of being straight or cisgender may provide a temporary mental escape from the hardships of a marginalized existence; however, in Tom’s words, this is precisely what his abuser used as part of his abuse—manipulating the external cultural hostility that exists against those who transgress the gender binary in an effort to control Tom’s identity.
At the crux of this book’s analyses is the goal of detailing abusive intimate partner dynamics among a sample of transgender individuals in order to understand and generate theoretical interpretations about their experiences. How the participants’ identities framed the meanings and interpretations of violence and, subsequently, how the process of leaving an abusive relationship was structured for these trans survivors form the center of understanding how intimate partner violence is experienced by transgender people more generally.
Almost by default and continuing today, discussions of violence between intimate partners conjure images of abused ciswomen and abusive cismen: women and men who identify with their assigned sex and gender at birth. Even in a time when our culture has progressed toward the recognition of same-gender couples through either popular culture or the nationwide legalization of marriage equality, the compulsion to try to make sense of the world in rigidly gendered ways is still the convention. Take for example how the public imagines domestic victimization as distinctly feminine all the while conflating violence or aggression with masculine traits. While many efforts have been made to critically reconsider the gendered assumptions behind intimate partner violence, very little has challenged us to think about the experiences of those whose gender identities are more complex than the unquestioned labels we receive at birth.
While much debate exists about the social understandings of gender, it is understood to be more complicated than the decisions rendered at birth. Psychology scholars generally agree that our sense of what makes us feel like a man, a woman, or neither becomes deeply embedded by ages two to four; this is understood as our gender identity.13 Beyond the internalized sense of what makes human beings identify with a particular gender, externally we express such attributes in ways that are socially understood to signal masculinity, femininity, neither, or both. Humans engage in gender expression daily through the ways in which we carry our bodies and wear our hair, the clothing we select, and much more. Sociologists understand gender as a social construct: a concept that highlights how humans make social categories “real” by attributing meaning to bodies, reifying differences through structure (e.g., gendered bathrooms, sports teams, labor, and wages), and subsequently internalizing such messages. Generally, almost without question, gender has been central to how social scientists and many antiviolence activists have come to understand why intimate partner violence exists, how it manifests, the dynamics involved, and how it is experienced. Despite gender informing much of the understanding that exists around intimate partner violence, mainstream discussions have often taken a rather linear look at gender, mostly limiting the analysis to the two most recognized genders.
Developing the Project
As is the case with many research ideas, my journey toward a trans-centered project on intimate partner violence came about in gradual stages. As a scholar exploring the field, I quickly learned how divisive and contentious the debate over the role of gender in intimate partner violence had been and began questioning some basic assumptions. For instance, do men and women commit equal acts of violence toward one another, or are men the dominate abusers? Meanwhile, I grew more and more interested in the deeper complications of gender—beyond this binary system—to explore how gender informed violence structurally and through interaction.
Today, advocates and scholars alike find that different types of intimate partner violence result in different gendered dynamics. As sociologist Michael P. Johnson generally argued, perhaps the intense coercion that more women experience in intimate partner violence at the hands of men requires the structural power of patriarchy, while more common violence between partners may arise in less patterned and inherently gendered ways.14 As a queer-identified individual, however, I understood that gender could be experienced more dynamically and in less static ways than commonly conceptualized in the intimate partner violence literature. That is to say that for many individuals, gender identity may conflict with assigned labels or can be understood as more of a journey of evolution and self-discovery. I questioned how a type of violence in which gender informs aggression, communication, identity, and interaction is experienced by those who identify outside of the rigid gender binary, which represents a cultural system of two institutionally legitimized genders. Scholars often refer to that cultural system of two genders as genderism—“a social system of structural inequality with an underlying assumption that there are two, and only two genders.”15 I utilize the term “genderism” here and throughout to describe the structural, institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal systems that marginalize, subordinate, and threaten gender variance for individuals who identify as transgender, which includes those who are genderqueer, gender-nonconforming, gender-nonbinary, and/or otherwise gender variant.16 Further, genderism characterizes a cultural ideology “that reinforces the negative evaluation of gender non-conformity or an incongruence between sex and gender.”17 While transphobia describes fear or disgust against transgender people, genderist ideology more broadly describes how culture regulates the boundaries of appropriate gender expression and identification.18 In setting up a research endeavor to answer that initial question, I started by first taking stock of what we already knew, in particular, how scholars had come to understand the role of gender and other identities within intimate partner violence.
Tracing Thought in Intimate Partner Violence
Arguably, one of the best ways to begin an exploration of understudied social phenomena is to understand the trajectory of the problem to date. Today, intimate partner violence is viewed as a social problem largely as a result of the efforts of feminist activists and scholars of the 1970s who framed the social problem as violence against women: a phenomenon that exists directly as a result of a patriarchal power structure that fosters a hostile cultural climate against women and enables men to perpetrate violence against them as a means of maintaining control.19 Within this mode of thinking, the cultural construct of the gender binary is the primary facilitator of the existence of violence against women. In its most rigid application, women are the only potential victims while men are the only potential perpetrators. The response that emerged from these intellectual exchanges and theorizations about women’s place in society provided the foundation for the development of the sociopolitical or sociocultural explanations of the existence of domestic violence. This research generally concluded that violence against women was a “natural consequence of women’s powerless position vis-a-vis men in patriarchal societies and the sexist values and attitudes that accompany this inequity.”20
Though groundbreaking feminist perspectives provided a logical framework to understand a specific type of intimate partner violence,
