Gender and Sexual Identity by Julie L. Nagoshi Craig T. Nagoshi & Stephan/ie Brzuzy

Author:Julie L. Nagoshi, Craig T. Nagoshi & Stephan/ie Brzuzy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer New York, New York, NY

The traditional heteronormative view of gender is that gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation/identity are all of one piece, such that an individual with a female gender identity is essentially predisposed to engage in predominantly feminine behaviors and appearances and to only be sexually attracted to those with a male gender identity, while an individual with a male gender identity is essentially predisposed to engage in predominantly masculine behaviors and appearances and to only be sexually attracted to those with a female gender identity. Not only are gender roles and sexuality essentially tied to gender identity, maleness and femaleness constitute complementary identities in which greater power and initiative in gender roles and sexuality are ascribed to possessing the male identity (Segal 1997). As discussed in Chap.​ 2, feminist theory challenged the essentialist basis of the gender roles part of this system, arguing instead that these heteronormative gender roles that subordinated women to men were social constructs that could be reconstructed in the self and society to empower women. Queer theory, in turn, sought to empower sexual minorities by separating out sexual orientation/identity from gender identity and proposing that these identities and their associated behaviors and appearance were all social constructs that could be reconstructed in the self and society. However, as discussed in Chap.​ 5 and demonstrated in our interview findings presented in the previous chapter, feminist and queer theories are regarded by some transgender individuals as being inadequate to understand the embodied experiences of such individuals.

In the present chapter, we consider two more perceived limitations of feminist and queer theories for understanding the lived experiences of transgender individuals. The first concerns the necessary intersectionality of gender and sexual identity for transgender individuals. As will be presented below from our interview study, while gay men and lesbians, consistent with queer theory, could easily regard their sexual identity as being a social construct separate from their gender identity, for many transgender individuals, understanding their gender and sexual identities was a dynamic process in which social and embodied experiences informed a continual process of defining one’s identity among the many intersectional permutations of gender and sexual identity. Not having gender and sexual identities fixed by heteronormative social definitions, conventions, and enforcements, in turn, made it much more important for many transgender individuals to construct narratives of self-identity that integrated and made sense of these lived experiences of fluid gender and sexual identities. The latter part of this chapter thus compares the narratives of negotiating a gendered world from the perspectives of straight, gay/lesbian, and transgender individuals.

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