title: "I don't like passing as a straight woman": queer negotiations of identity and social group membership.
abstract: For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate along presumably "natural," biological, and essentialized binaries of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/ homosexual. However, as the lives and experiences of transgender people and their families become increasingly socially visible, these normative structuring binaries are called into stark question as they fail to adequately articulate and encompass these social actors' identities and social group memberships. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 50 women from the United States, Canada, and Australia, who detail 61 unique relationships with transgender men, this study considers how the experiences of these queer social actors hold the potential to rattle the very foundations upon which normative binaries rest, highlighting the increasingly blurry intersections, tensions, and overlaps between sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 21st century. This work also considers the potential for these normative disruptions to engender opportunities for social collaboration, solidarity, and transformation.
authors.forename: Carla A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Pfeffer
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D002170:Canada; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D063106:Transgender Persons / Q000523:psychology*; D014481:United States; D014930:Women