Normative Resistance and Inventive Pragmatism

Abstract

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across (primarily) the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities (or “agency”) of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families.

Keywords

culture family sexuality

Introduction

This empirical work begins by seriously considering (and considering serious) transgender families—something long overdue in sociology. Where do these families fit in our existing classificatory systems? What makes a particular couple “same-sex” or “opposite-sex?” Is it the genetic blueprint or karyotype of each partner relative to the other? Unlikely, since most of us will live our entire lives never truly knowing our genetic karyotype, let alone that/those of our partner(s). Is it the relative levels of sex hormones in each partner’s body? Hormone replacement and supplemental therapies allow us to control these presumably natural variations—which we now know exhibit greater statistical variation within sex categories than across them (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Then it must be the genitals, reproductive organs, and secondary sex characteristics of each partner, correct? Yet modern medicine increasingly allows us to alter and (re)construct these somatic features in dizzyingly variable amalgamations (Meyerowitz 2002). Furthermore, most of us go through our everyday lives only presuming what lies beneath the clothes and skin of the majority of social others (Garfinkel 1967)—“cultural genitals,” as they have been termed (Kessler and McKenna 1978). Then it must be the legal status of each partner—whether there is an “M” or an “F” on their birth certificate, passport, and/or driver’s license. Wrong again. In the United States, federal policies on the designation of sex status on legal documents, and state policies on whether or not birth certificates and other legal documents may or may not reflect a literal “sex change,” are often inconsistent, as are policies indicating which hormonal and/or surgical procedures provide necessary grounds for requesting that such changes be made (Currah, Juang, and Minter 2006; Kirkland 2006).

While these ambiguities and inconsistencies may be perplexing, they also open up possibilities for remarkable social transformation and new family forms that require more focused empirical and theoretical inquiry (Valocchi 2005). For instance, the medical, legal, and social realities of some transgender and transsexual (henceforth “trans”) peoples’ lives, in this historical moment, may make it possible for one to choose to enter into either a “same-sex/gay” or “opposite-sex/heterosexual” legally recognized marriage or civil union with the very same partner in some localities (Robson 2006). Given the complexity of social identity in the context of trans lives and partnerships, it makes sense to further consider the ways in which these identities are both relationally formed and embedded within social contexts, systems, structures, and institutions. As Seidman (1994, 173) writes: “Decisions about identity categories [are] pragmatic, related to concerns of situational advantage, political gain, and conceptual utility.”

Furthermore, we might also consider the structural barriers that individuals and couples face as they forge family unions and partnerships that may at first glance seem culturally or legally unintelligible (with multiple overlapping and conflicting gender markers and designations) yet might nevertheless appear quotidian or even normative in everyday social practice. In this article, I draw on empirical data from research with cisgender (henceforth “cis”)¹ women partners of transgender and transsexual men to propose two analytic constructs—“normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism”—for more richly conceptualizing relational processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of those within trans families.

Toward Theorizing Trans Families

A body of theoretical and empirical sociological scholarship focusing exclusively on trans families does not yet exist.² Yet trans individuals and their partners present perplexing sociolegal dilemmas when it comes to conceptualizing and operationalizing the very types or forms of relationships in which they engage. Researchers may be unsure how to classify these research subjects using existing typologies. Are these partnerships gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, queer, or something entirely new and yet unnamed within the sex/gender/sexuality system (Schilt and Westbrook 2009; Seidman 1995)? Are relationships between trans people and their partners socially assimilationist and normative or counternormative? How might the particular choices or expressions of “agency” made by members of trans families, as embedded within existing social systems, institutions, and structures, trouble existing notions of normativity in ways that may be simultaneously pragmatic, socially destabilizing/transformative, and reinforcing of the status quo? How might choosing to “pass” as unremarkably heterosexual hold both pragmatic and limiting potentials for these couples in terms of mediating social identity group membership and accessing valuable social institutions and resources?

In the absence of a well-developed sociological literature on trans families, I turn toward several useful concepts for framing and beginning to theorize the experiences of these families. Halberstam (2011) outlines tensions among and between queer theorists and scholars of kinship in their attempts to variously (1) carve out queer identities and communities that are not predicated on (and sometimes explicitly reject) traditionalist notions of “the family” or family membership, (2) recuperate queer social actors as critical yet often sidelined or invisible members of families across particular times and places, and (3) propose consideration of how queer families might work to usefully reconfigure the very notion of “family” itself. This work may be characterized by each of these aims, so often seen as mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. I wish to push beyond limited (and often limiting) governmental (e.g., U.S. Census Bureau 2011) and mainstream public (e.g., Powell et al. 2010) definitions of “the family.” In their stead, I draw on postmodern understandings to focus on social processes and interactions that challenge existing definitions of “the family” and resist their further concretization (Bernardes 1999; Holstein and Gubrium 1999; Kitzinger 2005). Rather than convincing the reader that cis women’s partnerships with trans men (with or without children and cohabitating or not) legitimately constitute family, my intention is to assert that a focus on these relationships productively compels reconsideration of “the family” and its various attributes (such as marriage, monogamy, and parentage) and attendant sociolegal gatekeepers.

Key to this project is an exploration of normativity in the context of “the family.” Normativity has been described as a “charmed circle” within which social privilege, opportunity, and freedom from stigma are conferred to those conforming to particular social rules and regulations (Rubin 1984). Some of these rules and regulations dictate that opposite-sex, normatively gendered individuals monogamously pair (Jackson 2006; Kitzinger 2005). This regulatory social force has been termed “heteronormativity” (Warner 1991), described as “the view that institutionalized heterosexuality constitutes the standard for legitimate and prescriptive sociosexual arrangements” (Ingraham 1994, 204). Heteronormativity has also been cast as “shorthand for the numerous ways in which heterosexual privilege is woven into the fabric of social life, pervasively and insidiously ordering everyday existence” as a key component of social structure (Jackson 2006, 108). Under such social privilege, relational configurations and family forms falling outside of compulsory heteronormative parameters are often rendered invisible (Rich 1980). Kitzinger outlines interactional and institutional processes through which family forms and members that diverge from heteronormative parameters are rendered deviant, thereby instantiating “the family” as a social “categorization device” (2005, 480). As such, heteronormativity exists as a powerful structuring force in our lives and is reflected through numerous social structures and institutions such as marriage, monogamy, and parenting.

Importantly, scholars note that those forming same-sex pairings may also follow proscriptively normative behavioral patterns and support normative social institutions, movements, and structures, described as “homonormativity” (Duggan 2002) or the cultural “normalization” of gay identities (Seidman 2001). These patterns are further evident in contemporary mainstream gay and lesbian politics and social movements, which focus on such “respectably queer” (Ward 2008) topics as legalization of same-sex marriage and same-sex second-parent adoption and elimination of policies excluding “out” gay men and lesbians from military service. Johnson (2002) explores how normativity structures contemporary citizenship, socially compelling gay and lesbian individuals to “pass” as conventional in order to access sociocultural and material benefits. Of critical import to the present study, both heteronormativity and homonormativity are concepts depending on the actual and/or perceived identities (gender and sexual) of social actors in relation to one another (Jackson 2006).

In both mainstream and academic conversations surrounding trans people and their lives, questions are often posed about whether trans people and their relationships mirror non-trans people and their relationships, or if these individuals and partnerships represent a fundamental counternormative challenge to such identities, structures, and institutions. Furthermore, some seem to suggest that trans people bear particular personal responsibility for enacting and forming counternormative identities and relationships. These conversations and vantage points all center on the notion of agency, or a social actor’s ability to intervene in, resist, or transform existing social structures, systems, and institutions. Moreover, it is critical to consider not only ideological and political commitments when assessing seemingly heteronormative and homonormative social practices, but their pragmatic potentials in producing and constraining access to regulated social and material resources as well (Rosenfeld 2009).

Responding to an existing gap in the theoretical and empirical literatures, in this article I will propose the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” (conscious and active strategies and actions for making life choices distinct from those considered most socially expected, celebrated, and sanctioned) and “inventive pragmatism” (active strategies and actions that might be considered clever manipulation of an existing social structure in order to access social and material resources on behalf of oneself or one’s family) to articulate processes by which cis women partners of trans men³ negotiate agency and structure. This study outlines strategies members of one type of trans family deploy as they negotiate social structures and institutions in their everyday lives, to consider how these acts of resisting and accessing regulated social resources carry the potential for social transformation that extends beyond these families or their members alone.

Method

Research participants were recruited using Internet-facilitated social network purposive sampling (Patton 1990) to target the significant others, friends, families, and allies of trans men. Eligible participants included current and former partners of trans men whose relationship(s) were at least three months in reported duration. I developed the interview protocol to gain deeper understanding for how participants “do gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) and construct their social worlds through everyday actions and interactions (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1959). I conducted audio-recorded, face-to-face interviews with 11 participants and telephone interviews with the rest, lasting from 47 to 150 minutes, averaging just over 100 minutes.

Interviews were transcribed by a professional transcriptionist and analyzed using a qualitative data analysis software program. I used inductive and deductive coding techniques, informed by grounded theory methods, to distill emergent themes, patterns, and trends in the narrative data (see Charmaz 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Approximately 200 themes and subthemes emerged through the open coding process, which I distilled to approximately 50 during focused coding (Charmaz 2006). Confirming and disconfirming evidence were coded for each theme. I also coded for approximately 30 demographic variables connected to the participant, their partner(s), and relationship(s). Finally, to discern differences in experiences across particular groups of participants, I conducted axial coding, which allowed me to sort coded themes by various participant attributes and demographic characteristics (Strauss 1987).

In sum, I interviewed 50 cis⁴ women partners of trans men who resided across thirteen states in the United States, three Canadian provinces, and one territory in Australia.⁵ As such, this study expands previous work on sex and gender minorities, which tends to focus almost exclusively on a few states in the United States—mostly centering on urban populations. This study also captures the perspectives and experiences of cis women from most of the U.S. geographic regions with the largest reported numbers of trans men (see Rosser et al. 2007). Study participants largely self-identified as white (90 percent⁶) and ranged in age from 18 to 51 years, averaging 29 years of age. While most participants were white, nearly 30 percent of cis women reported being in an interracial relationship and only 75 percent of their partners were white. Participants and their trans partners were highly educated, yet reported disproportionately low household incomes for those choosing to report this information. Study participants (52 percent) most often self-identified as “queer” when asked to describe their sexual orientation, and this was the label most often used to describe a trans partner’s sexual orientation as well.

While I interviewed 50 cis women, these participants discussed 61 individual relationships with trans men, since some cis women reported more than one relationship with a trans partner. More than 80 percent were reporting on a current relationship, and relationship duration ranged from 3 months to more than a decade, with an average of just over 2 years. The majority of relationships involved cohabitation, with partners living together, on average, for about 1.5 years at the point of the interview. About 10 percent of participants were legally married to their trans partner and about 12 percent reported experiences with parenting (while only 4 percent were actively raising children with their trans partner in their home). Participants were in relationships with trans men who were at various stages of sex and gender transition, with most at just over two years into the process. Nearly all of the trans partners were either taking testosterone or planning to do so and had had or planned to have “top surgery,” while a minority had had or planned to have “bottom surgery.” Study participants reported most often that their trans partner(s) were perceived as male in social situations either “always” or “almost always.”

Findings

The following sections outline dimensions of the two major strategic processes that emerged in analyses with regard to cis women’s negotiations of agency and structure. I term these strategic processes “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism.” While the conceptual chart in Figure 1 outlines these two strategic processes and their constitutive components, my intention is not to generate a pure typology. Indeed, many cis women in my sample employed strategies of both normative resistance and inventive pragmatism—visually represented in the overlap between the two spheres as trans family negotiations of structure and agency.

Figure 1:

Sample participants’ strategies of normative resistance and inventive pragmatism

In this section, I introduce the concept of “normative resistance” as a set of strategies cis women partners of trans men employed to negotiate social systems, structures, and institutions. “Normative resistance” refers to conscious and active strategies and actions for making life choices distinct from those considered most socially expected, celebrated, and sanctioned. Recall that the majority of cis women reported that their trans partner was socially perceived as male most of the time. A considerable minority (30 percent) of cis women I interviewed self-identified as “femme,”⁷ and all of the cis women in my sample reported being perceived by social others as a woman all or most of the time. As such, many cis women reported being frequently misperceived as part of an unremarkably heterosexual couple when in public with their trans partner. This stood in contrast to the self-identification of the majority of cis women in the sample as “queer.” Given this tension and discrepancy between personal and political identity and social perceptions, some of the cis women I interviewed described specific strategies for managing and resisting social misrecognition⁸ as unremarkably heterosexual and reasserting their identity as “queer” or counternormative. Their strategies for normative resistance spanned across four primary areas. Cis women reported resisting (1) marriage, (2) parenthood, (3) monogamy, and (4) queer invisibility (see Figure 1).

Resisting Marriage

“Opposite sex/heterosexual” marriage and parenting are often regarded as primary bastions, symbols, and institutions of heteronormativity, heteronormative practices, and/or heteronormative privilege. Furthermore, “same-sex/gay” marriage rights and parenting have recently taken center stage and become a primary goal of what some consider “homonormative” mainstream politics (see Duggan 2002; Ward 2008). Cis women in partnerships with trans men often face the unique circumstance of being able to choose between “heterosexual/opposite sex marriage,” “gay/same-sex” marriage, or no marriage at all with the very same partner (dependent on a trans partner’s legal sex status and personal gender identity, and the couple’s legal geographic residence). As Tabitha (see Appendix for brief participant demographics by pseudonym) described it: “In a way I think it’s kind of an amazing loophole. The Christian right hasn’t figured it out yet.”

Despite the existence of such a “loophole,” nearly one quarter (n = 12) of the cis women in this sample expressed antimarriage sentiments, lack of interest in marriage, or situated their support of marriage as far less personally or socially important than other issues and causes. I consider this interface between agency and structure in the lives of cis women partners of trans men one of the forms of “normative resistance” in which they frequently engage. For example, as Trixie stated:

I’m not really into the idea of gay marriage. If that is something that any gay person wants, I’ll definitely support them in that—that they should be able to have whatever they want. It’s just not what I want. My idea of living my life successfully has nothing to do with assimilating to that kind of heterosexist ideal of a man and a woman as a unit with children . . . when I think about pressing gay or queer issues, marriage is never one of them. It’s not in my agenda to show the public or the world that I’m just like them.

Trixie makes it clear that her notion of what it means to be queer involves anti-assimilation personal life choices, and that accessing marriage would be an assimilationist choice.

Emma articulated another perspective on marriage—that even as it expands to “same-sex/gay” couples, it remains exclusionary in other ways:

In Canada [same-sex marriage is] legal everywhere, but it’s still exclusive in that sometimes people of certain migration can’t get married or it’s the financial thing and they can’t get married and religion plays a lot into marriage. So neither of us wanted to get married in the very traditional sense of going to church or otherwise. We talked about getting married if we wanted the legal benefits with each other . . . [but] we didn’t want to play into that because it wasn’t where our politics lie.

These expressions of politics and agency centered around resisting, opposing, and decentering marriage are a key component of much queer theory and social activism, which critiques social imperatives to marry and the very linkages between state-sanctioned marriage and regulation of social and material resources (Duggan 1992). Toby told me that she and her partner are able to legally marry as an “opposite-sex/heterosexual” couple where they live, yet have chosen not to marry as an extension of their political and ideological beliefs:

Neither of us have ever been particularly fond of the institution—for anybody. I’ve always been adamant about it and harassed my heterosexual friends when they say, “We’re getting married!” And I’m like, “Why?! Why are you joining this private club that I’m not invited into?! Would you join a club that Jews were not allowed to join, that Black people are not allowed to join? Well, you’re doing the same thing.”

Axial coding revealed that cis women who explicitly self-identified as “queer” were more likely to express antimarriage political beliefs, and to report that their trans partner was more interested in marriage than they. Cis women from the Western United States (particularly California) in this sample were more likely to hold antimarriage sentiments than those from other regions of the United States or Canada.

Resisting Parenthood

Participants also expressed normative resistance in the form of eschewing parenthood or expressing the desire to remain childfree. Nearly half (44 percent) of participants I interviewed told me that they were either not interested in becoming a parent now or had no specific plans to become a parent in the future. Among those not expressing a desire or plans to parent, this was conveyed as indifference, conflict, and (in some cases) active resistance to normative ideals and celebration of new possibilities connected to being and remaining childfree.

For example, when I asked Jodi if her decision not to become a parent had been a difficult one for her, she told me, “No. Actually, I celebrated by going and getting a huge tattoo piece. . . . I will not be having babies from this body; it will ruin my tattoo! Part of the symbolism in the tattoo . . . represents an empty womb.” Jodi’s tattoo exemplifies another critical aspect of normative resistance in transactions between agency and structure—constructing new rituals to signify, and quite literally mark on the body, important life choices that disrupt and diverge from the socially normative and celebrated ideals of having children as key to both womanhood and family. As Tabitha told me, “I’m starting to feel a little bit like an aberration. I’m 33 and I’m not interested in kids. . . . I’m on my own queer path now and that’s my focus.” Rachel said, “I know I never want to be pregnant because I think it sounds awful and I also feel really strongly about not further expanding the population. . . . I want to be a professor, so I have a lot of school ahead of me. . . . I don’t want to compromise my desire to teach to have a child.” The reasons for not desiring to become a parent were varied and included one’s own or a partner’s infertility, physical and/or mental health problem(s), lack of economic resources, desire to prioritize education and/or career, advancing age, citizenship status, and conflict over reproductive and parenting options.

Resisting Monogamy

Partnering is a social-relational practice that may be particularly “queered” and destabilized when considering the lives and experiences of participants in this study. Participants discussed relationship configurations that differed in striking ways from the monogamous relational structures generally considered emblematic of heteronormativity. For those providing data on intimate relationship structure, 40 percent of the relationships with trans men that participants described were polyamorous (not strictly monogamous) at one point or another over the course of the relationship. This figure does not reflect reported infidelities that occurred across the relationships but, instead, captures the proportion of the sample that engaged in consensual,⁹ negotiated polyamory/nonmonogamy (or “open relationships”).

In this study, cis women from the western United States and Canada reported the highest rates of nonmonogamy in their relationships, while those in the midwest and northeast United States reported the highest rates of monogamy. Though the number of cis women actively raising children in their homes with their trans partner was very low (n = 2), both of these cis women reported having a monogamous relationship with their trans partner, despite the fact that one of these participants self-identified as polyamorous. Future research on trans families might investigate how raising children intersects with the politics and practices of monogamy and polyamory.

Queer-identified cis women and cis women younger than 35 years of age were more likely to report practicing nonmonogamy in their relationships than those who identified as lesbian or were older than 35 years of age. For younger, queer-identified cis women in particular, then, forming an open relationship structure with a trans partner may serve as one way in which this group engages in social innovation to keep their relationship counternormative, though they may present the semblance of normativity in the public sphere. Moreover, it may be one strategy of resistance for maintaining a personal and community-based “queer” identity in the context of being perceived by many social others as unremarkably heterosexual.

Robyn discussed that among her community of queer-identified individuals, polyamory is not only common but perhaps even necessary for being “truly” queer: “I know a lot of people who have been in open relationships because it’s kind of like people are expected to be in open relationships . . . it’s kind of the norm. You’re supposed to be in an open relationship because, otherwise, that’s like oppressive.” Ellia offered a similar perspective: “The more people we meet in life it seems like people are very into open relationships. A lot of the queer community that we’ve been meeting lately, they all seem to be in open relationships.” Study participants discussed numerous types of polyamorous relationship configurations and varying degrees of negotiation between partners regarding the contours of sexual and/or romantic relations with others outside of their primary relationship.

The polyamorous relationship configurations, which a sizable portion of respondents described, challenge conceptualizations of these relationships as simply “heteronormative,” insofar as heteronormativity is predicated on individuals establishing intentionally exclusive, monogamous pairings (Jackson 2006). These polyamorous relationships further differed from normative ideals given that the configurations described (duos and triads) reflected a broad spectrum of various gender identities and expressions. For example, a considerable number of cis women in open relationships with trans men told me that their trans partner was engaged in another relationship with a man (in some cases trans and in others cis). In the context of these relationships, trans men reported being perceived by social others as unremarkably “gay.” Nearly 30 percent of the cis women in my sample described instances in which their partner was presumed gay by social others when in physical proximity to other men. In another scenario, a participant in an open relationship with a trans man described her relationship with a trans woman who was not always socially perceived as a woman, discussing how their relationship was variously perceived as lesbian or as unintelligible (hence “queer”). In some cases, cis women described the power of these relationships to socially recuperate their own (or their partner’s) otherwise invisible queerness. These reported experiences highlight shifting relational, context-dependent, and nonstatic possibilities for sexual identity and social perceptions thereof.

A considerable minority of cis women partners of trans men explicitly discussed their open relationships as a conscious form of resisting normativity (as well as a critical aspect of some queer identities and relationships) and countering others’ social (mis)perceptions about the presumed heteronormativity of their relationships. These relationship configurations also parallel emergent trends toward open relationships, even in the context of legal marriage, among other segments of the LGBTQ population (see Green 2008; James 2010). Taken together, these findings challenge assertions that efforts to legalize same-sex marriage reflect simple mimicry of heteronormative relationship configurations and an abdication of a radically queer political agenda, suggesting that it may not be such a simple dichotomy.

Resisting Queer Invisibility

Despite some scholars’ claims that sociology might fruitfully move into a “post-queer” era (Green 2002), 52 percent of the cis women I interviewed self-identified as “queer.” Furthermore, when offering a label to describe the sort of relationship that they had with their trans partner, 65 percent of these relationships were described by participants as “queer.” In the context of others’ reported social misperceptions of these cis women as unremarkably heterosexual and/or part of a presumably unremarkable heterosexual couple, however, these queer identities and relationships were often elided. Many cis women described their fears of being perceived as “just like everyone else” by social others. In response, the cis women I interviewed described specific strategies for managing and resisting this (actual and potential) misrecognition and reasserting their own identity as “queer” and/or counternormative.

Participants’ narratives also revealed the extent to which some forms of normative resistance highlight sociopolitical and identity divisions within LGBTQ communities as well. As Trixie told me:

A lot of my gay male friends and I talk about the difference between just gay people and queer people and, “Don’t you hate when gay people are just gay and not queer?” And I guess what we mean by that is just . . . to me I guess it means that . . . someone identifying just as gay wants to assimilate somehow . . . I know that’s not necessarily true and I’m not judging anybody’s identification at all. It’s totally everyone’s own business and I’m so in support of it. But, for me, when I identify as queer, I feel like I’m also putting a message out there that my sexual orientation is not about assimilation to any sort of heterosexist ideal.

Trixie’s narrative speaks to many participants’ complicated negotiations of LGBTQ identification and disidentification when it comes to resisting normativity. Many strategies of normative resistance that participants described also resonates with Halberstam’s (2011, 110-11) discussion of queer as “a mode of critique rather than a new investment in normativity or life or respectability or wholeness or legitimacy.”

Narratives like these also emerged as a striking empirical converse to Green (2002), who finds some members of the LGBTQ community identifying as “gay but not queer.” These experiences of resisting queer invisibility among cis women in this sample are shared by individuals in another undertheorized and often invisible identity and social group—cissexual (non-trans) “opposite-sex” partnerships wherein one or more partners is bisexual- or queer-identified (Ault 1996a, 1996b; Burrill 2001; Tabatabai and Linders 2011; Wolkomir 2009). Yet trans couples may face challenges that cissexual queer-identified individuals in “opposite-sex” partnerships encounter less frequently, such as accessing legal marriage and having children. Nevertheless, queer invisibility may also hold pragmatic potential for some queer social actors in terms of accessing regulated social and material resources, which I detail below.

Strategies of Inventive Pragmatism: Accessing Legal Marriage, Legal Parenthood, and Reproductive Technologies

While normative resistance was one approach cis women described for making their identities and relationships personally and socially intelligible, they also detailed inventive ways in which they sometimes embraced what might seem like normative behaviors and identities for pragmatic purposes. “Inventive pragmatism,” as I term it, entails active strategies and actions that might be considered clever manipulation (or “work-arounds”) of an existing social structure in order to access social and material resources on behalf of oneself or one’s family. Recall, once again, that many cis women reported belief that their relationship with their partner was perceived as unremarkably heterosexual most of the time, which stood in contrast to their majority self-identification as “queer.” Despite this discrepancy, some cis women described inventively manipulating such misrecognition in order to access regulated social institutions, resources, and technologies. Cis women’s strategies for inventive pragmatism spanned across three primary areas of access: (1) legal marriage, (2) legal parenthood, and (3) reproductive technologies.

Accessing Legal Marriage

Depending on existing laws in their geographic area of residence, the cis women I interviewed often faced the unique circumstance of being able to legally marry a partner after he has engaged in gender transition—something that is often not legally possible (in the United States) while the two are legally classified as same-sex. Recall one participant referring to this fact as an “amazing loophole” that “the Christian right hasn’t figured . . . out yet.” Some participants insisted on the pragmatic importance of having the option to access legal marriage with the hopes of broadening and expanding this institution for a broader diversity of couples. Terry described a contentious interaction she had with another member of the LGBTQ community on announcing her upcoming marriage to her trans partner:

This one [queer] woman put up this interesting analogy of how she saw getting married as selling out and [asked], “If you could be a member of an exclusive club and go into that club and dine fabulously but your best friend, who is a different ethnicity, could not, how could you live with yourself if you went ahead and went into this club and dined fabulously?” And I said, “You know what? I would expect you to go in there and dine and bring me a plate. Don’t be a martyr. . . .” [I think you should] do what’s right for you and if you can find a way to reach back and help everybody else, do it.

This analogy parallels the one discussed earlier by Toby; but the analysis and conclusion are starkly different. To Terry, marriage to a trans partner is a move away from ideologically motivated, punishing self-interest and may be a move toward LGBTQ community betterment (although she does not explicitly specify how).

Like Terry, a small minority of cis women in the sample (10 percent) reported existing legal “same-sex/gay” (n = 1) or “opposite-sex/heterosexual” (n = 4) marriages with their partners, while 28 percent (n = 14) reported contemplating, discussing, and/or actively planning such legal unions and 22 percent (n = 11) reported feeling neutral about the possibility of marriage. Sixteen percent (n = 8) of participants did not comment specifically on the topic of marriage. Axial coding revealed that cis women who self-identified as bisexual were more likely than any other group to report a desire to be legally married. Participants’ endorsement of marriage, as a personal goal, increased along with the degree to which one’s trans partner was reportedly socially perceived as male—with those reporting that their partner was socially perceived as male “always” or “almost always” most frequently reporting the desire to marry. While only two cis women were actively raising children in their homes with their trans partner at the time of the interview, both were legally married to their trans partner. Future studies of trans families might usefully examine the degree to which the presence of children influences the desire or propensity to legally marry.

Many cis women participants in the United States mentioned marriage as a gateway to accessing the material and social rights and privileges that accrue to those who are legally married, including (but not limited to) next of kin status, tax benefits, hospital visitation rights, legal parentage status, and citizenship rights. As Lea told me, “This year we thought about okay, well, if you want your [transition] surgery then we can do the ‘One-Plus-Adult.’ But we need some kind of life-changing event to allow us to put one or the other on the other one’s insurance. So what would that life-changing event be but marriage?” When Mel was asked if she had spoken with her partner about marriage, she responded:

We’ve discussed it, and our decision on whether to be married or not comes down to a case of protecting our rights as a couple. It usually comes in the context of, you know, would it help our tax situation or hinder our tax situation? If one of us were to be sick would we want to be sure to be able to sit with the other person in the hospital, to be the one that decisions about life support would be deferred to. . . . Is there something in the legal status of marriage that would make our lives a bit easier?

Mel, then, describes making future-oriented pragmatic assessments to consider the potential legal “what-ifs” were injury or illness to befall her or her partner.

Cis women’s reasons for accessing legal marriage were varied and complex, but most highlighted primarily instrumental and pragmatic—rather than emotional, romantic, or symbolic—factors. Anna directly connected her intention to marry with the ability to access certain material benefits and explicitly articulated the inner conflict that accessing such regulated social privileges entails:

We made the decision really quickly. It was like, “Oh, I need healthcare.” He was starting a new job, so if I was going to go onto his healthcare it should happen right away. So it was like in a three- or four-day period we talked about getting married for the first time and then got married all in the same blink of an eye. I was aware though, during that time, of, “My God, this is something that I really don’t completely believe in and never believed that I would do and I certainly wouldn’t do it when . . . people who would like to get married can’t because they’re not legally able to.”

June echoed this same sentiment: “There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get married when there’s [sic] so many people in the world that can’t.” Such complicated and fraught decision-making processes revealed participants’ awareness that their decisions to access legal marriage were not similarly available to other members of the LGBTQ community.

For Anna and June, decisions about whether or not to access legal marriage (a state and federally regulated institution) are imbued with awareness of its exclusionary and restrictive nature. Anna does not describe a desire connected to habituated romantic cultural ideals of marital love; rather, the focus of her decision-making process with her partner seems to be on pragmatic concerns—having healthcare. Indeed, participants’ narratives frequently articulated the catch-22 nature of (and personal ambivalence toward) gaining access to an institution to which they may be both politically and ideologically opposed in order to access valuable and regulated economic, legal, and social benefits. Julie, for example, described marriage as “a bad institution” and stated that she thought that marriage should be “abolished.” Yet Julie also admitted that she had once contemplated getting married in order to gain citizenship. These narratives frequently attested to the pragmatic concerns often fueling communication and decision making around accessing legal marriage.

Accessing Legal Parenthood

The pressing need for sociologists to consider the paradoxical sociolegal invisibility and hypervisibility of trans families is particularly highlighted when focusing on the issue of parenting. Take, for instance, the international media firestorm that enveloped Thomas Beattie (a trans man who came to be known as “the pregnant man”) and his (then) wife Nancy Beattie in 2008 when they announced, on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in the pages of People magazine, that Thomas was expecting the couple’s first child (see Albiniak 2008; Barkham 2008). While only 4 percent (n = 2) of participants reported actively raising young children in their homes with their partners at the time of the interview, 8 percent of participants (n = 4) reported other current or former personal experiences with parenting, and 44 percent of participants (n = 22) discussed intentions (many describing detailed plans) to become a parent in the future.

Participants discussed sociolegal challenges that they and their trans partner may face when considering the options available to them as parents. Rachel told me, “We don’t even know if we would be allowed to adopt a kid. He’s a transsexual and gay people can’t even adopt kids [in some states]. . . . People think trans people are even weirder than gay so who knows if that’s even an option.” The dilemmas these couples face were sometimes met with frustration and discussion of the privilege that often accompanies non-trans heterosexual relationships. As Samantha stated, “I’m sort of angry that straight people have babies on accident and make it work. It makes me really pissed off. . . . We have to be more responsible because we can’t just, like, have that. I’m sure they don’t see it as a blessing, but I do.”

The narratives of those who were currently parenting at the time of the interview also revealed important and potentially worrisome sociolegal dilemmas. For example, Maya and her partner have a legal, “opposite-sex/heterosexual” marriage in the United States. They are also recognized as the legal mother and father (respectively) of their infant daughter, to whom Maya gave birth. However, as Maya discussed:

We are legally married . . . as long as no one contests it. . . . He’s on the birth certificate and we’re legally married [so] he’s [our daughter’s father by] default. If you’re legally married, if something were to happen to me, [our daughter] goes to him automatically. However . . . my mother holds a trump card. In other words, if I were to die, she could conceivably potentially sue for custody, saying that she’s the nearest relative, not [my partner]. . . . There’s this legal limbo we live in. . . . [In some states] we wouldn’t be recognized as being legally married at all. He would never be recognized as [our daughter’s father].

Maya’s family provides an example of how the marital paternity presumption, which is the legal assumption that children born to a legally married man and woman are that man’s biological children, offers a “trans loophole” for accessing legal parentage, but introduces instability insofar as such parentage may face legal challenges (Rosato 2006).

Narratives like these provide striking examples of how the legal rights and privileges conveyed by marriage are often tenuous, at best, for some queer families. While Maya and her family may be considered social innovators, this innovation is dependent on continuing familial and state recognition of both their marriage and their rightful and respective roles as mother and father to their child. As such, accessing legal parentage through legal marriage, legal adoption, and other formal pathways may serve as a pragmatic, though not failproof, safeguard for forming and protecting some trans families.

Accessing Reproductive Technologies

Technological advances in the biomedical sector are making parentage possible for a broader group of people in ways never before imagined (Hare and Skinner 2008; Mamo 2007; Thompson 2005). A considerable number of participants in the sample (n = 11; 22 percent) discussed—spontaneously and not under direct prompt—conversations they had with their trans partner about the possibility of retrieving and harvesting his eggs (among those whose trans partner had not had an oophorectomy—removal of the ovaries) for later fertilization and implantation into themselves or a surrogate. While almost all of these participants discussed this possibility as remote because of its present costliness, existing technologies radically shift possibilities for creating and forming families in the twenty-first century. Today, it is possible for cis women partners of trans men to give birth to their trans partner’s biological children. While such procedures may not currently be common, they may become increasingly so as these novel reproductive technologies advance and become more affordable to consumers over time.

In the egg harvesting and donation scenario previously described, a trans man who has attained legal status as male might be simultaneously legally classified as a child’s “legal father” and “biological mother,” depending on local jurisdiction and statutes, which vary widely (see Hare and Skinner 2008; Smith 2009 for an overview of similar legal quandaries for lesbian and gay couples). Were the couple to separate, however, it might also be argued that the trans man was nothing more than an “egg donor,” with no existing legal connection or rights to the child at all. Potential sociolegal dilemmas became further complicated as some cis women described their intention to choose a male sperm donor, related to themselves or their partner, in order to maintain a mutual genetic connection to the child. Martha provided a narrative that illustrated many of these complex and new sociolegal possibilities:

I don’t care to birth a child myself at this point in my life. . . . And he really wanted to. So we talked about . . . if he’s taking [testosterone] and then stops taking it, will he be able to get pregnant and how? And we would talk about, well, if we’d like a child that comes from both of us, we could use one of my brothers’ sperm to impregnate him so we’d have a child that, hopefully, would look like both of us. . . . And then also, how would this play out if he has transitioned further with testosterone and he can get pregnant and he looks very male? How’s this gonna work with this person who identifies as male and possibly has had his sex changed on documents coming into a hospital pregnant as a man?

Existing technologies radically shift possibilities for creating and forming families in the twenty-first century. Yet these new possibilities engender complex sociolegal questions regarding who “counts” as a biological and/or social mother, father, and parent.

Conclusion

So why and how does all of this matter? In addition to proposing the theoretical constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism,” this work informs and extends existing sociological literature on agency and social structure. Enacting agency may involve strategies virtually requiring participation within oppressive social structures and institutions, particularly among those in marginal social positions. Ewick and Silbey (2003, 1330, 1337) note:

Resistance does not . . . seize upon lapses of power so much as it relies on the persistence of and familiarity with a particular social organization. Through everyday practical engagements, individuals identify the cracks and vulnerabilities of institutionalized power such as the law. . . . Because hegemony renders certain actions conventionally unthinkable, when it does occur, resistance is often institutionally indecipherable. . . . There are no standard operating procedures anticipating, no taxonomies classifying, no rules forbidding such practices. . . . The fact that they cannot be deciphered by the formal rational organizations in which they occur insures that if and when they are detected, they will incapacitate that bureaucratic power, if only for a moment.

In this analysis, I have revealed the ways in which cis women partners of trans men and their families locate these weaknesses and fissures in institutionalized power, deploying strategies of resistance and pragmatism that have, in many instances, incapacitated it—allowing access to legal marriage, parenthood, and various other regulated gateways to social and material resources. This analysis also provides empirical support for the Foucauldian concept of “power” as a network of social and institutional relations that hold not only repressive functions (Foucault [1976] 1990) but generative potential as well, through which social actors may be able to resist or even transform social and institutional constraints (see also Sanger 2010).

Emirbayer and Mische, in their theory of agency and structure, refer to “‘procedures and ruses’ by which actors can resist and subvert the logics of practices of the established social structure . . . ‘getting around the rules of a constraining space’” (1998, 1001). They also discuss “the importance of ‘flexible opportunism—maintaining discretionary options across unforeseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options’” (ibid.). I would suggest that the strategies of normative resistance and inventive pragmatism that I have outlined exemplify such procedures, ruses, and flexible opportunism by cis women partners of trans men and their families. Importantly, once individuals engage in normative resistance and inventive pragmatism by identifying and exploiting existing fissures or predictabilities in social structures, they often transform their experiences into narratives and accounts that may be circulated between and across social actors and networks to enable and perhaps even foster cultures of resistance (Ewick and Silbey 2003).

Yet the destabilizing effect that trans marriage and parenthood may have on these institutions themselves is not unidirectional. As trans people and their partners push against existing social structures, institutions, and regulations, we might expect a dynamic reciprocal response. As Emirbayer and Mische (1998, 1009) write,

Members of any excluded group seeking entrance into a previously barred arena . . . border crossers . . . [may] experience difficulties [because] they have already projectively expanded and recomposed their proposed fields of action (e.g., the experience of those involved in heady discussions of social reform, such as the civil rights, feminist, or gay and lesbian rights movement), but that when trying to implement those reforms in practice, on either a personal/professional or institutional/legal scale, they encounter hard barriers of interpersonal and institutional conventions.

As highlighted in this analysis, even when cis women and their trans partners form families, they often rest on shaky legal ground, with potentially frightening and destabilizing material consequences should they be externally challenged.

As trans individuals, and the families they create with their partners, slowly become more socially visible within both mainstream and LGBTQ social life, they remain virtually unexplored within most social science research on the family. This study begins to fill this gap through demonstrating the ways in which systemic structural forces work to constrain and discipline divergence from pathways of idealized, normatized family life even as they generate possibilities for new family forms. Cis women partners of trans men draw not only from contemporary understandings of what families are or are “supposed” to be, but also resist and reformulate some of these notions as well—if doing so might prove personally and/or socially advantageous. The narratives explored herein detail the ways in which contemporary notions of family work and do not work in the everyday lives of cis women partners of trans men and their families. Cis women’s accounts also reveal the extent to which they actively evaluate and negotiate sociolegal notions and practices of “family,” family structure, and family roles in ways that may court pragmatic advantage in the face of systematic structural and institutional barriers.

The cis women described in this study are negotiating new ways of constructing family forms, including those not strictly grounded in normative or nostalgic ideals for families and family life. I find that cis women partners of trans men often serve as social innovators—strategically and pragmatically negotiating system loopholes to access otherwise limited and regulated sociolegal institutions and structures (such as marriage and parentage) for their families that others within the “LGBTQ umbrella” may not be able to similarly access. As this study makes clear, cis women partners of trans men face social realities that are not adequately explained or accounted for by existing sociological research focusing on the lives and relationships of either heterosexual women or lesbians, pointing to the growing necessity for a sociology that more fully accounts for a broader cross-section of queer lives and families. Indeed, the negotiations of normative resistance and inventive pragmatism that I have outlined hold relevance not only for transgender families headed by cis women and trans men, but for a broad range of queer individuals and queer family types.

The families described herein present conceptual, social, legal, and political challenges that warrant closer sociological attention. These narratives point to the ways in which queer social actors may throw the existing sociolegal system into perplexing disarray, blurring notions of both opposite-sex and same-sex legal marriage and parentage. The present study articulates resistance in the lives and choices of cis women partners of trans men as both transformative and fraught—pushing against and disrupting the contours of normativity from within powerful, interlocking social systems, communities, and institutions that push back and discipline in dynamic response. One possibility for expanding current sociological theorizing around normativity and agency is to consider the multiple dimensions on which normative social structures are both resisted and (re)produced by social actors. Doing so produces critical scholarship on not only how social actors engage in normative social practices but the ways in which they also resist and transform them in response to pragmatic personal, interpersonal, and material needs and desires.

Processes of trans family formation often exemplify “inventive manipulation” of the social world (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 988). Emirbayer and Mische (1998, 991) propose that manipulation of social roles during transitional, chaotic, or liminal periods may have “a transformative . . . effect upon the larger culture, as new possibilities for human interactions are imagined, tested, and (perhaps) defined on a collective scale.” Despite claims that marriage and parenthood must always reduce to normative assimilation, the existence of various types of families among trans people and their partners may actually serve to destabilize some of the very foundations of these social institutions, highlighting the state’s increasing inability to regulate complex human identities, embodiments, and relationships. This study, building on interdisciplinary gender and sociological theory and scholarship, holds the power to complicate politics and rhetorics that are becoming increasingly mainstream yet polarizing and in danger of pushing some individuals and groups further to the social margins. The insights gained from studying various types of transgender families contribute to and expand the interdisciplinary project of gender scholarship that, reciprocally, so many of my participants reported actively drawing upon to make sense of their own experiences. Working to understand processes of resistance and pragmatism in the lives of queer social actors and families—in the context of regulatory social norms and structures—ultimately holds potential to broaden not only gender and sociological scholarship but their relevance for understanding the increasingly diverse family forms of the twenty-first century.

Footnotes

Appendix

Participant Demographics by Pseudonym

Pseudonym	Age	Race or Ethnicity	Country	State/Province
Abigail	28	White	USA	California
Amber	19	White	Canada	Ontario
Ani	21	White, Jewish	USA	Ohio
Anna	48	White	USA	California
Belinda	24	White	Canada	Ontario
Bella	18	White	Canada	Ontario
Charlene	24	White	Canada	Ontario
Donna	47	White	USA	Florida
Drea	28	White	USA	Illinois
Eliza	25	White	Canada	Nova Scotia
Ellia	24	Latina	USA	New Mexico
Emily	23	White	Canada	Ontario
Emma	22	White	Canada	Ontario
Eva	29	White	USA	New York
Frieda	28	White	Canada	Ontario
Gail	28	White	USA	California
Jodi	38	White	USA	Colorado
Josie	31	White, Jewish	USA	Washington
Judy	27	White	Canada	British Columbia
Julie	30	White, Polish citizen	USA	Washington
June	21	White	Canada	Ontario
Kendra	21	White	USA	Ohio
Kyla	45	White	USA	Michigan
Lea	37	White	USA	Michigan
Lilia	22	Irish, Native American, Black	USA	California
Lily	26	White, Jewish	USA	Florida
Linda	22	White	Australia	Sydney
Lynne	35	White	USA	California
Margaret	29	White	USA	Massachusetts
Marisol	32	White	USA	New Mexico
Martha	25	White	USA	Massachusetts
Maya	30	White	USA	California
Mel	28	White	Canada	Ontario
Michele	32	White	USA	Michigan
Nina	25	White, Latina	USA	California
Polly	40	White	USA	New York
Rachel	27	White	USA	Ohio
Robyn	24	White, Jewish, Native American	USA	Ohio
Sage	21	White	Canada	Ontario
Samantha	20	White	USA	Michigan
Selma	43	White	USA	Michigan
Susan	23	White	USA	Tennessee
Tabitha	33	White, Jewish	USA	California
Teresa	24	White	USA	Maine
Terry	35	Black	USA	Michigan
Tiffany	20	White	USA	Massachusetts
Toby	50	White	USA	Michigan
Trixie	27	White	USA	Indiana
Veronica	21	White	USA	New York
Willow	51	White	USA	California

The author wishes to thank Melissa Milkie, Joya Misra, anonymous reviewers at Gender & Society, Jane Brooks, Cheryl DeLeón, Laura Hirshfield, David Hutson, Kazyak, Katherine Luke, Zakiya Luna, Christabel Rogalin, Kristin Scherrer, and Amy Stone for their thoughtful and incredibly useful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Funding for the project was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Michigan, and Purdue University.

Notes

Carla A. Pfeffer is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University North Central. She earned her PhD from the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in gender, sexuality, family, body, and embodiment. She is currently working on a book focusing on transgender families, under contract with Oxford University Press.

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