Definitional Disruption

Most of the research participants said they had experienced no problems or prejudicial behaviour from strangers. However 6/28 Research participants in the current study described having experienced harassment from strangers because of their transgender presentation. Of these, five participants Grace, Lady G, Sindy, Suzy and Vida described single incidents that had occurred in public. Sally was the one participant in the study who had experienced years of sustained rejection and maltreatment from her neighbours and the local community in the small Scottish seaside town where she lives.

She in effect became the town ‘other’ the witch figure for whom the villagers looked to resurrect the ducking stool. After transition, she was unable to find employment or social acceptance, and even the elders of the Church of Scotland rejected her and would not allow her to play the church organ. Since 1996 when she began living as a women two years before her surgery, Sally recounted an ongoing, catalogue of abuse, victimisation and harassment from neighbours and strangers alike over a period of twenty years. Some of the incidents are summarised in the following account:

It was forty people altogether. The next thing, they came up. One punched me in the face. And then they held my arms behind my back. One right up front, ripped all my clothes off. I was actually really naked. I don’t know whether I kind of froze. the others were egging them on… I don’t know what they done to me… But they never caught them. They’re sexual predators men. Everything that men engage with transgender society, they think it’s their human right to name call, spit, and I’ve been shot at... And the police never caught anyone. I put in a triple 9 call and said: I’ve just been shot in the arm.…And on another day there was a chap called to me, and he says: ‘see by 5 o’clock? That will be cut off your head.’

What? I called the police triple 9 and that time also I waited all day for the police

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139 to come. And they did nothing. Also I have this neighbour about who I told the police. And I said to the police: ‘youse are not going to do nothing until I’ve actually been put six feet under.’ I’d been in touch with the police because of this alcoholic character across the road… he says to the neighbour: ‘get me the can of petrol, I’m gonna pour it over her and set her on fire’. I dialled triple 9 and within seconds the police came along here. And then they said: ‘we cannae arrest him because he’s under the mental health’!…I’ve lost all my trust for people.

Sally continued experiencing harassment even after the passing of protective legislation: The Gender Recognition Act (UK Gov, 2004), the ‘Hate Crimes Bill’ (Scot Gov, 2009), the Equality Act (UK Gov, 2010). Although this did apparently improve the attitudes of the police towards her whereas previously they had arrested her ‘for dressing in women’s clothes’, it also appears to be a tragic tale of police inability to act.

Reflecting a patriarchal authoritative police culture, in the days before protective legislation and more tolerant social attitudes, many older participants recounted how the police in Scotland would arrest people if they presented as transgender.

While not experiencing overt harassment, Boxer-Rider a transman from another country, found it difficult to adjust to the local reaction to himself in both the industrialised Scottish town he moved to in the Central Belt, and in rural areas of Scotland. He describes his experience thus:

Most of the time I get that grim, closed shouldered, teeth together: ‘black leather hmmm’. …. I have never experienced direct violence here. … I find Scotland very buttoned down, very stiff, very grim, very dour, very reluctant, very old fashioned, rigid. I feel comfortable on the streets of Glasgow only because it’s not [Scottish town where he lives] which is so, for me, unrelentingly rigid and paranoid and violent and threatening and hostile and cold and grim and: ‘we don’t want any of your kind here’! … But Glasgow still feels like an isolated Northern cautious city in terms of allowing and tolerating but not going as far as encouraging difference.

Accounts of one off incidents of social prejudice experienced from Lady G, Grace, Vida and Sindy were described in a way that indicated agency and ability to fend for themselves rather than victimhood. After she transitioned Grace initially experienced some harassment from the local youths at her home also in a small rural village. She describes her response to the harassment from the village hoodlums:

One night I decided I was going to take matters into my own hands. I took a golf club, stuck it down my trouser leg, and walked down to the park where all the local neds are like wee flies on top of the tables on a Friday night, guzzling their Buckfast. I tapped the shoulder of one guy and he turns round and says: ‘what do YOU want?’ And I says: ‘I just want to warn the lot of you not to give me any more hassle because just remember I’ll find out where you live, and when you

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140 leave this place at night you’re half canned or gutted, and some of you go singly to your homes. Just remember you might meet someone some dark night and you won’t know who it is but it will be me’. And I whipped out this golf club, and I said: ‘see this golf club? I’ll crack it over all your heads’. ‘Aye but we’ll tell the polis’, they says. I says: ‘you’ll not be fit to tell the polis when I’ve hit you with that golf club you’ll be in a mental hospital because you’ll have lost your memory and everything else’. …So that stopped it. That male chauvinist pig came out in me for a moment, I let them see that I could handle myself, and that was it.

Four of the six isolated harassments described by participants were from young inebriated adolescent males and occurred in small Scottish villages. All the other research participants said they had never had a problem with harassment on the streets.

Many of the research participants displayed a sense of agency in that they thought social attitudes and behaviour towards them depended on how they comported themselves in public.

The reason for negative reactions to gender difference may be that when transgender people appear as categorically incoherent to strangers, and thus unclassifiable, a form of gender panic is induced. Audience reaction to discredited gender performances could be usefully interpreted with Goffman’s concept of the performance of ‘personal front’, which he divides into: ‘appearance’ - telling us of the performer's social status and ritual state; and ‘manner’ - warning us of the interaction role the performer will play in the coming situation. Goffman points out: ‘We often, of course, expect a confirming consistency between appearance and manner’ what he refers to as ‘a coherence of front’ (Goffman, 1959:24).

Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him.

Informed in these ways the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him (Goffman, 1959:1).

This sets up certain expectations for the coming interaction. When expectations are transgressed by an obviously gender variant performance, a breakdown in the social contract seems to occur, a sense that the moral order has been violated and the reaction from the audience can be aggressive. Goffman’s concept of ‘definitional disruption’ is also useful as a possible interpretation for a sense of righteousness in responding violently to transgender performance by an audience with expectations of normativity:

Any projected definition of the situation also has a distinctive moral character...Society is organised on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is. In

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141 consequence, when an individual projects a definition of the situation, and thereby makes as implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand on the others, obliging them to value or treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect. He also implicitly forgoes all claims to things he does not appear to be and hence foregoes the treatment that would be appropriate for such individuals (Goffman, 1959:13).

Social anxiety around transsexuals in particular, can descend into discrimination, victimisation and bullying, the reasons for which can perhaps be partially explained through Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’, usefully elaborated thus: ‘identificatory regimes exclude subjects that they render unintelligible or beyond classification. As such, the abjection of others serves to maintain or reinforce boundaries that are threatened.’ (Phillips, 2014:19). This refers particularly to transgendered bodies which:

‘when viewed as physical bodies in transition, defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear definitions of sex and gender’ (Phillips, 2014:20).

Bornstein contends: ‘when a gay man is bashed on the street …it has little to do with imagining the man in sexual conduct with another man. It has a lot to do with seeing that man violate the rules of gender in this culture’ (Bornstein, 1994: 104). The ambiguity of homosexual and transgender subjectivities disturbs conventional identity categories and cultural concepts, rendering them vulnerable to abjection.

5.6 Conclusion

The gender ratio for the current study was 22/28 participants assigned male at birth and 6/28 participants assigned female at birth. 18/28 Participants were somewhere on the GRS trajectory at the time of interview: 14 assigned male at birth and four assigned female at birth, being either post-surgery at the time of interview, or having already started their transition and the prerequisite processes. The majority of participants narrated a sense of gender dissonance from their first consciousness, and all participants said they had experienced this before the age of 20. Most MtF participants only transitioned much later in life. This demographic may be changing as societal attitudes become more accepting and transgender people more aware earlier in life of their options for medical transition. There is also increasing support available for choosing a less binary option without medical intervention at a younger age, enabling

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142 gender variant people to have recognition of their gender identity without undergoing medical processes that effectively render them incapable of reproduction.

A theme of participants needing to keep their gender identities entirely or partially concealed or in the ‘closet’ for most of their lives emerged, although nearly all participants are now open about their identities to their friends and families, with varying degrees of acceptance. For some participants this changed between first and second interviews as they chose to transition and live their lives permanently in their gender and came out to their friends and families. This is a different concept to transitioned trans people living in ‘stealth’ as in hiding their histories in their new transitioned lives. Only one participant chose to live in stealth and moved to a new rural neighbourhood to do so while keeping close connection with her conjugal family in Glasgow.

The possibilities for varying narrative presentations of self and identity have increased with online social media - through which the meaning of transgender identity is continuously intersubjectively reconstructed. It is crucial to understand that when an individual makes a choice to behave in a way that is different to the norm, this may be about a choice between ordinary life and extraordinary life, for which gender and sexuality may be just a medium. Of interest was to note the development of intersubjective meaning and the dynamic development of socially constructed gender identities within the context of transgender social and support group settings. Several of the participants changed their identities from TV to TS, their intentions for GRS, and their lifestyles, between the two interviews. This was with the support and influence of other transgender people usually in the context of the trans support and social groups.

The dominant discourse in these groups is that those who chose GRS are imbued with increased symbolic and social capital. There has also been increasing public acceptance of transgender identities over the past few years, with increasing numbers of public figures coming out as transgender providing role models and a sense of public acceptance that would have encouraged other nascent identities,

Narratives of changing selves are appropriate to diverse and highly differentiated societies such as contemporary Scotland. The interviews in this study revealed the

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143 participants’ sense of plurality, diversity, and flexibility of gender identities.

Participants have learned to deploy multiple, transient presentations of self, depending on the context, and, through acts of self-presentation, produce or ‘perform’ identity.

These individual acts of identity performance can then become stabilized and internalized through reiterative performativity. The essentialist/constructionist distinction is just too simplistic to encompass the nuances of transgender lives and experiences; and through their nuanced gender identity and changing sense of self, participants revealed that there can be no uniform umbrella transgender identity.

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