EXPLAINING TRANSPHOBIA AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST TRANS PEOPLE: A REVIEW OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES

EXPLICAR A TRANSFOBIA E A DISCRIMINAÇÃO CONTRA AS PESSOAS TRANS: UMA REVISÃO DE PERSPECTIVAS TEÓRICAS

EXPLICANDO LA TRANSFOBIA Y LA DISCRIMINACIÓN CONTRA LAS PERSONAS TRANS: UNA REVISIÓN DE ENFOQUES TEÓRICOS

Sara Aguirre-Sánchez-Beato

Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Trans people are increasingly visible. A number of celebrities have recently ‘come out’ as trans and National Geographic put a transgender girl on the cover of its 2016 special issue on the ‘gender revolution’. According to Platero (2015), representations of trans people in the public and cultural scene appear to be more positive than in previous decades. However, trans people still face pervasive transphobia¹, violence and discrimination all over the world (Amnesty International, 2014; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2014; Transgender Europe, 2016). Despite the increased number of publications on trans experiences, most studies focus on documenting discrimination against trans people and not so many explain how and why it occurs (Riggs, 2014).

Different theories and approaches may explain the problem of discrimination against trans people in different ways and the adoption of a specific perspective is not irrelevant. On the one hand, knowledge produced by research contributes to establishing the criteria through which a phenomenon is understood and analysed (Doménech & Íñiguez-Rueda, 2002). On the other hand, different approaches not only provide specific understandings of discrimination, but also frame the strategies to address it (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). Identifying the theoretical perspectives used in research is therefore important to address the implications in terms of how the problem of discrimination is framed and explained and the scope for action offered.

Considering the greater public focus on trans people, we can expect growing scientific interest in explaining discrimination against them. In view of the above and to contribute to future research on the topic, the objective of this paper is to identify the theoretical perspectives and explanatory categories used in contemporary scientific research (2005-2016) to explain discrimination against trans people and to discuss the implications.

To achieve this objective, a review of the literature and a qualitative content analysis were carried out. In the next section I describe the method and procedure. The section ‘Results: Theoretical perspectives and explanatory elements’ presents the two perspectives identified in the analysis: cognitive approaches and discursive approaches. In the Discussion section, I address the implications of these two perspectives. Following the step, I present a discursive psychology theoretical proposal and the conclusions.

The literature review was carried out through a systematic search of the following databases: Redalyc, Cairn, Scopus, JSTOR and DOAJ. Redalyc and Cairn are regional databases that include articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and French respectively. Scopus and JSTOR are relevant international databases and DOAJ includes open access journals that may not be incorporated in the other four.

Whereas prejudices, stereotypes and discrimination are traditional research topics in social psychology, I decided not to limit the review to the discipline of psychology to broaden the scope of theoretical perspectives. I therefore looked for articles, book chapters and books published from January 2005 to September 2016 in the field of social and human sciences.

The keywords² and Boolean operators used to identify the documents were: (a) ‘exclusion’/‘discrimination’/‘stereotypes or prejudices’ combined with ‘transgender or transsexual or travesti’, and (b) the term ‘transphobia’ entered in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French into the five databases. The keywords were searched for in the abstract when this option was available (Scopus, CAIRN) or in the full text when it was not (JSTOR, DOAJ, Redalyc). The number of documents found per database (all languages) is shown in Table 1.

Table 1
Total number of documents found per database and combination of keywords

After eliminating all duplicate documents (N=413), I read the title, abstract and introduction of documents, using the following criteria for their final inclusion in the review:

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  Documents written in English, Portuguese, Spanish or French.

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  As the main objective is to explain transphobia/exclusion/discrimination against trans people, I excluded: (a) documents dealing exclusively with documenting this type of discrimination (percentages of trans people reporting discrimination) and/or with its consequences (health impacts, psychological distress) and (b) documents in which trans people are only mentioned under the LGBT acronym or sexual minority umbrella but not really targeted.

After an initial reading of the whole body of the documents, other texts that were mentioned but not identified in the initial search were added because of their relevance to the topic, including grey literature. The final corpus covered 68 documents (62 articles, 3 book chapters, 2 books and 1 research report).

The methodology used for analysing the corpus was qualitative content analysis (Andréu Abela, 2000). Content analysis is a text interpretation technique that can be applied to any type of data record and uses codes as the systematic fundamental element to describe the characteristics of the data content. It aims at systematising and explaining the content of texts with the help of hints, quantifiable or not.

I employed an inductive approach to identify theoretical perspectives and explanatory categories and subcategories. Using software for qualitative data analysis (ATLAS.ti 7 for Windows), I attributed codes to units of meaning in a process of coding and recoding following a reiterative process. Two broad theoretical perspectives - cognitive approaches and discursive approaches - and three explanatory categories within each perspective were identified. Results are briefly presented in Figure 1 and described in detail in the next section.

Figure 1
Theoretical perspectives and explanatory categories

Two broad theoretical perspectives were identified: cognitive approaches and discursive approaches. Cognitive approaches are one of the main paradigms in the discipline of psychology, whereas discursive approaches are rather interdisciplinary. Both take into account the role that gender norms play in discrimination against trans people. However, the status attributed to these norms varies. In cognitive approaches, gender norms are conceptualised as a belief system that is ‘out there’ and is internalised by individuals, whereas in discursive approaches norms are conceived as social practices: they are done and reproduced. The first approach situates the problem in the mind of (some) individuals, the second as social and historical practices and processes. The different implications of the two accounts are discussed below.

Cognitive approaches situate the problem of transphobia in the mind of some individuals, whereas others are considered free of transphobia or less affected by it. As a consequence, it individualises the problem of discrimination and it risks homogenising, essentialising and stigmatising certain populations, such as religious and ethnic minorities or poor people. In this sense, it can reinforce the idea that, for example, being a member of a specific religious or ethnic community and accepting trans identities are mutually exclusive, contributing to the creation of a polarisation between the ‘egalitarian us’ and the ‘transphobic them’.

These approaches also treat attitudes as having a predefined, coherent and stable content that can be identified and measured through questionnaires. However, defining the content ‘on an a priori and global basis’ can have dangerous counter effects (Wetherell & Potter, 1992, p. 71). If the content of transphobia is defined as fixed and invariable, we may overlook transphobic claims that are not expressed in the way we expect them to do it (for instance, as open hostility or negative valuing towards trans people).

Moreover, cognitive approaches conceive attitudinal change as the result of a cognitive input in form of contact and information about trans people. Familiarity with trans experiences may indeed play a role in people’s ideas about trans people, since it can make visible non-hegemonic meanings about gender. However, this explanation seems problematic in two ways. On the one hand, it assumes that there is an evident truth about trans people that can be both taught and learned, as if there was no battle over meanings. On the other hand, it assumes that people will unquestionably accept new meanings, without reflecting on them and their implications.

Alternatively, the attention paid to the construction of meaning by discursive approaches seems promising to understand discrimination against trans people. These approaches pay attention to the construction of hegemonic meanings, their social functions and their effects on trans people. However, most studies identified under these approaches are theoretical and in their effort to characterise gender norms as social practices they seem to convey a certain notion of social determinism. As a consequence, it would seem that gender norms are a congruent and consistent ensemble that occupies all symbolic space and that people just reproduce them thoughtlessly.

In view of the above, it is argued that a discursive psychological perspective towards transphobic attitudes and ideology may offer important insights to address the limitations described above.

Discursive psychology (DP) is a ‘theoretical and analytical approach to discourse which treats talk and text as an object of study in itself, and psychological concepts as socially managed and consequential in interaction’ (Wiggins, 2017). It emerged within psychology in the UK in the 1980s (Martínez-Guzmán, Stecher, & Íñiguez-Rueda, 2016; Wiggins, 2017) and has remarkably expanded the boundaries of the discipline. Its main contribution has been to move the study of psychological matters into the areas of language and social interaction (Sisto Campos, 2012; Weatherall, 2012).

DP does not reject the idea that cognitive processes exist, but it argues that these should not be the main object of study, setting an important difference with cognitive approaches in psychology. Within this paradigm, attitudes towards trans people are not considered a mental reality but a social practice. The expression of the attitude is thus ‘the reality that needs to be studied’ (Billig, 1991, p. 15). The study of transphobic attitudes from a DP perspective entails some conceptual differences with mainstream cognitive approaches.

First, the separation between the attitude (evaluation or judgement) and the object of the attitude becomes virtually impossible to sustain (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), the object - in this case, trans people - is discursively constructed in the course of doing evaluation. The use of the same term (e.g. ‘trans people’) to refer to the object of the attitude does not mean that it is understood in the same way by different people. It is therefore important to examine not only the judgement expressed about trans people, but also the construction of the social category ‘trans people’ itself.

Second, attitudes are thought to be both personal and social (Billig, 1991). The DP approach to attitudes assumes that knowledge is socially shared and that common sense contains conflicting themes (Billig et al., 1988). In fact, the notions of dilemma and ideological dilemma are central in this approach: common sense provides people with the ‘seeds for contrary themes’ which can conflict in dilemmatic situations (1988, p. 20). Within this perspective, attitudes are thus defined as ‘stances taken in matters of controversy: they are positions in arguments’ (Billig, 1991, p. 143). Therefore, they are not assumed to be a coherent, permanent and unitary mental reality, but rather a fragmented, contradictory and changeable practice that evolve with the argumentative context. In this sense, transphobia is possible when cracks appear in hegemonic gender meanings, leading to a dispute between hegemonic meanings and alternative ones.

Third, within this perspective people are not assumed to only bear and follow rules, but also to create, to interpret and to challenge them. People have an active role in the selection of arguments when they express their attitudes. This brought Wetherell & Potter (1992) to develop the notion of interpretative repertoires to denote the available resources upon which arguments are built.

Finally, the expression of attitudes is not only argumentative and rhetorical, but also ideological because it has functions that are related to patterns of domination and power (Billig, 1991). In this sense, discourse is ‘a set of linguistic practices that maintain and promote certain social relations’ (Íñiguez-Rueda & Antaki, 1994, p. 63). However, the connection between attitudes and ideology should not be examined only in relation to the content of attitudes, but also, and specially, in relation to their effects. For example, a discourse can be racist without mentioning race whatsoever (Wetherell & Potter, 1992). In fact, sometimes the difference between open and subtle prejudices is not a different in kind, but rather an ability to provide justifications for views (Billig, 1991).

Gender is governed by certain norms that construct the binary opposition between the categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’, including the social functions attributed to each category. These norms are particularly visible when they are breached. Indeed, terms such as ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ were coined to give a name to the breaching of those norms (Tosh, 2016). However, the norm was not given a name⁴, which can be understood in terms of ‘uninteresting reflexivity’: we do not describe or explain what is taken for granted. Discursive practices thus perform norms constituting the binary opposition between women and men but they also re-establish it (or challenge it) when it is breached so that the binary opposition is maintained (or challenged). Discursive practices have the effect of both performing the norm and re-establishing it.

The problem of exclusion and discrimination against trans* people can thus be situated in the norms defining the binary opposition between women and men in specific contexts. People who breach those norms are defined as ‘abnormal’. In this sense, in spite of the fact that pathologisation is increasingly questioned, trans people are still overall defined as ‘not normal’. The theoretical and methodological framework proposed by DP allows understanding how trans people are discursively constructed as such. Instead of taking for granted the definition of ‘trans people’ or fixing beforehand an academic definition to assess people’s attitudes towards them, DP examines how people themselves define, describe, explain and argue about social categories. This prevents researchers and practitioners from reifying the norms that constitute the binary opposition between women and men. From this perspective, the task of researchers and practitioners is not to define themselves gender norms, but rather to determine how people produce them through discursive practices.

Discursive practices not only define social categories but they also legitimise, minimise, justify or promote exclusion and discrimination against them. Conversely, they can also criticise or challenge exclusion and discrimination, thereby promoting other types of social organisation. Because of its focus on discursive practices, this theoretical approach allows us to see how the gendered organisation of society takes place in everyday social interaction and how this organisation is resisted. It enables us to see how norms establishing social categories and their corresponding roles are constantly produced and re-negotiated at the micro-level.

Finally, DP allows for the identification of more ‘sophisticated’ expressions of views on gender categories that, officially adhering to common values such as equality and inclusion, actually have exclusionary effects and promote unequal social relations. This, in turn, avoids pointing at certain groups of people as more transphobic or sexist than others, thereby avoiding stigmatisation. Therefore, this theoretical framework allows us to understand how the redefined transgression of gender norms nowadays actually keeps on maintaining the binary opposition that sustains the (gendered) organisation of society.

Cognitive approaches and discursive approaches are two broad theoretical perspectives used in contemporary literature to explain transphobia and discrimination against trans people. However, a number of limitations were identified. These are related to the individualisation of the problem described as a cognitive matter in the first approach and a certain notion of social determinism in the second. It is argued that a distinction between gendered practices on the one hand and transphobic attitudes and ideology on the other may be useful to understand transphobia and discrimination. A discursive psychology approach to attitudes and ideology is suggested to overcome the individual-social cleavage.