By Kai W. McKinney with David G. Ortiz
When I came out as transgender in 2012, there was no template for how to broach the subject in interactions with others. After I returned to school to pursue my bachelor’s degree in 2013, one of the first faculty members I encountered refused to use my name and pronouns and made me justify my taking issue with her refusal in front of a witness. The second faculty member I encountered was in the Department of Sociology at New Mexico State University. This professor immediately affirmed the importance of my name and pronouns and was surprised at the mistreatment I had experienced. These experiences were my first steps toward understanding how policies, people, conversations, and the beliefs of others shaped my ability to simply be recognized for who I was.
I found a home in NMSU Sociology where I was encouraged to ask questions about how I was treated as a person. More importantly, I learned how to ask other people about their experiences, how to collect data and think critically about myself as a researcher. During my time as a student, I took advantage of opportunities to carry out classroom research, pilot projects, and my master’s thesis which became the foundation for this article. Much of this work was under the mentorship of Dr. David G. Ortiz, who pushed both me and this project to make a more meaningful contribution than I could have ever imagined when we started. “Pursuing Gender Euphoria” encompasses almost a decade of academic work and sociological inquiry into the multifaceted experience of being trans.
As a master’s student, I requested to work with David because his approach to mentorship and collaboration encouraged me to delve deeper into theory, methods, analysis, and my positionality as someone who began this journey as a binary trans man and has found themselves as a non-binary trans person. Through sociological inquiry, my understanding of who I am has shifted because of changes in my perspective as this project progressed. The hours of discussion, doodled diagrams, hundreds of pages of researcher notes, and new questions to consider made the past eight years of collaboration on this project a joy.
Using sociological inquiry to examine how gender diversity is recognized or not became my passion and David and I worked together to craft research that would highlight the constraints and agency provided by the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. We sought to engage with and highlight normative cultural assumptions medicalizing gender diversity in the US under the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, shaping trans and gender diverse agency.
In line with the literature, we developed a series of questions about how participants learned about and defined their gender diverse identities, how they made decisions about embodiment and Gender Affirming Medical Interventions (GAMI), and the effects they experienced because of their decisions. Most participants reported that GAMI was a way to reduce the dysphoria they experienced. However, some others did not. They saw it as a way to prescribe gendered binaries. Luckily, at the end of the first round of data collection, our participant Chloe stated that she thought about her transition as the pursuit of gender euphoria and not as gender dysphoria she was running away from. This was the first time I had ever heard the phrase “gender euphoria” and it became clear that it was conceptually tied to gender dysphoria at a time when there was almost no scientific literature on the phenomena.
Based on Chloe’s response, David and I went back to the data and developed a series of questions for follow-up interviews trying to unpack and contextualize participants’ experiences of dysphoria and euphoria. Our participants transformed our exploration of the problematic and limiting nature of medicalizing gender diversity into a project about how being trans is about the pursuit of gender euphoria interrupted by experiences of misrecognition which make gender euphoria feel impossible.
In our recent article in Gender & Society, we offer three contributions. First, we reframe gender dysphoria not as an individual pathology, but as a social process rooted in the pursuit of gender euphoria. Second, we coin the term lenses of impossibility as an umbrella term for the gendered restrictions brought up by assumptions about how to “correctly” be trans or gender diverse. These restrictions can be enacted through policies, interactions, and even self-perceptions, and often bring dysphoric distress that is then medicalized. Finally, we illustrate how the relationship between gender dysphoria and gender euphoria is mediated by these lenses of impossibility. We call this a model of gender dysphoria as a social process. This process is repeated across different levels of society, imposing the burden of institutional and interactional misrecognition on the non-conforming individual.
Our participants experienced gender dysphoria as a social process in institutional settings like courts, hospitals, and governmental agencies, in interactions with friends, family, and peers, and even internalized it. For example, a participant might have a gender euphoric desire such as being able to have their identity legally recognized, having their pronouns respected, or feeling at home in their bodies. These desires were shut down by lenses of impossibility in the form of policies, behaviors, and internalized gender ideals, all of which reinforced binary norms and expectations. Each time these desires were shut down marked a moment of dysphoric distress–feeling invisible, feeling like a gender failure, or feeling like one’s body did not fit right. Across all societal levels, the solution offered was to medicalize dysphoria rather than engage with the social mechanisms that obscured gender euphoria.
Our research demonstrates the vital nature of recognizing trans and gender diverse individuals and emphasizing empowerment in the process of seeking gender affirming care. Participants experienced many moments of euphoria, including partners seeing and treating them as their gender, choosing a new name, pursuing medical transition, and even the moment of self-recognition when participants understood themselves as trans or gender diverse for the first time. Recognition that empowers trans and gender diverse people is vital to creating more space for gender euphoric experiences. Gender euphoric experiences gave our participants hope and “something to keep going for.”. We advocate for an understanding of transness that welcomes and validates all identities, embodiments, and euphoric desires.
If our model can help offer sites of joy and resistance during the political onslaught we are already facing, then it has been worth every minute spent working on it. Gender euphoria is a vital lifeline right now. There are parts of being who we are as trans and gender diverse people that cannot be legislated away or swept under the cisnormative rug. Trans people have a long history outside of medicine and western concepts of binary gender. This is a history that cannot be erased by the violence of bathroom bans, censorship of research, or even an executive order declaring that trans and non-binary people do not exist. Trans people have always and will always exist in our world and our joy is an act of resistance.
Kai W. McKinney completed his Masters in Sociology and is an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University. He plans to pursue his PhD in Sociology. His research interests include the intersection of embodiment, medical sociology, trans studies, and culture. His work uses qualitative methods to explore trans experiences including the role of social media in mediating the relationship between gender dysphoria and gender euphoria.
David G. Ortiz is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at New Mexico State University. His research explores how people and communities make meaning of, organize, and mobilize in unsettled times. He has published in the fields of Social Movements, Latin American Studies, Cultural Sociology, Gender and Trans studies, Sociology of Digital Media, and Sociology of Education.