The importance of women to the spiritual wellbeing of the inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago was a recurrent theme in the reports emanating from the quills of missionaries, explorers and administrators alike from the first European contact with Magellan in 1521 and subsequently during the decades following Legaspi’s arrival in 1565. However the reports contained…
“Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba” is a compilation of 25 articles about same-sex love and sex/gender variance in Cuba’s pre- and post-revolutionary history. These articles make up parts 86 to 110 of the Lavender & Red series, which has run as a feature in Workers World weekly newspaper since the first article appeared in…
Leslie Feinberg’s series on LGBTQ history, “Lavender & Red,” appeared in the Workers World newspaper in 2004-2008.
This paper discusses legal sex in the context of transgender jurisprudence, reviewing arguments for individual agency, elective categories and ideas concerning or ‘self-sovereignty’. It is argued that legal sex has no explicit foundation in case law or statute, and that it was effectively brought into being by the decision in Corbett v Corbett (otherwise Ashley)…
A specialist book for mental health professionals, sex therapists and educators to develop and improve their clinical work with trans clients with regards to their sexual relationships and sexuality. It provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the subject, and relates to both clinical practice and theory. Topics explored include the shifting of sexual orientation during or…
The Gender Unicorn is a popular infographic used to educate people about gender diversity. We adapt the Gender Unicorn for use as a measure of gender identity—the Gender Identity Scale (GIS)—in which participants report level of identification with each of three genders: female/woman/girl, male/man/boy, and other gender(s). We administer the GIS to a sample of…
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Filipino seamen in metro Manila (Philippines), the San Francisco Bay Area (California), and the Pacific Ocean, this essay examines how heterogeneous Filipino masculinities (heterosexual and transgender tomboy) are cocreated and coexperienced in local and global sites. Through a queer, immigrant, transgender, and transnational Filipino (American) cultural logics and critique this…
This essay focuses on hijras in India and on male women sangomas in Zulu gender-differentiated possession cults in South Africa. We approach these individuals through the travelling concept of “translects”, in the sense in which hijras and sangomas as “transgender individuals” cultivating a culture-specific, gender liminality use words to refer to themselves, their body parts,…
This cross-sectional study examines the incidence, demographic characteristics, and cost associated with masculinizing and feminizing chest surgical procedures among individuals younger than 18 years. Thirty-five state legislatures have introduced more than 100 bills that limit or prohibit access to medically necessary gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) youth, resulting in poor mental and physical…
Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas)…