TransForming gender: Transgender practices of identity, intimacy and care

This book explores a range of gender identities and experiences that fall under the broad umbrella of ‘transgender’. The term transgender relates to a diversity of practices that call into question traditional ways of seeing gender and its relationship with sex and sexuality. Used broadly, the concept of transgender is extensive – incorporating practices and identities such as transvestism, transsexuality, intersex, gender queer, female and male drag, cross-dressing and some butch/femme practices. Transgender may refer to individuals who have undergone hormone treatment or surgery to reconstruct their bodies, or to those who cross gender in ways that are less permanent. Transgender has also been referred to as ‘gender blending’, ‘gender mixing’, ‘gender fucking’ and ‘gender crossing’ (Ekins and King, 1996). In this book ‘transgender’ is used as an umbrella term to cover a diversity of practices that involve embodied movements across, between, or beyond the binary categories of male and female. My use of the term ‘transgender’ thus relates to transsexual identities and practices, and those that are articulated from a variety of other (trans) gender positions. —Excerpt from Introduction Chapter