The Transgender Theory And Social Constructionist Theory

I. Introduction

The 1990s marked a shift for transgender studies, especially in relation to the US context. Prior to this last decade of the 20th Century, psychology and medical concerns defined what it meant to be transgender. With the arrival of the 1990’s came “a new scholarship…informed by community activism” that disconnected the transgender experience from these structures and, linked to a queer theory-turn, relocate it in the individual themselves, “enabling trans men and women to reclaim the reality of their bodies to create with them what they would, and to leaves the linguistic determination of those bodies open to exploration and invention” (Whittle, 2006: xii). This new queer poststructuralist turn noted what would become a constitutive

Instead, the queer theory and social constructionist approach creates space for transgender and gender non-conforming identities and bodies that do not fit the rigid frames of a “true transsexual” category; embrace gender as socially constructed, potentially non-binary and fluid; considers the enforced character of the “true transsexual” as conforming to a heteronormative dichotomy that can only imagine the identities of man or woman (changing gender markers, but staying within the socially accepted

Although there has since been a noticeable repositioning of transgender as a deviant aberration or whim, the medical discourse continued to present it as an illness and chronic calamity. Use of the terms trans women and trans men in context of this discourse indicated the opposite of contemporary English language usage as the accepted criterion was of the gender assigned at birth, instead of the gender the person identifies with (Imieliński, Dulko 1988 1989). At the turn of the last century, the psychological definition of transgender was still limited to an essentialist-based medical transsexual perspective that considered it an abnormality. The terms trans women and trans men continued to denote the opposite of contemporary English language usage as the accepted criterion was of the gender assigned at birth, instead of the gender the person identifies with. (Fajkowska-Stanik