Both, and: Transmedicalism and resistance in non-binary narratives of gender-affirming care

While gender dysphoria is a real and acute distress for many transgender people, it is not universal, and it is experienced and oriented to in a myriad of ways. However, its status as a prerequisite for gender-affirming care can lead trans people to feel compelled to amplify its salience in their pursuits for medical support. Through a critical discourse analysis of non-binary healthcare narratives, I trace the relationship between linguistic practices in these care interactions and the gender and sexual logics of the transmedicalist model of transgender care. With a focus on excerpts that center on individuals’ descriptions of dysphoria in the consultation room, I contend that these experiences are not straightforward accounts of assimilation to transmedicalist expectations. Rather, when read from a trans linguistic perspective, these strategies are examples of non-binary patients enacting their own interventions on a process over which (it may seem) they have minimal control and present a critical thirding (Tuck 2009) of a dichotomous view of either transnormativity or resistance

The transgender couple : Transnormativity, trans separatism, and the discourse of t4t

Originating as a category on the now-defunct Craigslist backpages, t4t (trans for trans) emerged as a place for trans people to connect for sex and dating in otherwise cis-dominated dating pools. Since the passing of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) in 2018 that impactfully resulted in the dissolution of the personal ads section, t4t has been taken up on other social media platforms, becoming shorthand for larger discourse(s) within the trans community regarding the political radicality of transgender love outside of the cisgender gaze (Williams 2018). With the increased public visibility of trans individuals, a singular trajectory of transgender experience has become socioculturally salient. Transnormativity, a regulatory ideology that holds that there is one way for trans people to practice their gender (Johnson 2015, Vipond 2015), presumes not only heterosexuality and its associated cultural baggage but also a linear transition “from one socially knowable sex to another” (Nicolazzo 2016: 1175). Building on existing considerations of normativity in language, gender, and sexuality research (Motschenbacher 2014, Jones 2019), we argue that the ethos of t4t pushes against assumptions that trans people’s ‘ultimate goal’ is to partner with a cis person. Yet, while t4t creates opportunity for rejection of such expectations, mainstream media outlets continue to rely on these normative discourses in representations of trans couples. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin 2013), this study has two core aims. First, it explores how media representations of transgender couples elide transgender identities into cisheteronormative conceptions of romantic partnership, centering the (perceived) heterosexuality, reproductive capacity, and medical transition of both partners. Second, it outlines how the growth of the t4t label and hashtag resists such a narrative coercion. Employing a scavenger methodology (Halberstam 1998) drawing on data from American news segments and social media posts across various platforms (Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr), we show how a close reading of t4t against dominant media depictions reveals an emerging political discourse whereby transgender subjects reject the imposition of cisheteronormativities, build intracommunity connections, and refuse to seek validation on the terms of desirability to cisgender people

Variation in subject doubling in Homeland and Heritage Faetar

This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Francoprovençal. Comparing Homeland speakers (i.e., speakers who were born and raised in Faeto) and Heritage speakers of the language (i.e., speakers who emigrated to Toronto, Canada after age 18, and their children), we find some striking differences. Our results show that subject doubling is grammatically constrained in the source variety: Homeland speakers favor doubling in new information contexts, while Heritage speakers do not. There is also evidence for a change in progress among Homeland speakers, with younger speakers using more subject doubling than older speakers. This change is not mirrored by the Heritage speakers. We propose that this is because the Heritage speakers left the Homeland either before or around the time that the youngest Homeland speakers in our sample were born, resulting in them having missed out on this change. This highlights that both Homeland and Heritage varieties are dynamic and may develop in different directions. Additionally, this study helps complete the picture previously reported for variation between overt (single or doubled) and null subjects in these two varieties: an ongoing decrease in null subject rates in the Homeland variety and stability in the Heritage variety (Nagy et al. 2018)