Book Review: Laura Erickson-Schroth (ed.) (2014), Trans bodies, Trans selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Since the mid 1990s there has been a proliferation of books by academics and practitioners about transgender lives (see, for example, Bornstein, 1994; Stryker & Whittle, 2006; Teich, 2012). Trans Bodies, Trans selves breaks new ground, however, by offering an accessible, comprehensive and also practical resource guide for trans people themselves. The book is modeled on the feminist health manual, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’, first published by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in the 1970s. This book was written by and for women and aimed to counter malestream knowledge about women’s health and empower women by sharing information and experience

Intersex activism, bringing the personal to the public

This paper provides initial findings from an EU funded project about Intersex, Human Rights, and Citizenship in the UK, Italy and Switzerland. It focuses on intersex peoples’ accounts of the developments in contemporary Intersex activism, towards human rights claims that move away from both purely medical jurisdiction and/or identity politics. The topic of Intersex human rights is highly pertinent to sociologists, as Intersex activism is currently entering the international and national human rights spheres, and there is a dearth of research about this. This new project provides original insights into the ways that personal and social troubles are intertwined. Historically, Intersex medical treatment is multi­layered, contradictory and problematic. Treatment for minors has been especially concerning, as medics have used psycho­social rationales as a justification for coercive surgery, combined with shaming and inaccurate diagnosis communication. Since the creation of multi­disciplinary centers and teams following the 2006 Consensus Convention guidelines, many medical centers now claim these previous issues have been resolved (or claim the surgical techniques are now ‘better’). Yet, generally these clinics still do not refer new patients and families to peer groups and/or patient associations as would occur with some other medical conditions, evidencing ongoing discord between user generated expertise and medical authority. Therefore, this presentation will address different forms of intersex activism, their fluctuations between biosocial patient association forms and social movement organizations, and the varied targets of their actions, which increasingly include the general public and international policy bodies outside the medical realm

What’s the Story? Exploring Online Narratives of Non-binary Gender Identities

Currently, people with non-binary gender identities – those who identify as either both genders or neither - are gaining more social visibility, suggesting that changes in social understandings of gender are now underway. Facebook, for example, has recently introduced a range of non-binary gender options for user profile pages; indeterminate and ‘third gender’ identities are now legally recognised in a number of countries, including Australia, Germany, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, New Zealand and Thailand; and the term ‘cisgender’, which refers to those whose self identity matches the gender and biological sex assigned to them at birth, has now entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Typical spaces where personal narratives concerning non-binary gender identities are generated and shared are Internet blogs and online discussion forums. However, as yet these narratives have not been explored and non-binary gender identities remain largely under researched within the social sciences. This paper begins to address this gap through the presentation of some initial research findings from a qualitative study of online non-binary gender identity narratives. It explores some key themes within and across the narratives of younger and older generation non-binary people produced within a sample of blogs and forums, and draws out their implications for the development of further research