School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Br J Psychol. 2024 Nov;115(4):723-739. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12722. Epub 2024 Jul 17.
Psychological research has acknowledged that the commonly accepted definitions of 'transgender', 'sex' and 'gender' within psychological research have resulted in limitations in accounting for the lived realities of transgender individuals. Such limitations include, but are not limited to, the continued pathologization of transgender experiences through idealizing sex and gender congruence and incapacity to account for non-normative and non-binary transition pathways. This paper provides a review of these limitations to first demonstrate how the incongruence definition of 'transgender' is reliant on the idea of a 'true' gender, and next suggest that problematising the idea of a 'true' gender allows new conceptions of transgender experiences to be advanced. To undertake this problematization, the work of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed is used to consider how gender could be conceptualized otherwise in psychology and then applied to transgender experiences. In all, this paper theorizes transgender experiences without a reliance on the assertion of a true gender, to suggest instead a focus on contextualized transgender experiences. Last, the limitations and implications of this definition of transgender are briefly discussed. Overall, transgender experiences are conceptualized as those experiences that run counter to the dominant (re)production of binary sexed gender.
心理学研究已经承认，心理学研究中普遍接受的“跨性别”、“性”和“性别”定义导致了对跨性别者生活现实的解释存在局限性。这些局限性包括但不限于通过理想化的性别和性别一致性继续将跨性别经历病理化，以及无法解释非规范和非二元的过渡途径。本文首先回顾了这些局限性，以证明“跨性别者”的不和谐定义是如何依赖于“真正的”性别的概念，其次表明对“真正的”性别的质疑可以为推进对跨性别者经历的新概念提供帮助。为了进行这种质疑，本文借鉴了朱迪斯·巴特勒（Judith Butler）和萨拉·阿哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）的著作，探讨了在心理学中如何以其他方式概念化性别，然后将其应用于跨性别者的经历。总之，本文提出了一种不依赖于对真正性别的主张来理解跨性别者经历的理论，而是主张关注情境化的跨性别者经历。最后，简要讨论了这种跨性别定义的局限性和影响。总的来说，跨性别者的经历被定义为与主导的（重新）生产二元性别相矛盾的经历。
