Transitioning gender, transitioning race: Transgender people and multiracial positionality

Abstract

Background: While research on trans People of Color’s experiences has been increasing in recent years, this intersectional work has often not included a focus on the specificities of multiracial and multiethnic trans experiences.

Aims: This study explores shifts in racial identity by multiracial/multiethnic trans people as they transition gender and the ways Whiteness and nationalist ideology shape their racialized gender experiences.

Methods: This paper is based on six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with self-identified multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-heritage trans people in the USA. Data collection centered participants’ experiences of self-identification and interactions with others (e.g., family, acquaintances, and strangers).

Results: As participants transitioned gender and were acknowledged by others in their gender identity, shifts in their embodiment were used by others to ascribe a new racialized gender. This often resulted in participants reflecting on their sense of self and racialized gender identities in new ways.

Discussion: Multiracial and multiethnic transgender people’s experiences in transitioning race confirm the importance of intersectional analysis, reveal the intersectional fluidity of social categories, explicate how social understandings of one category (e.g., race) influence another category (e.g., gender), demonstrate that the meanings associated with racialized gender are based in relations of power, and show that, in transgender studies particularly, we must attend to the ways that the concept of transition implicates not only gender, but also other categories such as race and nationality.

Introduction

This study centers the stories of six multiracial¹ and multiethnic transgender people who shared experiences of changing race as they physically transitioned gender. The embodied markers others drew upon to ascribe a racial identity to these participants are interconnected with gender, sexuality, and nationality, which are rooted in relationships of power. These intersectional identity attributions had a profound effect on participants’ sense of self, their perceptions of fluidity and “borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 2007, p. 216), and their experiences of inequity.

Literature review

Trans intersectionality

Historically, much of the research and knowledge about trans people in the USA has been based on middle-class White trans people’s experiences (Stryker, 2006), while the last 10 years have seen an increase in the inclusion of trans People of Color’s experiences (e.g., Chan, 2018; Howard et al., 2019; Krell, 2017; Sevelius, 2013; Vidal-Ortiz, 2009). In Schilt and Lagos’ (2017) review of primarily USA sociological trans studies research, they highlight two paradigms: early research (1960–1990) focused on gender “deviance” with trans people as the objects of study, and more recent work which centers trans people as the subjects of study in examining gender difference. This recent work is increasingly intersectional, addressing the ways identities, social locations/positions (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, nationality, age, and ability), and geopolitical place shape trans people’s sense of self, experiences, and interactions with others (e.g., Abelson, 2014; Chan, 2018; de Vries, 2012; Monro & Van Der Ros, 2018; Tree-McGrath et al., 2018). Intersectional analysis allows us to better understand diverse trans experiences and challenge normative social locations (e.g., White, monoracial).

Like all people, trans people come to understand their identities and social locations through interactions with others (Goffman, 1959). Expanding on Goffman’s work about the attribution of background identities onto others to frame interaction, de Vries (2012) suggests individuals draw upon hegemonic narratives to construct “intersected identity frames” which they then attribute to others (p. 50). In interaction, individuals employ embodied constructs and meanings of various social positions to attribute an intersected identity onto someone to help frame that interaction. These intersecting identities include both hegemonic (e.g., White, cisgender, masculine, able-bodied) and marginalized frames. de Vries (2012) found these attributions had a significant impact on how trans people who experience a gender transition incorporated new meanings into their sense of self.

Multiracial positionality

While research about multiracial (i.e., mixed-race, biracial, mixed-heritage, or interracial) individuals spans centuries (Ifekwunigwe, 2004), critical mixed-race studies (CMRS) has only recently been recognized as its own interdisciplinary field (Daniel et al., 2014). Much of this work has been informed by Omi and Winant's (1994) “racial formation theory” (p. 109) and the process of racialization, or the ways in which racial meaning is attributed to individuals, groups, social practices, and/or relationships. In the USA, and arguably elsewhere, this process is integral to the structure and organization of society and individual lives. While race is not a biologically deterministic category, bodies and physical characteristics are imbued with racial meaning (e.g., phenotype, skin color) (Omi & Winant, 1994). Scholarship has often focused on how the existence of multiracial individuals calls into question the hegemony of monolithic understandings of race or “the depiction of racialization as monolithic” (Curington, 2016, p. 27). Some CMRS addresses how identities are intersectional and complex and how individuals incorporate and resist societal definitions of race and ethnicity (Curington, 2016; Khanna, 2004; for an in-depth review of CMRS, see Daniel et al., 2014 ). Similar to some of the writing about trans people, some scholars place multiracial people in an in-between space or as “out of place” and highlight aspects of difference rather than challenging racial hierarchies (Mahtani, 2002).

In defining CMRS, Daniel et al. (2014) suggest a critical process where multiracial people:

become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological, social, economic, and political forces, as well as policies that impact the social location of mixed-race individuals and inform their mixed-race experiences and identities. CMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of “race.”…CMRS also emphasizes the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with gender, sex, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference. (p. 8)

This intersectional approach highlights the importance of broader power structures in creating and reinforcing the meaning attributed to identities and social locations. Khanna used Cooley’s (1902) framework of “reflected appraisals” to highlight the ways multiracial individuals reflected on what racial identity was attributed to them in interaction, in turn shaping their own sense of self and racial identity (2004, p. 116). Khanna found phenotype or physical appearance and cultural exposure significantly influenced how individuals began to think about their racial self. While Khanna did not find that gender influenced an individual’s racial identity, individuals in her study may not have been aware of how gender interacted as an intersecting identity frame. Additionally, while few studies address changes in embodied racial markers for multiracial individuals over time, Khanna (2004) noted, “Some respondents commented on how their racial identity was influenced by changes in their looks while they were growing up” (p. 125).

In part because the people in this study engaged in various medical transition processes, how their bodies were perceived by others shifted over time. We suggest the importance of examining this shift from an intersectional lens, with particular attention to broader ideologies, narratives, and power structures. These experiences with others had a profound effect on participants’ sense of self and identity.

Method

This article is based on a subset of six interviews from a larger ethnography with trans People of Color in the USA. This research was approved by the IRB at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, USA, with informed consent obtained from all individual participants. Fieldwork, conducted by the first author, entailed 31 interviews and participant observation in conferences, social gatherings, and online groups. The interviews for this paper were conducted in-person in the midwest, west coast, and southwest.

The study employed snowball sampling, reaching participants through transgender networks, many of which addressed race. The call consisted of participant criteria, the researcher’s biography, and a description of the study. Interviews of approximately two hours were conducted in English at a location chosen by the participant. Interviews were designed using a conversational approach with open and closed questions and interviewing by comment (Snow et al., 1982). Questions focused on three areas: self-identification; interactions with family and friends; and perceptions, experiences, and presentation of self in relation to: “others” (i.e., acquaintances, strangers), specific communities, and the medical community. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and field notes included information that might be lost in the transcription process.

Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, the interviews explored participants’ standpoints, centering their perspectives about their race and gender (Collins, 2002). Initial analysis of the broader study by the primary researcher involved “open coding” to identify concepts, themes, and issues followed by “selective coding” to create categories and subcategories which were then compared to examine connections (Corbin & Strauss, 1990, pp. 12–13). One distinct theme emerged from the transcription of multiracial/multiethnic interviews. Unlike the monoracial participants, six of the seven multiracial participants experienced shifts in their racial identity as they medically transitioned; this analysis focuses on these six. The second researcher independently thematically coded the transcriptions, and we compared coding to ensure measurement validity. Experiences of shifting racial identity were shared by participants both when asked about their self-identification and interactions with others.

The primary author disclosed his identities as a “White, queer, working class [at the time], transguy raised in Canada” on calls for participants and welcomed questions about his identities. Many participants discussed “bad experiences” with other research projects (Weston, 2004), and his insider status as trans addressed some concerns. The first author also highlighted his Canadian bicultural (Dutch/Canadian) identity and minimal experiential knowledge of race relations across the USA (for an interrogation of this process, see de Vries, 2015). While not involved in data collection, the second author (a White, cis, nonbinary femme in the USA) engaged in intercoder reliability and analysis.

Participants include five working-class trans masculine people and one middle-class trans feminine person. They ranged in age from 23–39 (mean = 27.5) and had been out as transgender from 3–15 years (median = 5). All had at least some college education and either held jobs or were students.

Results and discussion

Transition can correlate with and lead to a change in gender attribution and how we learn to do, enact, and embody gender (Dozier, 2005). While not all trans people experience transition or experience aspects of transition in the same way, these participants experienced a shift from being perceived by others as one gender to another, regardless of their gender identities over time, and to varying degrees, some conceived of gender as fluid. For them, the concept of transitioning gender typically meant altering mannerisms and appearance coded as gendered, taking hormones resulting in bodily changes, and in some cases, having one or more gender-affirming surgeries.

While participants expected their perceived gender to change throughout transition, they did not anticipate this would also mean transitioning in relation to how others, and often they themselves, perceive their race. Because the social construction of race is rooted in embodied meanings which are strongly linked to other social positions such as gender (Collins, 2002; Crenshaw, 1991), it makes sense that trans people who experience changes in their gender embodiment and how others perceive their gender may experience shifts in other intersecting categories. Participants experienced both rigid and fluid shifts in how their race was perceived by others throughout their gender transition. Rigid shifts are not concrete but instead indicate more consistent attributions (e.g., predominantly changing from attributions of one racial category to another). In contrast, fluid shifts indicate how racialized gender attributions changed not only across transition but also across multiple contexts before, during, and after transition.

Rigid shifts

The multiracial/multiethnic trans people’s experiences in this study demonstrate how socially constructed racialized gender meanings are intersectional. Three participants, Diego, Scout, and Lance², experienced more rigid shifts in others’ racial perceptions of them as they transitioned gender:

Diego:  White woman → Latino

Scout:  White woman → Latino

Lance:  Woman/Man of Color → White man (Indigenous man in Indigenous communities)

As each of these participants transitioned gender, their shifts in body/facial hair and hair style/length in combination with height, hair color, skin color, and other phenotypic markers were used by others to ascribe a new racialized gender.

Diego, a 24-year-old queer trans man living on the west coast, stated that prior to transition he “passed for White” (i.e., he was treated as White); “people didn’t pick up on the fact that I’m Puerto Rican…I actually grew up in the foster system, and I looked up my court papers recently and they listed me as [non-Hispanic] White.” He did not become “conscious of my race until eighteen,” which is common in that most White people do not think of themselves as having a race, reserving racial identity for nonwhite people (Bonilla-Silva, 2003).

However, when discussing his gender transition, Diego stated, “I think the most interesting thing that changed for me [after transition] is my ethnicity is much more easily read.” Diego identified ways that others signaled they now perceived him as nonwhite:

I work at farmer’s markets, and I work for a farm, and people automatically, even if I go to a grocery store, automatically will speak to me in Spanish. And they’re people who are not native Spanish speakers [i.e., White, non-Latinx people]. And that never happened before. Ever.

Sims’ (2016) also found that when a multiethnic individual was perceived to be Latinx³, “the main indicator was that Spanish was automatically spoken to them” (p. 577). Through language, White people attributed “otherness” (e.g., Latinx ≠ American), demonstrating that perceived citizenship hinges on embodying Whiteness (Haritaworn, 2009).

Diego’s experience highlights some of the complexities of the Latinx ethnic category and its overlap with a racialized experience:

Latinx refers foremost to an ethnic identity that is often associated with a brown racial identity, but it can also refer to a white or black racial identity, as well as an indigenous identity (not to mention how multiraciality complicates this simple schema). Latinx is an inherently inter-locking category, overtly signaling attentiveness to coloniality, ethnicity and gender, and implicitly pointing to race and sexuality. (Soto Vega & Chávez, 2018, p. 320)

Vasquez (2010) addresses the social experience within the Latinx category, suggesting a continuum from “flexible ethnicity” - the ability to “navigate different racial terrains and be considered an ‘insider’ in more than one racial or ethnic group” - to the racialization as nonwhite (p. 46). Some of the concerns in equating ethnicity and race are that it conflates distinctions of this racially heterogeneous group, potentially minimizes colorism, and may not address the vulnerability of “Latinxs who are visibly othered (e.g., skin color, phenotype)” (Chavez-Dueñas, Adames, Perez-Chavez, & Salas, p. 51). However, this is further complicated by White nationalist ideology and rhetoric which simultaneously frame Latinx as nonwhite and unAmerican, regardless of one’s racial identification. When Diego and some of the other participants talk about their ethnicity being “more easily read” or being perceived as Latinx, they are referring to others racializing them as nonwhite. These participants interpreted this as a shared Brown racial experience and identity.

Diego was fairly consistently perceived as Latino after transition, but he noted one instance in which he was temporarily perceived as White. In an African American Studies class, he was one of only three non-Black people in the classroom. He challenged a comment another student made about people speaking “Mexican,” pointing out that Spanish and Mexican are not interchangeable. Later, classmates asked him his ethnicity, and when he said he was Puerto Rican, they responded “Oh! We thought you were White!” In the context of both Latinx and White communities, Diego was perceived as Latino, but here the Black-White divide may have factored into racial attributions more. Moreover, this situation, and Diego’s early discussion of his ethnicity being perceived as nonwhite, aligns with Gonzales’ (2019) finding that in “everyday life, being Latina and white are seen as mutually exclusive, especially when one has lighter skin color and can pass as white” (p. 7). In other words, once marked as Latinx, Diego was defined as nonwhite.

Like Diego, Scout also experienced a shift from being perceived as White to Latino. Scout is a 23-year-old “genderqueer, butch, trannyboi, dyke-fag, puppy-boy, daddy” living on the west coast. He was adopted and raised by conservative, White Jewish parents. Although he is Cuban/White and would “get pretty dark, especially in the summer,” as he grew up, he had thought of himself as White, was perceived by others as White, and his parents spoke minimally about racial/ethnic identity. Through transition, Scout mentioned he was shorter but “very hairy,” which increased others’ acceptance of him as a man. He commented, “the more and more I pass [as a man], the more I felt like I was read as a Hispanic male,” and as a result, he’s “identifying with it more and more.” In this sense, Scout wasn’t being perceived as racially White and ethnically Latinx, but what Soto Vega and Chávez (2018) refer to as being racialized as Brown. With this attribution came negative interactions from White people; Scout noted that after transition, “people treat me as if I’m part of that [Latino] stereotype.”

Scout and Diego both discussed moving from a normative White racial experience to being perceived as a threat. Scout shared his first experience of this shift:

I never thought about being an interracial couple before. When I was with [White girlfriend] I would get looks…like, ‘Why are you dating a White girl?’ when it wasn’t a problem [before transitioning] because everyone just read me as White.

Scout’s experience aligns with many Men of Color in the USA who are hypersexualized and perceived as threats to White women (Nagel, 2003). Scout and Diego’s experiences also align with what Rivera (2014, p. 45) refers to as a “Brown threat,” where Brown bodies, despite racial and cultural heterogeneity, are imagined as a national threat, and those labeled as Brown typically share an experience of “racialization and securitization” by the White American imaginary (p. 49). Rivera argues that the “[Brown threat]…highlights an ideological construction in the United States that suggests a difference from and a danger to the current definition of white(ness) as indicative of European descent or of black(ness) as indicative of African descent” (p. 46). Similar to the racial othering of Scout and Diego by White people in terms of language, this framing of a Brown threat further emphasizes the broader socio-political meanings of ‘American’ as White.

These newer experiences of being racialized as nonwhite had a significant effect on how Diego and Scout thought about their own racial identities. Scout noted, “not only am I transitioning into my gender, I’m claiming my ethnic background.” As these participants transitioned, it was only through reflected appraisals (Khanna, 2004) that they began to understand themselves as occupying a ‘new’ race. Their internalization and incorporation of this new racialized identity involved more than claiming a particular label/category; they began to construct and ‘do’ race in ways that aligned with how people treated them. Based on these continued interactions from a new racialized social position, Diego and Scout incorporated aspects of this new racial identity by, for example, becoming involved in Latinx communities, beginning to learn Spanish, and identifying as Brown.

These shifts in racial self-identification, while empowering for Diego and Scout in some ways, also brought other challenges. While Scout was learning how to navigate the world as a Man of Color, he said he often still felt “like an outsider” in People of Color spaces. He was also now sometimes treated as an outsider in predominantly White queer communities. Scout talked about attending a queer play party for cis women and trans people where two White trans men confronted him, saying “you’re a [cis]man. You’re not supposed to be here.” Scout’s racialized gender was assumed to be cis; as a Brown man, Scout’s shorter height and his amount of dark body hair were interpreted as cis by White normative trans standards. Scout added, “I feel like it’s a lot easier for me to pass as a bio male because I’m Brown…. Because I’m short and White men are tall.” Scout’s experience further exemplifies how others draw on intersected identity frames, informed by hegemonic ideologies and narratives, to mark bodies and frame interactions (de Vries, 2012).

Diego and Scout’s transitions shifted their race toward nonwhite, but Lance’s transition shifted him toward Whiteness. Lance is a mixed-heritage (Lakota and White) 39-year-old trans and intersex man living in the midwest. Lance says he grew up “in the middle,” being somewhat socialized as a girl by one parent and a boy by another. Particularly after puberty, his embodiment, both through his gender socialization from his parents and from other aspects such as hormones (e.g., having a goatee prior to taking testosterone) positioned him in the borderlands of gender, being sometimes perceived as a woman and other times as a man (Anzaldúa, 2007). As mixed-heritage, Lance stated he aligned with a quote by Cherríe Moraga (2015): “I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split” (p. 29). For Lance, this referred not only to his race but also his gender.

Lance’s experiences of being intersex, transgender, and mixed-heritage all influenced how he understood the world; he commented, “To me, there’s always this duality. It’s even more than a duality; it’s sort of like this multiplicity of who people are and that’s not confusing to me. It’s like, of course that’s how everybody works.” Lance also recognized racialized gender processes as socially constructed:

I actually have the privilege to see both sides, so I see that both sides of gender are constructions. Just like race is a construction….‘cause if you can look at me and tell me I’m completely White, well that’s interesting, because you constructed for yourself what White looks like.

Others racialized Lance, along with all the participants, through a process of assigning phenotypic characteristics to mark bodies along lines of race/ethnicity. This process of ‘knowing’ which phenotypic characteristics to apply to which race/ethnicity is informed by intersectional hegemonic meanings, particularly around ideas of Whiteness (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019). Lance experienced this in two ways. Living in a predominately White rural area, Lance grew up being treated as a racial other. He stated,

When I was a kid I’d always have people ask me, ‘What are you?’ They’d look at me and think I was Asian, which is pretty common [for Native Americans]….And it’s been interesting in the transition, ‘cause my facial structure has changed so much that I don’t get that question as often as I used to.

Upon medically transitioning, Lance further said, “my cheekbones don’t look the same, my face has gotten ‘whiter.’” Lance was not referring to the color of his skin becoming lighter; rather, people were drawing on other visual cues that now marked him as racially White.

He knew this shift in racial marking was happening because of changes in how people interacted with him. After transition, Lance discussed how, in his work environment among predominantly Black and Hmong folks, he was consistently perceived as White, although he would still be perceived as Indigenous in Native American communities. As he socially shifted to a White masculine identity and a more dominant social position, he continued to work in, but mostly removed himself socially from, areas where People of Color were more prevalent. A key change for him was that both White people and non-Indigenous People of Color no longer perceived him as a Person of Color after his transition; thus, his experiences of racism as a child, for example, were rendered not ‘real’ by others. Unlike Diego and Scout who somewhat embraced being racialized as Brown, Lance resisted being racialized as White and struggled with how to challenge his new masculine White privilege. In addition, now being marked as predominantly White by others discounted Lance’s Lakota identity and brought up historical and contemporary trauma of Indigenous people being erased through settler colonialism.

These three participants experienced a racialized gender shift in how others perceived them that was fairly consistent. As a result, they also incorporated others’ perceptions into their sense of self, which emphasizes the importance of meanings attached to embodiment of racialized gender.

Fluid shifts

While Diego, Scout, and Lance shifted racial identities through their gender transition, their new categories felt mostly rigid to them. However, three other multiracial/multiethnic participants found their racial identities also shifted but continued to remain in flux depending on their location, setting, and ‘audience.’

Bennyboy Filipina/o ↔ Latina/o

Dexter:  White woman/man ↔ Latina/o

Morgan:  Native American man ↔ White woman

Bennyboy is a 28-year-old bakla⁴, queer Puertopino (Puerto Rican/Filipino) born in the Philippines and now living in the southwest. He commented that his bakla identity provides a cultural connection to his Filipino roots and aligns with his feeling of being of both genders. Bennyboy had lived in southwest and west USA, the Philippines, and Japan, and his location influenced racial attributions from others. Even within the USA, regional location shapes racial classifications and social experiences (Soto Vega & Chávez, 2018). Bennyboy shared that in the southwest, people “thought I was Mexican, just because we’re really close to Mexico,” and people did not think he was Asian “because there’s not really many Asian people here.” However, when he had lived on the west coast, people would often identify him as Puerto Rican and Filipino, which he attributed to the larger Filipino population in that location.

Bennyboy’s shifting embodiment, related to testosterone, was intimately connected to his regional racialized experiences and profoundly affected his sense of self. His struggle with integrating others’ racial attributions with his self understandings is what Vargas and Kingsbury (2016) refer to as “racial identity contestation” (p. 719). In thinking about how others now perceived him racially, he reflected on his gender transition, noting “it’s really important for me to realize it was a choice that I made to physically change my being, outside at least.” Although he was coming to terms with the fluidity of how others racialized him, his identity as Puertopino, and not racial fluidity, was a significant part of his sense of self.

Dexter, like Bennyboy, also lived in the southwest. Dexter is a 27-year-old FTM who grew up primarily with his White mother but spent time with his “dark-skinned” Mexican American father and grandmother. Dexter shared, “as I’ve gotten older my skin’s whitened a lot, but when I was younger, my skin was darker.” This may, in part, be due to spending less time as an adult in the sun, rather than Lance’s experience of having others utilize additional phenotypic markers to attribute Whiteness. Dexter said his dad’s family highly valued assimilation into White culture, and his father raised him to believe he should “be as White as you can.” Dexter’s father’s advice is based on both assimilationism and experiences of colorism, the “social inequities circumscribed by skin color gradients within racial and ethnic groups” that support the USA’s broader racialized system (Burton et al., 2010, p. 440).

Dexter utilized hormones for about a year, which altered his features and voice; he noted he is most often perceived as masculine (the exception was when he was with his taller, queer, White girlfriend). Although Dexter experienced his childhood as racialized Brown, as an adult his experience was more fluid; he stated, “a lot of White people perceive me as White, and Latino people perceive me as Latino.” While now lighter skinned, Dexter’s assumptions of ingroup recognition as Latinx were tied to his thinking of “us Brown folk.” This experience of racial fluidity from childhood to adulthood and changes in attribution by others depending on the audience significantly shaped how he understood his gender. He shared that his “transness” was “almost comfortable at this point, like someone that’s in the borderland of race and gender….I’ve always been between races; I’ve never belonged to either.” Dexter’s understanding about the fluidity of his race and gender, as well as Lance’s experiences, are similar to what Anzaldúa (2007, p. 112) refers to as “mestiza consciousness:” occupying the borderland, holding a dual consciousness, and embracing ambiguity and contradictions. Dexter’s multiracial/multiethnic experience thus helped him to be more comfortable with his gender transition.

Dexter appreciated both his racial and gender fluidity and had stopped taking testosterone so as to curtail its more ‘masculinizing’ effects. His embodied gender changes through transition influenced how others perceived and related to his racialized gender; Dexter noted, “The first lover I had after transitioning, she very much saw me as Latino, and she was, like, really into that, really exoticizing the Latinoness. And that was a whole new experience for me, being the Latin lover” (see Lie, 2014). Dexter’s changing racialized gender through transition thus influenced how others perceived him in intimate and sexual relationships.

Like Bennyboy and Dexter, Morgan also experienced fluid shifts. Morgan is a 23-year-old who is “genderqueer, [a] trans-dyke, multiracial,” living on the west coast, and the child of White lesbian parents. The sperm donor her mothers chose is Native/Chicano and someone Morgan met in adulthood. Although she knew growing up she is multiracial, “half-Chicana,” and Indigenous, it wasn’t until she was sixteen that she really considered her racial identity. Morgan said she has “an ability to pass as White, and so even when people aren’t assuming that I’m White, they are thinking ‘maybe she could be.’”

Morgan noted that for a long time, she felt she had to

trade off as either being seen either as a Person of Color or being seen as trans or female…. What that meant is I had very long hair, and when people saw me as being Native, then that was the reason why I had long hair, and then of course they saw me and my gender in a way that I didn’t want to be seen. And so if I went into White spaces and passed as White, then I could pass as a woman a lot better. It actually really unfortunately drove me away from the Native community.

In response, she said,

I ended up cutting my hair and started passing as female a lot better [with] short hair, and I think part of it was being read as Native….It seems like the higher my hair goes, the more I pass.

Morgan’s experience, that either her gender or her race would be validated but not both, demonstrates how multiracial/multiethnic trans experience can come with unique challenges. It further emphasizes the importance of examining embodiment through the construction of racial and gender identities and social positions (Gonzales, 2019).

While multiracial people are often not affirmed in asserting a multiracial identity and are pushed into monoracial categories, some can move across racial categories (Gonzales, 2019). For the people in this study, experiences of moving across categories of race and gender influenced each other. As Morgan stated, “beginning to realize that one person would see me as a Person of Color and another person see me as White in the same moment gave me the ability to start thinking about my gender in similar terms.” Thus, some multiracial trans people can draw connections between the fluidity of race and the fluidity of gender that influence their understandings of both social categories and how they choose their identities.

Limitations

As with all research, this study is not without its limitations. The sample size for this study was small and drew on participants’ self-selection to be interviewed. This is in part reflective of the challenges in access and recruitment of trans people. Calls were distributed to established transgender networks and specific trans People of Color networks, but since the time of this research, networks for trans people who identify as Asian American, Black, Brown, of Color, Indigenous/Two-Spirit, Latinx, and/or Pacific Islander have expanded. Future research would benefit from engaging with these networks and organizations.

Additionally, because both Indigenous and Latinx populations are racially diverse, the use of the term “People of Color” may have, in part, left out trans people who identify as multiracial but did not understand themselves to be “of Color.” For instance, Lance emailed the first author prior to the interview, detailing his racial experiences and asking if he would still qualify as a participant since he was now predominantly perceived as White. Our sample also primarily centers racialized Latinx identities; future research would benefit by including a more diverse range of multiracial and multiethnic identities and experiences. Notably, the one multiracial/multiethnic Black participant in the broader study did not experience shifts in perceived racial identity, which may be due to the particularities of hypodescent practices around Blackness in the USA (Daniel et al., 2014).

Finally, the experiences of participants in this study are not generalizable to a larger population of multiracial trans people; however, some of the findings may be transferable. At a minimum, this study can further our understanding of diverse and intersectional transgender experiences.

Conclusion

These experiences in transitioning race reveal the continued significance of marking the racial other to maintain current racial, gendered, and national boundaries. Furthermore, it suggests that intersections of gender with race, sexuality, and nationality are key to this marking (Nagel, 2003). This confirms that challenging normative subject positions in the USA, and arguably elsewhere, requires an intersectional approach, and that in trans studies particularly, we must attend to the ways the concept of transition implicates not only gender, but also other categories such as race and nationality.

Others’ perceptions shape our identities and the social understanding of race as well as gender. Multiracial/multiethnic transgender people’s experiences provide valuable insight into the construction and fluidity of racial identities. Participants’ experiences demonstrate first and most significantly the importance of intersectional analysis and that the social construction of race is rooted in embodied meanings strongly linked to other social positions such as gender, sexuality, and nationality. Second, participants’ integration of new racial identities reveals the fluidity of these categories. Third, participants’ experiences of gender as fluid or changing shaped their understanding of race as fluid or changeable and vice versa. Finally, experiences of inequity significantly changed upon transitioning both gender and race, which demonstrates how racialized gender identity meanings are rooted in relations of power. Because these shifts happened to participants in this study in adulthood, they were able to recognize and interrogate the changes in social meanings attributed to them by others in interaction. Experiences of both rigid and fluid shifts provide a particular epistemic advantage to understanding both gender and race as changeable social constructions.

The White normativity of transgender narratives erases the significant ways other social positions intersect with gender to shape interactions and identities. For these multiracial/multiethnic trans participants, unexpected changes in their racialized gender often surprised them, and they initially felt unprepared because no one had discussed this within trans communities. While we do not suggest this is the experience of all multiracial trans people, a focus on these experiences can challenge both White and monoracial normativity within transgender narratives and transform key understandings in transgender studies.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.