Expanding Transgender Studies in Sociology

With the publication of “The Development of Transgender Studies in Sociology” in 2017, Schilt and Lagos provided sociologists with a summary of some of the ways our discipline has approached transgender populations and experiences over the past half century. Beginning with Garfinkel’s work in 1967; (Schilt 2016), they outline how transgender studies in sociology emerged as an attempt by sociologists to use transgender cases to de-construct and problematize sex, gender, medical, and other forms of essentialism from the 1970s to the 1990s (Ekins and King 1999; Kessler 1998; West and Zimmerman 1987). They further mapped how transgender studies in sociology shifted to examinations of transgender people and experiences as sociologically important in their own right from the early 2000s to present (Namaste 2000; Schilt 2010; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). In so doing, they called for greater incorporation of transgender studies throughout sociology as a whole and as a method for expanding the contours of how sociologists methodologically and theoretically approach our work. This special issue takes this history and these observations as its inspiration. Recognizing the historical erasure of transgender populations and experiences throughout the history of our discipline alongside the increasingly visible, vibrant, and innovative transgender studies within sociology in recent years (Schilt and Lagos 2017), I approached this special issue as an opportunity to expand emerging transgender studies in sociology at present. As I’ve proposed with co-authors elsewhere (see, e.g., Simula, Sumerau, and Miller 2019; Sumerau, Cragun, and Mathers 2016; Sumerau and Mathers 2019), I also sought to facilitate sociological recognition of some ways greater incorporation of transgender studies into sociology can expand the contours, norms, and assumptions of our discipline (see also Pfeffer 2014; Serano 2007; Vidal-Ortiz 2002). Especially as a non-binary trans woman navigating both sociological and interdisciplinary transgender studies over the past decade (Sumerau 2019), I also sought to highlight social locations and experiences less common in published sociological transgender studies to date. To this end, each of the articles in this special issue builds upon recent insights from emerging transgender studies in sociology. Recent sociological studies, for example, consistently demonstrate that transgender people face significant inequalities in familial (Meadow 2018; Pfeffer 2017; Travers 2018) ; religious (Moon, Tobin, and Sumerau 2019; Sumerau, Mathers, and Cragun 2018; Sumerau, Mathers, and Lampe 2019); occupational (Connell 2010; Schilt