Mainstream Psychology and the Gender Binary

MAINSTREAM PSYCHOLOGY AND THE GENDER BINARY: TOWARD AN ACCOUNT OF BECOMING “NON-BINARY” by Alexander T. Vasilovsky, M.A. Ryerson University, 2012, H.B.Sc. University of Toronto, 2009 A dissertation presented to Ryerson University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the program of Psychology Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2019 ©Alexander T. Vasilovsky, 2019 AUTHOR'S DECLARATION FOR ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION OF A DISSERTATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this dissertation. This is a true copy of the dissertation, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authoriZe Ryerson University to lend this dissertation to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I further authoriZe Ryerson University to reproduce this dissertation by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. I understand that my dissertation may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Mainstream Psychology and the Gender Binary: Toward an Account of Becoming “Non-Binary” Doctor of Philosophy, 2019 Alexander T. Vasilovsky Clinical Psychology Ryerson University The gender binary haunts mainstream psychology’s history of medicaliZing trans and gender nonconforming people, particularly its construction of their gender identities as psychopathological and in need of treatment for violating the binary logic of normative (cis) development. Drawing on interviews with 24 participants who identified as “non-binary,” this dissertation advances: (1) a genealogical analysis of the construction, interpretation, and administration of “transgenderism” (psychology’s parlance) which elucidates the discipline’s maintenance of the gender binary through said construction, interpretation, and administration; and (2) an account of “becoming” gendered (non-binary, in this case) as an alternative to the mainstream models of gender identity development. Becoming (a) shifts from the etiological “why” to the psychosocial “how” (as in, how to go about assembling oneself as non-binary; labels and pronouns are key); (b) eschews teleology (there is no end goal with regard to embodiment); (c) privileges gender self-determination; (d) attends to intersectionality; and (e) foregrounds intersubjectivity. The participants were largely concerned with asserting the validity of their gender identities as non-binary, which are routinely dismissed and invalidated, and this dissertation works toward undoing psychology’s own invalidating practices. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation was financially supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and three Ontario Graduate Scholarships. First and foremost, I’d like to thank the participants. This dissertation is not “my” dissertation alone and would not exist without them. I’m profoundly grateful. I’d also like to thank my doctoral (and master’s) supervisor, Dr. Maria Gurevich; my committee members, Drs. Tae Hart, Thomas Teo, Katherine Johnson, and Marco Fiola; the SHiFT Lab and its members, past and present; the volunteer transcribers, especially Mina Alves; and Sammy Binder and Nicole Werker. My relationships with Dr. Gurevich and my colleagues at the SHiFT Lab have been among the most impactful of my life. I very much appreciated the rigorous, insightful comments and questions during my defense: Dr. Johnson’s concerns with methodological specificity, Dr. Hart’s support of my participatory action initiatives, Dr. Fiola’s interdisciplinary musings, I could go on. Dr. Teo’s positioning of my work within the psychological humanities was especially meaningful. Thanks, again. iv Table of Contents Abstract . iii Introduction . 1 Objectives . 10 Background . 25 Foucault: Power and resistance . 26 Queer studies and ethics . 29 Transgender studies and queer genders . 33 Method . 42 Epistemological Framework . 42 Psychosocial studies . 48 Relational psychoanalysis . 50 Procedure . 53 Participants . 53 Recruitment . 56 Interviews . 59 Analysis . 64 Affirmative practice and participatory action . 68 The Psy Disciplines and “Trans”: A (Brief) Genealogy . 75 The Psy Disciplines’ Trans . 79 Trans Reverse Discourses . 114 Reconceptualizing Gender Identity Development . 127 Trans Gender Identity Development . 133 v Becoming Non-Binary . 143 1. Shifts from “why” to “how” . 149 2. Eschews teleology . 187 3. Privileges gender self-determination . 194 4. Attends to intersectionality . 211 5. Foregrounds intersubjectivity . 218 Conclusions . 236 Appendix A . 259 Appendix B . 261 Appendix C . 270 Appendix D . 273 Appendix E . 275 Appendix F . 280 Appendix G . 302 References . 303 Footnotes . 349 vi Mainstream Psychology and the Gender Binary: Toward an Account of Becoming “Non-Binary” This dissertation began with a question: What’s queer about “queer” now? About a decade ago, Eng, Halberstam and Muñoz (2005) posed a similar one vis-à-vis queerness in the academy: what makes queer studies queer is its commitment to queer epistemology, they concluded. Following Judith Butler’s assertion that queer must never purport to fully describe those it seeks to represent, Eng et al. (2005) defined queer epistemology as a “subjectless” critique which “disallows any positing of a proper subject of or object for the field by insisting that queer has no fixed political referent” (p. 3). They called for a renewed queer studies, one that would continue to attend, even more capaciously, “to those hegemonic social structures by which certain subjects are rendered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ through the production of ‘perverse’ and ‘pathological’ others” (p. 3). Queer studies must remain ever vigilant to “a wide field of normaliZation” (Warner, 1993, p. xxvi). As the activist energies that helped to fuel queer academic work in North America in the early 1990s have declined (Halley & Parker, 2011), and as the authors around whom queer theory first crystalliZed seem to have spent the past decade pursuing new avenues – Butler (2004a, 2005) began writing about justice and human rights, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) about affect theory, and Michael Warner (1999, 2007) about sermons and secularism – some have wondered whether queer studies has reached its “afterlife” (O’Rourke, 2011). Did it ever really “exist” as a discipline anyway (see e.g., Berlant & Warner, 1995; Halperin, 2003)? I was wondering the same as I set out to begin this dissertation. I started by searching for where these and other early authors’ commitments to interrogating the social processes that produce, recogniZe, normaliZe, and sustain identity might endure. In academia, I found, they had 1 been renewed by the next generation of new, rediscovered, and recently canoniZed queer scholars who have expanded the field’s “wide” originating critique. Reinvigorated by intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991), queer of color critique (Ferguson, 2004), and critical trans politics (Spade, 2011), among other forms and commentaries, queer studies now provides an array of tools for theoriZing normaliZation, resistance, and politics.1 Beyond academia, however, “queer” seemed to me to endure more so as a popular (in certain circles) term of self- identification, usually meant as a synonym of LGBT, than as one that connotes a political ethic that seeks to problematiZe heteronormativity and its natural-law approach to sexual morality (Vasilovsky, 2014; Vasilovsky & Gurevich, 2017). To answer my opening question, I’d turned to what I called “queer genders,” which, according to the definition I was working with at the time of my dissertation proposal (see Background), includes those designated by the labels “genderqueer” and “non-binary.” Non- binary describes people whose gender is not exclusively “female” or “male,” including (but not limited to) those who identify with a gender other than “woman” or “man,” as somewhere between the two, as both, but at separate times; with more than one gender; with a gendered neologism one’s own coining; or with no gender (see Matsuno & Budge, 2016). (“Gender identity” tends to indicate one’s “internal” sense of one’s own gender, whereas “gender expression” is “external.”) Non-binary is usually considered an umbrella term, encompassing other identities, including genderqueer, as well as “gender fluid,” “agender,” and “bigender.” Some who identify as such also consider themselves to be “trans” or “transgender,” two other umbrella terms that both refer to individuals whose gender differs from the one assigned to them at birth and/or from what others expect of their physical presentation.2 Research has just recently begun to acknowledge the existence of non-binary folx (e.g., Beemyn, 2015; Harrison, Grant, & 2 Herman, 2012; Kuper, Nussbaum, & Mustanski, 2012; Rankin & Beemyn, 2012). Despite some advocating for less binary measures of gender identity (e.g., Conron, Scout, & Austin, 2008; Frohard-Dourlent, Dobson, Clark, Doull, & Saewyc, 2017), most surveys of trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people have infrequently included “non-binary” as a forced choice option when soliciting respondents’ gender identifications; demographic statistics, as such, are hard to come by. According to the report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (James et al., 2016), the largest yet to examine the experiences of TGNC people in the United States, more than one-third of 27,715 respondents reported their gender identity was best described as non- binary or genderqueer.

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