Friendship: Trans Lives in Context

Abstract

• Explores benefits and barriers of friendships for transgender individuals.
• Participants: 536 individuals who self-identified as transgender or gender variant.
• Online survey about friendship experiences with transgender, cisgender, sexual minority, and heterosexual friends.
• Used a feminist intersectional theoretical framework.
• Unique friendship barriers and benefits were found across normative (cisgender/heterosexual) and non-normative (transgender/sexual minority) dimensions of identities.

LGBT Friendship Research: Framing Transgender Friendship Experiences

• Friendships have increased importance for gender and sexual minorities when their identity is at odds with social norms.
• LGBT friendship provides familial support.
• Friendships buffer gender and sexual minorities from social isolation or rejection associated with homophobia and transphobia.
• Connection to the larger LGBT community is one way that individuals can positively experience their transgender identity.
• Transgender friends offer support, have similar experiences, and share knowledge with one another.

Additional Research Needed

• Address barriers to friendships with transgender individuals and explore friendship experiences with friends across different identities.
• Understand how transgender friendships are both similar to and different from sexual minority friendships.
• Lesbians and gay men form the majority of their friendships with same-sex individuals who also identify with the LGBT community.
• Same orientation friends provide a sense of shared experience and an avenue for processing minority status.
• Bisexual women and men may be less likely to have a friend with the same (bisexual) identity as themselves.
• Research on sexual minority friendships with individuals in the LGBT community has largely focused on the benefits of such friendships while research that examines friendships between LGBT and heterosexual individuals has primarily considered the barriers to friendship development.
• Bisexual individuals are more likely to have cross-orientation friendships with heterosexual individuals, these friendships exist at the cost of bisexual identity where issues related to bisexual identity are less likely to be acknowledged within the friendship.

Feminist Intersectional Theory

• Emphasizes the importance of examining relationships among social identities as intersecting categories of oppression and inequality.
• Inclusive of sexual orientation, specifically addressing the role of homophobia and heterosexism in the lives of women and racial minorities.
• Shift the focus from the ‘‘unnatural’’ and ‘‘abnormal’’ conceptualizations of transgender.
• Allows a comparative dimension which invites exploration of cisgender experience.

Method

• Participants: 536 individuals who self-identified as transgender or gender variant.
• Data analysis focused on participants’ free response answers to four open ended questions

Coding and Content Analysis

• Used an inductive coding method to define unique benefits and barriers to transgender friendship across friends’ gender identity and sexual orientation.
• Data were coded in a binary (1 present; 0 not present) manner, with each participants’ response coded across 19 benefits and 19 barriers for each of the 4 questions yielding a total of 152 data points per participant (79,952 total data points for 526 participants; 19,988 data points for each of the 4 research questions).
• Chi square tests for independence were conducted to examine frequencies of codes across friends’ identity.

Unique Benefits and Barriers

• Unique benefits and barriers differed across normative and non-normative experiences.
• General features of friendships include having someone to talk to, emotional support, acceptance, and shared experiences.
• Unique benefits included: (1) helps me feel ‘‘normal’’; (2) transgender/sexuality issues do not dominate conversation and friendship; (3) validation more powerful from someone with normative identity; (4) more opportunity for friendship due to larger population; (5) emotionally stable; (6) helps me present as identified gender (‘‘pass’’); (7) offers more diverse perspectives and interactions; and (8) opportunity to educate about transgender experience.
• Unique barriers to friendships with cisgender and heterosexual friends: (1) not knowledgeable on issues of gender, sex, and privilege; (2) insensitive use of language in reference to identity; (3) difficult to talk about transgender/sexuality issues; (4) fosters feelings of discomfort; (5) not understanding non-normative experience; and (6) fewer shared experiences.
• Unique benefits included: (1) understanding non-normative experience; (2) knowledgeable on issues of gender, sex, and privilege; (3) shared experiences; (4) can talk about transgender issues; (5) offers support via mentoring and shared resources; (6) comfortable being myself; (7) shared community: ‘‘family’’ and belonging; and (8) non-judgmental/ open-minded.
• unique to friendship with transgender individuals: (1) shared experiences; (2) can talk about transgender issues; (3) offers support via mentoring and shared resources; (4) comfortable being myself; and (5) helps me present as identified gender (‘‘pass’’).
• Unique barriers Four benefits and four barriers were significantly more likely to be expressed in reference to transgender friends: (1) transgender issues dominate conversation and friendship; (2) negative emotions, drama, and emotional instability; (3) fear of being ‘‘out’’-ed by association or disclosure; and (4) fosters feelings of discomfort.