Abstract
Previous studies have found that trans people claim to have consistent gender identities over their lifetimes. As a result, scholars know little about processes through which individuals come to identify differently from their gender assignment. In this article, I analyze how gender minorities in the United States come to identify with new labels, theorizing gender-identity formation as a social process. Despite pressure to present oneself as “trans enough” and despite many individuals’ claims to “always have been” the ways they are, most research participants’ stories illustrate a process of gender-identity change—what I term coming into identity. Coming into identity is the process whereby individuals come to understand themselves in new ways despite living in epistemological systems and constructed realities where such ways of understanding oneself are not widely acknowledged. I find that participants’ coming-into-identity experiences involved self-reflection in relation to (1) exposure to new gender conceptualizations and models, (2) gender experimentation, (3) difficult experiences, and/or (4) conversations with others. This research contributes to our understanding of gender-minority identity formation and the relationships among discourse, narrative, story, social interaction, identity, and agency. I argue that in accounting for coming into their identities, individuals exercise agency, mobilizing and building new narratives and discourses.
The prominent transgender identity narrative claims conformity to a consistent identity throughout life (Garrison 2018; Mason-Schrock 1996; Stone 1991). As a result, how individuals come to identify differently from their assigned gender has been underexamined. In this article, I examine U.S.-based gender minorities’ accounts of how they came to identify in the ways that they do, theorizing gender-identity change as a social process—what I call coming into identity. I use the term gender minorities rather than trans people because, in addition to trans people, this study includes individuals who do not identify as trans but are otherwise gender minorities. I do not mean to claim that identities either are or are not innate. Nor do I address the question of what causes people to become how or who they are. Rather, I ask: How do gender minorities come to identify themselves in the ways that they do? And how do they come to claim the identity terms that they claim? This research contributes empirically to our understanding of gender-minority identity formation and theoretically to our understandings of the relationships among discourse, narrative, story, social interaction, identity, and agency.
Gender Discourse and Gender-Identity Stories
The idea that identity is an innate essence is dominant in mainstream culture and prominent LGBTQ+ narratives. I term this idea the innate-essence identity model. This idea operates in the “coming out of the closet” metaphor, which presupposes that a person has always had the stigmatized identity they are disclosing. The metaphor does not address how one came to identify in such a way, despite the social construction of sexual and gender categories and the social process of learning about them.
Scholars have observed that gender minorities frequently claim to have consistent experiences of gender identity throughout their lives (Garrison 2018; Mason-Schrock 1996; Stone 1991). The innate-essence identity model is therefore prominent in gender minorities’ self-stories, or stories about the self, and in the prominent trans identity narrative. The most common example is the “born in the wrong body” metaphor—what gender-minority communities call the “wrong body narrative.” Conceptualizations of trans identity that adhere to binary, “wrong body” thinking reflect transnormativity, a form of gender normativity. Trans people often hold themselves and each other accountable to transnormative standards (Johnson 2016). To be considered “trans enough,” gender minorities attempt to conform to the transnormative narrative (Garrison 2018). People thus use the innate-essence identity model as a resource to interpret their experience and make it understandable to themselves and others (Shotter 1984). Telling self-stories also reproduces the innate-essence identity model.
But stories are not simply told about a preexisting self. Rather, stories and their collective creation bring selves into being (Gergen and Gergen 1983). Mason-Schrock (1996) suggests that by learning the trans community’s storytelling tools, trans women learned to tell new stories about themselves—in effect, constructing new selves. The transnormative master story-pattern involved accounts of childhood gender nonconformity, such as childhood cross-dressing and poor athletic ability (Mason-Schrock 1996). In telling these stories, individuals provided an order for their gendered life events, giving the appearance of a meaningful whole (Polkinghorne 1988). Linking childhood gender nonconformity and adult trans identity offered evidence of a continuous self over time, tying together changes over individuals’ lives, to package coherent trans identities. Twenty-two years after Mason-Schrock’s study, Garrison (2018) found a similar pattern of lifelong gender nonconformity claims among binary and nonbinary trans people. Innate identity claims are not surprising, as both gender and the self are defined culturally as innate essences. The innate-essence identity model is thus a primary feature of cisnormative culture and claims to consistent identities are not unique to gender minorities.
The innate-essence identity model shapes research. Most studies conceptualize the gender universe as made up of individuals who are assumed to be cisgender (e.g., Ridgeway 2011). In addition, gender diversity researchers have often utilized cisnormative or transnormative interpretive frames. For example, Gagné, Tewksbury, and McGaughey’s (1997) research on “coming out to oneself” was based on the culturally dominant idea that identity is formed in early childhood; they observed people coming to accept their essential nature rather than coming to identify themselves in new ways. Therefore, although researchers have defined gender as a process (e.g., West and Zimmerman 1987) and/or a characteristic distinct from sex, many still employ the innate-essence identity model in conceptualization, measurement, and/or analysis. Transgender studies scholars are more likely to conceptualize gender identity in expansive ways. Yet the innate-essence identity model’s ubiquity has historically limited theorizations of gender identity and gender-identity change.
The innate-essence identity model structures the cisnormative epistemological environment in which gender minorities must attempt to attain social legitimacy. Because this environment privileges cisgender identities and assumes that sex equals gender, gender minorities constantly face the threat of a challenge to their identity, with potentially devastating consequences. Cisnormative perspectives, casting gender minorities as unnatural, deceitful, and dangerous, justify marginalization and violence against them (Bettcher 2007; Schilt and Westbrook 2009). Medical and legal gatekeepers have established their authority to discredit nontransnormative narratives and withhold care and services (shuster 2021). In this context, claiming “sameness” to social norms is a strategy for navigating social life (Abelson 2016) and pursuing civil rights and medical care (Stryker 2014). Gender minorities’ innate identity claims can be understood as a deployment of dominant discourse and master story-patterns about gender and the self—cisnormative discursive and narrative structures—as resources to obtain legitimacy in a cisnormative society. These identity accounts are a form of strategic essentialism (Spivak 1988) and a survival strategy within an oppressive, cisnormative gender system (Johnson 2019).
Scholars have also argued, however, that telling transnormative self-stories fails to challenge, and thus reproduces, oppressive dominant discourse about gender (e.g., Garrison 2018; Stone 1991). Some scholars have argued that transnormative self-stories maintain trans oppression (Stone 1991). Sandy Stone (1991), for example, claims that transsexuals cannot overcome subjugation if they resist by working within a discursive system that fundamentally discredits them. This analysis suggests that stock identity stories rely on common tropes and narrative arcs, thereby establishing and reproducing certain normativities.
However, some individuals challenge the dominant gender discourse. Gender minorities in the 1990s began to contest the innate-essence identity model through political critique (e.g., Stone 1991) and by creating new, alternative ideas about gender and themselves, resisting both cisnormativity and transnormativity (e.g., Bornstein 1994; Feinberg 1996; Wilchins 1997). They conceptualized gender without a binary structure and consisting of many varied and fluid identities not tied to biology. Using primarily print media to circulate their ideas, these intellectual rebels pushed toward a new discourse that problematized existing gender conceptions and expanded possibilities for new gender conceptualizations, experiences, and identities to come into being (e.g., Bornstein 1994; Feinberg 1996; Wilchins 1997). I call the discourse they created an expansive gender-identity discourse.
One would expect that an expansive discourse would facilitate opportunities for personal changes in identity. Despite this, research shows that even after gender-diverse communities contested dominant gender discourse, individuals maintained lifelong identity claims (Garrison 2018). Such transnormative perspectives foreclose gender fluidity (Sumerau, Mathers, and Moon 2020).
Although the innate-essence identity model is a feature of both dominant gender ideology and transnormativity’s master story-pattern, story-patterns do not necessarily determine experiences. As Mason-Schrock (1996, 177) explains, individuals’ experiences can exceed story-patterns, people can create new stories, and master story-patterns can shift: In this process of sense-making through story, the master patterns are adapted, modified, and later passed on in slightly altered form. Variations multiply, and so does the number of possible selves. And as lives are fitted to stories, lives may be led differently and new stories thereby created. From this perspective we can see how self-making is a collaborative process extending over time and acting back on culture. We can also see the need to observe how people collaborate to create the resources necessary to construct selves. Attention to this process would seem essential to the social psychology of self-construction.
Stories about new experiences, therefore, can crack discursive structures, creating space for agency. And social actors can exercise agency by modifying narratives with unique self-stories. Yet few scholars have examined how emergent alternative cultural understandings of gender might shape how gender minorities experience identity formation. In this article, I address these questions, asking: How do gender minorities experience gender-identity change? How do their accounts maintain and/or challenge the dominant gender meaning system? And what do their self-stories tell us about agency, considering what we know about the power of structure?
Unlike the idea of coming out, the idea of coming into identity does not presuppose innate identities; instead, it challenges the innate-essence identity model. Coming into identity is a process of gender-identity change whereby individuals come to understand themselves in new ways, despite living in epistemological systems and constructed realities where such ways of understanding oneself are, for the most part, not acknowledged or understood, but are, as Namaste (2000) observed, erased. The concept of coming into identity therefore encapsulates how people learn new ways to understand, label, and be themselves, regardless of whether they claim to have always known who they are. Self-stories reveal how individuals navigate and produce discourse. I argue that although gender minorities’ experiences of gender identity are shaped by dominant discourse, they also exercise agency by mobilizing and generating alternative discourses in the process of coming into their identities.
Methods
The 75 in-depth, semi-structured interviews I analyze in this article are a subset from a project investigating gender minorities’ lived experiences, knowledge systems, and cultural resistance practices. I conducted 15 interviews in 2011, one in 2012, 38 in 2016, three in 2017, one in 2018, and 17 in 2020. Interviews were in person or through telephone or video-conferencing software and ranged from 40 minutes to 3 hours. With purposive and snowball sampling methods, I recruited interviewees through community organizations and my personal networks using social media. Almost all participants were in four regions of the United States—the West, Southwest, South, and Northeast.
Most participants’ gender-identity definitions challenged conventional ways of thinking about gender: 44 (59 percent) claimed more than one label, and 31 (41 percent) claimed one label. Thirty identified exclusively with binary categories, and 45 identified beyond binary categories. Of these 45, 14 identified as nonbinary, two identified as both nonbinary and binary, two identified as exclusively agender, and 27 used other labels, such as genderqueer, gender nonconforming, or gender fluid. Seventeen individuals used they/them pronouns, 16 used she/her, 25 used he/him, and 17 used multiple different pronouns. Forty-four were assigned female at birth (AFAB), and 31 were assigned male at birth (AMAB). Their ages ranged from 18 to 66 years: two in their teens, 29 in their 20s, 14 in their 30s, 11 in their 40s, seven in their 50s, and 12 in their 60s. Thirty-seven (49 percent) participants identified as white, 14 (19 percent) as Black, six (8 percent) as Asian American, four (5 percent) as Latinx, and 14 (19 percent) identified with multiple racial categories, including Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and/or white. Thirty-five (47 percent) participants completed high school or a GED, 15 (20 percent) held college degrees, and 25 (33 percent) held graduate or professional degrees. My sample is more racially diverse (though majority white) and more educated than the sample in the largest existing study of trans people (n = 27,000; James et al. 2016). Therefore, the data reflect certain emphases and absences; the findings might be typical of individuals with more education. Although I attempted to recruit participants who were different from me, recruiting within my social networks generated a convenience sample, resulting in a higher-educated sample.
Identity was not the project’s focus initially, but when an interviewee suggested that I investigate how people “came to their identities,” I added a question to the interview schedule about how participants came to identify themselves with the terms that they used. During interviews, I sometimes rephrased the question to mirror interviewees’ language. Notably, 24 participants (31 percent) told their “coming into identity” story before I invited them to, reflecting Frank’s (2013) observation that regardless of what the researcher wants to know, given the opportunity to share, individuals will tell their self-stories. Thirty-three people came into their identities in the 2010s, 18 did in the 2000s, seven did in the 1990s, four did in the 1980s, five did in the 1970s, and one did in the 1960s. Seven interviewees did not mention the dates when they came into their identities, and 23 had key coming-into-identity experiences in multiple years. For further details on participants’ demographics, see Table 1.
List of Participants
Note: GED = General Educational Development; FTM = female to male; MTF = male to female.
My positionality shapes the knowledge I create. I am white, trans, and highly educated. During data collection, I was in my 30s and 40s. The assumptions I carry, due to my social location, likely influence my research questions, the theory I engage with, the language and strategies I used during recruitment, the interview questions, my demeanor during interviews, and how I analyzed the data—facilitating and limiting the project’s potential.
My positionality likely affected who decided to participate and the quality of the data. My gender-minoritized status likely enhanced my access to participants and may have produced “richer” data (Talbot 1998–1999). However, individuals who perceived that their race, age, education, and/or gender identity were different from mine may have felt less comfortable with me and may have shared fewer details or chosen to not participate in the study.
Although my familiarity with gender diversity may enhance my understanding of participants, it may also limit my analysis. I might have taken note of less because certain things might have seemed less distinctive to me (Kanuha 2000). In case I overidentified with my participants, it was important for me to tune in to the meanings they made of their experiences while noticing how my perspective influenced my perceptions (Maykut and Morehouse 1994).
Interviews were transcribed and analyzed with the software program NVivo, using a “flexible coding” method (Deterding and Waters 2021), combining induction and theory-based coding. I first explored the data, indexing the transcripts by coding for identity-related content, tracking emergent themes that became the basis for analytic codes, and developing hypothesized relationships between concepts by writing respondent-level and cross-case thematic memos as I saw patterns arise. I next re-read the sections of the transcripts where participants discussed identity and coming-into-identity experiences, applying analytic codes to integrate emergent findings with the literature. For example, when coding transcripts for “gender experimentation,” I looked for discussions of “exploring,” “experimenting,” “trying,” “trying out,” “trying on,” or “playing with,” gender labels, pronouns, clothing, or other adornment. When coding for “exposure,” I looked for discussions of meeting gender minorities or learning about gender diversity. When coding for “childhood gender difference,” I looked for discussions of wanting to be or wanting to have a body like another gender in childhood, dressing or acting like another gender in childhood, identifying as or being perceived as like another gender in childhood. After coding all interviews, I used NVivo to validate concepts, build models, and test and refine the data-based theory. I use pseudonyms in this article to protect participants’ identities.
Coming into Identity
Despite being raised in the gender associated with their assigned sex, most participants recalled memories of childhood gender difference. More than two-fifths of participants claimed consistent feelings over time about their gendered selves. These patterns suggest that the innate-essence identity model persists, but the fact that a minority of participants claimed consistent feelings over time means that gender identity, for most, has changed. Importantly, most participants discussed the circumstances under which they came into their gender identities. Regardless of whether they experienced childhood gender difference, almost all participants described a process of self-reflection whereby they gained an enhanced understanding of their gendered selves. Most also described one or more of four experiences, which co-occurred with and/or led to their self-reflection: (1) exposure to gender minorities and/or information about them, (2) gender experimentation, (3) an emotionally difficult period or event, and (4) conversations with others. These patterns suggest that the expansive gender-identity discourse’s dissemination facilitated coming-into-identity experiences. The data also enhance our understanding of the expansive gender-identity discourse. In addition, coming-into-identity stories’ pervasiveness suggests that a distinct coming-into-identity narrative operates alongside the “wrong body” narrative. In the following pages, I present participants’ experiences of coming into identity and the persistence and change I have observed in the innate-essence identity model, as represented in participants’ self-stories.
Exposure to Information and/or Models
Most (56 percent) participants’ coming-into-identity experiences involved meeting and/or learning about gender minorities. Exposure most often involved direct engagement with gender-diverse people—often personal acquaintances—who demonstrated how it was possible to be such a person, modeling identities and personal pronouns that participants could claim and others could honor. Participants also sought out or otherwise came across information about gender minorities in books, magazines, the Internet, especially social media, or other media. Before the advent of the Internet, books and magazines were the main information sources. Such models, information, and language were discursive resources that presented identity options.
Exposure prompted more than half of interviewees to reflect on their own gender identities. For instance, Devon, a 20s, Asian American, high school–educated, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming person in the Northeast, interviewed in 2016, who came into their identity in the 2010s, shared: Where I come from, there weren’t that many nonbinary and trans people. And it was just never on the radar growing up. And then when I came to [college] there was hella, hella queer people. And the more that I guess I saw that, the more I began to question and think about my own gender.
Devon illustrates how, after lacking awareness of gender diversity, their increasing exposure to queer people, including gender minorities, directly impacted them. Seeing people who demonstrated how gender-identity change was possible inspired Devon to question their gender identity. Exposure to gender minorities was also a process of exposure to the expansive gender-identity discourse, which brought Devon to “think about gender in a wider way.” Eventually, Devon used labels reflecting this discourse—nonbinary and gender nonconforming—to describe themself. Thus, exposure to the expansive gender-identity discourse via models enabled Devon to come into their identity.
Exposure to models familiarized participants with gender diversity, enabling them to reflect on themselves and consider whether their gender identities, too, might be more complex than they had previously thought. Most participants who discussed exposure talked about how finding others who they saw as like themselves played a role in their coming-into-identity experiences.
Besides exposure to models, exposure to their self-stories assisted participants in coming into their identities. Amy, a 40s, college-educated, white, trans woman in the South, interviewed in 2016, who came into her identity in the 1990s, explained, When I was in the Navy . . . I went to the newsstand to get a Playboy . . . I’d heard about it that afternoon at work, so my whole specific reason for going was to get that particular article. It was at that point that I knew exactly what or who I was because I was able to read about this woman’s past and how she began her transition . . . up until that time, I didn’t really know what I was. I had heard the term transvestite . . . and transsexual, but I really didn’t have any stories or know anyone who could tell me what it was like to be one, or how they knew they were one.
Exposure to an individual’s gender-identity realization and change profoundly impacted Amy. Reading a transsexual woman’s self-story and learning about her past, her coming-into-identity process, and her transition brought Amy to observe similarities in herself and realize that she, too, was trans. In the early 1990s when Amy came into her identity, the expansive gender-identity discourse was only starting to develop. Yet her case demonstrates how even before the discourse emerged, individuals came into their identities with the support of exposure to others’ self-stories; the option to change gender became available with this knowledge.
Thus, access to gender minorities’ accounts of their lives, which resonated with participants, enabled them to come into their identities. Most individuals who came into their identities in the 1990s looked for similarities between themselves and others (86 percent); seeking similarities remained common among those who came into their identities in the 2000s (39 percent) and 2010s (36 percent) but decreased over time. Relatedly, the portion of participants who claimed that not relating to the gender minorities they were exposed to delayed their coming-into-identity process was higher in the 1990s but decreased progressively and significantly by the 2010s. Resonance’s diminishing salience suggests that the epistemic authority of self-identification has increasingly taken precedence over ideas about what a gender minority should be like.
Relatedly, increasing access to the expansive gender-identity discourse appears to have facilitated gender minorities’ coming-into-identity experiences. Between 2011 and 2020 (the data collection period), cultural knowledge of gender diversity became more widespread in the United States, and gender minorities’ accounts of themselves—in contrast to dehumanizing media representations—became more publicly and interpersonally available. These trends are, in several ways, reflected in the data. Gabby, a 30s, Asian American woman in the West with a graduate education, had also identified as intergender—a label she did not define, but perhaps signified “in between genders.” I interviewed her in 2016; she did not state her exact coming-into-identity dates. As Gabby put it, “the emergence of a transgender movement” was a key factor in coming into her identity: When people actually around me were starting to talk about transgender identity . . . I think that’s when things started to change in how I identified myself, because then I had more explicit vocabulary to conceptualize it. And being around more people who self-identified as trans. And sharing their stories and sharing how they understood themselves and how they understood the world.
Gabby had been exposed to gender diversity through drag performance and gender-nonconforming peers years before she came into her identity. For her, exposure to trans people who shared their self-stories, self-definitions, and explanations of the expansive gender-identity discourse facilitated her gender-identification change. Gaining “vocabulary to conceptualize” her identity enabled it to shift. Thus, greater access to gender minorities’ self-stories, self-understandings, and identity terminology—expansive gender-identity discourse—enabled participants to come into their identities.
Exposure to the expansive gender-identity discourse was especially pivotal for participants who described cathartic, self-discovery, realization moments when learning about new identity labels. These identity epiphanies often took place while participants were reading books or websites that presented new gender-identity concepts. Adam, a 30s, Black, genderqueer and transmasculine person in the Southwest, with a graduate education, interviewed in 2020, who came into their identity in the 2000s, explained, [I] gradually kind of discovered genderqueer when . . . I was reading . . . some gender book that made sense. And it was like, you’re not really feeling a pull towards man or woman, male or female, it’s kind of like a both, and, or nothing. And I was like, yes, this is it, this works for me.
Reading a book that explained the expansive gender-identity discourse and introduced the label genderqueer, which resonated with Adam, prompted their coming-into-identity experience. Discovering new gender-identity labels—thus, new gender-identity concepts—gave participants more identity options, enabling them to see themselves from new perspectives and prompting self-identification changes. Most participants came into their identities gradually; about one-third had identity epiphanies, like Adam.
Most participants across gender identity, assigned sex, age, education, and coming-into-identity decade discussed exposure to the expansive gender-identity discourse in their coming-into-identity stories. Half of participants in the West and all or most across other regions discussed exposure. Discussions of exposure in coming-into-identity stories increased over time: Less than half of participants who were interviewed before 2014 and most interviewed after 2014 discussed exposure.
The data suggest that participants’ access to information about and contact with gender minorities has been unequal, when taking their racial identities into account. Most participants who identified as white, Latinx, or with multiple racial categories discussed exposure, whereas half of Asian American participants and fewer than half of Black participants claimed that exposure was involved in coming into their identities. Black participants were more likely than non-Black participants to learn about gender diversity by seeking information and models rather than by happening to meet or come across information about gender minorities. Two of the three older, Black, transmasculine participants did not meet another Black transmasculine person until after they transitioned. For example, Eddie, a 50s, high school–educated, Black trans man in the Northeast, interviewed in 2016, who came into his identity in the 2000s, shared, It was very hard to find trans men of color anywhere, and . . . there was kind of a dearth of specifically Black trans men role models around. I mean, we eventually found each other here and there . . . but it was lonely going for a while, and I think the notion that somehow when people transition into manhood, that we transition into the same kind of manhood— it’s just false, you know? So, for someone . . . who is white and has blending privilege, that’s a whole other life than the one I transitioned into, and so there was really not a lot of places to have dialogue about what does it mean to be a Black man in the U.S. in this era.
Eddie points to the absence of visible Black trans men role models in his communities and the lack of understanding about the day-to-day racism that Black trans men face. Although Black trans men existed when Eddie came into his identity, the transmasculine communities around him were majority white and not racially inclusive, which likely pushed Black trans men to seek support elsewhere. Lacking support for his whole self in these communities negatively impacted Eddie; while other participants talked about feeling resonance, excitement, and relief when finding gender minorities, he felt lonely. Thus, access to information about and contact with gender minorities has been segmented by race, due to racism in gender-minority communities.
As sexual- and gender-minority communities often overlap, membership in a sexual-minority community may have enhanced participants’ exposure opportunities. Participants who were AFAB, binary, older, in the West, Black (eight of 14), Latinx (four of four), or claimed multiple racial identities (eight of 14) were more likely than their respective counterparts to have identified as sexual minorities before identifying as gender minorities. The portion of people who came into a gender-minority identity after coming into a sexual-minority identity increased over time among AMAB people and decreased among AFAB people. Notably, all the AFAB people who came into their identities in the 1990s identified as sexual minorities before coming into their gender identities, which indicates that sexual-minority women’s communities/cultures and gender-minority communities/cultures overlapped significantly then.
Gender Experimentation
Experimenting with gender was part of more than two-fifths (44 percent) of participants’ coming-into-identity process. For some, gender experimentation was an effort to “figure out” identity, whereas others came into their identities while experimenting with gender. Those who worked to figure out their identities often talked about “trying on,” “trying out,” or “playing around with” identity labels, personal pronouns, names, or gender expressions (such as clothing, hairstyle, or vocal expression), to see if they “felt right” or “fit.” The following accounts illustrate experimentation.
Vanessa, a 40s, Black and Pacific Islander, high school–educated, nonbinary trans femme in the Northeast, interviewed in 2016, came into their identity in the 1970s (when they started exploring gender as a child) and 2010s (when they came to claim their identity as an adult). Vanessa explained how experimenting with different pronouns clarified which pronouns and identity labels felt right: I was using she/her . . . I identified as feminine but not really identified as female, but I didn’t know how to express that, and one of my friends said, well you can try they/them . . . So, for a long time I was using they/them and she/her, just so I could get a feel for it, but then I realized nobody was using they/them, and I guess gradually I came to prefer that they did. And it took about a year for it to really, just take hold, but I just came to feel that, yeah, in the end, I feel kind of nonbinary . . . I feel feminine, but I don’t feel male, but yet I don’t feel female. So, in the middle.
This example illustrates how the expansive gender-identity discourse, which authorizes individual agency, enables individuals to exercise agency. Vanessa’s awareness that they could identify as feminine and not female and their friend’s suggestion to “try” they/them pronouns led them to try the pronouns and eventually identify as nonbinary. The idea that gender identity is changeable influenced Vanessa’s coming-into-identity experience and self-story. Their case illustrates that the option to take steps, like trying new pronouns, that might clarify gender identity is an important component of the expansive gender-identity discourse.
Loria, a 20s, white, college-educated trans woman, interviewed in 2016, in the Northeast, who came into her identity in the 2010s, experimented with identity labels to “figure out” her identity: [It] was the first time that I ever said to myself . . . “Maybe you’re not cisgender.” And it took me a while to figure out exactly what that meant . . . [At first], I identified as gender-fluid in the sense that . . . Maybe I’m a man sometimes, and I’m a woman some other times, and maybe I’m neither. Or maybe I’m some combination of both. And there was a lot of trying on those identities to see what felt right over a period of maybe three or four months, just before I decided that . . . I feel like a trans woman.
Like Vanessa, Loria understood that she could “try on” identities “to see what felt right”—applying the expansive gender-identity discourse to her situation. Saying she “decided,” Loria exercised agency in coming into her identity.
Lance, a 20s, high school–educated, white, genderqueer, gender-fluid, bear, cub, femme, trans guy/boy, in the West, interviewed in 2011, who came into his identity in the 2000s, experimented with gender expression as part of his coming-into-identity process. He shared, When I first came to [college] I . . . was presenting more masculine . . . And then I sort of had a gender crisis (laughs) a few months in. I was like, but I want to wear dresses and I want to paint my nails . . . And I started by doing drag and presenting in a feminine way . . . I’ve been able to reclaim femme and have that be a part of my boy identity.
Aware of the option to explore gender by experimenting with adornment and performance, Lance applied the expansive gender-identity discourse to his life. Lance understood his gender-expression experimentation as both gender-fluid identity expression and a femme coming-into-identity process.
Thus, experimentation, which the expansive gender-identity discourse facilitated, enabled identity realizations. Unlike trying out pronouns, labels, or names, clothing experimentation was not necessarily an attempt to figure out identity. Participants who were AMAB, identified beyond binary categories, identified with multiple racial categories or white, or lived in the Northeast were more likely than their respective counterparts to talk about gender experimentation. That AMAB participants were more likely to see gender experimentation as key to their coming-into-identity experience might be attributed to how masculinity expressed by AFAB people is often more socially acceptable than femininity expressed by AMAB people.
Talking about “trying on,” “playing with,” and “figuring out” gender, participants deployed a gender-experimentation discourse in their self-stories. Having access to the gender experimentation discourse enabled individuals to understand, conceptualize, and articulate their experiences of identity as processual, to experience identity shifts, and to see identities as fluid. This gender-experimentation discourse is an important component of the expansive gender-identity discourse.
Emotionally Difficult Experiences
More than a third of participants (37 percent) came into their identities via reflecting on themselves after an emotionally difficult period or event. By working through their difficult experiences, participants experienced shifts in both self-awareness and well-being. A comparison of people who came into their identities between the 1990s and 2010s shows that difficult experiences leading to identity realizations increased over time. In addition, emotionally difficult experiences were more often key to coming into identity for participants who were AMAB, white, in their 20s or 60s, college-educated, or in the South than they were for their respective counterparts. Cisnormative gender expectations might have led AMAB people to question their gender identities when they felt feelings not culturally considered masculine.
Depression was the most common emotional struggle that led to coming into identity. For example, Andre, a 60s, college-educated, Black trans man in the South, interviewed in 2020, who came into his identity in the 2010s, shared, I’m in a relationship . . . and I was miserable. . . . my depression and my anger was through the roof . . . after she left, I got into this really spiraled depression . . . [partly] because I didn’t know who I was. I started going to therapy and . . . nothing was getting better. And then one night . . . I pulled out a journal and started writing. I called my therapist the next morning. I said, “I know it’s not an appointment, but can I just drop this journal off at the desk and you take a look at it?” And in that journal, it said, “I’m not sure what gender I’m supposed to be.” And so, we took it from there.
Andre’s coming-into-identity experience began with depression, which progressed to despair and then, through self-reflection, to a moment of self-awareness. His awareness of the option to identify differently from his assigned gender reflects the expansive gender-identity discourse’s impact.
In most cases where participants moved from depression to realization, processing the depression facilitated a new understanding of their gendered sense of self. They frequently portrayed this as an inchoate process—their descriptions of which were often vague—through which the depression eventually lifted, shifting individuals into self-awareness about new gender possibilities and, usually, relative ease and contentment. Participants who were in their 20s or who came into their identities in the 2010s were the most likely to talk about coming into their identities through a period of depression.
Midlife reckoning experiences also led to identity realizations. A traumatic event prompted self-reflection in half of participants who experienced midlife reckoning. For example, Zelda, a 60s, white, gender-fluid trans person in the Northeast, with a graduate degree, interviewed in 2016, who came into her identity in the 2000s, recalled, In [one year] I went blind in one eye and my mother died. So, I had two big traumas all at the same time. And I said, my life is not working as it is right now . . . I’m 58. I’m not going to get younger. It’s only behind me. So, if I’m going to be happy the rest of my life, I have to decide what’s going to make me happy.
Reflecting on her life and making a decision about her gender after two traumatic events, Zelda demonstrated an awareness that her gender could change and exercised agency—mobilizing the expansive gender-identity discourse.
With or without trauma, midlife reckoning involved realizing that an unsatisfactory aspect of one’s life was about gender. Decisions to initiate gender changes typically were made with a desire for happiness and an awareness that time was limited, which spurred the decision. Most participants who experienced midlife reckoning were AMAB or white, and, of course, older.
Reflecting on marginalizing experiences led a small minority of participants to come into their gender identities. Refusals to recognize self-determined gender identities (i.e., cisnormative gender enforcement) were the most common, sometimes co-occurring with anti-gay sentiments. Jack, a 20s, high school–educated, Black, nonbinary transmasculine person in the Southwest, interviewed in 2016, who previously identified as gender nonconforming and came into their identity in the 2010s, decided to claim the trans label after a series of microaggressions at work. At the school where Jack worked, faculty photographs were displayed on the wall. For unclear reasons, staff removed the photograph of Jack that accurately represented his gender identity and replaced it with an older photo that did not: They took my faculty . . . picture and they replaced it with my old one . . . so I [asked the principal] . . . can I remove that picture? . . . So, they took the picture down . . . I went in the next day . . . and that picture was back up . . . they put my new picture next to it, and so it was like, a “before and after.” And that was my first time really experiencing transphobia . . . I [told myself] . . . you’re trans, and you’re going to own this shit for the rest of your life.
In addition to the nonverbal, direct identity negations that exposed Jack’s history, his boss also verbally negated his identity. He recognized these negations as common ways trans people are marginalized in a cisnormative society. Making this connection led Jack to claim a trans identity. He recalled, “on that day I decided that I’m going to own it, because those are my experiences.” Jack knew that gender identity can change and that he could claim a new identification—a key component of the expansive gender-identity discourse. His decision to claim transness due to his social experiences suggests that for Jack, being treated as trans is a key part of what it means to be trans. Most individuals who came into their identities through reflecting on marginalizing experiences were AFAB.
Conversations with Others
Talking with others about one’s gender identity played a key role in more than a quarter (27 percent) of participants’ coming-into-identity experiences. More than a third of these participants talked to a therapist; fewer participants talked to friends, family members, or new acquaintances. For example, Tomás, a 20s, high school–educated, Latinx and Indigenous transgender male in the Southwest, interviewed in 2020, who came into his identity in the 2010s, shared, I finally was able to get enough therapy, get enough help, learn about myself by being in therapy. I actually hospitalized myself so I could get all the noise out of my head and figure out what I want and who I am and where I want to go . . . and so I realized . . . I’ve been living my life a lie as this person . . . so I started my transition.
Tomás knew that gender could change and that he had agency to “figure out” his gender identity. Deploying these elements of the expansive gender-identity discourse, Tomás sought therapy to assist in his coming-into-identity process.
In comparison, Serena, a 20s, college-educated, Latinx female in the Southwest, interviewed in 2020, who came into her identity in the 2010s, had a more serendipitous experience, coming into identity via conversations with a peer. She recalled, What got the ball rolling maybe was I had a classmate . . . and it just came up casually in conversation that her dad was actually transgender . . . and so I just started asking her all these questions . . . And then she sort of helped me through sorting through some of the turmoil that was going on in my head and basically told me just to look within myself and not worry about what other people would think if I made a certain decision. And . . . somewhere around that week maybe is when I went home and I told myself, definitely, yeah, that’s who you are.
With the support of her classmate, who nonjudgmentally encouraged her to reflect on herself—applying the expansive gender-identity discursive elements of agency and gender change potential—Serena came into her identity.
Like Serena, Ray, a 20s, high school–educated, Latinx, agender, and gender-nonconforming person in the Northeast, interviewed in 2016, came into their identity in the 2010s via an unexpected conversation. Ray had previously identified as gender fluid, genderqueer, and pangender. They realized while talking with an acquaintance about the distinction between gender and sex that they could apply ideas of social construction to themselves, concluding that they didn’t have a gender: Within this conversation I realized that . . . I don’t have to identify with any sort of gender, because gender, we created it. . . . the idea, what it means to us and if it matters or not . . . I decided I don’t even want to belong to this idea that gender matters . . . it was in this conversation that I realized I just don’t have a gender.
Ray’s interpretation of expansive gender-identity discourse involved applying queer deconstruction literally to themself and claiming an anti-identity gender-identity label. Ray’s case unmistakably illustrates agency to change—further, to absolve oneself of—gender identity.
White participants were more likely than Black, Indigenous, and People of Color participants to talk to friends, and people who identified with multiple racial categories were the most likely to talk to therapists, which suggests that support from established friends might be more accessible to white people. Talking to therapists or supportive new acquaintances about their gender identities rather than people they knew might have felt more comfortable to participants. Therapists and new acquaintances were probably less invested in particular outcomes, so the stakes—and risk of rejection—were likely lower than with familiars.
Coming into identity through talking with others has increased over the last three decades, shifting from 14 percent among people who came into their identities in the 1990s to 22 percent among those who did in the 2000s and then to 39 percent among those who did in the 2010s. Participants who were AMAB, high school–educated, Latinx, or identified with multiple racial categories were most likely to talk to others about their gender identities as they figured them out. Conversation partners demonstrated familiarity with the expansive gender-identity discourse, lending further support to the idea that increasing access to this discourse has facilitated gender minorities’ coming-into-identity experiences.
Persistence and Change in the Innate-Essence Identity Model
The data indicate that the innate-essence identity model has contracted over time. Three components illustrate the shifts. Overall, claims to childhood gender difference, claims to have “always been this way,” and the use of “wrong body” discourse to describe oneself have diminished. Whereas all or almost all participants who came into their identities in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s experienced childhood gender difference, just over half of those who did in the 2000s and 2010s did. In addition, the portion of participants who described themselves with “wrong body” discourse decreased from 20 to 25 percent among those who came into identities in the 1970s and 1980s to 6 percent among those who did in the 2000s and 2010s. Most participants who came into their identities in the 1970s and 1980s claimed to have “always been this way” while fewer than half of those who came into identities in the 1990s and 2010s did; less than one-fourth of those who came into identities in the 2000s did.
Participants who used innate identity rhetoric often also explained how they came into their identities. For example, Vanessa used “always been this way” language while describing how therapy facilitated their identity realization: I found a really good therapist. And she did what the one therapist when I was 14 did and encouraged me to be who I felt I was. And once I figured that out, I’m like, okay, this has always been me, and I’ve been fighting it all these years.
This statement illustrates the persistence of the innate-essence identity model in a coming-into-identity story. As most participants described coming-into-identity experiences, most self-stories reflecting the innate-essence identity model also reflect the expansive gender-identity discourse. This pattern indicates that although the innate-essence identity model’s prevalence is diminishing, gender minorities continue to simultaneously deploy in their self-stories the contradictory logics of this model and the expansive gender-identity discourse.
Participants who were AMAB, Black, or in the South were most likely to have experienced childhood gender difference. Participants who were AFAB, Black, or in the South were most likely to have claimed that they had “always been this way.” And participants who were AFAB, binary, Black, Asian American, identified with multiple racial categories, in the West, or high school–educated were most likely to use “wrong body” discourse to describe themselves. Vulnerability to multiple oppressions in cisnormative environments and/or unequal access to these narrative elements may play roles in these demographic patterns. The patterns suggest that the expansive gender-identity discourse’s dissemination has unevenly impacted gender minorities’ self-stories.
Conclusion
This article shows how, despite innate identity notions’ persistence, most gender minorities experience an identity change process. Coming into identity via self-reflection, exposure to ideas and models, gender experimentation, difficult experiences, and/or conversations transcends both cisnormative gender enforcement and a transnormative narrative. Rather, identity is a process that involves understanding oneself in social and epistemic context, through interaction with others. The data also demonstrate that coming into identity is a racialized process. My research suggests that, although it is uneven, access to the expansive gender-identity discourse has expanded options for people to consider themselves gender diverse and to conceptualize, experience, and describe a coming-into-identity process. Reimagining gender—as changeable—has changed how individuals see, define, and live their gendered selves.
Examining how coming into identity is an interactional process supported by epistemic assumptions enables us to consider its political potential. The innate-essence identity model is the basis of the dominant, cisnormative gender frame (Ridgeway 2011) that most social actors employ when “doing” and attributing gender, in social interactions (West and Zimmerman 1987). Assuming that gender is equal to biological sex leads social actors to attend to others’ bodily appearance when determining gender, holding them accountable to gendered expectations and leading to misgendering and other discursive aggressions (Nordmarken 2022; shuster 2017; Westbrook and Schilt 2014). In contrast, gender-minority communities use alternative practices to “do gender” in interaction—verbally communicating gender pronouns and identity labels—mobilizing the expansive gender-identity discourse and honoring self-determined identities (Nordmarken 2019). Although coming into identity may not “undo” gender (Deutsch 2007), it may not necessarily “redo” gender either (West and Zimmerman 2009).
The coming-into-identity process reorganizes the accountability structure of “doing gender.” This reorganized accountability structure privileges the epistemic authority of selves, holding individuals’ self-knowledge above all other ways of knowing gender (Nordmarken 2019). With gender-expansive assumptions that allow them to honor whatever potential identities are forthcoming, conversation partners enable gender minorities to self-define. Gender minorities serving as models demonstrate how to self-define. Individuals experimenting with gender resist expectations to perform gender normatively. Even difficult interactional experiences, such as misgendering, which hold gender minorities accountable to normative gender expectations, also bring them to come into new identities when they self-define despite and against this accountability system. Thus, the reorganized accountability structure facilitates interactional identity formation. Although the traditional “doing gender” process and its epistemic foundations persist, the coming-into-identity process operates simultaneously, as an epistemic challenge that social actors of all genders can participate in. Coming into identity is therefore not an individual process of self-making; it is a fundamentally social process. The interactional plays a key role in bringing people into new selves.
What impacts might coming into identity have? The diversity, complexity, and fluidity that coming-into-identity stories illustrate can challenge innateness assumptions about all social actors’ current and future gender identities; this challenge, if taken seriously, could potentially disrupt the traditional gender accountability process. However, my data show that gendered racial framing persists in gender minorities’ interactions, limiting the potential self-definition freedom that gender accountability disruptions might bring.
In the context of a culturally dominant, cisnormative gender accountability structure, telling coming-into-identity stories is resistance. By telling self-stories about identity change, gender minorities resist the patterned, common tropes and narrative arcs that stock identity stories rely on to reproduce normativities, challenging master story-patterns, and producing alternative story-patterns. Each unique story contributes to an expanding pool of available stories, demonstrating options for how to interpret—and experience—a coming-into-identity process. Although the original, transnormative, master story-pattern stays intact, new patterns are added, expanding narrative resources for individuals to construct selves. In this way, “self-making is a collaborative process extending over time and acting back on culture” (Mason-Schrock 1996, 177). Telling coming-into-identity stories therefore expands gender-identity narrative possibilities. Telling such self-stories also resists pedagogically, by demystifying personal experiences of identity change and helping others to understand gender expansively. Some people find complex identity conceptualizations esoteric, and stories help translate their meaning by grounding them in concrete experience, offering examples of how such lives are lived.
Thus, coming-into-identity experiences are facilitated by and advance an expansive gender-identity discourse. Telling coming-into-identity self-stories chips away at hegemonic gender discourse and builds alternatives, expanding identity options and extending opportunities for more gender-identity possibilities to be imagined, created, embodied, and lived. Telling such stories also expands narrative options—contrasting sharply with assumptions about the deterministic power of structure and arguments against the possibilities of narrative freedom (e.g., Zussman 2012). Although the hegemonic gender system persists, through telling their self-stories, gender minorities push against the foundational ideas that uphold this system, exercising agency and expanding gender possibilities.
This research has implications for academic understandings of gender and future research. As discussed, many scholars still work from cisnormative or transnormative perspectives, staying within the parameters of the innate-essence identity model. Gender minorities’ coming-into-identity stories demonstrate ways to define gender beyond this model. Following their lead in conceptualizing gender identity more expansively is necessary to produce more accurate social scientific understandings of gender diversity. Unhinging ourselves from the innate-essence identity model will enable scholars to push forward the edge of gender theory further and in new, expanding directions.
Footnotes
Author’s note:
I thank Millie Thayer, Robert Zussman, Joya Misra, and Miliann Kang for their helpful feedback on my preliminary analysis of the data for this article; stef shuster, Katie Acosta, Ashley Currier, Doug Mason-Schrock, and Jack Gieseking for their insightful comments on previous drafts; the editor and reviewers for their helpful guidance; Georgiann Davis and June Bloch for their support; and a special thanks to Jack Gieseking for the encouragement to write the paper. This research was funded by the Department of Sociology, the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, and the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Department of Sociology and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston.
Sonny Nordmarken is an assistant professor at Georgia State University. His research explores inequalities and resistance in the lives of gender minorities.