Transgressing Criminology and Victimology

Even though the lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in trans populations is around 50 percent (Messinger and Guadalupe-Diaz 2020), there is an alarming absence of trans-specific and trans-inclusive research and interventions to address IPV. For sociologist Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz, this absence raises two important questions: 1) Under what conditions are trans people's experiences of IPV erased? and 2) To what extent does intimate partner violence produce “genderist” systems? Answering these questions first requires a historical tracing of social scientific understandings of IPV, which stem from 1970s feminist activism and scholarship that understood gender in binary-essentialist terms. This work resulted in legal and institutional adoption of cis- and heteronormative approaches to domestic violence work (as it was called at the time) that continue to center white cisgender women in discourses on the gendered nature of violence in romantic relationships. Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives invites us to examine the ways that systems of power foster IPV while also examining the ways that IPV replicates and reinforces systems of power, namely, genderism.Transgressed is a sociological study that uses a modified grounded theory framework to expand our knowledge of the relationship between interpersonal violence and structural, institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal genderism. The text begins from the assumption that little scholarship in trans studies has focused on IPV and little criminological scholarship has focused on trans survivors. Transgressed is based on data from thirteen personal interviews and five online free-write questionnaires with eighteen trans survivors of IPV. This study contributes to our knowledge about trans survivors of IPV by providing empirical evidence for existing claims made by activists and scholars, most notably that genderist social and legal structures erase trans people from social institutions meant to reduce the incidence of IPV. Contemporary interventions within health care, in schools, on college campuses, and in the workplace thus often only account for cis people, leaving behind fertile grounds for intimate abusers to disproportionately harm trans people.Throughout the book, Transgressed includes vivid descriptions of abuse by contextualizing survivors' experiences in terms of genderist systems that assume that only cisgender men are perpetrators of abuse and only cisgender women are victims of abuse. Guadalupe-Diaz frames individual stories within broader genderist systems to paint a picture of the ways that understandings of trans IPV both converge with and diverge from patterns of violence represented in mainstream victimology. Abuser attacks reflect genderist systems in that they “regulate the boundaries of appropriateness as defined by a genderist culture and the abuser” (77), while “positive attacks” reinforce “a limited conception of the victim's gender expression” through positive reactions to gender conformity (77). Transphobic attacks, on the other hand, are aimed at trans survivors' trans identities by “belittling bodies, making victims feel that the abuser was doing them a favor in staying, stereotyping and misunderstanding their transition processes, or threatening to ‘out’ them” (79). In effect, these attacks work only in societies and cultures where trans identities are institutionally antagonized, including through cultural scripts, lack of legal protections, and unequal access to health care.In his richest chapter, Guadalupe-Diaz moves beyond documenting abuse and toward participants' understandings of their experiences. Most participants “saw many of their experiences with abuse as attempts by abusers to control [gender] transition and define them on the abusers' own terms” (87). That is, abusers manipulate and limit survivors' ongoing gender embodiments and imaginaries, fostering a dynamic and mutually constitutive disempowerment loop. This inter- and intrapersonal entrapment leads us to ask not only when this loop is maintained, but also how it is broken. When describing victim identities in the help-seeking process, participants appropriated the notion that victims were “submissive, traditionally feminine, and . . . did not fight back” (121). Paired with their abusers' genderist and transphobic attacks, as well as awareness that resources such as police and shelters often benefit only cis people, participants struggled to see themselves as victims able to access formal resources. While some did access formal resources, queer kinship structures, informal resources, and fighting back more often fostered avenues for trans IPV victims to move toward survivorship.Although topics like immigration are alluded to in the text, intersectional factors (e.g., ableism, classism, racism) do not receive the attention I crave. Guadalupe-Diaz correctly avers that failure to adopt intersectional frameworks results in goals that remedy individual problems but “merge with the neoliberal state” (49). Transgressed at times centers some narratives of multiply marginalized participants, yet the extent to which gendered understandings of IPV otherize multiply marginalized people goes unremarked. For instance, how are gendered understandings of IPV artifacts of class privilege that collude with structures of class domination? Limitations notwithstanding, Guadalupe-Diaz has crafted an engaging and valuable study that synthesizes, contextualizes, and elevates the voices of privileged trans populations who have sustained violence from intimate partners. This study would fare well for courses in criminology and victimology, gender studies, and social science approaches to trans studies. Transgressed invites us all to examine and challenge genderist systems that facilitate IPV.