Transforming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity, Intimacy, and Care (review)

Well balanced and refreshingly sensible, Transforming Gender is a critical and insightful book. It aims to “contribute to the development of a sociology of transgender” (6) and avoids privileging unitary perspectives on trans-issues. To emphasize the diffuse everyday realities of trans-subjectivity, Sally Hines casts empirical research findings alongside recent social and cultural trans-theories to explore how broad understandings of trans-phenomena can be further developed. Hines’s further aim is to privilege a sharper focus on issues such as intimacy, identity, parenting, partnership, friendship, and citizenship.

Transforming Gender discusses a range of gender identities and experiences that Hines locates under the umbrella term “transgender.” This term is used throughout the book to broadly signify “practices and identities such as transvestism, transsexuality, intersex, gender queer, female and male drag, cross-dressing and some butch/femme practices” (1).

The empirical material is U.K. focused, although a range of contemporary Western perspectives (for example, Butler, Feinberg, Halberstam, Foucault, Grosz, Walby, Bourdieu) informs the theoretical basis of the book. Non-U.K. and non-Western perspectives would, as Hines notes, produce different findings. These are not explored, and the book is very clearly defined in terms of Hines’s own exclusive research, although she does gesture toward some perspectives of identity and community that are non-Western, non-nuclear, and postcolonial (191).

Transforming Gender is not writerly in style. It is, however, lucid and evaluative, covering the quotidian, and the contentious, issues of (U.K.) lived trans-experiences with well-informed and nuanced understandings of politics and power relations around (for example) the “right”/“wrong” body, passing, medical discourse, sexuality, and increasing interest (public and academic) in trans-phenomena.

Transforming Gender informs us of the necessity to keep in sight the everyday realities of transgender life as they complicate, in myriad ways, subjective experience and power relations. It also tackles the “location” of different theories, some of which have, in Hines’s view, given unsatisfactory accounts of trans-phenomena. This necessary critique begins in Chapter 1, where Hines provides a succinctly argued overview of some social/cultural/discursive analyses. Medical discourse, ethnomethodology, lesbian and gay studies, radical feminism, and pluralist feminism are critiqued for producing restricted or biased theories of trans-phenomena.

Hines also provides grist for the theoretical mill through her provocations to queer and poststructural theories that “lack attention to subjectivity, [which] is problematic for a social theorising of transgender” (5). Hines claims that queer sociology is well suited to the task of bridging the gaps between social, cultural, and poststructuralist theories of identity, which have through their paradigmatic intractabilities insufficiently analyzed the diversity of trans-people’s experiences (8). Certainly, Hines adds to the conversations about the efficacy of queer, feminist, gay and lesbian, sociological, or cultural theories to render wide-ranging and relevant accounts of trans-phenomena, especially in relation to subjective experience.

However, Hines’s analysis of disparate theories (beyond which queer sociology is employed as the remedy for ungrounded or nonmaterialist perspectives) is contentious. Hines’s theoretical analysis could be further extended precisely because it is the foundation from which her empirical studies are framed and on which much of the book rests.

As it has become commonplace to read of “the developing field of interdisciplinary transgender studies” (5) I found myself wanting to know more about Hines’s assertion that the “intersections of transgender studies and queer studies offer a theoretical space in which to conceptualise a queer sociological approach to transgender” (185). Queer sociology—which is also developing—goes largely unquestioned.

One minor drawback of Transforming Gender is its rather dry style: it tends to read as a condensed doctoral thesis. As a book reader, one too easily feels the “legacy” of an overly careful explanation of methodology and argument structure. Although Hines directs the reader to a discussion of methodology in the appendix, one is still very aware of the methodology’s place within the main text. Nevertheless, if the reader does not mind the book...