Henderson2025
| Henderson2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Henderson2025 |
| Author(s) | Elle Henderson, Emma Tennent |
| Title | Sex, Gender, and Bodies: Transmisogyny and Garfinkel's Status Degradation Ceremony |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, In press, Transphobia, Transmisogyny, Social interaction, Conversation analysis, Membership categorization analysis, Natural attitude |
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| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Symbolic Interaction |
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| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1002/symb.1231 |
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Abstract
Hatred and fear of trans people, particularly trans women, are worldwide social phenomena. Transphobic rhetoric rests on essentialist understandings of sex and gender, but ethnomethodology shows how the “natural attitude” to sex/gender is a practical accomplishment. We use conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to examine the workings of the natural attitude in a public submission to a government select committee about a law that would affect transgender people. We adapt Garfinkel's concept of the status degradation ceremony to show how the submission systematically used categories of sex and gender to present trans women as illegitimate and dangerous in women's spaces. We also show how the submission was recognized as transmisogynistic and challenged by government ministers of the select committee. We thus show how people can accomplish and challenge transmisogyny through common-sense knowledge about sex and gender.
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