Congress Paper Abstract

Circling the margins of identity: controversies in the Sydney transgender community

Lee Anderson Brown, Doctoral Student, Dept of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia 

Email: leeb@student.unsw.edu.au

In recent years the spaces opened up in the politics of identity by the queer debate have allowed a range of people from the margins of human sexuality to express their difference in new and eloquent languages. On the surface it would seem that one of the major groups who have benefited from this process have been transgendered people. For example the development of queer commentary has enabled transgendered people to organize a challenge to the medical and psycho-sexual pathologies which developed to contain them. In New South Wales the success of this strategy led to the legal recognition of transgendered people for purposes of Anti-discrimination legislation and, for post-op transsexuals, ability to legally change their birth certificates.

Unfortunately the queered, post-modern discourse, with its challenge to stable identity formations, put forward by those most active in this campaign alienated many of those who would directly benefit from these legislative changes. This caused a rather bitter debate to occur with in the Sydney community. In this paper I will discuss the reasons for the controversy within the transgender community and use them to explore some of the problems of post-modern perspectives on identity.

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