UC Irvine

Based on three waves of longitudinal survey data and fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with trans/KuaXingBie individuals in a cosmopolitan city that I call Shanghua in China, this interdisciplinary and multi-method dissertation sheds light on our fundamental understandings of gendered and sexed inequities and their implications for mental health, identity formation, politics of “differences,” and our mutual connections in the world. Part I, consisting of Chapters 1 and 2, used quantitative survey data to test, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, the gender minority stress model as well as how various kinds of support system (i.e., parental, friend, and community) would be platforms of resilience for trans/KuaXingBie individuals. These two chapters emphasized how interpersonal connections, particularly parental support for young adults’ gender identity, may be a platform of resilience for transgender individuals in the face of gender-related discrimination and gender minority stress. Part II, consisting of Chapters 3 & 4, drew on ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate the sociohistorical processes of gendering and trans-national geopolitics in making trans identity and vulnerabilities. These two chapters laid bare the roles of broader sociopolitical processes in shaping trans identities and lives. Taken together, this dissertation suggests that trans justice and liberation are inseparable from taking seriously relations across interpersonal, national, and trans-national levels and the rethinking of our assumptions about gender and “differences.”