In her blog piece, Violet Fox calls on sociologists to dig deeper into questions regarding the economic life of gender diverse people. She argues that the expansion of trans studies should be a welcome development to all social science scholars as it is clear that this population is here to stay and can contribute complex and creative insights to long taken-for-granted socioeconomic systems.

The emergence of “trans studies” as a discreet academic discipline is relatively recent but it has been increasingly taken up by sociologists as a subfield. Not unlike women and gender studies more broadly, it seems that it will remain an interdisciplinary field led primarily by social scientists and humanities scholars with feminist commitments. Concerning trans and gender diverse economic subjecthood specifically, sociologists versed in inequalities, family, LGBT+ and race scholarship are well placed to enrich academic inquiry into the topic and expand existing connections with other marginal and financially precarious communities such as the homeless, previously or currently incarcerated, elderly, dis/abled, sex workers and more. Since many of our societal structures are built around the sex/gender binary, experiences of gender diversity are unique in their ability to teach us about contingencies in inequality as well as showcase creative innovations within and beyond those structures. Despite this, there has been little sociological attention paid to the economic lives of gender diverse people. It my hope that this blog can assist in generating some curiosity on the subject and direct interested readers toward some helpful resources.

For context, in 2018, the United Kingdom’s Government Equalities Office published data from one of the largest recorded LGBT surveys in Europe, consisting of approximately 108,000 responses which detailed the lives and experiences of LGBT+ people. According to the report, transgender and non-binary people experienced a significantly lowered quality of life, due at least in part to facing more threats to their safety, health, wellbeing and employment than their cis-gendered LGB+ counterparts. Only about half of the trans and non-binary respondents had paid employment in the year previous. A Stonewall report from the same year found that some 25% of trans people had experienced homelessness. Unfortunately, as is typically the case, experiences of harassment, discrimination and poverty were even more pronounced for respondents with multiple marginal identities (race, class, immigration status, disability, etc.). And still- despite 4.5 million pounds being allocated by the government toward remediating the issues described in the survey back in 2018- trans people have continued to experience detrimental economic, social, and medical marginalisation in the UK. As recently as last year, researchers for the British Medical Journal found that there is a concerning correlation between trans and non-binary patients seeking medical care from the National Health Service and living in “deprivation”.

Professor Lee Badgett of the University of Massachusetts has emerged as a champion of this subfield and has recently co-written an article on LGBT Economics that maps the terrain of LGBT socioeconomic trends in America. In their conclusion, the authors concede that there is still little understood about the economic outcomes of transgender people- let alone those who identify as non-binary or otherwise- and they gesture toward the development of greater quantitative measures for capturing this information. However, generating data on trans and genderqueer economic subjecthood necessarily must be an interdisciplinary endeavour. Demographers and economists must be joined by gender studies scholars, sociologists and anthropologists if there is to be any substantial growth in our understanding.

Why is that? To start with, much of what is researched and taken for granted about economic behaviour (particularly when it comes to families) is rooted firmly in the binary sex/gender system, and much of the research under the moniker “LGBT” is actually severely lacking in “T” participants. While this can be partially attributed to the relative rarity of transgender adults (somewhere around %1 of the total population in the UK) there is certainly greater access since the advent of social media, internet chat rooms, and countless other digital spaces. There are times when trans and gender diverse experiences can and should be folded into larger analyses of ‘LGBT’ community affairs due to the many intersections and relationships between gendered and sexual identities, but care should be taken not to fully eclipse the distinctiveness of gender diversity as a central point of analysis while researching socioeconomics- else it will be forever relegated to a sentence or two in the conclusion section.

For an idea of the kinds of specificities I am gesturing towards, I offer the following questions: How do households with one or more trans adults allocate and perform domestic labour, child rearing responsibilities and household finances? How are these behaviors informed by their sex/gender-assigned-at-birth and to what extent are they challenged as adults? How about the decision-making process for deciding whether to pursue private or public transition healthcare and how the timing and cost of ‘transitioning’ is reconciled with other financial responsibilities relating to one’s career, family and housing? Or perhaps these mainstream socioeconomic milestones are disrupted by trans and gender diverse people and take on new form and meaning. How do ‘chosen families’ organise to support one another and handle economic decision-making? Are there efforts to establish generational wealth in queer kinship circles and what is the role of practices like inheritance in this?

To conclude, the expansion of trans studies should be a welcome development to all social science scholars as it is clear that this population is here to stay and can contribute complex and creative insights to long taken-for-granted socioeconomic systems. It is only fitting that sociologists, who have historically generated foundational sex and gender scholarship, should continue to chart the burgeoning new territories of our social landscape and its shifting matrix of power.

More resources to dig deeper:

• For sociologists who are looking to expand their teachings or knowledge on trans topics, I recommend the Sociologists for Trans Justice syllabus.
• For UK-based scholars, there is the Feminists for Gender Equality Network which will be holding events throughout this year and next. For those with a leaning toward “public sociology”, the Consortium for LGBT+ is a network made up of over 600 LGBT+ community organisations and charities in the UK – many of which are open to working with researchers who are committed to ethical collaborations between academics and community partners.
• And for those readers who may already be pursuing research on gender identity, the 2nd International Trans Studies Conference took place this September at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, USA and certainly made for some impactful conversations and networking opportunities.

Note: In regard to language used in this blog, I use “trans” and/or “gender diverse” to include people who may or may not identify explicitly as “trans” but who do live gendered lives other than their sex/gender-assigned-at-birth. I ask the reader to consider “trans” as a political term that describes a group of people facing similar kinds of gender identity-based oppression- as is formulated by Julia Serano in her landmark publication Whipping Girl (2009). For a more thorough analysis of this use of language, I recommend Helena Darwin’s Challenging the Cisgender/Transgender Binary: Nonbinary People and the Transgender Label (2020).

Image credit: Annie Spratt

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.