Thursday, July 14, 2016 at 12:30 p.m.
Room 203, Graduate Student Centre (6371 Crescent Road), UBC Point Grey Campus
Supervisor: Dr. Marla Buchanan
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Marv Westwood and Dr. Melady Preece (Medicine)
University Examiners: Dr. William Borgen and Dr. George Belliveau (LLED)
External Examiner: Dr. Kevin Alderson (University of Calgary)
Title: XWHY: Stories of Non-Binary Gender Identities
ABSTRACT
This research project explored the narratives of people who identify as having a non-binary gender identity. This is an important study, filling a gap in current psychology and health literature, because it expands the conversation on transgender and transsexual populations to include people who identify their gender outside of the binary of female and male. Eight people participated in open-ended interviews telling the story of their gender identity. The Collaborative Narrative Method (Arvay, 2003) was used in this research, chosen specifically because of its focus on keeping participant voices intact. This in-depth method involved unstructured interviews and collaborative thematic readings of interview transcripts by participants and researchers to identify common experiences shared by people belonging to this population. Some of the major themes explored are threats to welfare, compulsory conformity, coming out as trans/genderqueer/non-binary, gender performance, the sexed body, gender affirming procedures (surgery/hormones), community support and intersectional identities.