Digging beneath the Surface: When Disability Meets Gender Identity

Abstract

This article presents the results of a community-based participatory action-research conducted in the province of Quebec with 54 trans youth (15-25 years old). It describes the difficult reality faced by youth who are both trans and disabled and who live at the intersection of cisgenderism (or transphobia) and ableism. The research project, which uses the grounded theory methodology, was conducted in two phases of data collection between 2016 and 2019. In total, 39 of the 54 youth interviewed in person (72.2%) self-identified as disabled. This article therefore focuses on the experience of these young people. We begin this paper with a review of the literature on the theme of “transness and disability.” Then we present the core concepts in our research, including intersectionality, as well as the methodological framework that guided the project, grounded theory. In the following section, we present and discuss the research findings. After showing that, for trans youth, disability has implications at all levels in their lived experience and cannot be separated from their trans identity, we explore the intersections between transness and disability in the lives of trans youth through two main axes. We demonstrate how, on the one hand, impairments and ableism sometimes become obstacles to the realization of gender identity, and how, on the other hand, gender identity and cisgenderism can sometimes become disabling.