The case study focuses on the CRT tenet of intersectionality at the micro level regarding the issue of homelessness. Informed by the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins on intersectionality, this case highlights how the intersection of multiple oppressed identities compounds the life of a first-generation African American transgender individual. Sitting at the intersection of their race, gender and cultural upbringing affected how the client navigated homelessness. Using that same tenet, the case demonstrates how the social worker working with the client is able to intervene in a way that centers their various identities. The case posits that by acknowledging the interweaving of different identities such as race and gender, CRT prompts a deeper understanding of the structures of power and discrimination.

This case discusses how the concept of family is a social construct, created and maintained by social norms that inform our individual attitudes, perceptions, and expectations of what a family is or is not. Although there is a strong history of advocacy in the Black queer community, families who identify as more traditional may struggle with acceptance of LGBTQ+ persons. Additionally, systemic racism and homophobia may create barriers to legal protections for individuals and partnerships who sit at that intersection. Being aware of the role of negative social construction on Black individuals’ ability to thrive in society and considering and honoring the roles of persons who are part of one’s chosen family is essential for social work practice. This is especially true in spaces where chosen family are given little to no legal consideration.

The way in which our understanding of and approaches to Bloomsbury have been changed by feminist and gender scholarship is under discussion in this chapter. In the main, however, it addresses the gender politics of Bloomsbury itself primarily through how Bloomsbury artists engaged with feminism and gender in their creative endeavors and in their personal relationships, and how their gender politics accorded with or diverged from what was happening in the broader public sphere in terms of social movements such as suffrage, and cultural institutions such as marriage. The chapter discusses Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster, among others. Far from seeking to present a coherent position among the group, this chapter teases out the contradictory and shifting views of various members. It ends by considering the group’s legacy in terms of whether and how Bloomsbury contributed, artistically and politically, to the reorientation of gender in its day, and ours.

This chapter introduces trans studies to Michael Field, and Michael Field to trans studies. It sketches out a range of critical approaches to Victorian trans studies and considers how Michael Field’s life and work enrich and complicate this emerging field. It introduces Mo Moulton’s ‘non-binary methodology’ as a framework to consider Michael Field’s many gendered selves, for instance, Edith Cooper as ‘Henry Boy’ in their diaries and correspondence. The chapter then turns to the transgender phenomena that proliferate Michael Field’s published work, using three case studies: Tiresias’ transfeminine power in Long Ago (1889), the condemnation of cross-dressing in The Race of Leaves (1901), and the artistry of transition in The World at Auction (1898).

Chapter 47 covers the topic of gender dysphoria. Through a case vignette with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the management of patients with gender dysphoria from first presentation to subsequent complications of the conditions and its treatment. Topics covered include diagnosis, differentials, course, co-morbidities, management with hormonal treatment, sex-reassignment surgery.

Readers have very credibly seen their most innovative concepts about gender reflected in James Joyce’s works. Joyce presented gender as it affects our attempts to live collectively and on shared terms, suggesting that gender flexibility is crucial to understanding human community, the polis, and thus the political. He explored gender as a physical experience, a socially intersectional construction, a performative speech act, and a phenomenological gesture while consistently challenging the stability of gender difference. Joyce’s famously ambiguous prose remains the creative strength of his oeuvre, which may put political and social wrongs to right by witnessing to a long history of gender-based violence, but equally may perpetuate old ideals in the service of strange comedy. His texts place responsibility on the reader to make meaning and justice in the world, while his words also provide readers with more fluid possibilities to counter the old inequities of the sex/gender system.

In this chapter we ask if people have rights to their social identities – in particular, their gender identities. We cash out what such gender identity rights entail by discussing the appropriate level of constitutional scrutiny to apply to laws that target transgender people.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

Marriage equality was a significant achievement, one that yielded both practical and symbolic benefits for hundreds of thousands of queer households. At the same time, marriage equality is not the same as full equality. In the years since the Obergefell decision, LGBTQ rights advocates have continued to fight difficult and demoralizing battles against harmful laws and policies, which have increasingly targeted transgender rights. However, the movement’s past successes should offer hope for the future. The history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy reveals that small victories at the state and local level, brought about by working with nonlegal actors, can transform both the law and society. Although advocates have not yet achieved gay liberation’s visions of the future, they have attained meaningful reforms. The movement’s history thus offers a crucial reminder that the law can change society for the better.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.