Enacting bodywear : a glimpse into the bodywear praxes of transitioning

Enacting Bodywear

A Glimpse into the Bodywear Praxes of Transitioning

Silke Boertien

Master´s programme: Sociology: Gender, Sexuality and Society

University: Graduate School of Social Science – University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Sarah Bracke

Second Reader: Margriet van Heesch

Student, Student ID: Silke Boertien, 10449256 E-Mail: Silke.Boertien@hotmail.com

Date, Place: 15th August 2019, Amsterdam Word Count: 25.706

Abstract

This thesis explores how bodywear is enacted through praxes such as shopping, wearing clothes and moving through the world clothed and how bodywear affects the process of transitioning and the experience thereof. It is an effort to contribute to the need of making the lives of transgender persons more visible and research their lives empirically. To guide this investigation theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory in particular are used. The data for this thesis was gathered by conducting interviews with eight young adults who identify as transgender, five of their loved ones and three

psychologists. Through their stories an intimate image of the bodywear praxes of transitioning is created. The analysis focuses on how reality is co-produced by wearer, worn and other bodies involved and how this is experienced. The lives and praxes of transgender persons have been often been used to theorize gender. In such theorizations of gender, the lives of actual transgender persons remain eclipsed. This study contributes to the existing literature because it provides an empirical account on the bodywear praxes of transgender persons. It also contributes to the gap that exist between literature on clothed embodiment, which is focused on the lives and bodies of cisgender persons, and literature on transgender embodiment, in which this aspect of embodiment is still under researched.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

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2 Theorizing Bodywear

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Embracing Objects and Ontological Diversity Within Sociology 10

Moving past dualisms 13

The Object Multiple 15

Affects 18

Conclusion 19

3 Making Bodywear Praxes Visible

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Research Design 24

Ethics 27

4 Mapping Bodywear Praxes

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Experimenting with Clothing and Social Transition 36

Changing Bodies, Changing Clothes 46

5 Making Connections and Drawing Conclusions

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgements

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“Our goal is no longer to identify the one coherent explanation or verify and falsify a

system of general claims. It is to appreciate incoherence, to embrace and to explore

multiplicity.”

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Introduction

This thesis is led by the question: ‘How is bodywear enacted, in the process of gender transition? And how does this affect transitioning and the experience thereof’? This might strike as a strange or unusual question to ask, mainly because at first glance it is not clear what is actually asked. Only in a specific framework, a framework in which objects can be “enacted” and objects can “affect” processes and experiences this question makes sense. Therefore, before elaborating on how I’m going to answer this question and why it needs answering, I will first elaborate on how this question came into being. Doing so I will explain what the question means and therefore what this thesis is about.

It is relevant to know that this investigation did not start out with a particular question, let alone this one. It started out with a curiosity more than anything else. Along the line of writing this thesis that curiosity has led me to posing this specific question. Experiencing the process of

transitioning somewhat up close because someone I love is in this process, I started to learn new things about transitioning from one, assigned, gender towards a gender that feels more faithful to oneself and makes being in the world more enjoyable. I now know for example how frustrating waiting can be, and that if someone needs medical assistance for their transition how much of what we call transitioning is not about changes but about waiting. I also learned that when transitioning is talked about, other people are often most curious about changes in appearance. When people ask me about my friend, they often do not ask me about how they are but ask most frequently about how the transition is coming along. Or rather, whether things have changed yet. What I learned that intrigued me most however, is that transitioning is not done alone. Rather, it is something that is done by interconnecting with the world around you. Even though the process can be very personal, and might even be lonely, it is not something that happens in an abstract far away universe separate from this world. It is done in worldly practices: long hours searching the internet; a nervously send text to a parent; going to work with your newly short-cut hair; signatures from psychologists and appointments with doctors. They are all part of it, of changing with which gender you move through this world.

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An acquaintance of mine wrote a beautiful reflection on what makes transitioning a process in one of their columns for “De Groene Amsterdammer”:

“The only thing I found there [in a support group for gender dysphoria] was a deeply rooted unease with the present and the quite simple hope for something better - for change. But one kind of change is easier to enforce than another” (Lakmaker, 2019, in “De Groene Amsterdammer”)

A change in your gendered being in this world needs to be enforced, it takes effort to materialize a desire for change. Before being more up close with the process of transitioning myself, I could not have imagined the practicality of it all. Somehow, because gender is an elusive concept, abstract and open to interpretation and debate, it can be hard to envision how many practical considerations are part of materializing gender transition. Now that I had become a witness of these practicalities, I felt it would be a worthwhile project to try and capture the complexities of the everyday praxis of transitioning and the experience thereof in this thesis. This is where the endeavor of writing this thesis started. If one is to imagine thesis writing in praxis, one needs to be aware that thesis writing is done under supervision and that a lot of the creative process in the beginning takes place in a (not very aesthetically pleasing) lecture room with other students by sharing work and ideas. In such a class I was advised to look into Actor-Network Theory (ANT), because it came to my advisor and classmates that it might be fruitful ground to start an investigation into the complexities of every day transitioning praxis. Through sharing ideas with other students, I accomplished to focus my curiosity of transitioning praxis towards a more specific set of practices, bodywear practices, such as shopping, dressing and moving through the world (un)dressed. This choice, to focus on these praxes specifically, was not made because bodywear praxes of transgender persons1 are overlooked per se. They rather seem to be an object of fascination to many researchers, but studies of dressing practices of people who identify as transgender are rarely thoroughly empirical and as such can not

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This thesis is an inquiry into the lives of people who have started to stop living as their assigned gender, and start living as the gender that feels faithful to them. Therefore, when I use the word transgender, I refer to people with a similar experience. The term transgender is an umbrella term, encompassing a wide range of gender variety. It lumps together a wide variety of people with a diversity of experiences and perspectives on gender (Bornstein, 2016). It is good to remain aware that this thesis therefore will likely not resonate with the experience of people who are also labeled as transgender or identify with transgender, but who are not going trough/have gone through the process this thesis is about.

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illuminate the complexities and surprising specificities of clothing praxes. They are also often focused on understanding gender, rather than understanding the experiences and lives of transgender persons (Namaste, 2000, 2005).

One of the most well-known studies, “the locus classicus of sociological research about transgender people” (Schilt, 2016, p. 1), in which clothing praxes of transgender persons is prominent, is based on observations of Agnes Torres; a transgender woman who was studied by Garfinkle and his colleagues. In this study Garfinkle shows his readers the work Agnes puts into passing, - making sure others perceive her as the one she identifies with. His inquiry is quite exoticizing, he describes Agnes from the position of a fascinated outsider:

“Agnes was typical of a girl of her class and age... There was nothing garish or exhibitionistic in her attire, nor was there any hint of poor taste or that she was ill at ease in her clothing, as is seen so frequently in transvestites and in women with disturbances in sexual identification. Her voice, pitched at an alto level, was soft and her delivery had the occasional lisp similar to that effected by feminine appearing male

homosexuals.” (Garfinkle, 1967, p. 119)

Garfinkle describes Agnes from an expert position and makes an effort to categorize her, using different social sciences concepts such as class and age and comparing her to other “deviants” such as transvestites and homosexuals. Although Agnes’ appearance is a focus of his research, we hardly learn anything about how she connects with the items she constructs her appearance with, or how they make her feel. Garfinkle uses his observations of Agnes to say something more universal about gender, namely that although gender might seem effortless, we maintain it on a daily basis. Because Agnes is outside “normal” gender relations the effort put into maintaining gender suddenly stands out. About this, Raby remarks that there is a certain “sociological fascination with Agnes” and that “the discipline's interest in 'Other' sex and gender configurations [is] an interest that is frequently explored as a way to understand 'normal' gender arrangements in Western society.” (Raby, 2000, p. 19). The idea behind the studies Raby critiques is that they study the “marginal” to understand the “normal”. In her study, “Re-configuring Agnes”, Raby rightly argues that it is vital to be reflexive

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about the ways in which social scientists produce alternative 'Agnes’s' to exemplify their theoretical claims.

The tendency to make use of the notion of appearance producing praxis of transgender persons instead of doing empirical research (into their lives), as critiqued by Raby is also visible in two of the currently most influential theorizations of gender, the theories of “doing gender” by West and Zimmerman (1987) and “gender performativity” by Butler (1988, 1990, 1993, 2004). Both theories make use of theorizing dressing praxes of transgender persons to serve as a foundation for their theorization of gender, even though neither of their theories is rooted in rigorous empirical research of said praxes. In the canonical article “Doing Gender” West and Zimmerman try to formulate an explanation of how the division of society into “men” and “women” is maintained. West and Zimmerman, like Garfinkle, use a symbolic interactionist approach focused on everyday praxis and conclude that gender is something that needs to be actively achieved and maintained through routine performances in everyday social situations in the presence of real (or imaginary) others. They make a clear distinction between sex, gender and sex category and as such try to provide a basis to understand why someone who does “femininity” (the normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for women) through their clothing, make up and demeanor can still be put into the category “man” for instance if this person has a broad jaw and visible Adam’s apple. Although this person does femininity, others will still often perceive this person as a man dressed as a woman. West and Zimmerman base their theory directly on the work of Garfinkle. They re-interpret Agnes instead of researching empirical material that goes beyond Garfinkle’s widely criticized work. As a result, “Doing Gender” has also been criticized for not faithfully capturing the experiences of transgender persons. However, an effort was made by Connell to rethink West and Zimmerman’s work in a way that does resonate with transgender persons. Her work “Doing, Undoing or Redoing Gender” (2010) rethinks “Doing Gender” in a way that does represent the experiences of trans persons. She accomplishes this by conducting an empirical study (interviews with transgender persons about their experiences in their workplace) to investigate how transgender people “do” gender at the workplace. She concludes transgender persons need to actively navigate the disconnect between sex, gender and sex category. They might obscure it, or

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the opposite: actively express in social interactions. For Bettcher (2014), such rethinking of “Doing Gender” will still not serve the transgender community as West and Zimmerman embrace a

biological attitude towards sex. A biological attitude towards sex can never support a trans person’s ontological claim of being a certain gender because it enforces that an unclear and shifting set of biological requirements need to be met. Is having a vagina enough? or does one need the “right” chromosomes? This boundary can always be pushed and prevent trans persons from making a claim to belong to a certain gender category. It also makes medical transition necessary to be able to make such a claim, while not everyone who is transgender desires or is able to change their body. As such, Bettcher makes the valid argument that a biological attitude towards sex obstructs the possibility for transgender persons to self-identify.

In Gender Trouble and the subsequent work Bodies That Matter, Butler presents and develops a theory of gender that rejects this notion of a biological sex; gender performativity. Gender performativity is arguably the most popular and renowned theory on gender in the English-speaking world of academia (and even beyond) at this moment in time. Gender performativity is a theorization of gender that approaches gender not as a performance (like West and Zimmerman do) but rather as something that is entirely performative. To Butler, gender is a stylized repetition of acts; a mere imitation of the dominant conventions of gender. “The act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that's been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Butler, 1988, p. 526). As such Butler’s view on gender is not rooted in a biological sex, because it is not rooted in anything else than itself. Gender is understood as both constantly being produced and constantly producing itself through its enactment. In this view sex is also understood as a social construction. Yet, Butler too uses the notion of transgender persons and their praxes to build her argument without investigating the experiences of transgender persons empirically. As such Butler’s inquiry fails to center the authentic experiences of queer and trans individuals who make this inquiry possible in the first place. Viviane Namaste (2000, 2005) shows why this shortcoming is significant. Namaste argues that due to a lack of empirical interest in the lives of the people upon which the theory of gender performativity is built, the work of Butler, and queer theory in general, exhibit great insensitivity to the substantive issues of transgender people’s everyday lives and

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therefore these works do not serve the trans community well.2 Also the limited sites of inquiry in queer theory ensures that the range of objects which are seen as appropriate for examination is limited, which ensures that the lives, bodies and experiences of transgender persons are eclipsed. Prosser (1998) too, opposes the strictly discursive outlook on transitioning, and argues his work

Second Skins is a necessary response as there is a need for a more embodied theory of “trans”.

Prosser and Namaste show that there is a need for empirical research on transgender lives,

experiences and embodiment, to make the lives of transgender persons visible. Research that has a focus on the actual complexities, specificities and daily lives of transgender persons.

This thesis is an effort to contribute to this need. The bodywear praxes of transgender persons should not just be an object of fascination or tool for the theorization of gender. Especially since everyday experiences of getting dressed per se have been increasingly written about, since Entwistle published her book The Fashioned Body (2000) in which she argued that dressing oneself is a ‘situated bodily practice’ (Back and Findlay, 2016, p. 2). These works, which explore the complexity of human-bodywear relations, unfortunately do not take transgendered persons and their experiences into account. They do show however, how enriching it is to explore embodiment in social sciences not merely “skin deep”. This thesis can therefore enrich the work of Prosser (1998), who investigates the “bodily” - skin deep - embodiment of transgender persons, like the work of Entwistle enriches works such as The Body and Social Theory (Shilling, 2012) which investigate the physical embodiment of cisgender persons.

Even though putting on a bra for the first time can be life changing for someone who struggles with their assigned gender, and receiving clothes from your friends can feel like an assurance of their acceptance when one has just come out. Bodywear praxes and experiences of transgender persons have thus unfortunately not been explored in the same rigorous manner as bodywear praxes and the experiences of cisgender persons. During the writing of this thesis I have learned that “to be able to not have to worry about dresses and such anymore and just be me” (Respondent IV, 2019), was life-saving. Therefore, because clothing plays a huge part in how we experience ourselves and our lives (Black and Findley, 2016), the bodywear praxes of

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For an in-depth discussion on how the lives of transgender persons are specifically misrepresented and erased in Queer Theory and Social science see the works of Namaste (2000, 2005) and Prosser (1998).

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transgendered persons should not be overlooked as an object of study to better understand the lives of transgender persons and make them visible.

My inquiry will be led by insights developed within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and by Actor-Network Theorist (ANT) in particular. Not only because “ANT is very much an ‘empirical theory’, or a theoretical position that is primarily concerned with empirical

questions.” (Buegger and Stockbruegger, 2016, p. 3), which clearly fits the aim of this study, but also because its theoretical inventions offer intriguing and promising new ways to understand objects, reality and “the social”. Such intellectual inventions serve a thesis in which binders, hormones, doctors, friends, nail polish and laws are all involved and interconnecting with each other well. If one is to understand the everyday life experience of shopping, dressing and being in the world dressed, all these actors (both human and non-human) need to be considered and made part of the inquiry. It is in this framework my question has been formulated: “How is bodywear enacted, in the process of transitioning? And how does this affect the process of transitioning and the experience thereof?”. And although the theoretical underpinnings of this question will be elaborated on more extensively in the first chapter, it is important for now to elaborate on it in such an extent that it is clear what is asked. I use the verb “enact” in imitation of Annemarie Mol (2002). Meaning I understand “enacting bodywear” as engaging with bodywear through practices,

understanding such engagement as the production of reality in a certain moment.3 As such my inquiry is an inquiry into how reality is produced (with bodywear), and how the production of this reality affects the process of transitioning and the experience thereof. I use the word “affect” in imitation of Nick J. Fox (2015), and understand it as “changing the state of another body” (p. 306). In other words: how can bodywear change the states of other bodies and as such the process of transitioning and how it is experienced?

I answer these questions with the help of a specific set of people. I interviewed 8 young

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Mol specifically uses the word enact because it is free of the connotations the word “perform” bears with it. Mol argues that the word perform suggest there is a backstage where the “actual reality” is hiding or that something difficult is going on or something needs to be accomplished. It also bears the connotations of performativity, which suggest effects before or beyond the moment itself. Enacting has less academic history and does not instantly bring the same baggage with it as the word performance. It merely suggests that activities are taking place. (Mol, 2002, pp. 32-33)

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adults in the Netherlands between the ages of 20 and 29 who identify as transgender and wanted to talk with me about their experience with exploring gender and making changes in their gendered being in this world. I also interviewed 6 of their loved ones (5 parents and 1 girlfriend) and 3 psychologists; i.e. the humans located in the web of interconnections that make the process

transitioning and spoke with them about transitioning and bodywear praxes. I spoke with them in a rather explorative manner and focused on getting detailed descriptions of moments, situations and as such: practices. It seemed fitting to apply the method of abductive analysis (Timmermans and Tavory, 2009, 2012, 2013); to be explorative and open to surprise and move between my empirical results and literature to look for the best possible connections to be made between my interviews and published scholarly works. It is important to remark that this thesis is by no means an attempt to portray a representative account of “transitioning in the Netherlands”, or even “transitioning in the Netherlands for young white adults”. I further discuss the shared characteristics of the set of people I have interviewed in the methodology section, in order to localize my results and reflect on how my own process of thesis writing praxes has affected my results. What this thesis does do, is provide an account of the lived experiences of 17 respondents, that in conversation with social science literature enables new ways to understand transitioning as a practical, fleshy, clothed, embodied, and object-including praxes. It is therefore an account of the lives and practices of my respondents and shows how they, through praxes, have built their respective realities. The structure of my thesis allows me to illustrate that an investigation of objects, their affects on us and our practices opens up ways to investigate the praxes of transitioning outside efforts to theorize gender. This thesis is structured as follows: In the first chapter, Theorizing Bodywear, I outline my theoretical approach, which is ANT. In this chapter I elaborate on the introduction of objects and ontological diversity into the social sciences, a move past Western dualisms and a rethinking of objects and reality. My theoretical approach draws upon the work of Latour, Haraway and

especially Mol heavily. In the second chapter I discuss my methodology. In this chapter I reflect on 1) how I implement ANT in my methodology, 2) why I have chosen to do interviews, 3) what my research design is, 4) how I have gathered my data, 5) how I have conducted my analysis and 6) my ethical considerations. In the third chapter a elaborate on my findings. The chapter is a thick

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description of what I have gathered from my interviews. It is a patchwork of the stories my respondents have shared with me. In the last chapter I go into possible understandings of my analysis, possible conclusions which can be drawn from it and how this study relates to other sociological work.

Theorizing Bodywear

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the ontology of objects, - what objects are. It provides an innovative perspective on objects and how they can be included and taken seriously in the social sciences. ANT is most frequently associated with four writers, namely; Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, and Annemarie Mol. It is a theory that is often said to be radical, as it questions many great divides that structure Western thinking (Cressman, 2009).

“Truth and falsehood. Large and small. Agency and structure. Human and nonhuman. Before and after. Knowledge and power. Context and content. Materiality and sociality. Activity and passivity…all of these divides have been rubbished in work undertaken in the name of actor-network theory” (Law, 1999, p. 3).

In this chapter I do not embark on the endeavor to define or summarize ANT 'as a whole', as interpretations of ANT are diverse and ANT has spread from sociology of science and technology to sociology, geography, management and organization studies, economics, anthropology, and philosophy (Cressman, 2009). According to Law it is not even useful to approach ANT as a creed or dogma, as it is a “disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis” (2009, p. 141). Therefore, it makes more sense to go into the tools, sensibilities and methods that STS and ANT provide which are useful for my inquiry into bodywear praxes in specific. As such, I will elaborate on the theoretical innovations ANT has brought forth, which have helped me to theorize physical things (bodywear) within sociology, include things of various

ontologies within one framework and which have helped me to study praxis and the production of reality. These theoretical inventions have been most relevant for this research because the

connections between people, dresses, laws, hormones, grey hoodies, surgical instruments, and jeans without front pockets are central to this thesis. Investigating practices also forces this study to hold up to the promise be empirical, and to explore the realities and experiences of transgender persons themselves. ANT has provided me with the tools to do so, and helped me to research situations in which putting on a bra means the world.

Embracing Objects and Ontological Diversity Within Sociology

It is not surprising that STS and its intellectual child ANT provide great tools to analyze situations in which bodywear is important. STS is known for being an object-oriented field, due to its focus on technology. To ANT theorists, theorizing objects is of particular importance. ANT theorist Latour explicitly argues against a study of the social that neglects objects. In his work Reassembling the

Social (2005), a work that promotes the use of ANT, he deplores that within the academic field of

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“Much like sex during the Victorian period, objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt. They exist, naturally, but they are never given a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants, they live on the margins of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to be represented as such. There seems to be no way, no conduit, no entry point for them to be knitted together with the same wool as the rest of the social ties” (Ibidem, p. 73).

Latour radically breaks with the notion of what is ‘social’, as traditionally conceptualized within sociology. According to Latour the established notion of the social entails only humans and the ties between them. He argues, however, that our understanding of the social should expand into

arrangements which are more heterogeneous, as the social is made up not only of the interconnections between humans but also their interconnections with non-humans.

In the case of bodywear such a conceptualization of the social invites the researcher to be interested in the connections between wearer and worn: to ask what happens in their relationship – how they affect one another. It allows the researcher of the social to be interested in their

relationship itself, instead of only how bodywear affects relationships between humans, as the relationship between wearer and worn also becomes a part of what is understood as the social. Even more so, when we accept his notion of the ‘social’, tracing the interconnections between humans and non-humans and making what happens in them visible is suddenly at the heart of what a science of the social should be about (Star, 1991). In order to be able to trace these

interconnections in a meaningful way, one must adopt a new way of understanding what acting is. While most people accept that a kettle boils water, a lack of intentionality from the kettle’s part makes us understand this action as void of agency. In most common understandings, agency

requires a certain amount of intentionality or ‘free will’. Relying on such a definition of agency, the kettle is robbed from the ability to be an actor. ANT gives this ability back to the kettle (and to a diversity of things of other ontological natures) by redefining what acting is (Latour, 2005). According to Latour, “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor” (Ibidem, p. 71). In his work On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications (1996) Latour also defines an actor in ANT as:

“a semiotic definition – an actant – that is something that acts or to which activity is granted by another… an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action” (Ibidem, p. 373).

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Following this assumption, it is a collective of actants among which the kettle, the water, the power outlet, the electricity, the thirsty body, and the goal-oriented mindset together make the boiling of the water happen. When one of these actants is missing, the situation is drastically changed. We are physically not able to make water boil without interacting with non-human actants; we need them to be part of the collective.

It is good to point out, however, that ANT theorists are not claiming that material actants do things instead of human actants, or even that different objects do things in the same way, that is to say, that they are the same kind of actants (Latour, 2005). A key has a different mode of modifying the state of affairs than a person or an algorithm. What is argued within ANT is that to gain an understanding of the social world we need to acknowledge the importance not only of people but also of keys and algorithms, because they matter. They should therefore be part of social analysis. As Callon and Law (1997) note:

“Often in practice we bracket off non-human materials, assuming they have a status which differs from that of a human. So, materials become resources or constraints; they are said to be passive; to be active only when they are mobilized by flesh and blood actors. But if the social is really materially heterogeneous then this asymmetry doesn’t work very well. Yes, there are differences between conversations, texts, techniques and bodies. Of course. But why should we start out by assuming that some of these have no active role to play in social dynamics?” (Ibidem, p.168).

Rather than ignoring objects or casting them in a passive, servant like role, as is common social scientific practice, ANT offers a way of studying society which encompasses an effort to deal with the heterogenous intermingling of things which are a part of the social world.

In this I see an invitation for social scientists to make visible what happens in the

interconnections between actants. This does not necessarily imply that one has to naively assume all actants act alike but also that one does not have to naively assume there is only one mode of acting that matters. It is an invitation to be curious about how things interconnect. However, some scholars have critiqued that this creates too much analytical flattening as macro/meso/micro actants are all appreciated as occupying the same analytical position (Mwenya and Brown, 2017). Because by redefining agency its relation to structure is also uprooted. The fear this analytical flattening within ANT evokes is the fear that it leads to outright ignoring of asymmetries. One is, however, not forced to fall into the pitfall of doing so. Just as one does not have to naively assume all actants act in the same way, not all actants are able to assert the same power and dominance. Different actants have different levels of access to certain assemblages and different ways in which they can act. A

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certain actant within an assemblage (such as the “transgender law” which dictates what

requirements need to be met to be able to change your gender and name in one’s passport) might inhibit many other actants of easily being granted access to be part of a certain network. For this study it is clearly important to be mindful of the different ways actants are able to act and assert power. Transitioning is a process that is highly regulated in the Netherlands, one is dependent on medical professionals not only for body alterations but also to change official documents. It would therefore be naive to assume an equality of ways in which actants are able to act or change the situation. Instead of ignoring such asymmetries it is essential to remain aware of such asymmetrical power relations, how they are created and sustained, regardless of approaching different actants of different ontologies as able to act (Star, 1991).

Moving Past Dualisms

A consequence of this particular perspective on ‘what the social is made of’ and its flattened analytical conceptualization of humans and non-humans is that many dualisms in Western thinking such as the subject/object, structure/agency, human/non-human, materiality/sociality and

society/nature divides become less obvious and less meaningful. Such an approach questions the asymmetry created by such divides. Why divide the world of objects, of structures, of materiality, of non-humans and of nature from the world of subjects, of agents, of materiality, of humans and of society when all these interact with each other, changing each other and clashing and merging with each other? In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), one of the earlier works of Latour, he argues that these dualisms cannot account for what we encounter in our daily lives. In practice we deal with many hybrids – things that are neither solely part of nature or solely part of society, neither object nor subject. Latour offers us the following example: when we open the newspaper, it is almost impossible to read an article in which many things of different -hybrid- ontologies do not come together. In a news article about, say, the AIDS epidemic, doctors, viruses, patient

organizations, laws, chemical labs, industries, nations, and politicians are all knitted together producing the fabric of a certain situation. However, in Western academic traditions the situation is cut up into pieces. It is studied within different fields (such as biology, sociology and political science) as if the situation can be spliced into natural, social, and political aspects. As if they have nothing to do with each other. As such we undo in our knowledge practices the tightly knitted knot of everyday life practices (Latour, 1987).

When we redo this knot and start considering all actants as being part of fluid heterogeneous arrangements such divides begin to seem artificial at best and problematic at its worst. ANT

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categorized as part of either side of these dualisms. Are border collies nature or culture? Is testosterone an object or part of a subject? Can body and mind be divided into distinct spheres of “fleshy object” and “sentient subject”? An ANT approach calls such dualisms into question. Within the field of transgender studies, especially the questioning of the nature/culture and object/subject divide has been valued. In the transgender studies reader edited by Stryker, Stryker introduces the work A Cyborg Manifesto (2006) by Haraway in the following manner:

“The cyborg, in Haraway’s usage, is a way to grapple with what it means to be a conscious, embodied, subject in an environment structured by techno-scientific practices that challenge basic and widely shared notions of what it means to be human – practices such as animal-to-human organ transplants and gene splices, cochlear implants or the seemingly inescapable structuring of the material world by machine readable codes. […] Transgender and intersex figures have likewise become politically charged sites of cultural struggle over the meaning of human being, and being human, in an increasingly technologized world.” (Stryker, 2006, pp. 2-3)

Stryker argues that transgender and intersex figures have become a site for struggle over what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world. New technologies have increased the ways in which people can change their bodies and their embodied experiences. The discussion what it means to make use of such possibilities and change one’s embodied experience is politically contested. The image of the cyborg, which is called into life by Haraway, and is described as: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 2006, p. 2) urges us to accept that, yes, humans and non-humans can together make new, fluid, interconnections which can change the fabric of reality. According to Haraway the cyborg can be imagined only because different developments (from organ

transplantation to AI) have already proven that boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine and the physical and the non-physical are less meaningful than they seemed to be. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” (Haraway, 2006, p. 6). A cyborg politics is therefore one that questions great divides of Western thinking and makes us question the naturalization of these divides. As such it also questions the naturalization of the categories “man” and “woman” and which I believe makes it a great recourse for trans-politics. Her cyborg both questions naturalization of categories and emphasizes that arrangements between humans and non-humans can be fluid and create new meaningful realities and ways of being. The acceptance of ways of being and living outside

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categories naturalized in Western thinking is at the heart of a trans positive politics. For many transgender people (and people who are intersex) their experiences breach the naturalized categories of man and woman and for those who have undertaken medical steps to alter their bodies also transgress what is seen as natural and what is seen as artificial/technological.

Adding to this, in her earlier work, Modest Witness (1997), Haraway also points out that the separation of nature, society, and technology has led to a disconnection of the subject and the object. Although the argument she makes in this book is about how this allowed scientists to disguise their situated subject position which enabled them to make universal truth claims, this disconnection of subject and object (the situated body) also inhibits us to understand gender in both its subjective and embodied fullness. It forces us to narrow the experience of gender down to something belonging to either the sphere of subjectivity, of consciousness, or that of the sphere of bodies and objects, while both don't seem to do justice to daily life experiences of gender. The artificial divides between nature and culture and subject and object force us to locate gender in either one of these sites and pin it down, while in practice – in everyday life situations – gender fluidly glides through all these spheres. An ANT approach allows us to focus on how gender is practiced, to how people do their gender, whether this is through thoughts, words, boxer shorts or operations.

The Object Multiple

The focus on everyday life and practices within ANT opens up new ways to understand reality. It multiplies what objects can be, Star and Griesemer (1989) argue, when introducing the concept of boundary objects. On this concept Star and Griesemer write:

“Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation.” (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393).

In their understanding of objects, one in which objects are researched in everyday (knowledge) practices, objects are reimagined as plastic yet robust. Their meanings multiply over different sites, in different social worlds, yet they remain recognizable and loosely structured in their common use while in individual site use, they are more strongly structured. Such a conceptualization of objects

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invites the researcher to investigate the multiple meanings of objects and how they are managed: what can a dress mean in different sites? What do dresses remain to have in common over different sites? And how do people manage these meanings?

In this conceptualization of objects however, other dimensions besides meaning are ignored. Objects are conceptualized as passive receivers of the meanings of human subjects. In the work of anthropologist Mol the conceptualization of objects rethinks objects in a way that does not make them passive receivers of meaning but active co-creators of reality. Like Star and Griesemer, Mol also appreciates objects as multiple and also advocates a focus on objects in situations, but her, as she calls it, “praxiomatic appreciation of reality” is one in which objects are multiple instead of objects that have multiple meanings. About this Mol says:

“If practices are foregrounded there is no longer a single passive object in the middle, waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives. Instead objects come into being – and disappear – with the practices in which they are manipulated. And since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to another, reality multiplies.” (Mol, 2002, p. 5)

In her book The Body Multiple she argues that looking at practices opens up the opportunity to make objects come into being, to get within them instead of looking at them from a distance. In this book she theorizes atherosclerosis as a disease that is multiple which means they are not a singular entity but a coordinated crowd enacted through different practices (Mol, 2005). Therefore, she discusses many atheroscleroses in her book – such as an atherosclerosis that is the plaque cut out of a vein, an atherosclerosis that is enacted with complaints uttered by a patient in the doctor’s office and an atherosclerosis that is seen under a microscope in the pathology lab – and finds that these are not the same. Atherosclerosis investigated in the pathology lab (in the shape of a preparation of a vessel wall being looked at through a microscope) is not atherosclerosis that determines what treatment will be given. The opportunity to look at a vessel wall is only presented after amputation or death, therefore making such a preparation for the microscope would otherwise be impossible without harming the well-being of a live patient. As such this atherosclerosis can only help a pathologist determine whether amputation was the right decision. What makes it important to recognize these atheroscleroses as different is the fact that they are not homogenous. For example, the atherosclerosis that determines treatment is a hurtful one and prevents a patient to walk more than 100 meters without pain, while the atherosclerosis which killed a woman one day after being admitted to the hospital for renal problems which is examined in the pathology lab did not. While the atherosclerosis of this woman is as real as a hurtful one, it cannot be treated anymore. The

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reality it produces is completely different.

Mol moves away from an epistemological inquiry towards an ontological one, which

ensures that atherosclerosis becomes something more than a single passive object that is known and seen from different perspectives such as the perspective of a doctor, patient or health insurer. Mol argues that this is one of the major problems with perspectival tales about meanings and

interpretation: they leave the physical untouched. They are perspectives on/interpretations of

something, about which Mol wonders “of what?”, “of some nature that allows culture to attribute all these shapes to it” (Mol, 2005, p. 12). An untouched object observed by seemingly endless number of observers which only get to know it by seeing or hearing it, maybe from a bigger or smaller distance, but never interacting with it. By investigating the practices, materialities, and events that are atherosclerosis, Mol tries to find a way out of such perspectivism and a way into atherosclerosis. Her work therefore inspires to investigate practices and how practices affect reality. It urges to draw upon empirical work and investigate what people do and let this material speak for itself. In my case it invites to investigate bodywear practices empirically and draw upon this work to explore how bodywear affects the realities of transgender persons.

This what she calls “praxiomatic appreciation of reality”. And it can be seen as an elegant solution to a dilemma Latour poses in We Have Never Been Modern (1991) about how social scientists must approach objects. In We Have Never Been Modern Latour criticizes that social scientists commonly wield two very contradictory ways of approaching objects. One way in which social scientists commonly speak of objects, Latour argues, is that they speak of them as if they have no intrinsic value, as if they “offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests” (Ibidem, p. 52). This is a way of approaching material things in which they are

objectified. Objects become portrayed as empty canvasses passively waiting to be given meaning to. This approach clashes painfully with its counterpart, which is to approach objects as structuring forces, and as such naturalizing “the indisputable results of the sciences” (Ibidem, p.53). In this approach the “nature of things” is used to show how humans are determined, informed, and molded. According to Latour, in the one approach material things become mere canvases, while in the other they are portrayed as so powerful they have the ability to shape society which lifts them towards a near magically powerful status (Ibidem.). Latour suggests that a solution would be to acknowledge material things as our co-producers of reality. About which he says: “Is not society built literally – not metaphorically – of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles?” (Ibidem, p. 54). He adds to this that it would therefore be better to focus on quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, to focus on what is between the poles of “true” subject and object. Just like Haraway’s cyborg, Mol’s multiple object is an intellectual innovation to discover and research this space, to investigate what is between these

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two poles. Therefore, the theoretical and methodological insights Mol offers in her study of atherosclerosis offer great tools for analyzing bodywear as well. Her approach provides a way to theorize bodywear as something else than either a family of lifeless objects which are passively waiting to be interpreted as masculine or feminine by living subjects or things which are so powerful our gender depends on it. It offers a way to see bodywear as co-producers of reality, things we can interact with and co-create reality with.

Affects

After completing my interviews, I entered a stage of understanding better where my inquiry was heading towards. Why did I find bodywear praxes interesting and important? Because of what these praxes do to people, how they co-create reality; how they make people feel and how these feelings change praxis. Therefore, it seemed fitting to return to social science literature to explore this further. A concept that helps understand the how of reality production is the concept of “affecting” - changing the state of another actant. The conceptualization of affects that seemed most fitting for this inquiry has been developed by Fox (2015). His conceptualization of affects is fitting because it is a great extension of ANT as it is founded on assumptions akin to ANT. Fox's conceptualization of affects is founded on a Deleuzian ontology, which Fox describes as a materialism which, like ANT, is relational - “considering bodies, things, ideas, social institutions or – for that matter – emotions as existing or having integrity only through their relationship to other, similarly contingent and ephemeral, bodies, things, ideas or social institutions” (Fox, 2015, p. 305). This draws the attention to the assemblages different bodies (human or non-human) make up together, instead of the separate bodies themselves. For example: a specific chemical compound only gains pharmacological capacities in assemblage with a body or tissue. The pharmacological capacity can be understood as the affect (the capacity to affect or be affected) that arises out of this assemblage. The bodies in these assemblages are not only physical bodies, also abstract concepts such as gender can be included, because such bodies too have the capacity to produce material change (Fox, 2018). Transitioning can be viewed as a great example of this. The more abstract concept “gender”

produces, in assemblage with other bodies, both subjective and material changes during this process. The affects which are the result of the assemblage of bodies are understood by Fox as autonomous from the separate bodies. They are a consequence of the relation the different bodies in the assemblage are in. They are the capacities, desires, and feelings that are produced in the

encounter.

In this conceptualization affecting can be understood as a specific way bodies are able to act, namely, acting in a way that changes the state of another body. But what it means to change the

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state of another body is diverse. Affects can be physical (for instance the affect of testosterone on the body), psychological (such as the affect high heels can have on someone's self-esteem), social (like the affect of changing one’s gender in one’s passport, which is social as well as legal) or emotional (such as the affect of a hug after a coming out) and so forth. This conceptualization is therefore great to understand how bodywear affects transitioning and the experience thereof. Because the affects of bodywear are diverse and multiple. Fox emphasizes that affects should be understood as part of affective flows. He conceptualizes affects not as isolated, but as part of a flow: one affect subsequently creating another. He describes such a flow as “branching, reversing,

coalescing and rupturing, as affects produce multiple capacities in multiple assembled relations”. A certain encounter can have the capacity to release endorphins, increase feelings of self-esteem and make one unpack their fear of not feeling “man enough” in such a way they feel able to toss some of their doubts aside all in one big sweep. The idea of affectual flows is enticing because it

resonates the processual aspect of transitioning, one change creating the possibility for another. Fox’s conceptualization of affects sensitizes the researcher to be attentive to change, movement, multiplicity and the results of connections.

Conclusion

The insights produced with STS and in the tradition of ANT that I have elaborated on invite the researcher to examine how reality is produced and offers theoretical tools to do so. Transitioning can be understood as a production of reality, a production of change: a production of a future in which one is able to live in a way that feels faithful to oneselves and more enjoyable. The tools provided by ANT researchers help a researcher interested in the daily life complexities of

transitioning, like me, to research this in a way that is empirical, embodied and complex. Objects are suddenly allowed to be part of analysis, to be actants and to be multiple, not only in meaning but even in what they are themselves. It is with such a framework the complexities of the

interconnections between people, bodywear and other bodies can be mapped out in a way that stays close to the experiences of the respondents themselves. In this framework there is room for a dress not to be the same in every situation; affecting people differently and affecting what happens in the moment it is worn differently. There is room to make the “how” of transitioning visible, seen from an everyday-life perspective.

Making Bodywear Praxes Visible

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researcher to do science differently, as it offers a distinct view on the production of knowledge: one of science, and reality, in motion – in the making.

“The objectives of doing research change. Our goal is no longer to identify the one coherent explanation or verify and falsify a system of general claims. It is to appreciate incoherence, to embrace and to explore multiplicity. As an ANT researcher you do not want to tell one clean, sanitized narrative, and to make your empirics “fit”. Instead it is to draw on the empirical material, let it speak for itself as far as possible [..] It is to reconstruct complexity and incoherence.” (Bueger and Stockbruegger, 2015, p. 13)

Such objectives of doing research align well with the objectives of this thesis: to understand better the experiences of transgender persons with bodywear as well as how their relationship with bodywear affects them and their transition. They align well because they redirect the focus to praxis, the empirical, instead of verifying or falsifying grand claims about gender, which I have argued is not a direction in which I would like to proceed. Originating in an interest in science in the making, STS has produced excellent tools to research reality in the making because its focus has been on gaining understanding of processes - of production - not outcome. It is therefore a

specifically valuable way to investigate transitioning, because transitioning can be understood as a directed process of reality making; a process of producing a reality more faithful to one's

experience.

Researching reality in the making, results in studies in which praxis are the main focus. Whether it is the work of Latour, Haraway, Star or Mol, what they all have in common is an interest in practices in the empirical. This 'praxiomatic appreciation of reality' as Mol has called it, is

researched by ANT researchers by looking at practices. And whether this is done by mapping pasteurization practices (Latour, 1988), fishing practises (Callon, 1986), hospital practices (Mol, 2005), human-animal cohabitation practices (Haraway, 2003) or museum practices (Star &

Griesemer, 1989) it is the empirical material and the practicing itself that are foregrounded. In this chapter, I explain how I have used their insights to design this study and reflect on the consequences of the choices I have made. In the first section I go into the choice to use interviews. In the second section I reflect on my design itself, on my choice of respondents and the process of interviewing. In the third section I reflect on how I have analyzed the material. I conclude by reflecting on how I have dealt with the ethical issues that arose.

Talking About Practices

Before elaborating on the choices I made in searching and selecting respondents to talk to, I need to reflect on why I have chosen to speak with them. ANT theorist are known for producing

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“knowledge about the world by being in that world” (Bueger and Stockbruegger, 2015, p. 13), and taking this very literally. Both Law & Singleton (2013) and Callon (1986) have for example not been afraid to make their hands dirty, and fishy, as they worked in the salmon and scallop industry for their respective studies. For The body multiple Mol (2002) explored and studied a hospital from examination room to morgue, taking part in what happens in these places. When studying a specific industry or place this makes a lot of sense. To be a part of it helps understanding the complexity and the nitty gritty of what happens. It allows the researcher to see what is done in a very practical way. To understand fisheries, it is helpful to understand the fishing gear as the mechanics of such gear affect what it can do and how it is best handled and at which depths to fish. To understand

atherosclerosis, it is helpful to see how a preparation is made of a vein and to see what is necessary to make one successfully. Another reason why ethnography is a method that fits well with the work of ANT researchers is that it is messy, and deliberately so. “Rather than seeking the security of pre-conceived analytic categories, ethnographers typically steer a far more inductive course by

cultivating an openness to the multiple and overlapping phenomenological worlds of their subjects” (2011, p. 112) Nimmo argues. The marked attentiveness which is manifested in ethnographic thinking is very much akin to what Law calls “non-coherent” – messy – realities and the notion that heterogeneous elements interweave and constitute life-worlds.

This study therefore embraces an ethnographic approach and as such is a “documentary product” capturing the dynamic of particular interconnections. However, in contrast with the studies named above this research is not based on participant observation. As remarked by Hockey and Forsey, although the term participant observation has become conflated with the term ethnography participant observation is neither the only nor the best way to gather empirical data for every ethnographic study. The goal of providing a rich - “thick” - description which captures the sometimes messy and non-coherent dynamics of reality can be reached by doing qualitative

interviews. So why did I make the choice to do interviews and ask about practices instead of (also) observing them? First of all, I faced the same problem as Mol and Heuts encountered in their inquiry in tomato praxis (2013). Mol and Heuts explain:

“Ideally, we would have wanted to do fieldwork and follow our informants in all their tomato related activities. This, however, wasn’t easy to achieve in our practice. We had little time, wanted to know about diverse practices, and found that potential informants were not keen to be shadowed.” (Heuts and Mol, 2015,

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I encountered this issue as well. To conduct a study in which I would have been able to observe my respondents during all their bodywear related praxes would have been impossible (especially

because part of my inquiry is about past practices). Such a study would also have surpassed the time and resources available to me. To study how bodywear affects transitioning and the experience of it, a participant observation study would have needed to be conducted over a time span of years, since the topic of this study is the durable change from someone’s assigned gender towards one that feels more faithful to them. And it takes time to make such a change. It takes time to figure out a new name. It takes time to experiment with your new look. It takes time to change your legal gender, or to get access to medical treatments. It all takes time. The sheer amount of time it takes to get access to diagnosis and medical treatments due to long waiting lists is one of the most significant issues that are addressed in Dutch trans care at the moment (De Bekker et al., 2019). Moreover, I would argue that conducting participant observation in my case would not have been the wisest or most ethical approach, even if it were more possible to conduct it. Although participant observation is a popular method among ANT researchers, for good reason, I argue that it is not suitable for this study. When one is researching the tomato industry, a fishery or a hospital one can arrive when the workday starts and leave when the work day is done. One can make sure that over time one gets to know every inch of the place, see all the machines, speak with all the colleagues and get to know about how things are done. When researching bodywear this becomes harder. One would have to be there all the time, as the praxis of wearing clothes is practiced most of the hours, we are awake and sometimes even when we are sleeping. To be able to see all bodywear praxes would therefore mean I would need to be with my respondents all the time in disregard of their privacy. I believe it would be unethical to conduct such a study.

Also, one of the reasons this study is especially socially relevant is that it studies the moments in which clothing has a big emotional or psychological affect on people who are transitioning. Such moments, however, in which bodywear affects people deeply and which are most interesting, are also the moments which would be disrupted most by the presence of a researcher. Adding to this, while some affects are visible (someone might look happier and more confident in a different outfit), most of these affects are not visible. This is one of the reasons why one conducts interviews in the first place, according to Weiss: “we can learn how events affected their [the respondent's] thoughts and feelings. We can learn the meanings to them of their

relationships […] we can learn about all experiences, from joy to grief” (1994, p.1). The way wearing a binder for the first time makes someone feel can therefore best be asked instead of

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observed. Of course, it is important to remain aware of the fact that the asking of a question is a production of reality in and of itself. The moments that come up as relevant, worth talking about, and the way those moments are put into words, are influenced by many things; the chemistry between the researcher (me) and their (my) respondents, the questions that are asked and the interview location for example. And these things affect each other as well. The trust between researcher and respondent can affect the choice of the location of the interview, a public place or a respondent's home. And when someone’s home is chosen as a location, the proximity of the nearest photo-book and a question about past styles can spark the idea to bring it to the table. Because bodywear praxes are so deeply embedded in our daily lives, I am very sure my respondents have elaborated on their bodywear praxes in a way they would not have without being specifically asked. How a certain sweater makes you feel is not something you contemplate on every day you are wearing it. The elaborations of my respondents should therefore be seen as their reflections on their praxis co-produced by me and my thesis writing praxis (which in itself involves a whole world of actants). It is through the praxis of interviewing the reality of our conversations and eventually this thesis is produced.

By asking about the experiences of my respondents and as such making them co-creators of this thesis (in the sense that they co-produce the reflections on bodywear praxes and its affects) also promotes valuing the self-determination of my respondents. Who am I to determine what my respondents know about themselves and feel? Especially as a researcher concerned with studying transitioning, I should not concern myself with doing so. The right for self-determination is a core issue for transgender persons and of trans politics (Stanley, 2014). Therefore, like Heuts and Mol (2015) I embraced qualitative interviews as the more practical and more appropriate method of inquiry, and made sure I used their insights in conducting my interviews.

“We invited informants to talk as if they were their own ethnographers—or rather (as the object of conversation was not a tribe but a practice) their own praxiographers. Here the art is to persistently ask questions about the specificities of activities that informants tend to take for granted.” (Ibidem, p. 5)

This insight is very similar to the technique of the explication interview as developed by Vermersch (1994). I have therefore embraced the suggestion of Gore et al. (2012) and made use of

Vermersch’s work to make sure my interviews would allow me to get beyond generalizations and get an understanding of embodied experiences. I could use Vermersch work on this technique as a more elaborate guide for my interviews as is aimed to achieve the same goal as Mol suggests: it

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serves the goal of getting an insight into practices by letting respondents verbalize in great detail the lived experience of actions.

Research Design

The combination of an ANT inspired inquiry and qualitative interviews has resulted in the fact that this research has a quite particular design. I have interviewed 8 young adults between 20 and 29 who identify as transgender, 6 of their loved ones4 (5 parents and 1 girlfriend) and 3 psychologists about the praxis of transitioning and what they do with clothing. These 3 types of respondents all have a different position with regard to each other, and with regard to the bodywear praxes of transgender persons. Interviewing these three “sets” of people results into a strange mix of interviews, but I consider this approach valuable. As elaborated on in the introduction, the

observation of how many things need to assemble in a specific way to make it possible to undertake one’s desired steps in transitioning made me want to practice the writing of a thesis about

transitioning. It made me want to try and design a study that aims to capture the complexity of navigating the practicalities of transitioning; a study that showed how much is going on, how many (f)actors weigh in - determining what’s next, and how these actors together shape what this process will look like and is experienced. Although ANT has sensitized me to look beyond human actors alone, it is the human actors I can speak with and frankly, it is their experiences I am interested in. This made me choose to interview not only young adults who identify as transgender but also other people who are part of the intermingling that makes up the process transitioning. I firmly believe their stories contribute to a better understanding of the web of interconnections that together make transitioning happen. I specifically choose to interview psychologists because their work and practice is specially intended to guide the process of transitioning and due to the regulations within Dutch trans care every transgender person who wants to change their legal gender or have access to and funding for medical or cosmetic services needs to be diagnosed by a psychologist with the license to do so (T’Sjoen et al., 2013). I also chose to ask permission to interview a loved one whom my respondents felt has supported them in their transition. In this way I got to speak with the people close to my respondents in their transition. However, because this research is a study of practices focused on making the lives of transgender persons visible my focus has been on interviewing young adults who identify as transgender, resulting in more interviews with this type of

respondents. Unfortunately, the psychologists are not directly connected to my respondents. With my resources it was not possible to retrace the actual connections of my respondents with their

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psychologists and doing so would have been illegal and immoral. Psychologists are bound to secrecy about their clients which would make an interview about identifiable clients a breach of trust and an endeavor punishable by law. Therefore, with the psychologists I was bound to speak of examples of their praxis and I was not able to directly connect it to the web of interconnections that made up the process of transitioning of my respondents. However, their praxis is a professional one and as such their praxis is structured to be replicable with other clients.

To find my respondents I have used my personal network and visited transgender related events. One of my respondents whom I’ve met on one of these events shared my request for

respondents on several private groups on Facebook. These groups were specifically aimed at people who identify as a trans man, as trans-masculine or non-binary. Because of this my respondents all identify as either as a trans man, trans-masculine and/or non-binary and only one of my non-binary respondents was assigned to live as a man. A more extensive study which also includes trans women might therefore lead to additional insights. To meet loved ones, I have approached some respondents to ask whether I could do a follow up interview with someone close to them as well. I have approached the respondents with whom I felt confident to asks this after our interview. I was not able to meet every loved one of the respondents who reacted positively to this request as I was dependent on my respondents to connect me with their loved ones. Since my respondents of course also had their own lives to attend to, this did not always work out. It is good to note, however, that all my respondents did have loved ones which they could turn to for support, even though this has not always been like this for all my respondents in the past. Also, an above average number of respondents was highly educated and all my respondents were white and born in the Netherlands. Most of my respondents have reflected on doubts having been part of their transition, but all my respondent are happy and confident with the fact they have started transitioning/ have transitioned. One can conclude that due to the limited time in which I could find respondents most of my

respondents reflect shared traits with my own network; white, educated, middle-class and with a supportive home. The results of this study therefore provide valuable insights in how bodywear interconnects within the web of transition, but it’s results should be approached as localized within this specific position in the world. To generalize these results and transport them to other places might not work well, and to do so even furthers the marginalization of transgender persons in less privileged position or a more precarious one (Roen, 2001). However, this study does offer an intimate insight in the lives of these specific people, and through their stories accomplishes an understanding of how bodywear is practiced within the process of transitioning and how these praxes affects transitioning and the experience thereof. Lastly, to be able to interview psychologists I sent an email to every practice listed on the website of the organization Transvisie, the largest