Transitioning: Disruptions

Transitioning is an analysis of female-to-male (FTM) gender transition that inverts taken for granted assumptions that transition begins within the body, that it always affirms binary gender, and that its political temporalities gravitate toward identity recognition. Taking the body, its ontologies and temporalities, as a primary ethnographic heuristic, this book offers an anthropological analysyis of transitioning explores transitioning as a process that is brought into experience in the making of material, social and political worlds. Taking the body, its ontologies and temporalities, as a primary ethnographic heuristic, this book is an anthropological analysis of changing cultures and epistemologies of transition in Britain today. Although the Gender Recognition Act has, since 2004, provided a framework for identity recognition for those who seek to live as a member of the opposite gender, many trans men transition outside this framework, and instead understood transitioning as an open-ended process that often defied political and social convention. This book argues that their experiences of transition generate new ways of knowing gender, materiality and process that significantly extend conventional cultural understandings of gender and experience.