Handbook of Research with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations

William Meezan, James I. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781560235316
• eBook ISBN: 9781135466701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Handbook of Research with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations provides a detailed examination of the current methods and theoretical frameworks for conducting research with LGBT populations. Introducing greater nuance in designing and implementing research models for working with these populations, Handbook of Research with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations provides guidelines for defining these groups, strategies to obtain more inclusive and representative samples, and methods for engaging these populations to produce consistent and relevant data.

Collecting essays by notable researchers and scholars in the field, Handbook of Research with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations provides meaningful analyses of the ethics and practical constraints that researchers confront in dealing with LGBT populations--including protection of privacy--which is a special concern for many. For students, teachers, social workers, mental health professionals, and researchers of all backgrounds, this is an invaluable resource and guidebook for anyone seeking a better quality of understanding and engagement with LGBT individuals and communities.

Part I

Why Do LGBT Research?

1	What’s “Queer” Got To Do With It?
	Enlightening Mainstream Research
	Perry Silverschanz

Studying lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations is clearly useful because such research provides vital information that can improve important aspects of the lives of LGBT people. For example, research has shown that lesbians and transgender people are less likely to seek medical care, and do so less frequently, than their sexual majority counterparts (Aaron et al., 2001; Dean et al., 2000). One possible reason for this might be that distressing interactions with medical professionals who are unknowledgeable or even openly hostile could result in a functional lack of access to critical health care services for many LGBT people. Such knowledge can allow officials to devise educational programs, policies, and interventions to decrease disparities in health and health care between LGBT people and others in society.

Similarly, there is a lack of knowledge concerning the social service needs of LGBT people, and deficits in research about LGBT populations have been noted in the social work and social welfare literature (Meezan & Martin, 2003, this volume; Van Voorhis & Wagner, 2002). Clinicians, social workers, human resources personnel, and other human service workers are better at their jobs when they have relevant resources and knowledge about all the clients with whom they have contact in the course of their work. Social scientists have the ability to provide that knowledge; they may even be obligated to contribute to knowledge about LGBT populations, since refusal to research what may be 5–10% or more¹ of the population can be seen as a self-reinforcing cycle of deliberate neglect.

This volume is full of excellent examples of the important things that we can learn about the lives of LGBT people and the methodologies that should be used to ensure that what we learn is accurate and correct. With frequent news stories about same-sex marriage laws, public figures coming out, and transgender activists marching on state capitols, the public needs valid information about LGBT people in order to understand issues that concern these populations and become more knowledgeable about them; familiarity with LGBT people is strongly correlated with more positive attitudes toward them (Herek, 2002; Mohr & Rochlen, 1999; Smith, 1993). Thus improving and disseminating accurate knowledge about LGBT people can potentially contribute to social harmony and understanding.

However, there is more to LGBT research than just learning about LGBT lives; these lives contain much that is relevant for heterosexual and gender-typical people. This chapter attempts to debunk the notion that LGBT-focused investigations are merely “special topics” contributing limited insight for broader populations, and argues that such research should become central to the study of human behavior and experience. It is argued that research on LGBT people introduces possibilities for learning more about all people through thoughtful and enlightened investigation. It offers ways to become more broadly informed about the nature of sexuality, heterosexuality, gender, gender normativity, and the consequences of invisible privilege, oppression, and stigmatized and marginalized identities of all kinds.

People who stand outside mainstream American culture are viewed as “exceptions to the rule” to those who have power and are therefore considered normative – the white, male, heterosexual, upper middle-class standard by which all others are judged. When one group’s version of reality dominates all others, distortion of actual human experience is inevitable (Sampson, 1993). For example, pharmaceutical companies once used only 21-year-old, white males as research subjects in drug development, and then extrapolated the findings to all persons (Tavris, 1992). For those who do not belong to that demographic (i.e., the majority of Americans), such drug trial results may have been irrelevant or even dangerous.

Standpoint theory (viewing the center from the margins) allows for a better understanding of the “multifocal nature of reality” (Riger, 1992, p. 734). People in power do not need to pay attention to those with little power (Fiske, 1993). But those who are marginalized, because they must pay attention to those in power, are able to see what is invisible to those in control (Harding, 1994). By viewing the world with different assumptions, alternate possibilities can be imagined (Giorgi, 2003), and the subjectivity of reality becomes apparent. Recognizing the arbitrary nature of what is “true” can be a significant source of new knowledge that is not accessible within a dominant worldview (Fletcher, 1999).

This paradigm offers an excellent argument for studying marginalized groups in general, but what is particularly important about studying LGBT people? I believe there are unique aspects of the lives of sexual minority people that can help illuminate a variety of more general questions. For example, LGBT people may have less investment in the sex- and gender-typical status quo because they have violated typical gender and sex role boundaries, and thus may be more ready and able to challenge other taken-for-granted mainstream beliefs (Harding, 1994; Swigonski, 1994). For example, as a result of their extensive self-inquiry, one thing apparent to transgender people is the arbitrary nature of “two-and-only-two” genders (Green, 2004). Likewise, LGB people may recognize more clearly the compulsory nature of heterosexuality (Rich, 1980) because they stand outside of it. Challenging “normative realities” is not solely for the sake of confrontation; questioning assumptions that are untested because of their seemingly “natural” occurrence can further scientific and philosophical inquiry and our knowledge of both mainstream and marginalized groups.

How Sexual Minority Perspectives Can Inform Mainstream Research

Research on LGBT populations allows opportunities for ferreting out truths related to some particularly prickly social debates. The rest of this essay examines several topics to demonstrate the new directions that knowledge-seeking in these areas might go by using an LGBT lens.

Understanding Gender

The increasing visibility of transgender and transsexual people in the U.S. forces a rethinking of the insistent dichotomization of both sex and gender (Drechsler, 2003). Indeed, for decades many have felt that same-sex-loving individuals (e.g., lesbians and gay men) have also blurred sex/gender boundaries by being attracted to the “wrong” sex. Inversion theory (Ellis, 1915) proposed that lesbians and gay men were sexual “inverts,” that is, their psychic gender contradicted their apparent biological sex. These beliefs extend into the modern era (Kite & Deaux, 1987) and continue to be used by some to explain the “abnormal” configuration of same-sex desire.

Many academics tend to regard sex as essential (or “natural”) and gender as a social construct with the potential to vary across culture and historical time, even though popular culture remains rooted in the binary of masculine/feminine. By assuming that there are only two genders, and that each gender maps unproblematically onto one of only two possible sexes, many questions remain unasked and nothing is learned about normal variation among humans (Green, 2004). As Kessler and McKenna (1978) wondered, if gender is considered socially constructed and mutable, why do transsexuals need to change their bodily and sexual characteristics and not their gender? They suggested just the opposite – that gender may be less amenable to change and sex more easily alterable, calling into question the social construction of gender. Research in the transgender community could offer insight into whether our binary classification of gender and its neat mapping onto binary sex is appropriate or realistic, and explore the ways in which we can think of sex and gender as continua.

Understanding Sex

What is sex? The essential “fact” of biology is generally considered the sole determinant of a person’s sex. To a biologist, strictly speaking, the sex of a creature is determined by whether it produces large gametes (ova) or small gametes (sperm) (Roughgarden, 2004). It is clear that we actually define sex culturally, given that the determination of sex is common in hospital delivery rooms, without regard to internal organs, reproductive capacity, or chromosomes. An infant born with ambiguous² genitalia is assigned one of two sexes by the delivering physician, and often a surgeon is consulted to help determine how best to create an “appropriately” sexed child (Kessler, 1990). In these cases, the act of essentialism is not the definition of a biologist, genetic expert, or endocrinologist, but of a sociocultural insistence on two and only two sexes (Roughgarden, 2004).

Fausto-Sterling (2000) argued that sex is a continuum with male and female representing two biological extremes.³ Indeed, an extensive search of medical literature published since 1955 suggested that a minimum of 1.7% of infants are born with some form of sexual development that lies between the two extremes, i.e., intersex (Blackless et al., 2000). Because there are increasing numbers of people assigned to one sex who grow to realize that they are the other, some hospitals are now moving away from hasty determinations and “corrective” (sometimes neonatal) surgeries. Activists and medical researchers are now advocating for the rights of children with intersex conditions to make their own decisions about their identities and bodies later on in life (see Diamond & Sigmundson, 1997; Intersex Society of North America, 2005a, 2005b). This suggests that there may be more people being raised as one sex who “change” to the other – again challenging the fixed binary system of sex/gender. By documenting these lives, social scientists can inform the general public about intersex people’s existence and we can learn much about what it means to “know” what and who one is.

Because many transsexuals take “cross-gender” hormones, we might consider examining the potential biological underpinnings of sex by exploring the hormonal and chemical influences of testosterone and estrogen. Longitudinal studies before and after transsexual hormone therapy may afford insight into whether there is such a thing as a sexed or gendered brain, furthering our appreciation of the interplay of biological and social influences on human identity.

Understanding Sexual Orientation

Is it safe to assume that heterosexuality is “normal?” Currently, sexual orientation is generally conceived of as two mutually exclusive categories – heterosexual and everything else. A person is one or the other, one being considered socially “good” and the other “bad.” Sexual orientation, like sex and gender, is perhaps better understood as a continuum. Chung and Katayama (1996) even termed the trichotomous categorizations of sexual orientation as “over-simplifications.” As explained by Rodríguez Rust (this volume), the bisexual population may include those who are mostly attracted to same-sex others, different-sex others, equally to both, equally to neither, those who have acted with one sex but only fantasized about the other, and so on. It is hard to imagine that all of these people could comprise a single grouping of like individuals, as each certainly must understand their sexuality in a different way.

Gender-crossing people, by their very existence, throw categorical sexual orientation out the window (Alexander & Yescavage, 2003). If we accept that gender and sex vary across continua, the traditional notion of sexual orientation being toward the “same” or “other” becomes moot, as one’s sexuality is no longer determined by the binary classification of the sexes of oneself and the loved one. A more fluid definition of sexual “orientation” may counteract the tendency to polarize sexual orientation into two and only two distinct groups. Highlighting those who do not “fit” into traditional categories expands the range of conceivable human behavior beyond the binary; if we were to accept a fluid notion of sexual orientation, we can learn more about what lies in between the old binary system’s two extremes.

In an example from my own research, 11% of a college student population responded to a survey identifying themselves as something other than “completely heterosexual” (Silverschanz, Konik, Cortina, & Magley, 2005). This study was conducted at a small public university in a mostly rural, conservative, mountain state, not a place where large numbers of LGB persons⁴ typically would be found – 2 to 4% is a more typical percentage of students self-identifying as sexual minority in response to general, campus-wide questionnaires (e.g., Waldo, 1998). How can this finding be explained?

Our method of asking respondents’ sexual orientation is, I believe, what garnered such a high percentage of students responding as they did. We offered the three typical choices for sexual orientation (“Do you identify as lesbian, gay, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: What’s “Queer” Got To Do With It? Enlightening
• PART II: Doing It Right: Ethical Standards in Conducting Research
• PART III: Doing Valid Research
• PART IV: Challenges in Doing Research on Populations at the Margins
• PART V: Conclusions
• PART VI: Addressing the Social and Political Context
• About the Editors
• Also by Authors
• Index