America Through Transgender Eyes - by J E Sumerau & Lain A B Mathers

About the Book

America through Transgender Eyes provides readers with important insights into the beauty and struggle of transgender people, identities, experiences, and relationships.

Book Synopsis

America through Transgender Eyes provides an opportunity for readers to look at American society through the eyes of transgender people at a time when movements for and against transgender people permeate socio-political discussions throughout the nation. This book provides readers with important insights into the beauty and struggle of transgender people, identities, experiences, and relationships. As political, religious, and scientific traditions update their arguments in relation to growing recognition of transgender lives and histories, America through Transgender Eyes offers an opportunity to visualize the way such traditions appear to some of the people often left out of them. As political battles about the rights of transgender Americans grow throughout the nation, this book provides an important introduction to this population for voters, leaders, activists, and scholars seeking to make sense of the shifting gender dynamics of contemporary America.

Review Quotes

America through Transgender Eyes offers important and incisive insights into the lived experiences of transgender people. This book maps how transgender people experience cisgendering reality and how cisgendering reality shapes gender relations and dominant structures. The book also teaches students how gender operates in US society, and the consequences of these gendered processes for everyone.

Trans people are becoming a more visible and vocal community within the United States and around the globe. Sociology must grapple with how to better think and talk about gender outside of normative understandings of men and women. This book offers an interruption to the dominant cisgender worldview that is characteristic of sociology as a discipline. It serves as a primer for all sociologists from undergraduates to career faculty.

About the Author

J.E. Sumerau is an award-winning researcher, novelist, and professor in sociology as well as the director of applied sociology at the University of Tampa. Their research focuses on the intersections of sexualities, gender, health, and religion in relation to systemic patterns of violence and inequality. They are the author of over seventy works to date, with work published in countless academic journals and edited volumes and as monographs from multiple academic presses. They are also the co-editor of the academic blog site www.writewhereithurts.net and a regular contributor to Conditionally Accepted at Inside Higher Ed. For more information on their work, please visit www.jsumerau.com.

Lain A. B. Mathers is an award-winning instructor and doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their areas of interest are gender, sexualities, religion, and health with a focus on LGBTQ religious experiences, transgender existence, and bisexualities. Their work has been published in academic journals including Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Social Currents, Teaching Sociology, and Sociological Inquiry. They are also the assistant editor of the academic blog site www.writewhereithurts.net and are currently finishing a dissertation on the experiences of bi+ people in America.