Master 1’s thesis

Having encountered, in my private and professional life, to individuals labeling themselves as trans-identitarian, without however using this word, I grew interest in the context of the study and research assignment during the 1^st year master’s degree to this state of the individual.

The analysis that has been lead allowed us to question the link between gender and work. My research worked through thanks to weekly visitations in a trans-identitarian association since the beginning of September 2016. The observation of failure to gain access to employment (50% of them facing unemployment) enables us to initiate reflection on the link between work and gender but also the effects of discrimination in workplaces. Furthermore, can a population, victim of sexist prejudice, find a solution in demanding protective rights?

Thanks to individual and collective interviews and to the participation of therapy groups during weekly receptions in this associative context, it was made possible to tackle the complexity and the entanglement of the difficulties encountered by those individuals.

In an administrative level: the time needed in order to obtain identification papers does not correspond to the time of physical transformation. The employers face administrative incoherence especially in front of social security.

Regarding prejudice and discrimination: trans-identitarian individuals are sometimes, for their employers, individuals able to bring up, by their own presence, questioning from the other employes able to spark conflict and negative reactions. Here are appearing phenomenons linked to the symbolic racism as it is described by Katz and McConahay

And difficulties to adapt to a job: Transitioning for trans-identitarian individuals causes them to sometimes go blank and suffer from fatigue which can require adjustment and reorganization of their job impacting on the work collective. In the long run, and in the transition male to female, transitioning can lead to a loss of physical strength and make necessary here yet again a change regarding work by including the hierarchy of gender (male vs female)

The act of changing gender during one’s life brings up questioning on gender stereotypes and their effects of categorization in the professional world. Centers accentuated on the fact that trans-identitarian individuals and by contagion the organization, can be or not, affected by sexist discrimination.

Nevertheless, those integration difficulties made work recenter on one’s indentitarian stance in society outside of the work issue

Those integration difficulties and social insertion of trans-identitarian individuals are the object of numerous studies. Whether it be by denouncing the violence undergone or the difficulties of society’s acceptance, of indentitarian change, the demands of those individuals aim for a change in society’s look on the issue and a better integration of their minority defining itself as a “Trans community”. Therefore the idea of my study and research assignment is a qualitative study which had aimed, firstly to analyze if the individual complaints indeed correspond to an organized collective demand then to try to analyze if the interviewed individuals identify themselves in a demand which would go through the validation of a trans minority identity (multiculturalism thesis) or in a demand of softening the hierarchy and gender stereotypes (feminist struggle or Queer movement).

Under this aspect of advocacy, the study will try to analyze if a trans-identitarian identity is underlying and corresponds to this advocacy and where and how, in the prospect of a better acceptance, trans-identitarian individuals they stand against society.

Therefore, with an 8 months old participative observational approach, individual interviews and an collective interview, the study did not allow us to prove the hypothesis of integration following the multiculturalist model. The emphasis, during the interviews, on the feminist struggle and the self-definition in reference to gender, proves the hypothesis that the mean of integration chosen, goes through a struggle against men and women inequalities and the softening of gender’s effects. This mean would allow a better integration of trans-identitarian individuals while making identification models put forward by society progress.