“Can I still say Dad?”: An Exploration of Loss and Grief Experienced by Irish Adult Transgender Women and their Families

Abstract

In recent times, there has been an emergence of transgender visibility in Ireland, with some positive changes in social attitudes regarding transgender issues (McGuire et al, 2016). However, transgender people, who expressed their gender identity long before this societal shift began to occur, faced particularly uncertain futures fraught with stigmatisation, isolation, and heartbreak. This study explores experiences of grief and loss on the part of five adult transgender women and eleven family members of adult trans women, who undertook gender transition during the last quarter of a century in Ireland. Notably, these gender transitions occurred before trans people in Ireland were legally recognised. This thesis makes an original contribution to our understanding of family acceptance (Emerson and Rosenfeld, 1996; Lev, 2004; Zamboni, 2006) and ambiguous loss (Norwood, 2012; Wahlig, 2014; McGuire et al, 2016; Boss, 2016; McGuire and Catalpa, 2018) as they relate to gender transition. It argues for a state-funded service to support trans people and their families through transition and through their experiences of traumatic and ambiguous loss in this context, while acknowledging the gender binary, not gender transition, as the root cause of transgender people and their families’ experiences of loss and grief. My conclusions regarding the essence of participants’ experiences of loss and grief, are grounded in rich qualitative data acquired via sixteen interviews. Using hermeneutic phenomenological analysis, I show that both trans women and their families experienced both traumatic and ambiguous loss in the context of gender transition. I also reveal that the trans women experienced ambiguous loss of the gendered self throughout their lives, not only at the point of social gender transition. I elucidate the experiences of both trans women and families concerning grief and loss, but also in respect to resilience, revealing key coping strategies which they have developed to successfully navigate gender-transition. My analysis of participants’ experience, is framed by a reflexive account of my personal experiences of gender transition, and of loss in this context.