“I Gender Normed as Much as I Could”: Exploring Nonbinary People’s Identity Disclosure and Concealment Strategies in Reproductive Health Care Spaces

Abstract

Reproductive health care is characterized by pervasive cisnormativity and trans erasure. Trans people therefore must employ improvisational tactics to access and navigate these spaces, including deciding whether, when, and how to disclose their gender identities. Drawing on the experiences of four nonbinary people from British Columbia, Canada, this qualitative discourse analysis explores how identity disclosures created opportunities for ad hoc education of ill-prepared providers and how identity concealment may be used to mitigate the risks of being identifiable/identified as trans. This analysis demonstrates how identity disclosures alone are insufficient for ensuring that nonbinary people have affirming reproductive health care experiences.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• nonbinary
• reproductive health
• identity disclosure
• cisnormativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cis and trans are being mobilized here as gender modalities—terms that refer to the relationship between the gender/sex a person was assigned and the way that they currently identify (Ashley, 2022).

2 In this manuscript, nonbinary is being used as an umbrella term for those people whose gender identity is neither exclusively man nor exclusively woman, including people who define, understand, and experience their gender identity as outside of the gender binary. Importantly, not all nonbinary people claim “trans” as an aspect of their gender identity, and the suggestion is not that all nonbinary people also identify as trans. Instead, nonbinary people are framed here as trans people, insofar as they do not identify with the gender/sex they were assigned.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship—Doctoral Award.