Ethics Approval Information

Ethics Approval Information

This research project has ethics approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Melbourne. This means that several committees have read through a statement of aims, objectives, methodologies and research planning, finalising each detail of the project beforehand.

If you have any ethical concerns or quetions about this project, please contact the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Melbourne. If you would like to verify the research, you can email one of the representatives of the Human Research Ethics department at my institution or you can contact my supervisor, Dr Fran Martin, whose details are listed on the Contact page.

Sketching a Research Methodology

The widespread trend of travel to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery presented itself as a perfect case study to ask questions about the intersection between gender variance, travel as a material practice and travel as an 'idea'.

But although this particular instance of 'gender travel' seems quite self-contained at first, it really isn't. Understanding this particular flow of people involves an understanding of Thai and Australian laws, medical/psychiatric regulations concerning gender reassignment surgery, and the differential patterns of gender variant practice or identity that take place in both locales. It's also important to contextualise all of those things at the level of transnational flows of money and people: tourism, Thailand's growing cosmetic surgery market, and the transnational or globalised 'hacks' that exist because of a lack of public national healthcare services in both nation-states. Not least, fully understanding the subjective experience of people who make this kind of journey involves talking to them and trying to understand their experiences.

At the same time, limiting my research on 'gender travel' to an example that primarily involves gender reassignment surgery risks a lack of attention to other gender variant travels, particularly the journeys or gender variant people who might not undergo gender reassignment surgery or recognise themselves as 'transsexual'. When I realised this, I began to formulate a different project that would gather together as many accounts of 'gender variant travel' as possible, under whatever definitions of that phrase the participants decided were relevant. Hence, the Gender Travel Questionnaire.

I don't wish to lump together the vastly different experiences of people depending on their gender variant self-identification (let alone class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, language, geographical location and so on.) But I do want to ask what kinds of different journeys might result from, or result in, non-'transsexual' gender identifications or practices.

The Ethics of Gender Variant Research

It's impossible to talk about the ethics of doing research on gender variance without first addressing the politics of intersections between gender variance and the academy. In the field of 'Western' medicine, gender variance and intersexualities have traditionally been classified as mental illnesses, deviant behaviour or physiological abnormality.

Despite the number of people who have fought such classifications, and the stigma and discriminations that go with them, 'Gender Identity Disorder' is still included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the primary textbook for diagnosing and treating psychiatric conditions in English-speaking states. Indeed, it is only by being classified in this category that many transpeople can access treatment.

Historically, many non-trans researchers have appointed themselves as experts in the field of gender identity 'disorders', influencing both the paths of those gender variant people under their professional medical care and the trajectory of theoretical and scientific 'knowledge' about gender variance. At best, some researchers may have used their status to help trans and intersex people. At worst, 'expert' status has allowed researchers to manipulate and maltreat their patients in the service of proving questionable scientific theories; or to produce findings aimed at denying transpeople the right to live in the gender they feel that they are.

Given this history (which is, unfortunately, not entirely past), in my own research I feel a responsibility not to reproduce the terms of the traditional 'academic-transperson' relationship, in which the transperson is a subject to be assessed, judged and dismissed.

But this is not the only ethical consideration that matters. Globally, gender variant people comprise a diverse 'non-community'. Depending on location and context, the names people use to identify themselves and their place in the world vary enormously. Even words such as 'transsexual' and 'transgender' differ in meaning according to who one talks to. These naming differences often coincide with differences of opinion: about political strategy, about what a transsexual or transgendered person should be; about the relationship of gender variance to sexuality, gender, race, class or politics itself.

In this research, I hope to both respect, and give the requisite textual depth to, these multiple differences, and to fully investigate the connecting, contextualising 'backgrounds' that give them meaning. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously called this method "thick description".

"What it means," he writes,

is that descriptions of [the researched] culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine [those we are researching] to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them.

Identity and Partiality

The Clifford quote I cited above draws attention to the importance of what researchers imagine as the contexts and meanings those who are studied place upon their languages and practices. It should already be clear that as a researcher, I don't see myself as an 'all-seeing' objective note-taker, resting on the scientific authority of the academy.

The fact that I am trans myself, and have experienced many of the events I'm researching myself, gives me a particular stake in not repeating mistakes of misrepresentation. At the same time, I cannot claim that this project will speak for all gender variant people, all transsexuals, all transgendered people, all intersexed people or any other category. My perspective is partial, and filtered through a political lens -- which also filters my framing of the questions I began this thesis to work through. I anticipate having to reframe and rephrase some of those questions in the course of doing this research -- in fact, that's what research is all about. Perhaps this methodology and ethics write-up will also change as we go.

Aren Aizura April 2006