Abstract
In this thesis, I aim to investigate and challenge cisgenderism— the ideology that delegitimises people’s own designations of their genders and bodies. In Chapter 1,1 discuss the epistemological concerns that informed my decision to apply a bricolage approach, explain how I applied bricolage techniques in my research, and introduce the cisgenderism framework. In Chapter 2,1 conduct a bibliometric analysis to identify the four most widely cited empirical papers in the field of sexist language research in English. I then discursively analyse these four empirical papers for the cisgenderist assumptions that can lead to misgendering and explore the implications of this misgendering. In Chapter 3,1 shift my disciplinary focus from feminist research to psychology with a quantitative content analysis of pathologising and misgendering forms of cisgenderism in psychological literature on children’s genders and gender-associated expression from 1999-2008. In Chapter 4,1 conduct two experiments that that use Prader’s (1954) diagram of infant genital ‘virilisation’ to explore whether framing effects in ostensibly ‘neutral’ and ‘value-free’ medical communication about infant genitals can affect laypeople’s decisions to recommend or reject ‘normalising’ infant genital surgery. In Chapter 5,1 conduct two studies of people’s self-reported experiences of being misgendered and misgendering others. I explore whether perceptions of the adverse effects of misgendering differ between targets and sources of misgendering, between people who report being perceived as ‘trans’ and people who report that they are not, and between people who report having matching and mismatched identity documents. I complement the quantitative empirical findings with an analysis of qualitative participant narratives of having been misgendered and having misgendered others. Chapter 6 concludes this thesis with a restatement of the aims of this research, a synthesis of how the six bricolage techniques I employed contributed to my findings in Chapters 2-5, and a discussion of how these findings can inform interventions to reduce cisgenderism.