Coming Into Identity: How Gender Minorities Experience Identity Formation

Abstract

Previous studies have found that trans people claim to have consistent gender identities over their lifetimes. As a result, scholars know little about processes through which individuals come to identify differently from their gender assignment. In this article, I analyze how gender minorities in the United States come to identify with new labels, theorizing gender-identity formation as a social process. Despite pressure to present oneself as “trans enough” and despite many individuals’ claims to “always have been” the ways they are, most research participants’ stories illustrate a process of gender-identity change—what I term coming into identity. Coming into identity is the process whereby individuals come to understand themselves in new ways despite living in epistemological systems and constructed realities where such ways of understanding oneself are not widely acknowledged. I find that participants’ coming-into-identity experiences involved self-reflection in relation to (1) exposure to new gender conceptualizations and models, (2) gender experimentation, (3) difficult experiences, and/or (4) conversations with others. This research contributes to our understanding of gender-minority identity formation and the relationships among discourse, narrative, story, social interaction, identity, and agency. I argue that in accounting for coming into their identities, individuals exercise agency, mobilizing and building new narratives and discourses.