Description:
This thesis accomplishes three main objectives. The first objective is locating, consolidating, and analysing current scholarship on transsexual, transracial, and transabled identities, with the goal of understanding the similarities and contrarities among them. As is detailed in the Literature Review, simultaneous discussion of these three subjectivities is absent from current scholarship. The second objective is to use this paper as an archive for the process that occurred in drafting new theoretical hypotheses regarding the varying levels of social permissibility each of these identities experience: brainstroming, researching, crafting The Trajectory of Permissibility, disproving that theory, and beginning to develop a new hypothesis based on the research completed. Because the paper is a product of two semesters of independent research, the bulk of the scholarship collected suppports - and then disproves - a theory that has proven to be unfeasible in understanding the relationships among identities and social permissibility. The third objective of this paper is to introduce a new theory-in-progress, The Hypothesis on Permissibility, which is a reactionary framework to the failure of the Trajectory of Permissibility. The Hypothesis of Permissibility seeks to understand the structural and indiviudal components of varied social permissibility for transsexual, transracial, and transabled identities independent of a trajectory. The final portion of this paper introduces early thoughts on The Hypothesis on Permissibility, which may become - via future investments in research, application, and trial-and-error - a theoretical lens through which we might better understand the co-existence of these embodied, marginalized identities.