“That’s just how people interact with me on a daily basis”: Trans and nonbinary young people’s experiences of sexual and gender-based violence

This article presents findings from a UK-based examination of personal experiences of sexual and gender-based subjugation and violence, as narrated in interviews with trans and nonbinary people aged 18-25. Using a critical discursive approach that can account for how situated positionings and acts of violence are shaped by hegemonic discursive and material structures, my focus in this study is on the ways in which hegemonic discourses on sexuality and gender ‘allow for’ productions of vulnerability and frame interviewees’ experiences of violence. The analyses demonstrate two primary positionings in trans and nonbinary participants’ experiences – positionings of conversion and positionings of entitlement. The interpretations also give insight into vulnerabilisation processes – that is, the ways in which specific materials, social structures and discourses are deployed in ways that ‘make space’ for the production of, and resistance to, subjugating and violent positionings of bodies and embodiments seen as threatening hegemonic ways of doing gender and sexuality. I conclude by suggesting that a focus on productions of vulnerability in positioning might be helpful in shifting the focus of change away from survivors and perpetrators, and towards the structures, dynamics and power relations that enable violence.