Nonbinary Aging: A Mixed-Methods Exploration of Nonbinariness in Middle and Later Adulthood

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3. Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary Lives Across the Life Course

Abstract

Despite growing scholarly attention to trans and nonbinary identities, existing research disproportionately centers younger cohorts, tacitly framing gender expansiveness as a youthful phenomenon and obscuring the social, structural, and historical conditions that have shaped older adults’ access to nonbinary recognition across the life course. This project proposes to investigate how nonbinary adults aged 45 and older in the United States experience and construct gendered life trajectories in middle and later adulthood. Drawing on life course theory, minority stress theory, and queer and trans aging scholarship, and introducing the concept of "enbinormativity" to theorize normative prescriptions of nonbinary legitimacy, this study will employ a sequential mixed-methods design integrating secondary analysis of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey with semi-structured life story interviews. Together, these methods will illuminate how older nonbinary adults came into their identities, navigate healthcare systems, workplace environments, elder care institutions, and interpersonal networks and how intersecting social positions including race, class, disability, and geography shape both cumulative marginalization and strategies of resilience over time.

Author

• Bailey Otter, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor