This research examines the ways in which individuals who identify with nonbinary gender identities 1) understand and perform their gender identities and 2) navigate the workplace, intimate partner relationships, friendships, and the LGBTQ+ community. Prevailing understandings of gender rely on a gender binary; identification with a binary gender is compulsory. Individuals are assigned a gender at birth and are expected to identify fully with that gender for their entire lives. However, despite significant social pressures to identify as man or woman, there exist individuals whose identities bring into question the stability of the gender binary. Non-binary is sometimes used to describe individuals who do not identify solely or fully as man or woman. Fifteen interviews were conducted with individuals living in the Portland Metro Area who included non-binary as part or all of their gender identity. Questions included general descriptive information, questions about participants’ conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and questions regarding their experiences as a non-binary person in the context of the workplace, intimate partner relationships, friendships, and the LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, plus) community. It was found that non-binary individuals are largely held accountable to a normative performance of gender by friends, intimate partners, employers, and coworkers. While non-binary individuals are constrained by the gender structure at the individual, interactional, and institutional levels, they also appear to push back against these constraints in small but meaningful ways. Results from this study provide insight into a group of people which has been largely left out of the literature.

The criminal justice system is a primary driver of racial and gender injustice. While research and policy advocacy tends to center the most typical criminalized subjects— black, and more recently Latino, men— unique insights into the dynamics of race, gender, and punishment emerge when we focus on a more unique group: transgender people of color. Nearly half of black transgender people experience incarceration over the course of their lives. The extreme criminalization of transgender people of color highlights the intersectional nature of carceral violence, and the ways state violence operates alongside social exclusion and structural abandonment. The carceral state produces and maintains social divisions. This dissertation investigates how the penal definition and management of racialized gender boundaries produces vulnerability and constrains life chances for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. I also demonstrate how, in the face of state coercion, criminalized gender-nonconforming people navigate and seek to mitigate vulnerability. The empirical context for this work is the California state prison system and the reentry ecosystem of San Francisco. Drawing on extensive archival research, 20 months of ethnographic observation in transgender prisoner advocacy organizations, and 136 interviews with formerly incarcerated transgender people, advocates, policymakers, and former prison staff, this dissertation shows how racialized gender regulation operates, transforms, and is resisted in penal organizations. This study traces racialized gender regulation over time— from 1941 to 2018— and across the carceral continuum, examining the management and navigation of racialized gender boundaries behind prison walls and in reentry organizations upon transgender people’s release. While transgender prisoner discourse foregrounds issues of identity, I find that neither identity nor accounts of race and gender as stable and transportable structures are sufficient to explain the ways racialized gender boundaries operate at the meso-level of penal organizations. Prison administrators and reentry staff articulate and regulate racialized gender boundaries based on historically-specific organizational imperatives (e.g. to distinguish between reformable and incurable prisoners, or to allocate limited reentry resources). Currently and formerly incarcerated transgender people, in turn, engage with classification pragmatically and pursue safety strategies designed to minimize vulnerability to both interpersonal and state violence. I arrive at these findings through three papers that focus on different dimensions of organizational practice and pragmatic survival strategies. In the first paper, I argue that, rather than emphasizing a categorical conflict between an institutionalized gender binary and gender-nonconformity, we should analyze how the nature of prison gender boundaries arises from the historically evolving nature of racialized punishment and the inherently coercive nature of classification in a total institution. Prison gender boundaries reflect an evolving conflict between the prison’s efforts to label, control, and confine bodies, and prisoners’ capacity to resist. Prison administrators make and manage gender boundary violation based on the evolving penal logics and resources at their disposal; from 1941-2018, administrators successively use strategies of segregation, treatment, risk management, and bureaucratic assimilation. Prisoners, in turn, express or repress non-normative gender identifications based on the consequences of classification in changing penal regimes. In the second paper, I extend research that has explained incarcerated transgender women’s high rates of victimization based on the prison’s rigid institutionalization of the gender binary. Employing an intersectional approach, I demonstrate that trans women of color in men's prisons are vulnerable because their restricted mobility, subjection to guard coercion, and material deprivation facilitates sexual assault. In this context, trans women of color use embodied, social, and economic resources to avoid victimization. Lastly, I examine how racialized gender regulation persists in the reentry organizations transgender people encounter upon release. Examining the gender rules and gendered interactions fostered by reentry housing programs, I show how the repudiation and regulation of black trans women’s womanhood leads to their exclusion from reentry resources and heightened reentry hardship. Together, these three papers work to explain how racialized gender regulation in the penal system generates complex, intersectional inequality, while also illuminating the ways criminalized transgender people of color understand, navigate, and resist these conditions.

Renewed efforts are needed to address rapidly rising HIV incidence among sexual and gender diverse (SGD) individuals—particularly cisgender gay, bisexual, and other men (MSM) and transgender and nonbinary individuals (TSM) who have sex with men—in Kazakhstan. Intervention research is uniquely positioned to advance HIV prevention through surveying factors shaping the HIV epidemic among MSM and TSM in Kazakhstan, developing and testing the effects of an HIV prevention intervention, and assessing overall social impacts of conducting research. This research proceeded to describe strategies and lessons learned during implementation of a stepped wedge clinical trial of an intervention designed to increase the number of MSM and TSM in the HIV care continuum in Kazakhstan cities of Almaty, Shymkent, and Nur-Sultan. Thus, this three-paper dissertation aimed to: (1) identify psychosocial factors associated with lifetime, past-12-month, and past-6-month HIV testing among a sample of MSM and TSM enrolled in the clinical trial; (2) describe the process of implementing remote training of facilitators for remotely delivering the HIV preventive intervention; and (3) assess social impacts of participating in the clinical trial. MSM and TSM from the study cities were recruited into the clinical trial and administered a structured behavioral survey at their primary visit and at follow-up visits every six months thereafter. After a period of no intervention implementation (‘pre-implementation period’), the intervention was implemented sequentially every six months in the study cities. Among 304 MSM and TSM enrolled in the clinical trial during the pre-implementation period, lifetime and past-12-month HIV testing were positively associated with polydrug use and negatively with sexual transmission HIV risk, and past-6-month HIV testing was negatively associated with sexual risk. The process of developing and implementing remote training of facilitators was guided by a protocol outlining phases involving formative assessment and planning, fundamentals training, and feedback loop and technical assistance. Out of 627 MSM and TSM who completed their primary assessment during the clinical trial, 579 (92%) returned for at least one follow-up visit; of these individuals, 88% reported at least one positive social impact, while 2% reported at least one negative social impact. Findings underscore the value of expanding access to substance use treatment for HIV prevention among MSM and TSM in Kazakhstan, the viability of remote training of facilitators for remote intervention delivery, and the feasibility of conducting HIV prevention research involving MSM and TSM with many benefits and few risks.