Reconceptualizing Gender Transitioning: Recognition, Flexibility, and Safety in Nonbinary Identity Journeys

This article interrogates gender transitioning by centering nonbinary experiences, which challenge the binary‐driven narratives that dominate both medical and sociological frameworks of transition. Drawing on seven focus groups with 48 nonbinary participants across multiple countries, this study explores three interrelated forms of transition: social, medical, and flexible aesthetic transitioning. Participants articulated transition as an ongoing, fluid process rather than a linear movement toward a fixed gendered endpoint. Their experiences challenge the assumption that transition must always align with transnormative narratives of dysphoria, permanence, or binary gender embodiment. Instead, participants engaged in practices that “undo” gender in ways that reject rigid classification while still considering safety, recognition, and legibility. This study builds on and critiques theories of doing, redoing, and undoing gender by demonstrating how nonbinary transitioning disrupts dominant models of gender accountability, recognition, and self‐determination. Ultimately, this work expands sociological understandings of gender transition by foregrounding nonlinearity, fluidity, and the role of social, institutional, and embodied constraints in shaping nonbinary identity formation.