Experiences of ‘Doing Passing’ in Interactions: A Phenomenological Analysis with UK Transmasculine Individuals

Abstract This paper explores transmasculine participants’ lived experiences of “doing passing” in social interactions, illustrating how they both take advantage of and are constrained by normative gendered styles and discourses in the intersubjective negotiation of their gender identities. Phenomenological analysis is used to demonstrate participants’ strategic approaches to the performance of passing in interactions, highlighting the linguistic signifiers that felt important (vocal pitch frequency and variation, lexical choice, and speech content), and the discourses that make the performance of gender meaningful in interactions. The analysis further conveys participants’ complex emotional relationships with passing, a phenomenon identified as cisnormative, binary, and obscuring of trans and queer identities. The authors argue that normative gendered styles and discourses are highly salient in transmasculine people's interactive doing of passing, through providing the terms by which a gender identity becomes intersubjectively legible, while simultaneously limiting a person's ability to do their identity creatively and congruently.