ABSTRACT
Ideas of community have implications for conceptualizing and conducting scholarly endeavors and practical applications, determining who is sought out and (in/ex)cluded, who chooses to participate and how, which voices are (over/under-)valued and even who conducts the research. Within interlocking systems of oppression, differences are subsumed into an aggregated sameness (e.g., White, masculine, able-bodied), producing a harmonious(-appearing) community. Conceptually, ‘community’ is rife with ambiguities, affective idealism and unnamed assumptions. These necessitate that scholars reflect on what they mean by ‘community,’ and on who is include(d)/exclude(d) through its meaning(s). These reflections become particularly important when working with trans people in a globalized and interconnected world, where ‘community’ is less mediated by face-to-face relations and transcends time and space. Undoubtedly, our own failings in not interrogating these undisclosed meanings that we, as well as our participants, held in our own research contributed to missed opportunities in explicating how we experienced ‘community,’ belongingness, marginalization, gender and identity. Through critical and collaborative reflections, such as our offering in this chapter, we call on ourselves, our kin and our colleagues to wrestle with taken-for-granted definitions of community, and to consider the exclusion/erasure of non-normative and non-U.S./non-Western-centric notions of transness and gender in order to write them (back) in honorably.
