ABSTRACT
Despite escalating academic interest in transgender identifi cation, especially within the humanities but also increasingly within the social sciences, most sociologists have not taken on board the radical potential of trans identities for challenging the taken-for-granted gender and sexuality binaries which underpin sociological theory (Hines 2007a; Monro 2007).2 I argue in this chapter that consideration of those who do not straightforwardly identify within the gender binary of male/female or the sexuality binary of heterosexual/homosexual, offer new directions for sociology in their repudiation of such binary positionings. These theoretical directions may take the form of, for example, a queer sociology (Seidman 1996; Hines 2006), gender pluralism (Halberstam 2002; Monro 2007, Chapter 12, this volume) or degendering (Firestone 1971; Lorber 1994, 2000; Hawkesworth 1997).3
