The Emergence of New Transgendering Identities in the Age of the Internet

This chapter is a case study of the emergence of two new transgendering identities in the age of the Internet, situated within the conceptual frameworks we have developed elsewhere for the sociological analysis of the full range of transgender diversity in contemporary Euro-American societies (Ekins 1997; Ekins and King 2001a, 2006). These conceptual frameworks were based, principally, on extensive life history work with several hundred Euro-American transgender informants and ethnographic work with several thousands of transpeople worldwide, since the mid-1970s, as guided by the methodology of grounded theory. Grounded theorists follow the research strategy of ‘theoretical sampling’. Informants and research sites are sampled on the basis of developing theory. Emerging data is analysed using the ‘constant comparative method’ (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Glaser 1978).