Posted originally on November 18, 2016, at Girl w/ Pen. This week, we are thinking about attention to what is said and done, and preparing for Women’s Equality Day on August 26.

This is sex as political football. Sometimes the games have the veneer of lightness, like a game you play after Thanksgiving dinner. Today, though, I was writing about the use of rape as tool of war.

In 1996 the International War Crimes Tribunal focused on rape  in the Bosnian war, and prosecuted people involved. Discussion of one of those prosecutions was here, and this quotation gripped me:

In a reply to his accusers, Mr. Mejakic, who along with others under indictment remains safely in Serb territory, described Ms. Cigelj as being old and unattractive; he added that he wouldn’t have leaned his bicycle against her, much less raped her.

And then I looked at this, from 20 years later, last month (October 2016):

Donald Trump on Thursday adamantly denied claims he forced himself on a People Magazine journalist more than a decade ago, responding to her accusation of sexual assault by saying, “Look at her … I don’t think so.”

That’s today’s brief reflection on normalization, 1996-2016.

Recently I interviewed Debra Umberson, author of Death of family members as an overlooked source of racial disadvantage in the United States. She is a professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and last week we featured her study on this page. The study examined the grief and loss in Black families and linked them to racial differences in US life expectancy. We hear frequent news accounts of Black people dying due to police shootings along with other sources of untimely deaths. The reality of these multiplied deaths affect the Black community as a whole. Looking at movements such as Black Lives Matter and how conflicts surrounding race recently can no longer be swept under the rug, I wanted to learn more about research suggesting that Black Americans die at much higher rates than White Americans due to historical racial inequalities.

Q: Your study discusses the extreme racial disparities in exposure to the death of family members in non-Hispanic Blacks compared to whites. What brought you to investigate this topic?

DU: Several things came together to lead me to this topic. First, several years ago, I conducted in-depth interviews with Black and White respondents to learn more about how early family relationships influence health habits throughout the life course. Although it wasn’t a focus of the project, the interviews with Black respondents were filled with stories of grief and loss, starting when they were children. This was especially striking in that the Black and White respondents were very similar in education and income and the stories of White respondents rarely included stories of family member loss. Around the same time, more and more stories were surfacing in the media about premature and violent deaths of young Black men in the U.S. and their devastated parents were often featured in those reports. I started thinking about the significant Black-White race gap in U.S. life expectancy and realizing how much more pervasive loss must be in Black families.

Q: Although you hypothesized that the death of family members would be more common among Black Americans than among White Americans, did you find anything that surprised you?

DU: The extent of the race gap in loss was striking. I was somewhat surprised by how big the gap was in the risk of losing a child.  Blacks are about two and half times more likely than Whites to lose a child by age 30. Between the ages of 50 and 70, Blacks are 3 times more likely than Whites to lose a child. For most family member deaths, the race gap begins to close in later life as Whites begin to more family members but that’s not the case for death of a child. Whites are much more likely than Blacks to never lose a child in their lifetime.

Q: In the context of current events such as deaths by the police, a rise in the Black Lives Matter movement, and police brutality, what is next on your research agenda?

DU: Our next step is to consider how exposure to family member deaths may contribute to racial disparities in wide-ranging life outcomes including mental health, physical health, and mortality risk. We will also consider how these effects differ for men and women across the life course. Since we know that even one family member death – whether a spouse, a child, or a parent — has significant adverse effects on health and well-being, we expect that more frequent and earlier family member losses contribute to racial disparities in health.

Bereavement rates, health & racial inequality, and criminal victimization mentioned in this research all illustrate a tragic point of view for Black Americans in the United States. With Black Americans in the news constantly this creates a sense of strain, “collective loss, and personal vulnerability” within the Black community.  If Black Americans have family members—whether that be a spouse, a child, or a sibling—dying earlier in their lives, these losses only create a lifelong ripple effect for generations and reoccurring disadvantages. Whatever can help: policies, interventions, or a simple acknowledgment of bereavement and loss in these populations must be taken into effect—and fast.

Tasia Clemons is a Senior sociology major at Framingham State University, an Administrative Resident Assistant, and a CCF Public Affairs Intern.

Originally posted 2/10/2017 

One consequence of racial inequalities in the United States is that black Americans die at much higher rates than white Americans. New research by UT Austin’s Debra Umberson and colleagues explores some understudied consequences of this. Umberson’s team finds that black Americans are more likely to lose their parents during childhood than white children. Furthermore, black Americans are more likely to experience the death of multiple close family members by mid-life. Along with the sheer tragedy, in the long run these losses have the potential to damage the health of black Americans. Bereavement following the death of just one family member has shown to have lasting adverse consequences for the health of the individual, with premature deaths having an even larger impact.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and Health and Retirement Study totaling 42,000 people, the researchers compared non-Hispanic black and non-Hispanic white Americans on their exposure to death of family members and total number of deaths experienced at different ages. The study shows that black Americans were twice as likely as white Americans to experience the death of two or more family members by the age of 30. Black Americans born in the 1980s were three times more likely to lose a mother, more than twice as likely to lose a father, and 20 percent more likely to lose a sibling by age 10. The race gap diminishes slightly at age 70. At that point, whites begin to exceed blacks in experiencing loss. However, black Americans experienced more family member deaths than white Americans overall.

This racial disparity in family member death rates paints a stark picture of black health disadvantages. Death of family members puts strain on other family relationships. This strain often persists throughout a lifetime, thus adding to even more trouble. As Umberson and colleagues emphasize bereavement is a known risk factor for mental and physical health having an even greater impact if it occurs during childhood or early adulthood. The loss-upon-loss quality of this result sets up another reinforcing cycle. Racial inequalities contribute to a high death rate for black Americans. And they add another racial inequality all together; health disadvantages due to the loss of family members.

We also featured an interview with Dr. Umberson about her research.

Megan Peterson is a 2017 sociology graduate of Framingham State University and a Council on Contemporary Families Public Affairs and Social Media Intern.

My husband and I recently spit in tiny tubes just after watching an Ancestry.Com commercial where “Kyle” recounted his ethnic transition. In the commercial, we saw Kyle dancing vigorously in lederhosen, and then heard him say he had discovered that, after years of assuming he was German, he and his family were “not German at all.” They were, in fact, Scottish. This led him to trade in his lederhosen for a kilt, at which point the commercial showed him standing – not dancing – in a kilt, presumably to avoid any vigorous knee kicks. I imagined Kyle and his family discussing over dinner how all of the fabric choices for celebratory outfits would need to be changed to include homage to the new pieces of the ethnic pie chart that science had spit back at him. Ditch the lederhosen! Tartans for everyone!

For a mere $100 (which my biochemistry wizard friend assures me is supercheap for science projects involving DNA), I spit into a tube and added the magical “who am I” solvent that also summarily eliminated the possibility for my DNA to come back as “100% bean soup.” I then shook the tube, sealed the envelope, and mailed it to a place I later read may, in fact, be cataloging and declaring the rights to my DNA for the forever future. (How cool would it be to have new Michelles roam the earth in the year 2786, and then again in the year 2986? Okay, not cool.)

My husband did the spitting project, too. Admittedly, we were doing this not only to see where we stood in relation to our own “where did our family come from” stories, but also to be able to see where our combined-DNA-son may fit. So it was a parenting project that linked the past with the future. Plus, for me, there was always the question of that one great-great-relative whose ethnic origins have been as unknown to all of his descendants as the secret ingredient in his wife’s Norwegian krumkake recipes was. Note to reader: the secret ingredient for krumkake recipes is always cardamom.

The website differentiates those with whom we share DNA from thousands of years ago from those who are probably related to us from just a few generations ago. The recent ones are more connected to things like contemporary languages, clustered immigration across national borders, and krumkake recipes – you know, the stuff that our great-greats talked about over dinner as making us who we are in terms of our imagined ethnic past.

Even though the percentage of DNA-shared lands from thousands of years ago for me centered in England more than I thought it would, my results from just a few generations ago were fairly close to how I envisioned my grandparents and their grandparents moving from there to here. This consisted of my German grandparents (Oma and Opa) landing in Chicago, and my other European ancestors landing in other parts of the upper Midwest a couple generations earlier. The results for my husband mostly situates his DNA ancestors in lands we know today as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Central Asia, and Scandinavia. And we both have about twelve other European lands listed. Our son thus shares genetics with people from geographical locales made up of at least fourteen places that have everything from mead to beer to wine to chai to arak to vodka to ouzo at their dinner parties.

Perhaps the most surprising news for me was that my results came back with a tiny percentage that said “Greek,” which immediately resulted in a new type of bond with my Greek-American mother-in-law, with whom I was staying when I got my results. Along with this revelation came some tongue-in-cheek references to other traits – utterances that included “no wonder she likes feta,” or “that’s why she doesn’t sunburn easily.” Utterances that I’ve probably used to refer to my son to connect him to his Yía Yía.

Importantly, my mother-in-law and I already have a great non-ethnic bond regardless of my new status, mostly due to the fact that her husband is the father of my husband, and they have many things in common. Like the fact that they’re both sociologists, they both are the oldest sons of the oldest sons who were born when their dads were thirty years old (guess how old my husband was when our son was born), and they married women who make fast decisions that, fortunately, included the decisions to marry them. But now we have an added Greek connection.

So, what does all of this do to our understanding of family? Who are our relatives? Who are we supposed to feel close to?

Family can be defined lots of ways. Sometimes it involves blood relations, but any who have adoptive families or people who don’t fit some legal definitions of family may grimace at that. Sometimes family involves lineage and inheritance rules, and worrying whether one’s line will continue for more generations. But the way that families are constructed today increasingly defies straight lines and rules.

Kinship lines and the meanderings that created them from thousands of years ago are immensely varied. We add girth to lines whenever we hear our great-greats talk about why our family is the way it is because we come from those people over there who were a certain way. We add girth to lines when we learn, through our spit, that we share some kind of blood connection to people from a long time ago in a land far away. Just like family can be defined lots of ways, we now have more ways to define lineage. Or at least to investigate it and figure out what to do with it.

The line between me and Greece didn’t used to exist except that I gave birth to a son who descends from my husband’s Greek family. Now it’s a line of mysterious genealogy for me. Maybe a dotted line. Lines can be thickened because we decide so based on new information that has been revealed in a tiny tube of spit. Science stuff. But socially we decided that it matters all of a sudden. Even if it’s based on blood, lines thicken because we decide that this particular blood matters.

By defining something as real, it develops real consequences. Take Ancestry.com’s latest ad, in which descendants of many races from the signers of the Declaration of Independence are featured, posing in the places of their ancestors as depicted in John Trumbull’s famous 1818 painting. The ad’s closing line is “Unlock your past. Inspire your future.”

Isn’t it interesting that, all of a sudden, a little spit in a tube can redefine everything from a family’s connections to a nation’s racial-ethnic imagery? The process of redefining who we come from and where our children will claim to come from is a social process, even when it involves bloodlines. Our family stories have a fabric pattern that tells others who we are, until we learn that we need to change fabrics because our biochemical story has been socially attached to a different fabric. The fabrication of family ethnicity, as it were.

That is not Greek to me.

Michelle Janning is a sociologist and author of The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives. She aims to point out the “between-ness” of our social lives, evident in her essays featured in the collection Between: Living Life in Neither Extreme. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington. 

Most people know that there’s a long and persistent history of racial and ethnic segregation in the United States. There’s less awareness of segregation of gays and lesbians, and gay neighborhoods often get treated as simply a matter of “choice”— much the way that queer identities have historically been treated as a “choice.”

Is it the case that gays and lesbians simply gravitate to similar areas and form gay “enclaves,” or is the segregation of gays and lesbians related to systematic inequalities? According to new work in Population Review by Dudley L. Poston Jr., D’Lane R. Compton, Qian Xiong, and Emily A. Knox, it’s a little of both.

To a degree, discrimination drives the segregation of gays and lesbians. The researchers point to religious intolerance and recent anti-sodomy laws as evidence that gays and lesbians are systematically excluded from some heterosexual communities. But Poston Jr. and colleagues don’t reject the possibility that some gays and lesbians segregate voluntarily. As homophobia decreases, gays and lesbians may still wish to take advantage of the “protective shield and social support” and “stronger political voice” afforded by self-segregation.

It’s likely that the dynamics of segregation might be different for gays and lesbians. Lesbians are more likely to have kids, and thus might voluntarily congregate in places with better school districts. But they’re also more likely to live in poverty than gay men, which leads to fewer living options.

Poston Jr., Compton, Xiong, and Knox examined the relationship between factors related to racial segregation and segregation by sexuality among 100 metropolitan areas with large gay and lesbian populations, using American Community Survey data from 2008 to 2012. The researchers estimated the percentage of gay or lesbian households that would have had to relocate within that metropolitan area for the number of same-sex and different-sex households to be proportional.

In all metropolitan areas examined, gay and lesbian households were segregated from heterosexual ones. On average, about 75 percent of gay male and 69 percent of lesbian couple households would have had to relocate within their metropolitan area to eliminate neighborhood segregation. The lowest estimate of segregation was between lesbians and different-sex couples in Madison, Wisconsin. Even there, though, just over half of lesbian households would have had to relocate for there to be no segregation.

Gay male households were more segregated from heterosexual households than were lesbian couple households in most cases. Provo-Orem, Utah, had the most segregation by sexuality: More than 90 percent of gay male households would have had to relocate to be proportional to heterosexual married and cohabiting couples in the population.

Gay and lesbian households are segregated from each other, too. In El Paso, Texas, which had the most segregation of same-sex households by gender, there was almost complete segregation between lesbians and gay men.

What factors predicted increased segregation between same-sex and different-sex households? For gays and lesbians, high prevalence of gay/lesbian couple households, high rates of Republican voters and Southern Baptists, and high poverty rates in their metropolitan areamade segregation more likely.

For gay men, they also found high population density, anti-sodomy laws, and a lack of non-discrimination laws predictive of increased segregation.

For lesbian households, high racial segregation also made their segregation from different-sex households more likely.

The only factors that predicted segregation between gay male and lesbian households were the gay male prevalence rate and the poverty rate. As the proportion of gay males in an area increased, segregation between gay male and lesbian couple households decreased. Conversely, as the poverty rate in an area increased, segregation of these two groups also increased.

The salience of poverty rates in these patterns suggests that segregation by sexuality is fueled at least partially by inequalities rather than the choices of gay and lesbian couples. But, to the extent that they have the option, gay and lesbian couples might choose to live in areas where they share political ideologies with others and can avoid discrimination.

There are still unexplained factors related to segregation by sexuality. Earlier qualitative research comparing the Castro with other gay enclaves, for example, found that what draws residents toward specific areas varies by the community, often in conjunction with more specific intersecting identities of the gays and lesbians that predominate in each space. Future research could examine individual communities to better understand how inequalities may be perpetuated through the residential patterns of gays and lesbians. But amid researchers’ calls for more research on the geographic distribution of gays and lesbians, there’s currently a policy shift away from data collection on LGBTQ demographics. The findings in this research by Poston Jr., Compton, Xiong, and Knox highlight that data on where sexual minorities live is crucial for understanding, and thus addressing, inequality more generally.

Braxton Jones earned his MA in Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and will begin a doctoral program at Boston University in the fall. He serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar. 

You can also read an interview with Joan Maya Mazelis at CCF@TSP regarding Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor.

Approximately 47 million people in the United States live under the poverty threshold. The erosion of the public safety net has made their struggle to survive more difficult in recent decades, and cuts currently under consideration that would weaken programs which help make medical care, food, and housing affordable and accessible to the poor would worsen this.

Those in desperate poverty often have to turn to a private safety net, frequently made up of family members, to meet basic needs, as many jobs fail to pay a living wage. But in my research on people living in poverty in Philadelphia, I found that many of the most vulnerable had no family members they could turn to, which meant any crisis could lead to homelessness. Others had family ties, but those relationships were often negative, characterized by long histories of unsupportive, mistrustful behavior.

As a child, Betty (note: all names here are pseudonyms) was a victim of sexual abuse by an older male relative, and when she told her parents, they didn’t believe her. Once she reached adulthood their relationship wasn’t better. While her mother allowed Betty and her daughter to live with her for a year when they had nowhere else to go, she made Betty’s husband sleep in his van outside their home. The couple had moved to Philadelphia in part to escape this arrangement, and Betty sometimes skipped meals to ensure their daughter got enough to eat.

When Rebecca and her son were homeless, her mother and sister sought custody of her child instead of inviting her to stay with them, citing Rebecca’s lack of a place to call home as evidence of her unfitness as a parent. For CC, fleeing her abusive husband meant fleeing the only family who could provide her and her two young children a place to live. Bebe had left her abusive, violent mother who did not allow her to go to school. Her aunt wanted to help her, but was homeless herself.

In my research, I found that some desperately poor people without supportive family ties joined together in a unique organization, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU). This group of and for poor people allowed many of them to provide each other the support they lacked from their families. This organization essentially substituted for family, fostering ties between members that provided housing, food, moral support, and a real sense of community. Many members built ties with one another that lasted for years, even decades.

Members often see each other as the family they never had or the one they wish they had. Pauline, who had moved to Philadelphia from out of state to live with her father and then became homeless when they had a conflict, had no other family to turn to for support when she came to the organization. She recalled: “When my family didn’t give me nowhere to stay [KWRU] did. . . .  When I came here they treated me like a family, like I was part of their little family.” James, said, “I got mad love for KWRU and KWRU family. . . . People in KWRU, I see them as like my brothers and sisters all the way around the board.”

Severe cuts in programs that help those in poverty means those who are struggling will need to lean on social ties more than ever. For those without family to rely on, KWRU served as a rare and meaningful substitute. But the organization’s ability to provide substantial help like housing weakened after its foundation grants expired in 2009. What they really require in an era of deeper needs is funding. Rather than slashing benefits to the poor and assuming family will fill the void, politicians and policy makers should make sure poor families have what is required to meet their needs—stable and affordable housing being the most fundamental among them and often the most difficult to acquire. And especially in a context of reduced government aid to the poor, organizations like KWRU need support so they can fill the voids that absent or destructive family ties create for those in very tenuous circumstances.

Joan Maya Mazelis is Associate Professor of Sociology and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Urban Research and Education at Rutgers University-Camden. Her book, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor, is available from NYU Press.

Sociologist Joan Maya Mazelis, author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Camden. Her research examines the experiences of people in poverty and the role of social ties in their struggles to survive. In her recently published Washington Post Op-ed she critiques the idea that having the right mind-set can help poor people escape poverty, and discusses her research findings that poor people often blame themselves for their circumstances. As a family sociologist, I was interested in finding out more about the social ties that poor people have, or avoid, and how those ties (or lack thereof) can contribute to poverty or alleviate its effects. I was recently able to interview her about her work:

AK: In your recently published book Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor, you interview people who are experiencing severe poverty. For some of them, a major factor in the difficulties they experience is not having family ties at all, or not having family members who are willing to help them. Some of your interviewees went on to form long term family-like ties with others that you call “sustainable ties” after joining a poor people’s organization that helped them form those ties.

What do your findings tell us about the importance of family ties or other “sustainable ties” and their connection to falling into and getting out of poverty?

JMM: Ties with others are incredibly important for those struggling financially. Social ties may not help people  escape poverty, but they can help them cope with its worst consequences. One of the most vital ways social ties protect people is helping them to avoid homelessness. For people who live from one paycheck to the next, a missed paycheck due to an illness or other crisis can lead to eviction. But people in this situation might avoid homelessness  if family members can loan them money for rent. And if no one can help with money, family members  might provide a place to stay temporarily, allowing them to avoid living on the street. Many of my research participants who didn’t have family to rely on had experienced homelessness.

Sometimes family ties aren’t as positive as we wish they would be. One participant, Rosa, told me about the time she asked to shower at a cousin’s house; the cousin wanted to charge her and her daughter money for the water they used. Alyssa lived for a time with family members but had to turn over much of her wages to them to do so.

But social ties with people who aren’t family can easily dissolve, especially given the pressure that extreme poverty places on them. Many participants described how this had happened in the past when they relied on non-kin ties. Sustainable ties are ties between people who aren’t family, but last for a long time. In my research, I found that the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), which brought poor people together in the fight to survive, fostered such sustainable ties between members. Some of these ties have lasted for decades.

KWRU provided housing for members who needed it, and thus filled a void for those who didn’t have family to rely on. As Pauline told me, “when my family didn’t give me nowhere to stay [KWRU] did, and I need somewhere to sleep for my kids. .  .  . When I came here they treated me like a family, like I was part of their little family.” Sustainable  ties people built through KWRU made an enormous difference in members’ lives.

AK: What are some of the differences you found between poor people who were able to build “sustainable ties” through the organization you studied, and poor people who weren’t members of that organization?

JMM: One of the main differences is that those in the organization felt less alone. They had a real sense of community. They also felt enveloped by social support, because they weren’t relying on just one tie. Most of those who weren’t in the organization did have family to rely on, but usually just one or two kin ties. Often those kin ties created a lot of negative feelings, in which family members helped only grudgingly, or the help came with guilt, shame, and strings attached.

People usually turned to KWRU when they were desperate, and therefore the people I interviewed who weren’t members of KWRU were generally a little bit better off—almost all of them had lived with family members as adults and many received other kinds of support from family, like free child care for their kids while they went to work or school.

AK: When doing the research for this book, what important lessons did you learn about addressing poverty and building “sustainable ties” that may be useful for other poor people’s organizations, policy makers, or the average person going through tough financial times?

JMM: One of the key lessons is the importance of reciprocity in building ties that last. Giving back—helping other members, volunteering in the office, and attending rallies—functioned like monetary dues in KWRU. This increased the number of people KWRU could help. It also made members feel better about getting help and helped to foster a sense of community. Organizations that serve poor people could ask them to do small things to invest in additional help and build ties with other clients based on this model.

Policy makers must understand, however, that fundamental needs have to be addressed first. Social ties can do a lot, but they can’t do everything. We need more income supports, child care subsidies, and widely accessible affordable housing. While KWRU members did build sustainable ties with minimal governmental support, their feelings about mutual support outside of KWRU as well as the experiences of those I interviewed who weren’t members of KWRU suggest that desperate poverty makes it very difficult to rely on one another. Positive social policies addressing fundamental needs would take the pressure off; people could be there for each other without worrying about being completely drained.

In terms of what the average person going through tough financial times can do, it’s so easy and common to want to withdraw from other people when you’re struggling financially. People feel embarrassed; they blame themselves, even when larger forces are at work, like a high unemployment rate. I found many participants in my study had done this, and it increased their desperation and depression. So to people going through tough times, I would say, remember that you’re not alone. And everyone needs help sometimes. Don’t be afraid to look for the right community and reach out to it.

Joan Maya Mazelis is Associate Professor of Sociology and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Urban Research and Education at Rutgers University-Camden. Her book, Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor, is available from NYU Press. Follow her on Twitter @JoanieMazelis. Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Follow her on twitter at @ATKuperberg.

New research in the Journal of Marriage and Family by Hui Liu and Lindsey Wilkinson reveals that married trans people (and particularly trans women) experience less discrimination than those who are unmarried. This doesn’t mean that marriage per se is what protects trans people from discrimination. As with other work examining the benefits of marriage, the issue of “selection into marriage” – or the idea that being well-off is a precursor to, rather than a result of marriage – seems to come up for trans women as well. “Transition stage,” or the extent of a respondent’s transgender visibility, as well as income and health insurance access, was linked to perceived discrimination more so than marital status. In the end, a few differences between married vs. cohabiting vs. previously-married trans people remained, but those who were never married at all perceived nearly the same (lower) amount of discrimination as married respondents.

The data come from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, a non-representative sample of 6,456 respondents collected between 2008 and 2009. The analyses are based on a sub-sample of 4,286 transgender (thus, excluding people who identify as non-binary) respondents who sufficiently answered questions about marital status and their perceptions of discrimination in the areas of work, family, public accommodations, and health care. In addition to analyzing the relationship between marital status and discrimination for the entire trans sample, the authors looked for differences by gender.

Initially, Hui and Wilkinson found the hypothesized differences by marital status: trans people who were married experienced significantly less discrimination than those who weren’t. This would make sense, according to some sociological theorizing on marriage. On the one hand, being in a “stigmatized category” generates negative effects, including discrimination (per the minority stress perspective). Yet, if one follows the marital advantage theory, that observes that there are distinct economic and social benefits to marriage, it appeared to be the case that marriage protects against transphobic discrimination. Before engaging this possibility, though, the authors accounted for other factors beyond marital status that could conceivably relate to discrimination against trans people.

Hui and Wilkinson understand that not all trans people are the same, and investigated the impact of transition stage on perceived discrimination, including how well the respondent “passed,” whether the respondent had medically transitioned, and whether they were out about their trans identity. Some of the power previously attributed to marital status was shifted after accounting for transition stage, because married people generally had characteristics that were less conducive to discrimination than those who weren’t married. Married trans women, for example, were less likely to live full-time as transgender or to be out about their trans identity than individuals in other categories, and rated their visual conformity higher than those who were never- or previously-married.  

 When taking transition stage into account, the “benefits” of marriage were still present, but they were reduced. Previously-married and cohabiting respondents still perceived more discrimination than married respondents in three out of the four areas each, but the disparities were less drastic. Never-married trans people reported nearly the same perception of discrimination as married trans respondents in all cases except for family discrimination. With family discrimination – indicated by relationship dissolution and family- and court-based restrictions on being with children – never-married respondents experienced more discrimination than those who were married. In other words, marriage for trans people was associated with also being more conventional; that conventionality—more so than marriage itself—explained the lower level of perceived discrimination, particularly for women.

There is also economics. Married trans men and women were better off, and this may have made a difference for perceptions of discrimination too. In the National Transgender Discrimination Survey sample, for example, the median family income for married trans women was at least $30,000 more than for unmarried respondents. More than 90 percent of married trans women had health insurance, compared to only 76 percent of those who weren’t married.  The greater economic and insurance advantages held by married trans women, Hui and Wilkinson found, helped to explain why they felt less discrimination. After considering economic resources, there were very few differences in discrimination by marital status. Still, cohabiters experienced more discrimination in family and public accommodations, and those who were previously married experienced more family discrimination, when compared to married trans people. There were no differences in perceived discrimination in work, family, public accommodations, or health care between never-married and married trans people.

The few remaining differences in discrimination by marital status were mostly confined to trans women. Even before considering transition stage and economic resources, there were fewer differences in discrimination by marital status for trans men, and these were mostly in the family. After accounting for socio-demographics, transition stage, and economic factors, married and unmarried trans men did not perceive differences in discrimination in work, health care, or public accommodations. In the final model, the only difference in perceived discrimination by marital status for trans men was that previously-married trans men experienced more family discrimination than married trans men. There are many possible explanations for why there were fewer differences in discrimination by marital status for trans men when compared to women. It could relate to findings that trans men generally experience less discrimination than trans women. It may also be because there were fewer differences by trans men’s marital status on other key explanatory variables. Unlike for women, for example, there were no differences for men in being out as transgender by marital status in any of the four areas studied by the researchers.

Hui and Wilkinson ask the question, “Does marriage matter?” In statistical models, and in predicting disadvantage, the answer is a qualified yes.  But it’s not quite clear, according to the authors, if marriage is responsible for reduced disadvantage, or if trans women with more disadvantage are simply less likely to marry in the first place. This means that, as with efforts to reduce disadvantage for cisgender couples, effective policy will likely require more than simply recommending marriage to trans individuals. By re-attributing much of the initial discrepancies in discrimination by marital status to economic factors, this research suggests that a fruitful avenue for reform will be addressing the economic injustices faced by trans people. In addition to transphobia, these economic injustices may actually contribute to the low ranking of trans people in the marriage market identified by the researchers.

Braxton Jones earned his MA in Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and will begin a doctoral program at Boston University in the fall. He serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.

Have you ever wondered how your living conditions might change if you moved? Maybe you have asked yourself what your living conditions are like compared to a relative or friend. The Economic Policy Institute developed a family budget calculator with answers (currently using data from 2014). The family budget calculator measures what one’s household income would need to be to achieve an adequate standard of living for 10 different family types in 618 locations across America. Essentially, this budget tool paints a picture of where families stand economically in America today.

This goes beyond personal reflection: As economist Elise Gould and colleagues explain in their accompanying report, What Families Need to Get By, “[their report] and the Family Budget Calculator itself measure(s) the income families need in order to attain a secure yet modest living standard where they live by estimating community-specific costs of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes.”

What I can see right now. As I explored EPI’s family budget calculator I thought of some of the ways I could use it pulling on two parts of my identity, recent college graduate on the job hunt and a sociologist. As a recent graduate, I have been applying to jobs in various states and cities. EPI’s family budget calculator is a good resource for mapping out what my salary would need to be and if I would need a roommate, or two. For instance, using EPI’s calculator I found out in Washington, DC, my housing cost would be about $1,176. If I stayed in the Boston, MA, area my housing cost would be about $1,042. Looks like I’ll need a roommate either way.

How students can use this tool. It is also easy to see how this tool can be used for students in various classes. For example, it can be used to discuss public policy. One of the costs measured with the EPI family budget calculator is childcare. A policy class could compare how different state childcare policies affect a family’s budget using the EPI calculator. EPI is due to update their family budget calculator this fall, and I am looking forward to seeing what new costs they will consider. With Devos rewriting student loan forgiveness rules how might EPI measure education costs? Students especially may be interested in looking into variances in the cost of education. I start paying student loan in about a month so I know I’m curious.

EPI has even more to consider approaching the update of their family budget calculator given the current state of health care. In the 2015 update, EPI made adjustments to account for the premiums available under the Affordable Care Act. With health care up in the air as I write this, how will EPI measure this? It is a task, we all have come to understand, that is rather complicated when there is no saying what will or will not happen to health care in America. Students can take this puzzle and run with it, investigating additional concerns that will likely be on their minds—and that are relevant for understanding the social world.

But about the bigger picture. Of course, EPI made this calculator to link specific, personal cases to larger policy concerns. That’s a core activity for the “sociological imagination.” The family budget calculator points to policy questions such as what an adequate minimum wage would be, what are appropriate levels of social insurance like unemployment insurance or TANF? It offers ideas about the kinds of wages and benefits that would make private sector jobs livable for all families, too. EPI’s calculator gives students, researchers, and all with a curious mind and a family budget a good tool: Examining the impact of context reminds me of how much policy isn’t about me, but it affects me, and all of us, personally.

Megan Peterson is a 2017 graduate in sociology from Framingham State University and a Council on Contemporary Families Public Affairs and Social Media Intern.