Transgender individuals often face a barrage of questions from family, friends, medical professionals, and others, asking them to account for and explain their identities. Ultimately, these questions all come down to one fundamental concern: “Why do you feel this way?” This essay offers one potential answer. By turning to the philosophical concept of reincarnation through the methodological approach of autoethnography, this essay posits a relationship among past lives and current lives as one potential way of accounting for one author’s (trans) identity. We present an exploration of one author’s identity in the form of a dialogue with the other author, a supportive friend curious about his interlocutor’s beliefs in reincarnation and excited to learn.
Giving an Account of One’s Current Self: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Gender Identity and Reincarnation
E. Tristan Booth (PhD, Arizona State University) is an instructor in the Hugh Downs School of Communication at Arizona State University. His area of emphasis is rhetoric, focusing on the rhetorical strategies of those whose gender, sex, and sexual identities are marginalized in society. His work appears in Communication Studies and Western Journal of Communication, as well as in the books Transgender Communication Studies (2015) and Queer Communication Pedagogy (2019). email: E.Tristan.Booth@asu.edu
Leland G. Spencer (PhD, University of Georgia) is associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies at Miami University. He is coauthor of Campuses of Consent (2019), author of Women Bishops and Rhetorics of Shalom (2017), and coeditor of Transgender Communication Studies (2015). Leland has published more than twenty peer-reviewed scholarly articles in outlets such as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Studies, Women & Language, and others. email: spencelg@miamioh.edu
E. Tristan Booth, Leland G. Spencer; Giving an Account of One’s Current Self: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Gender Identity and Reincarnation. Journal of Autoethnography 1 April 2021; 2 (2): 177–193. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.2.177
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University of California Press