“Why Don’t You Just Leave?”

This chapter focuses on the resilience and coping strategies of transgender intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors, as well as the complex factors that prevent them from leaving abusive relationships. Extensive barriers to help seeking play a significant role in determining whether survivors choose to stay or leave. Some barriers are similar to those experienced by cisgender IPV survivors, while others are unique to transgender survivors. This chapter also suggests new empirical and theoretical directions in transgender IPV research and dispels the myth of the willing transgender victim.

Theorizing on the Roots of Transgender Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence (IPV) prevention education, batterer intervention programs, and victim treatment services are often designed in part to help participants identify and undermine the causes of IPV so as to facilitate rehabilitation and limit future perpetration. Thus, understanding the causes of transgender IPV (T-IPV) is of vital importance to ending it. By drawing on both the T-IPV and the broader cisgender IPV research literatures, this chapter reviews emerging theories of the causes of T-IPV. These theorized causes include many that also have been identified in the cisgender IPV literature—including rationalizing abuse, socialization into IPV-condoning attitudes, and power imbalances—in addition to several causes unique to T-IPV, including transphobia-related perpetration theories and transphobia-related victimization vulnerability theories. Supporting evidence for and gaps in our knowledge about these causes also are reviewed.

The Intersections of Race and Immigration

As in the cisgender intimate partner violence (C-IPV) literature, transgender IPV (T-IPV) is often presented as a one-size-fits-all phenomenon, where all transgender survivors experience the same IPV tactics and barriers to escape. Consequently, IPV victim service providers may falsely assume that most transgender survivors are white, native-born citizens. In reality, transgender survivors who are people of color, immigrants, and/or undocumented face a variety of unique IPV tactics and barriers to escape shaped by racism, xenophobia, language challenges, and fewer legal rights. This chapter reviews the still-emerging body of research on T-IPV and intersectionality, specifically the intersections of race and immigration, supplemented by studies on race and immigration in the C-IPV literature. Ultimately, this literature emphasizes the need for tailoring IPV victim services to the unique needs of various transgender subgroups.

Undermining Transgender Survivors

This chapter examines the theoretical underpinnings as to how transgender people experience intimate partner violence, in a social context dominated by romantic love ideals and the gender binary. It examines how abusers manipulate transgender-specific insecurities and discredit identities through controlling gender transitions and other aspects of transgender identity construction. The processes of identity work—that is, constructing oneself as an image in relation to one's self-concept and perceptions of others’ reactions—influence almost all realms of life. Given the social context and distinct experiences corresponding with transitions, this chapter explores transgender peoples’ identity work as a potential site for identity abuse, identifying two altercasting strategies of retroverting (reinforcing past, undesired identities) and maneuverting (making desired identities unachievable by holding idealized traits and props over victims). In so doing, this chapter also considers ways in which discrediting identity work offers insight into “why victims stay” in abusive relationships within the context of transgender intimate partner violence.

Best Practices in Shelter Provision

Transgender individuals experience intimate partner violence (IPV) at rates similar to those of cisgender individuals. Despite this, many present-day emergency IPV shelters are ill-equipped to respond to the needs of transgender survivors, in part because of a historically gendered focus on how society understands IPV. This chapter begins by discussing how feminist IPV theory inspired how IPV shelters respond to abuse, and how this ultimately shaped how they (and society as a whole) viewed IPV. Next, the chapter discusses some of the current policies and practices that many mainstream IPV shelters use that may be cisnormative by focusing on the needs of cisgender survivors over the needs of transgender survivors. Finally, the chapter discusses some practical changes that IPV shelters can implement in order to help better assist transgender survivors of IPV.

The Intersection of Transphobia, Human Rights, and Transgender Intimate Partner Violence

Despite the alarming prevalence and consequences of intimate partner violence among transgender people (T-IPV), research, public policy, and service provision remains largely focused on cisgender IPV (C-IPV). Creating tailored societal responses for transgender survivors and abusers entails recognizing not only the similarities but particularly the differences between C-IPV and T-IPV. Research highlights numerous ways in which societal discrimination against transgender people uniquely shapes the causes, abusive tactics, and barriers to escape regarding T-IPV. In this sense, better understanding and addressing T-IPV necessitates acknowledging the extent of anti-transgender discrimination. This opening chapter introduces readers to the pressing issue of T-IPV by defining core terminology, reviewing prevalence estimates and outcomes, detailing the extent of interpersonal transphobia in the world and the dearth of transgender human rights protections, and discussing the many ways in which such discrimination fuels T-IPV. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book.

Working toward Transgender Inclusion in the Movement to Address Intimate Partner Violence

As this book highlights, transgender intimate partner violence (T-IPV) is both a prevalent and impactful phenomenon, with unique causes, tactics, abuser rationalizations, victim resistance and coping strategies, and barriers to escape. Beyond detailing the nature of T-IPV, Transgender Intimate Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Introduction provides evidence-based insights for improving future research, mental and medical health-care provision, services by shelters and law enforcement, legal protections, prevention education, and provider training networks. This concluding chapter reviews the core lessons of the book and each of its chapters and discusses how we might work to address key gaps in research, service provision, and the law—and, ultimately, how we may build toward a safer tomorrow.

Overcoming Barriers to Knowledge Production in Transgender IPV Research

The quality of research methodology is unquestionably at the heart of the accuracy and utility of empirical data on transgender intimate partner violence (T-IPV). Unfortunately, T-IPV scholars must contend with a host of unique methodological challenges, including defining the population, nonprobability and probability sampling with transgender populations, IPV measure diagnostic testing on transgender samples, and inclusivity of distinct T-IPV tactics in IPV survey measures. Unlike with the more extensive and established cisgender IPV literature, the smaller and newer T-IPV literature lacks widespread agreement among scholars on the best practices needed to overcome these methodological challenges. This chapter provides an overview of these issues and, by drawing on innovative solutions from the T-IPV and broader lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer IPV literature, offers tips on overcoming these methodological challenges going forward.

Best Practices in Policing

Intimate partner violence is one of the most underreported crimes in the United States. The sensitive nature of proper police response and protocol is further complicated by the need to adequately serve transgender populations criminally victimized by intimate partners. Due to the complicated history between the police and transgender communities, many transgender people hesitate to involve the police in their affairs. While police are often the first responders to IPV incidents and can serve as both help-seeking resources and safety enforcers, best practices in police interactions with transgender survivors of IPV are rarely discussed in the literature or applied in the field. Researchers generally identify issues with transphobia in law enforcement, misgendering, improper call screening, non-tailored response, and other LGBTQ competency training issues. This chapter will highlight some of the unique challenges for law enforcement in responding to transgender IPV, with an eye toward ultimately improving responses to transgender survivors.

Training Service Providers to Identify and Overcome Service Barriers in Working with Transgender IPV Survivors

For more than a decade, FORGE has been training victim service providers on how to better meet the needs of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming survivors of intimate or sexual violence. This chapter synthesizes what FORGE has learned about the barriers between transgender intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors and IPV service providers, and best practices in training approaches and techniques, including why FORGE has chosen not to present an oppression model in its training approach. Particular attention is paid to cognitive adaptations service providers need to make to adapt a service system that is literally based on a traditional gender binary so that it can respectfully serve nonbinary and transgender survivors.