International Transgender Day of Visibility and Gale Resources

| By Alja Kooistra |

Recent news stories regarding discrimination against those who identify as transgender—for example, in the workplace, in military service, and the bathroom debate—have led to a growing conversation on how notions of gender directly influence personal, social, religious, and public policy issues. Transgender is a term used to describe those whose gender identity differs from their assigned gender at birth. The International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31 encourages awareness of transgender lives. Gale is proud to present a complementary group of resources to help students, teachers, and researchers in many disciplines begin and further their understanding of gender.

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender (2016–2018) is an exciting new approach to reference and gender studies. Intended for or in addition to the classroom, the expansive series offers 10 volumes, beginning with an accessible introduction to gender, feminist, and queer theory. Subsequent volumes investigate how ideas of gender affect and intersect with Nature, Love, Matter, Laughter, Animals, God, War, Space, and Time. The topics across disciplines may seem broad but also delve into the many varied aspects of gender and sexuality studies.

The over 200 in-depth, comprehensive chapters written by leading scholars in their field are supported by images, bibliographies, and glossaries, providing all that is needed to become familiar with the theories and debates regarding the construction and performance of gender. Several chapters are specifically devoted to only transgender concerns, including “Trans” (Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies), “Transgender Matters” (Gender: Matter), “Divine Imaginaries and Transgender Subjects” (Gender: God), and “Transgender Temporalities” (Gender: Time).

Gale also offers the Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940. The archive is a collection of primary sources on LGBTQ issues from hundreds of institutions and organizations and includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, reports, photographs, and even interviews. This is where students and researchers can build their own research topics. Users can easily search and explore the massive collection of nearly one and a half million pages, identifying the numerous voices and moments in modern LGBTQ history. As J. Bryan Lowder for Slate magazine notes, this is “a digital archive that will make researching and experiencing queer history easier for everyone.”

The Gender Studies Collection is a perfect companion to Gender and the Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Within this continually updated InfoTrac database, one can locate articles, images, and videos from over 700,000 items from magazines, academic journals, books, and news sources. Users may download or save results and limit search results by text or image, date, subjects, document type, and publication title. The database includes such often-cited academic journals as differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Signs.

These three products are among many others from Gale that contain essential material for gender and transgender studies, providing both a starting point for understanding and extensive research into what gender is and how it affects individuals and society. Through education we can better understand our world and the various ways of living and being within it.

Learn more about supporting researchers’ transgender study needs by requesting a trial to:

• The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series on gender
• Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940 
• The Gender Studies Collection