Conversation analysis (CA) is an empirical approach to the study of social life that takes interaction in context as its primary focus. For CA, identity is something that people actively use, make reference to, and put to work, in order to bring about a social action or outcome. CA has been used in the study of gender identities, race, family roles, youth subgroups, and chatrooms, in mainstream media interaction, in studies of institutional exchanges such as in education, healthcare, advice and legal settings, and in sales environments, both online and face to face. To see what and how identities are achieved, CA explores sequences of embodied interaction, the primary source of data, carefully recorded and transcribed, so that we can identify patterns, including in how people bring off and attribute certain characteristics to their own and others’ membership of particular identity categories. In this chapter we provide a brief survey of the development of an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to identity. We offer an example of a conversation-analytic procedure, looking at how kinship carers handle matters of family identity in a support group environment. We demonstrate how kinship carers interactively establish recognizable attributes and features of a common and valid identity in their complaints about the actions and dispositions of absent third parties. We end by considering how an ethnomethodological CA approach contributes to identity research, its limitations and its future directions.

This book showcases cutting-edge research and current thinking by researchers writing on topics at the intersection of conversation analysis and gender. Work in this area has advanced rapidly over the past decade, and this edited collection provides the first comprehensive, book-length treatment of the field. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the chapters illustrate authors' perspectives on the operation of gender in interaction. Each chapter examines real-life audio or video interactions recorded across a range of ordinary and institutional settings, including face-to-face conversation, domestic telephone calls, children's play, mediation sessions, police–suspect interviews, psychiatric assessment and calls to telephone helplines.

The aims of this collection are both theoretical and methodological. At a theoretical level, we push forward the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship between conversation and gender, charting new territory as we present the most incisive and sophisticated thinking in the field. At a methodological level, the book offers readers a clear and practical understanding of precisely how gender is analysed using conversion analysis and related methodologies, by presenting detailed demonstrations of these methods in use. Although conversation is typically understood as referring to ‘talk-in-interaction’, several contributors analyse and reflect on the inextricable relationship between talk, gender and embodied conduct. This introductory chapter is divided into four sections. First, to contextualize the book's chapters and convey their distinctive analytic position, we provide a critical overview of conversation and gender research grounded in studies of either sex/gender ‘difference’ or gender identity ‘construction’.

Introduction

My aim in this chapter is to examine the role of reported, third party compliments in transsexual patients passing as ‘real’ men or women. This research forms part of a broader conversation analytic (henceforth CA) study examining the vocal and embodied production of gender identities in interactions between transsexual patients and psychiatrists in a large British National Health Service (henceforth NHS) gender identity clinic (Speer & Green, 2007; 2008). The gender identity clinic (henceforth GIC) is a distinctive institutional setting where individuals who identify as transsexual and who (usually, but by no means always) desire male/female ‘cross sex’ hormones and ‘gender confirmation’ or ‘sex change’ surgery' (Press for Change, 2007: 2) attend for assessment by at least two psychiatrists. Gender clinic psychiatrists are renowned for acting as ‘gatekeepers’ to hormones and surgery (Speer & Parsons, 2006). They assess patients according to a pre-defined set of medical criteria, and aim to produce a ‘differential diagnosis’ (that is, to diagnose the type of gender identity disorder (GID) accurately and to determine that the patient is not suffering from some related or unrelated mental health problem). Although psychiatrists at the clinic in my data do not work with a standardized patient interview protocol, part of their concern when assessing patients is to examine their motivations for transitioning, and to judge whether or not they have a realistic view of themselves in their new role.

Introduction

Psychiatrists, like other medical professionals with a diagnosing or prescribing role, control access to a range of forms of treatment, medication and service that their patient, or their patient's carer, may want access to. This ‘gatekeeping’ role is particularly acute in settings where a patient's desire for a certain medicine or treatment (e.g., for the drug methadone, or for ‘cross-sex’ hormones and sex reassignment surgery) may also be interpreted as a symptom of their ‘condition’ (e.g., heroin addiction, or transsexualism). The UK National Health Service (NHS) Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), is one setting where the psychiatrist's gatekeeping role is renowned.

Practitioners in a GIC deal primarily with patients who self-identify as ‘transsexual’. Transsexualism is formally designated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 1994) as a ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ (GID). Persons diagnosed with GID are said to exhibit ‘a strong and persistent cross-gender identification and a persistent discomfort with their sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex’ (The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, 2001: 4). Statistically, transsexualism is thought to affect 1 in 11,900 males and 1 in 30,400 females (ibid., 2001: 2). The treatment for the majority of transsexuals consists of taking high doses of cross-sex hormones (Hormone Replacement Therapy), and undergoing Gender/Sex Reassignment Surgery (GRS/SRS) (Green, 2000).

In order to obtain hormones and be referred for surgery, pre-operative transsexuals must be assessed by two psychiatrists at a Gender Identity Clinic.