Ethnography!

Research Design
Throughout the course I've been struggling with the heteronormativity of both the readings and the class discussion, and although bell hooks has talked about the challenges and benefits of lesbianism in Feminism is for Everybody there hasn't really been a discussion of gender identity. As someone with a variant gender identity that has pretty substantially affected my career aspirations and path I wanted to discover if any of my friends had had a similar experience.

Methodology
I decided to use the most readily accessible method of querying a large group of my friends, an internet poll using livejournal's built-in polling capacity. I had 61 respondents, and below I've included the questions that I asked, what the responses were, and a selection of the comments that my post generated.

Poll Responses
Do you consider yourself:
Female: 50
Male: 4
Other/NA: 7

Does this identification agree with the bits you had at birth/your societal gender?
Yes: 50
No: 11

(It is interesting to note that exactly one of the respondents who selected "Male" also selected that his identification agreed with his societal gender)

Do you feel that your gender identification/presentation has inhibited your career in any way?
Oh my god, yes: 8
Yes: 24
No, I am a straight white upperclass male. 0
No, I am insanely lucky. 28

On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?
1 12
2 10
3 10
4 8
5 2
6 6
7 8
8 4
9 1
10 0

(One of my friends pointed out that I hadn't established that 1 was the least and 10 the most, I edited my post to reflect that since I was unable to edit the poll itself)

Have you ever not gotten a job you were qualified for because of your sexuality, gender, or gender identification?
Yes: 12
No: 46
No, but I haven't gotten one for reasons I will elaborate in a comment. 3

Did you have to change your career aspirations because of your gender, sexuality, or gender identification?
Yes: 5
No: 56

Some of the descriptions given from respondents about their career path changes are as follows, their identifying information has been withheld for their privacy.

It more complicated than this, but a combination of being a girl and not wanting to do drugs caused my first and only boss as a lighting tech to make my life miserable until I quit and basically ran away from the industry all together.

The world told me girls suck at math and computers. Now I'm doing library stuffs.

Originally wanted to be a K-8 teacher, but figured nobody would want a tranny teaching their kids.

My Observations
The poll post generated over 50 comments and started a number of conversations that were extremely informative. Given that these are people who I know quite well and have communicated with for years in an interactive online forum, the thing that surprised me the most was discovering that a few of them objected to the implication that they were insanely lucky to have not experienced significant obstruction in their career because of their gender. I found it somewhat interesting that the only person who commented about the choice positively is one of the older women on my friends list who is very much a product of the second wave, who thanked me for allowing her to state that her success was an "insanely lucky" thing because she had done nothing to deserve it more than anyone else.

I also got into something of a verbal dust-up with one of my friends whose primary undergraduate area of focus is ethnography and social study over the bias inherent in my questions and specifically the inexact nature of the question "On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?". This led me to examine my motivation in both my question selection and my approach to the concept of ethnography in toto.

Write Up
My problem, when it comes right down to it, is that the prompt was somewhat limiting. It is impossible for me to approach the concept of work and gender without also addressing what bell hooks refers to as the intersectionality of oppression, the way that race and class (and sexuality, and gender identification, and body modifications, and everything else that identifies you as "not normal") affect the expression of gender inequality. And as my friend accidentally helped me figure out, part of my problem is my deep misgiving about the construct of the ethnography. I find it inherently problematic to presuppose that by observing, by asking insightful questions and injecting yourself within a culture you can somehow gain a more "authentic" understanding than the people who are fully acculturated and participating members, which you then share with others. It strikes me as a bizarrely patronizing approach to a problem that I prefer to approach more in the vein of Kate Bornstein and Julia Serrano and other pioneering gender activists- As a piece of the machine struggling to find a better and more fulfilling method of existence while trying to slowly form out of the machine something that will allow everyone to be whatever shape they desire to be.