This case study is drawing on research work conducted in the spring of 2014 (and published in August 2015) about hegemonic gender constructs as they affect the health and understandings of identity of transgender women of color sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa. This reflection on that research will focus on ways in which the project could have been more deeply participatory and the needs of the participants more explicitly engaged. Engaging the ways in which methodologies and research design could better reflect participants lived realities will necessarily also engage the ethics of conducting research with transgender women of color (as well as cisgender men who have sex with men), speak to the potential of envisioning new conceptual models by utilizing participatory paradigms, and highlight the constraints of theory development of marginalized communities by out-group researchers
