Abstract
Clinical expectations that trans people will be so filled with self-loathing that sexual interactions will be limited if possible at all fail to take into account the heterogeneous ways trans people experience their own bodies and sexualities. In this essay, I extend recent work in science and technology studies (STS) that attends to material practices by examining the work of narrative and argue for a new paradigm in situating trans sexualities. I analyse trans men's autobiographical stories to show some of the many ways that trans men make sense of themselves (and enact maleness) as sexual subjects. By focusing on how sex-gender is enacted and hangs together in narrative-practices, we can more fully understand and appreciate the realities of trans lives and the inadequacies of clinical diagnosis.
There has never been a time that I felt more human, more of this flesh, than when I am fucking. […] As complicated bodies touch, we are molded like soft clay into something resembling a form we can be comfortable enough to live in. Sex is the glue that has held my jigsaw body together. Surrendering to the touch of another has brought me back to self; it's given me back the body I lost to abuse and Dysphoria, it has in fact made me real. (Lowrey, 2011: 96) It seems that having a sex life and/or being able to take pleasure in your own sexual feelings “presurgery” is either seen as a “cure” for gender discomfort or proof that you must not have enough body hate and body repulsion to be transsexual. (p. 131; emphasis added)
In the story “Nick and Mark”, trans man Nick Laird outlines his experience of this tension: I even had to lie to doctors to get prescribed testosterone or, at least, I felt that I had to lie because I was scared they would not prescribe testosterone, which I desperately wanted to take. I pretended to want phalloplasty because I knew they could accept I was man without a penis, but they could not accept me as a man who did not want one. I felt I had to want one. (2008: 78–9)
In her powerful essay “The Empire strikes back”, Sandy Stone (2006 [1991]) comments on what she calls “the large grey area” of trans people's “erotic sense of their own bodies” (p. 228) as one problem (among many) in the clinical treatment of trans people. Stone's essay is described by eminent trans scholars Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle as “the protean text from which contemporary transgender studies emerged” (2006: 221). Yet this tension – between achieving the diagnosis and experiencing bodily pleasures – has remained under-examined even within the recently emerging field of transgender studies. Given that one of the primary concerns of trans studies is to analyze normative assumptions about sex and gender (Stryker, 2006: 3), the relatively scant attention paid to trans people's sexual practices (and trans men's in particular) is remarkable. 3
Despite the fact that the diagnosis has been somewhat “broadened,” as trans scholars Zowie Davy and Eliza Steinbock note, “The stated ‘correct’ intention to psychiatrists of one's wish for normative sexual morphology, orientations and gender congruence, are the significant factors in the markers between transsexualism and other diagnoses” (2012: 271; original emphasis). 4 What this means is trans people required to be approved for medical interventions by specialists following the criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) must articulate a bodily experience that follows this normative congruence logic.
It is my contention that the grey area of trans sexualities persists in large part due to the unsuitability of traditional ways of thinking “the body,” and trans bodies in particular. That is, trans ways of making sense of ourselves disappear under the lens of conventional theoretical approaches to sex-gender, embodiment and clinical understandings of trans lives. Through this essay, I argue that ‘science and technology studies’ (STS) ways of rethinking objects (like bodies) and “reality” as multiple, rather than singular, better allows us to take seriously the necessarily complex ways of being trans. A burgeoning interest in “new materialisms” across fields of study (see, for example, in feminism, Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; public health, Fraser, 2010; education, Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2013; medicine, Michael and Rosengarten, 2012; fashion, Parkins, 2008; HIV, Pienaar, 2014; law, Seear and Fraser, 2014; literary studies, Weaver, 2013) has yet to be brought to bear on sexuality studies or trans studies. Using the innovative methods of studying and ways of thinking offered by STS, I argue for a new paradigm in understanding trans lives that undoes clinical logic. I do this by showing some of the many ways trans men make sense of their maleness through what I term “narrative-practices.” 5 I focus on trans men's sexual narrative-practices as a way to argue against the assumed (and enacted) desexualization of trans bodies and to show the fruitful possibilities of engaging STS methods in studies of sexuality.
Introducing STS to trans and sexuality studies
I approach the task of this essay by extending STS scholar Annemarie Mol's (1999, 2002) work on multiplicity that I read through a shared understanding of reality with Karen Barad's (2007, 2009) theory of “agential realism.” Put simply, this “onto-epistem-ology” involves a shift from understanding objects (and subjects) as independent, to a focus on the situatedness of phenomena. For Barad, this requires a re-configuring of the language we use to describe relations: The neologism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction”, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. (2007: 33; original emphasis) While constructionism recognizes the “made-ness” of apparently given things such as diseases, it tends to frame the processes of making as singular and terminal. That is, these processes happen once, come to an end and, as a result, we are left with a disease or other object constituted in a certain way: a product of its social and temporal context to be sure, but complete and now immutable in its constructedness. […] Against this view, Mol argues that, on the contrary, phenomena are always being made and remade. (Fraser, 2010: 233) [A]fter the shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic appreciation of reality, telling about what [something] is isn't quite what it used to be. Somewhere along the way the meaning of the word “is” has changed. Dramatically. This is what the change implies: the new “is” is one that is situated. It doesn't say what [something] is by nature, everywhere. It doesn't say what it is in and of itself, for nothing ever “is” alone. To be is to be related. The new talk about what is does not bracket the practicalities involved in enacting reality. It keeps them present. (Mol, 2002: 53–4; original emphasis)
Towards the end of The Body Multiple, Mol briefly suggests the possibility of complicating further her study of multiplicity through consideration of “interference” with other realities (2002: 142–9; see also Mol, 1999: 81–3). 7 Her example of interference is “sex difference”. Mol does not go so far as to relate sex-gender as another multiple-object enacted in practice. This is not her task. For Mol, “sex difference” is “rather a too overwhelming complexity of the topic” (2002: 144). My task in this essay is to take up this moment and attend to that complexity. Sex-gender, too, is multiple. It cannot be taken for granted as a self-evident truth; rather, sex must also be achieved. Here we might well remember Judith Butler's work on the performativity of sex (1993), cited by both Mol (2002: 36–42) and Barad (1998: 89–93). Where Butler suggests sex “becomes something like a fiction” (1993: 5–6), here I am taking up exactly how that fiction works. As sex-gender is multiple, it also “hangs together” (Mol, 2002: 5). Following Deleuze and Guattari, STS scholar John Law calls this hanging together “assemblage” (see Law, 2004: 41–2). In this essay, I am investigating how sex-gender assemblage happens in trans men's sexual narrative-practices. That is, how do trans men assemble their (multiple) sexual practices, pleasures and embodiments to achieve maleness? Looking to the creative ways trans men compose narratives that coordinate their maleness and diverse embodiments can help to rethink transsexual pathology, as well as highlight the many ways we (all) materialize sex-gender.
At this point, the queer, trans and feminist scholars among us may recall the work of philosophy scholar and trans man C. Jacob Hale (2003 [1997]), who articulates in “Leatherdyke boys and their daddies: How to have sex without women or men,” how fluid possibilities for gender can be explored – both theoretically and in practice – through sexual dynamics. Hale describes the enactment of (trans)gender in leather scenes (where relation hinges on sex role rather than anatomy) as highlighting the crucial specificities of recognition and location, as well as the mutability of gender in practice. Hale's autobiographical story illustrates this onto-epistem-ology of gender: [W]hen my daddy goes to a women-only play party, probably the first thing she does is pay an admission fee and sign a release form. During this encounter, her operative sex/gender status is woman, since she must be a woman (however that is defined by the party organizers) to be admitted. Probably the next thing Daddy does is stow her toybag and hang up her leather jacket if it's a hot night, because Daddy likes to socialize a little and get into a party headspace before playing. During this time, her operative sex/gender status is leatherdyke daddy, for this is the category through which her interactions with others are organized, especially but not only those interactions in which eroticism is present. Once Daddy is in a scene with a butch faggot boy, once Daddy's dick has become a sensate dick in Daddy's phenomenological experience of Daddy's embodiment, Daddy may be simply a very butch gay male leather bear-daddy. Or something else entirely, depending on the specific content of the interactions between Daddy, Daddy's boy, and any other participants or observers. (2003: 68; original emphasis)
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Sexual interactions, along with public restrooms and medical settings, are some of the sites at which dominant cultural connections between genitals and gender are the tightest, so many people must remap the sexualized zones of our bodies if we are to be sexually active. (Hale, 2003: 65–6)
Trans sexual narrative-practices
This essay draws from a larger PhD project investigating trans men's sense-making in autobiographical accounts, paying particular attention to sexual, clinical and bodily realities. All published book-length autobiographies and edited collections featuring trans men were coded for statements about sexuality, sexual practices, clinical experiences, and feelings about embodiment.
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What became clear is that most autobiographies and memoir narratives by trans men do not include details of their sexual lives. Although Mario Martino's (1977) Emergence – the first published book-length female to male autobiography – does describe in detail his relationship to, and involvement in, various sex acts throughout his life from childhood to marriage, few others have included this information. Some frame this exclusion as deliberate, like T Cooper (2012) does in his book Real Man Adventures: HER: Hey, are you going to write about sex in your book? ME: Hey, are you fucking kidding me? HER: That's what people always want to know about. ME: No fucking way. HER: Just asking … (p. 255)
Cooper's interlocutor is his wife (Allison Glock-Cooper) and this excerpt implies the labor trans men's sexual partners also do (see especially Pfeffer, 2010; Ward, 2010; see also, Brown, 2010; Hines, 2006; Sanger, 2010). In a number of ways, trans men's maleness may be co-produced with, or indeed hinge on, sex partner reciprocation, and this mode of materializing maleness is considered throughout this essay. Significantly, by introducing sex in this way, Cooper simultaneously makes clear that he has a sex life, and that it will not be a part of his book. Cooper's (and others’) refusal to “write about sex” could be explained by the risks involved in trans men textually (re)producing their sex lives, including a wish to avoid the “genital-curiosity” trans people often experience (see Orchard, 2011: 26; “Oscar” in Vidal-Ortiz, 2002: 207–8). Yet the omission of writing about sex does another kind of work also: intentional or not, it erases the realities of trans people's sexual pleasures.
The examples presented here come from the brief mentions of sexual practices in published (in English) autobiographies of trans men, including Chaz Bono's (2012) Transition, Jamison Green's (2004) Becoming a Visible Man, Nick Krieger's (2011) Nina Here Nor There, Mark Rees’ (1996) Dear Sir or Madam, and Raymond Thompson's (1995) What Took You So Long? as well as the genital surgery stories collections Hung Jury, edited by Trystan T. Cotten (2012), and Loren Cameron's (2001) eBook Man Tool. 11 However, most of the examples come from three edited collections: Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox's (2008) Trans People in Love, Morty Diamond's (2011) Trans/Love, and the interviews presented in Jody Rose's (2010) eBook The FTM Sex Guide. These collections are unique in that they take sex and sexual relationships as their main focus, and therefore the short stories included tend to be explicitly sexual. This very textual reality – that sexual details are left out of book-length trans autobiographies and sexual stories are published only as snippets collected together and without the rest of the author's life story – reflects the extent to which stories of transexuality continue to be structured by the absence of sexual-bodily-pleasures and vice versa.
“I shut my sexuality off and isolated myself”: Mutual exclusion
One way trans men materialize their maleness is through total abstinence from sexual interaction. This is what Mol calls mutual exclusion: “These exigencies are incompatible, at least: they cannot be realized simultaneously. […] It is not a question of looking from different perspectives either. […] The incompatibility is a practical matter” (Mol, 2002: 35). In his autobiography, Dear Sir or Madam: The Autobiography of a Female-to-Male Transsexual, Mark Rees (1996) describes this practical incompatibility: My body was, to me, so repulsive that I didn't want to see it myself, let alone allow anyone else to do so. I realized that what others took for granted – sexual relationships – would be barred from me. Life thus promised to be one of isolation. (p. 17) I never dated. Unlike many trans men, I never identified as lesbian. I wasn't willing to give up who I was. No matter what lies my body told, my heart knew I was a heterosexual man, not a lesbian. Until I was nearly thirty years old I had no terms like “transsexual” to articulate how I felt. Being seen by a potential girlfriend as female was a risk I couldn't take. Before 2005, I never dated; I shut my sexuality off and isolated myself. (p. 146) My sexual experiences were one-sided, and for many years they had to be. While my body was the way it was, there was no way that anyone would be allowed to see or touch the parts of it that didn't belong to me. I had rejected them myself so long ago, and had learned to close off from my mind the fact that they were there. I never looked at the parts of my body which were wrong – it was hard enough to wash them. The only physical affection that I could be on the receiving end of was being kissed and held by a woman. I always slept in my underpants, and the women that I became involved with respected this – they had little choice. The older I got, the more I perfected my detachment from my body. My body didn't exist in the way it was born; for me it only existed in my inner identity as a male. Having a woman touch me sexually would have broken my detachment, which I needed to maintain in order to keep my sanity. (p. 75)
“I wanted to have sex with a guy in my male body”: Alignment
Thompson's post-surgical recalibration of his sexual narrative-practices depicts one way that mutual exclusion can shift into alignment. When trans men's anatomy is enacted as female and mutually excludes sexual interactions, the surgical construction of male genitals remakes that narrative (and reality). Indeed, many of the story-tellers in Hung Jury describe their experiences in a way that suggests this. For example, Tone (2012) writes in “Transforming to masculine embodiment”: “Surgery was necessary because it allowed me to feel whole in my body and express myself as a man socially and sexually” (p. 30). Importantly, when a skin-graft from the forearm, abdomen, thigh or back is refashioned and attached at the genital region, the shifting of the flesh constitutes one enactment, but it only becomes a penis through narrative-practices enacting that flesh in new ways. 12
Even if men do not obtain genital reconstructive surgeries, they may still evoke this narrative through waiting. As gay trans man Zed articulates, “I always knew I was gay, but I wanted to have sex with a guy in my male body, not the female body” (in Rose, 2010: 56). This notion of deferral can relate to the changing conditions of possibility in surgical techniques, as Fred in Man Tool explains: “If I could have a penis the exact size and shape that I always dreamed of, and it worked perfectly, the way a regular penis is supposed to […] then I might have genital surgery. But in the meantime, my pup is home grown and I like it just fine” (in Cameron, 2001). This way of coordinating maleness renders its multiplicity invisible: when enactments align they appear to produce a singular phenomenon, yet they are more than one (see Mol, 2002: vii–5). Fred's assertion “in the meantime” coordinates his sex-gender across time, anticipating different future possibilities. Genital reconstructive surgeries, however, are only one way of materializing maleness. Martino (1977) makes clear what materializes his sexual maleness: “Any resemblance to lesbianism on our part was due to my lack of the proper organs. Never did I use my vagina during lovemaking – always I attached and wore my false penis” (p. 134). This is an example of another coordinating strategy: translation.
“It's the same thing, a strap on and a dick, really”: Translation
Regardless of the physical make-up of Martino's “false penis” or what it was when first acquired (a dildo, a prosthetic, and so), what it is intra-actively to him and his lover is a penis, even if a “false” one. “A male sex organ” materializes as one thing turns into another, both narratively and practically. There are at least two ways trans men use translation in their sexual narrative-practices: 1) like Martino, by incorporating nonhuman objects; and 2) by resignifying anatomy. Much of Hale's (2003) formulation of sex-gender in “Leatherdyke boys” focuses on these ways of enacting sex-gender: One such phenomenon is that inanimate objects – dildoes – sometimes take on some of the phenomenological characteristics of erogenous body parts. So, when Powersurge defined a woman as someone who could slam her dick into a drawer without hurting it, a common response among some butch leatherdykes and some ftms was to say that it sure would hurt if their dicks got slammed into a drawer; a dildo may not be a dick only in the conception, it may be a dick phenomenologically as well. (Hale, 2003: 66) I like getting blowjobs while wearing a strap-on. I like the visual aspect, I like to watch a woman sucking my cock, and it feels like enough of an extension of my body that I get some visceral sensation from it. I don't like receiving oral on my actual cock/clit so much. (Tommy, in Rose, 2010: 66; emphasis added) This isn't any different than if I had a big dick and was fucking them. It's the same thing, a strap on and a dick, really, and I think about that sometimes, too. I mean I have a tongue, I have fingers, and I also have a big collection of dildos to choose from, so if a girl wants one size, she can have it and then if she changes her mind and wants bigger or smaller, then it's just a matter of me changing it. (Devon, in Rose, 2010: 71) He has also helped me see more closely what it is like to function as a man. I have sat behind him and masturbated him while playing with myself as well. I have knelt behind him and put him inside my girlfriend then guided his motions from behind. We have also had sex where he is penetrating me and I am penetrating my girlfriend. Each time this was very spiritual and energetic. We both get into a somewhat meditative state before we are able to do this for, and with, each other. Our eyes are always closed and we try to match each other's breaths as well as our body movements. While I sometimes have a hard time with this because I will never get to feel what he does, it has also been my most rewarding experience. (pp. 172–3)
A second form of translation, also identified by Hale, involves the resignification of particular body parts into a male (or trans male) register. In his autobiography The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Change from Female to Male, Max Wolf Valerio describes his sexual relationship with his genitals: Since my clitoris has grown, I have genitals that are noticeably different from my female partners’. Some have remarked that as far as they are concerned, my homegrown, small ‘neocock’ is indeed a penis and they relate to it as such. (2006: 317) I also tell them [potential lovers] that what I have is a hole and not a vagina. I also tell them to refer to my dick as my dick, my cock or my penis. It's not a clit or a dicklet. It's my penis. […] I make sure to use lots of cock talk and penis language, especially when he's sucking on my dick. That's why I usually get penetrated in the ass, too, but I also like how it feels better. It makes me feel more male, more gay, I guess. (in Rose, 2010: 55–7) Thus, if the body part a leatherdyke daddy is fisting is that which a physician would unequivocally deem a “vagina,” it may be resignified so that its use for erotic pleasure is consistent with male masculinity. It may become a “hole,” “fuckhole,” “manhole,” “boyhole,” “asshole,” or “butthole,” [among others] and a leatherdyke boy pleading, “Please, Daddy, fuck my butt!” may be asking daddy to fuck the same orifice into which a physician would insert a speculum to perform a pap smear. (Hale, 2003: 66) I’m finally admitting that I don’t mind having a vagina. Why does it matter if I feel pleasure there? It doesn’t have to be ‘female’ pleasure; pleasure is pleasure, and I don’t need to label or define my pleasure based on gender … I have a masculine, male vagina with an enlarged two inch clit that gets thick and hard and can get sucked – that can go inside a woman the way a thumb would. I can have sex with my enlarged clit/dick, and when I do it, my vagina gets wet. (in Cotten, 2012: 8; my emphasis)
Further possibilities for this form of translation become clear in the explicit vocalization of sexual practices for genderqueer/trans Kai Kohlsdorf (2011) and his lover Joey: When we fuck, we often talk to each other and say what we're doing. To an outsider, it probably doesn't match what they see is going on. […] Renaming, reclaiming, and resexing ourselves has resulted in us deciding together what is and is not a cock, a chest, or a finger. He can have his cock strapped on, fucking my tits, and suddenly my tits are fake, and his dick is real. (p. 110)
“[H]e's Daddy even when I top him”: Addition
Sometimes in order to make a singular coherent phenomenon (“maleness”), multiple sex-gender phenomena are added together to produce a composite assemblage that makes sense through narrative-practices. Mol describes this kind of process as addition: “the fact that different objects may be added together and thereby turned into one doesn't depend on the projected existence of a single object that was waiting in the body. Singularity can also be deliberately strived after. It can be produced” (Mol, 2002: 70). In this context, maleness can be understood not as something inherently discrete residing in one's body, but rather as an achievement.
One way trans men achieve maleness relationally through addition is validation. For example, L. Winterset (2011) writes in his story “Unicorn”: “The first time I had sex with her, I knew I was truly male. My maleness became all the more apparent knowing she believed in its existence as much as I did” (p. 134). In Winterset's story, there is corroboration that relies on his sex partner: she witnesses and reaffirms his maleness through sex. Similarly, writer Nick Krieger (2011), then Nina, recalls the feeling of his lover exclaiming: “Nina is the cutest boy here”, as he writes in his autobiography Nina Here Nor There: “I felt the colossal power behind Ramona's words, her validation all the more pronounced because no girl had ever acknowledged me in that way before” (p. 102). Ramona sees Krieger's maleness, it aligns with his idea of his maleness, and so they appear singular because they enact maleness together, although the enactments are more than one. We can see the work of sex partners’ validation in Kohlsdorf's (2011) story also: We navigate his conflicted feelings of wanting to be topped and his fears of losing his masculinity by reaffirming that he's Daddy even when I top him. After he cums, he usually asks for validation that I do not think he is any less of a man because he likes sex in certain positions. We get close, we cuddle, and I stroke his male ego a little. (p. 109) I’m not straight – I’m married. Within the context of that monogamous marriage it doesn't matter that I find gay men hot or that I like watching gay porn or even that, never having had sex with a man, I’m intrigued and have fantasized about what it would be like (not every position, mind you). As a married, monogamous man, I take whatever erotic input I receive and express that in bed with my wife. (p. 107; original emphasis) I didn't quite understand my dynamic with Joan at the time; I probably would have explained it like this: “She treats me like a butch, and she is a femme, and that's part of the reason we work so well together.” Obviously, I hadn't yet realized that I was a transgender male. But what I did know was that Joan really responded to my masculine energy in a very feminine way, and this made me feel incredibly at ease, powerful, and sexual with her. (p. 103)
Following from this, trans men's sexual desires and practices can also be imagined (and in that way enacted) as male without a partner. Former editor of the newsletter FTM International and current President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), Jamison Green (2004) describes such an experience in his autobiography Becoming a Visible Man: The one thing that has always been consistent for me when I think of physical pleasure is a desire to place myself inside a woman, to feel the difference in her skin – her smoothness, her resilience, as opposed to my muscled rigidity – the wetness of her mouth, of her vagina, sucking me in where I can expand and swell and work the magic of connection. (p. 150)
“In the beginning I could never penetrate him anally”: Distribution
Instead of being translated or added together, trans men may assemble their maleness by keeping certain sex-gender phenomena apart, spatially and temporally. Mol calls this strategy distribution. “Distribution, instead, sets apart what also, elsewhere, a little further along, or slightly later, is linked up again” (Mol, 2002: 117). To describe this way of organizing and assembling multiple enactments, Mol uses the metaphor of an “itinerary” (p. 115); what is one thing at one point is something else at another point, in another place and time. Author of The FTM Sex Guide, Jody Rose (2010) explains his sexual strategy: “When we were naked, I was always uncomfortable because my breasts got in the way, but the women I chose to date were very sensitive and did what they could to simply ignore my breasts” (p. 13; emphasis added). Here, Rose describes a situation where his maleness can be enacted without excluding sexual activity completely, but rather, Rose finds a way to manage his discomfort and his maleness: his breasts are kept apart from sexual activity. Importantly, Rose's assemblage of maleness in this way hinges on the action of his sex partners. It is his lovers who must ignore his breasts in order to enact his maleness in sexual encounters. Thompson's description – “Having a woman touch me sexually would have broken my detachment” (1995: 75) – also emphasizes the narrative-practical work of distribution and the compliance of a lover. As Mol suggests, “Work may go on so long as the different parties do not seek to occupy the same spot. So long as they are separated between sites in some sort of distribution” (2002: 88).
Returning to Kohlsdorf's (2011) story, he describes using sexual practices in ways that change over time as Joey's maleness changes composition: In the beginning I could never penetrate him anally. His dominance was much more important to him because that was the only tangible way he could feel male before identifying as trans. Our sex, in which he is dominant, now serves as validation where it used to serve as his only recourse to himself. As a result, there is now more freedom in what we do. In the beginning, when he had only been identifying publically as trans for a couple of months, we believed his emotional attachments and problems with sex acts might diminish as he became more comfortable and was frequently validated as male in other areas of his life. This has absolutely been the case for us. It took our sex, and my acceptance and acknowledgement of his masculinity, for him to come out as trans. (p. 110)
Conclusions
When I tell people that I actually physically enjoy penetration, they freak out. I am very masculine after all. Still, the goddess blessed me with having an extra hole that feels good when penetrated correctly. I don't have any gendered association with this part of my body though. Actually, I often masculinize it by calling it my “manpussy” or “boycunt” and so on. So for me, it means very little to be penetrated except that it is often quite pleasurable. I would trade it for a penis any day but it is what I have and I choose not to hate it. After all, it is all part of the transmale experience in my mind. (Nutini, 2008: 172) The senses only perceive what makes sense to them. And only that which fits with earlier perceptions and with theories about them may hope to make sense. The only exceptions to this are a few anomalies that linger in the margins until, one day, they fit into a new paradigm. (Mol, 2002: 73)
There are two important implications of seeing sex-gender in this way: first, assembling sex-gender through narrative-practices is not limited only to trans men (or trans people, or sexual contexts); and second, these narratives of trans sexual pleasure trouble the clinical expectations of diagnosing “gender dysphoria” (the current psychiatric label ascribed to trans people's desires for body modifications [see American Psychiatric Association, 2013]). Clinical requirements for diagnosis demand trans sexual practices be (described as) replicating stereotypical “sex roles,” fantasies and imagined normative (read: non-trans) embodiment. In most instances this means, practically, that sexual interactions must be avoided (or concealed) in order to achieve the diagnosis and therefore access body-modifying interventions. That is, this current institutional material-discourse produces sexuality and transexuality as mutually exclusive. But as we have seen, this is not always or necessarily the case for trans men themselves. Trans people do enjoy sexual pleasures in a wide variety of ways. Yet in order to achieve the diagnosis, trans people must represent themselves within narrow clinical ideals of sex-gender: ideals that reify normative sex-gender, sexuality and embodiment. As I have shown in this essay, these normative standards are just not relevant to many trans people's necessarily complex experiences of sex-gender and embodiment. It is my contention that the diagnostic focus on self-loathing and occlusion of sexuality cannot take seriously the lived realities of trans people. Excluding access to body-modifying interventions to those whose experiences diverge from a stereotypical diagnostic logic does not engage trans people's embodiment on our own terms. As such, trans people continue to tailor their stories to fit limited ideas of sex-gender and trans sexualities in clinical contexts, and beyond.
What to do? We are (all) produced through the practices to which we are subjected. For trans people seeking medically supervised body modifications, clinical treatment pathways are often composed of barriers: geographically sparse, financially expensive, psychologically intrusive, emotionally harmful, administratively difficult, just to name a few. On top of that, it is trans people who are expected to produce a narrative in line with clinical sex-gender, and not the other way around. What would it look like if clinicians supported trans people's sense of themselves, including those of us who do not experience our bodies as repulsive or asexual, yet still desire to physically change (in some ways and perhaps not all)? Unfortunately the threat of withholding services (surgeries, hormones) means that it is almost impossible to know (see, for examples, Lee in Sanger, 2010: 82–3; Spade, 2006). Trans people have so much to lose from even attempting to describe something that does not fit within clinical definitions of gender and gender dysphoria. Indeed, there is a reason the stories presented here come from edited collections produced by trans people themselves, and not from clinical case studies. I cannot even imagine Nutini's story relayed in a clinical context, or Kohlsdorf's, or indeed most of the stories I have presented here. And yet these are people making sense of their circumstances.
The fact remains that as long as medical professionals – acting as gatekeepers who determine trans people's access to body modifying interventions – rely heavily on a diagnostic category (and narrative) that presumes genital-loathing prior to medical intervention, the realities of how trans people make sense of their bodies in ways that may include sexual practices must necessarily be neglected. Not only does this limit an understanding of trans lives, it precludes adequate health care. The point I am making here is if we understand sex-gender as enacted in practice, we must attend to a different set of possibilities, more likely to do justice to the wide variety of ways that trans men materialize maleness, including sexually.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This essay was made what it is via dense intellectual dialogue with Steven Angelides and Bronwyn Wilson. Earlier drafts were also insightfully critiqued by Fran Martin, Kiran Pienaar and Catherine Barrett. A short version of this essay was first presented at the Sexuality Studies Association conference in May 2014 as the paper ‘How to Have Trans Sex,’ and was awarded the prize ‘Best paper by a graduate student’. Travel to this conference was made possible by the Harold Mitchell Postgraduate Travelling Fellowship. Discussing my work with members of the SSA, in particular Dan Irving, Melissa Autumn White, Elise Chenier, Diane Naugler and Matthew Halse, helped fuel this publication. The work described herein draws from a larger Ph.D. study into trans men's sexualities, which is supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award.