Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ Intelligible: Three Regulatory
Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society
REBECCA DUKE
“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological
construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was
born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the
monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully
human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human
community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in
which I must struggle to exist… I have asked the Miltonic questions Shelley poses in the epigraph of her
novel: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to
promote me?" With one voice, her monster and I answer "no" without debasing ourselves, for we have
done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we
forego the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and
blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.”
Susan Stryker, in My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamonix: Performing
Transgender Rage (1994).
Producing Viable Personhood
Transgender individuals have “identities, bodies and sexual desires [that] fall outside of the
dominant discourses” of sex, gender and sexuality (Cromwell, 2006, p. 51). Unfortunately, examinations by
theorists have often led trans individuals to being used as objects of theory, used merely to validate certain
theoretical opinions (Stryker, 2006). Trans individuals – who feel their ascribed natal sex does not match
their gender identity – grapple personally with questions of how gender identity relates to personal identity,
thus challenging the idea of gender as merely cultural inscription. The transsexual individual’s surgical
means of embodiment has led to vigorous debate about the nature of biological sex, and has necessitated
the development of a unique psycho-medical regulatory regime (Hausman, 2001). Some sociologists have
portrayed trans people as gender overachievers, guilty of being over-committed to gender binaries
(Schilt and Westbrook, 2009; Spade, 2006). The medical establishment, while providing a means
of embodiment through access to hormonal and surgical treatments, continues to endorse
a heteronormative, binary system of gender that ultimately limits non-binary expressions of identity
(Lev, 2005). In response to trans visibility in the 1970s, radical feminists have represented trans individuals
as reinforcing an oppressive gender binary (Riddell, 2006). While some theorists champion gender
libertarianism regarding temporary or permanent bodily changes, other commentators have recommended
that therapeutic intervention be focused on breaking down the gender binary instead of offering sexual
reassignment surgery (SRS) or other medical interventions. More recently, queer theorists have
represented the trans individual as subversive subjects of the sex and gender order (Bettcher, 2014).
In the current literature there is a trend to “invest heavily in transsexualism’s ‘transgressive’ potential,” so
that a hierarchy of subversive potentiality within performative gender paradigms (Davis, 2008, p. 98). While
psycho-medical, radical feminist and queer gender discourses have represented and used the trans
experience in very different ways, all of these approaches are inadequate in one way or another:
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
“Controversy over academic representations of transgender lives centres on and reiterates false
dichotomies of stable/fluid, hegemonic/subversive and oppression/empowerment… Stable, coherent
identification is conflated with the hegemonic reproduction of gender ideologies, leading to the further
situating of transgender individuals as either upholding or subverting the gender order.” (Davis, 2008, p.
99)
The narratives of transgender and transsexual individuals have revealed the constraints of current
academic and societal discourse surrounding sex, gender and sexuality. This essay will explore the
representations of trans individuals within the psycho-medical establishment, radical feminist theory and
queer theory to show that all three discourses “simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable
personhood, and eliminate others” (Stryker, 2006, p. 3). After analysing the identity category of ‘trans’ and
the concepts of gender and sex in relation to trans experience and personhood, I will analyse how each of
these three discourses constrain different types of trans identities in various ways. I argue that the psychomedical establishment, although a means to the embodiment of some transsexual individuals, marginalises
trans identities that fail to cohere to their narrow, heteronormative diagnostic criteria. I will then proceed to
analyse the radical feminist response to trans visibility in the 1970s, and demonstrate how this thread of
discourse worked to render male-to-female trans individuals unintelligible as anything other than victims of
sex-role oppression or inauthentic occupiers of ‘women’s’ spaces. Finally, I will address more recent queer
theory, focusing on the work of Judith Butler and associated trans theory academia, arguing that although
this discourse marks an important shift from notions of authenticity to notions of performativity, it ultimately
creates a problematic hierarchy of trans identities.
What is trans?
The identity category of trans is quite broad, and is by no means homogeneous or harmonious.
The identity covers diverse experiences:
“It can encompass discomfort with [gender] role expectations, being queer, occasional or more frequent
cross-dressing, permanent cross-dressing and cross-gender living, through to accessing major health
interventions such as hormonal therapy and surgical interventions such as hormonal therapy and
surgical reassignment procedures” (Davis, 2008, xi).
While sometimes a trans individual will have a very strong sense of being ‘female’ or ‘male,’ for some
individuals their trans identity eludes this type of classification, having an identity “distinct from male and
female – a combination of the two plus everything excluded from them” (Whittle, 2006b, p. 200).
Moreover, important differences of race and class exist within the trans community: trans individuals of
racial minorities and/or of low socio-economic status have different experiences and needs to the trans
individual of white, middle-class backgrounds. Within society, trans individuals, like every individual, must
find a way to present themselves that “facilitates social recognition and encourages suitable interactions,”
by externally reflecting their internal sense of identity (Davis, 2008, p. 100). However, this process, whether
or not this includes a formal transition for the trans individual:
“…disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume
to exist between the biological specificity of the body, the social roles and status that a particular form of
body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self
and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or
thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood” (Stryker, 2006, p. 3).
With this in mind, I now turn to the concepts of sex and gender, to explore how these categories can
thwart or render unintelligible particular identity and gender-configurations of the trans individual.
The heterosexual inscription of sex and gender on the body: trans experience
“How does it happen that the human subject makes [themselves] into an object of possible knowledge,
through what forms of rationality, through what historical necessities, and at what price? My question is
this: how much does it cost the subject to be able to tell the truth about itself?” (Foucault, as cited in
Wilchins, 2006, p. 548)
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
“If your sense of self matches closely with the cultural grid of what you should mean, and you find those
meanings pleasing, then the ‘truth’ doesn’t come too expensive. For the rest of this, though, it can cost a
great deal.” (Wilchins, 2006, p. 551).
Despite the fact that other societies have historically used signifiers of biological sex as a basis for
human identity, it is only the occidental system that exclusively deduces gender from the biological
substratum of sex (Valdes, 1996). Some societies have more than two dichotomized genders. ‘Berdaches,’
‘hijras’ and ‘xaniths’ possess the ‘male’ biology but live socially as women (Hird, 2002). ‘Manly-hearted
women’ in African and American Indian societies are biologically ‘female,’ but live as men: they marry
women, but are not bound by the social expectations of husbands and fathers (Hird, 2002).
But in occidental society, gender is legitimated by biological discourse (Hird 2002; Weiss, 2001).
The infant is socially gendered from the moment of birth. Assigned to a sex category based on the genitalia,
the infant is then dressed in such a way that signifies the category of boy or girl, and is treated accordingly:
“Once a child’s gender is evidenced, others treat those of one gender differently from those in the other,
and the children responds to the different treatment by feeling difference and behaving differently… Why
is it still so important to mark a child as a girl or a boy, to make sure she is not taken for a boy or he as a
girl? …They would, quite literally, have changed places in their social world” (Lorber, 1994, p. 55).
It is in this way that a system of power inscribes hierarchy onto the individual’s body, reinforcing
the gender regime (Stryker, 2006). Gender renders the body culturally meaningful and socially intelligible:
it is “a form of communication, a language that we all use to express and interpret each other socially”
(Green, 2006, p. 505). But although gender “codes and deploys our bodies in ways that materially affect
us” in society, we neither “choose our marks nor the meanings they carry” (Stryker 1994, p. 250).
Ultimately, this system of dichotomized gender attribution upholds heteronormativity, “the suite of cultural,
legal and institutional practices that maintain normative assumptions that there are two and only two
genders, that gender reflects biological sex, and that only sexual attraction between these ‘opposite’
genders is natural or acceptable” (Schilt and Westbrook, 2009, p. 441). These heteronormative
assumptions have extremely painful psychological consequences for some trans individuals, as this social
ontology has no way to fit the embodiments and subjectivities of trans individuals into the existing
categories without occluding or denying important aspects of the self (Hale, as cited in Hausman, 2001).
The maintenance of heterosexuality has been studied in other people’s reactions to trans individuals’
transitions. As “a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction,” gender necessitates
initiation into a series of hetero-social rituals (West and Zimmerman, 2009, p. 125; Schilt and Westbrook,
2009). Individuals in gender transition must thus be incorporated into the heteronormative framework
of intelligibility in the public sphere:
“For the first few weeks of Jake’s transition, heterosexual men colleagues began signaling in an obvious
way that they were treating him like a guy… ‘A lot of my male colleagues started slapping me on the
back… with more force than they probably slapped each other… they were trying to affirm that they saw
me as male’… The awkwardness of these backslaps illustrates his colleagues’ own hyperawareness of
trying to do gender with someone who is becoming a man. Jake felt normalized by this incorporation and
made frequent references to himself as a transman to disrupt his colleagues’ attempts to naturalize his
transition” (Schilt and Westbrook, 2009, p. 447).
Thus Jake was assigned to an “automatic normativity” as soon as he performed the male category
(Davis, 2008: 479). Just like infants ascribed a gender category and treated accordingly, Jake’s response to
such different treatment is to feel and respond differently (Hird, 2002).
The Psycho-Medical Establishment: Regulated Embodiment & Psychiatric Diagnosis
“Once I figured out that ‘transgendered’ was someone who transcended traditional stereotypes of ‘man’
and ‘woman,’ I saw that I was such a person… While I accepted the label of ‘transsexual’ in order to
obtain access to the hormones and chest surgery necessary to manifest my spirit in the material world, I
have always had a profound disagreement with the definition of transsexualism as a psychiatric condition
and transsexuals as disordered people.” (Feinberg, as cited in Spade 2006, p. 325)
While most sociologists understand both sex and gender to be the outcome of social interaction,
psychological and medical analyses of transgenderism and transsexualism generally cling to notions
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
of authenticity in relation to sex and gender (Hird, 2000). Both psychology and medicine as disciplines still
adhere to a dichotomous gender paradigm that facilitates some kinds of subjectivity while eliminating
others. Similar to the creation of the homosexual subject through the medical discourse in the latenineteenth century, the creation of the transsexual subject by the medico-psychological establishment in
the late 20th century was a social process with powerful regulatory effects (Spade, 2006). Just as the
homosexual identity-category functioned to normalize and naturalise heterosexuality, so the various psychomedical categories and diagnoses since its introduction into the DSM-III - transsexualism, trans-fetishism,
gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder in children – all have served certain
regulatory functions:
“Containing gender distress within ‘transsexualim’ functions to naturalise and make ‘healthy’
dichotomized, birth-assigned gender performance…. It is in the mind of the ill that the gender problems
exist, not in the construction of what is healthy.” (Spade, 2006, p. 319).
It is important to note however, that unlike homosexual individuals, trans individuals have a unique
relationship to the medical authorities, using “the logic of treatment in order to qualify for treatments… but
also for their own sense of themselves” (Rubin, 2006, p. 498). While the psycho-medical discourse
contains a regulatory function, psychological and medical services have enabled trans individuals to realize
their desired embodiment through medical procedures. As ‘gatekeepers’ to hormonal treatments and
surgical procedures, psychological and medical professionals constitute necessary stepping-stones in the
process. Unfortunately, this negotiation process often centres on defining the patient’s gender issues as
illness or a disorder (Lev, 2005).
However, the problems of psycho-medical professionals acting as gatekeepers to various bodily
interventions and sex-change procedures are not easily overcome. As Hausman (2001) acknowledges, it is
questionable whether practices that require hormonal treatments and surgical procedures should removed
from psycho-medical jurisdiction. Psychotherapeutic evaluation and referral is important when considering
irreversible hormonal and surgical treatments, but “should not have to depend upon a diagnosis of mental
illness,” rather on “a successful evaluation of mental stability” (Lev, 2005, p. 55). However, it is important
to point out that removing gender dysphoria from the current DSM-V would “undermine the rationale for
the surgical removal of healthy tissue that enables surgeons to perform SRS, hence undermining the claim
to insurance coverage and public funding” and above all, surgeons’ willingness to perform such
procedures (O’Hartigan, as cited in Elliot, 2009, p. 16). Thus, on the one hand, the diagnostic discourse of
the psycho-medical establishment is problematic in terms of using psychiatric diagnoses to label those with
different gender expressions and identities to the cultural norm, while on the other hand; this diagnostic
paradigm provides legitimacy for medical procedures (Lev 2005). Ultimately however, trans individuals who
deviate from the hegemonic, normative, heterosexist diagnostic criteria are sidelined:
“The medical model has left a problematic legacy by reinforcing the gender binary and therefore
legitimizing only certain kinds of gender dysphoric people, and eliminating, or severely restricted, access
to medical treatment for people whose gender-variant expression follows atypical patterns.” (Lev, 2005,
p. 45).
Unfortunately, the DSM criterion does not capture the full spectrum of gender-variant individuals
seeking medical procedures and interventions (Lev, 2005). As C. Jacob Hale recalls:
“One of the things that was really hard for me… was that I knew I didn’t fit classical definitions of
transsexual and I didn’t think I had much interest in genital surgery. What helped me a lot was to start
asking ‘What am I?’ and to start asking instead, ‘What changes do I need to make to be a happier
person?’ For me, that included testosterone and elective breast removal/chest reconstruction.” (as cited
in Cromwell, 2006, p. 518).
It is through this dominant discourse of diagnosis that trans identities that deviate from the psychomedical model become marginalized. Trans individuals undertaking their journey of “reconstruction,
reassociation and reconnection with the body” through some surgical procedures but not others,
or through hormonal treatments only, thus become marginalized (Cromwell, 2006, p. 519). Ultimately,
the psycho-medical establishment’s position in relation to trans individuals needs dramatic revision
in regards to the process of diagnosis, pathologization and treatment:
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
“Having a gender identity, even a non-conventional one, is not a dysfunction within an individual,
although it may cause psychosocial problems that need to be psycho-therapeutically addressed, and it
often requires medical treatment for the individual’s self-actualization and their sense of congruence
between their body and mind. Approval for medical treatment should not depend on being mentally ill,
but on being mentally sound enough to make empowered and healthy decisions regarding one’s body
and life” (Lev 2005, 59).
Radical Feminist Discourse on Transsexuality
“We know who we are. We know that we are women who are born with female chromosomes and
anatomy, and that whether of not we were socialized to be so-called women, patriarchy has treated and
will treat us like women. Transsexuals have not had this same history.” (Raymond, 1971, as cited in
Hird, 2002, p. 584)
Radical feminist discourse from the 1970s has also contributed to a totalizing discourse that
delegitimizes trans identity. The idea that male-to-female lesbian transsexuals violate women’s space is
arguably a response to the perceived threat of the identity of non-transsexual lesbian feminists. This antitransgender trend describes the male-to-female transsexual as having the “mentality of a rapist” and as
committing a “necrophilic invasion” of female space (Morgan, 1978, p. 81 as cited in Stanford; Mary Daly,
1978, p. 69-72, as cited in Stryker * Words to F). The most extreme and vehement expression of this idea
is found in Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979):
“All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this
body for themselves… the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and
spirit, as well. Rape, although it is usually done by force, can also be accomplished by deception.”
(Raymond, 1971, as cited in Bettcher, 2014).
Raymond argues that “patriarchal society and its social currents of masculinity and femininity”
constitute “the First Cause of trans-sexualism” (as cited in Riddell, 2006, p. 145). Thus the trans individual
is positioned as a victim of patriarchy, but also as a violator of women’s space in the feminist-separatist
movement. Raymond points to gender identity clinics, along with psychological and medical professionals
as the ‘Second Cause’ of transsexualism, acting as reinforcers of patriarchally defined stereotypes” and
denying trans individuals “the right to challenge the patriarchal stereotyping system which ultimately
creates them” (as cited in Riddell, 2006, p. 147). According to this view, the medical establishment uses
surgical intervention to assign transsexuals to the sex-role they were natally unable to fulfill due to their sexcategory, and subsequently enforce sex-role oppression. Ultimately, Raymond argues that “in a gender-role
free society… transsexualism would not exist, because anybody’s behavioural desires could be expressed
in whatever way they wanted, so ‘changing’ sex wouldn’t matter” (as cited in Riddell, 2006, p. 149).
Within this lesbian-separatist paradigm, Raymond assumes that sex exists “prior to the machinations
of gender,” that the gender dysphoria of trans individuals is actually distress with the existing sex-role
system, and that trans oppression cannot be separated from sexist oppression (Bettcher, 2014).
Her proposal is to “morally mandate [transsexuality] out of existence” and to end the violation of “bodily
integrity” by the medical establishment through tackling patriarchal oppression (Bettcher, 2014).
Other radical feminists, such as Jeffreys, have focused their critique on what they call the male-to-female
imitation of the political signifiers of female oppression. By engaging in “extreme examples of feminine
behaviour and dress in grossly stereotypical feminine clothing,” they reinforce normative patriarchal codes
that women are forced to adopt “in order to avoid punishment of the patriarchy” (1990, as cited in Lev,
2005, p. 355).
These analyses have been labeled as “blatant reactionary responses” to perceived “threats to female
bodies, feminism and feminist politics” (Green, 2006, p. 504). While this particular strand of radical
feminist discourse is right to point out the perpetuation of sexist and heterosexist norms in regards to the
medicalisation of transsexuality, it derogatorily denies the trans individual a space for their narrative, or any
type of agency at all. Furthermore, it relies on an essentialist feminist vision tied to biology. By defining
‘woman’ as a particular chromosomal makeup and particular genital morphology is ultimately to revert
to binary sex identities:
“To accept that biological boundary would mark a definite break with the key principle of the second
wave of women’s liberation… that biology is not given.” (Feinberg, as cited in Hird, 2002, p. 358).
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
Relying on artificial divisions strengthens radical feminist-lesbian discourse at the cost
of transgender identities (Hird, 2002). Furthermore, later feminist discourse has shown that such a reliance
on this notion of ‘shared experience’ combined with biology “subsumes variations of class, race, ethnicity,
age and sexuality” (Hird 2002, p. 358). Radical feminism fails to recognise the heterogeneity of gender
identity, and the arbitrary division of sexes. Those that argue that transsexual individuals are nothing more
than “medico-technical creations” or individuals with inauthentic narratives fail to recognise that all
narrative is creation, that identity is a process of construction.
Gender performativity and trans identities in queer discourse
“Most people born with a penis between their legs grow up aspiring to feel and act unambiguously male,
longing to belong to the sex that is male and not to belong to the sex that is not, and feeling this urgency
for a visceral and constant verification of their male sexual identity – for a fleshy connection to manhood
– as the driving force of their life. The drive does not originate in the anatomy. The sensations derive from
the idea. The idea gives the feelings social meaning; the idea determines which sensations will be
sought.” (Stoltenberg, as cited in Hird, 2002, p. 587).
While radical feminist discourses and their contemporaries rely on notions of ‘authenticity’ in relation to sex
and gender, queer discourse has shifted its focus to centre upon the notion of performativity. Butler argues
“we never experience or know ourselves as a body pure and simple, i.e. as our ‘sex,’ because we never
know our sex outside of its gender’ (1986, as cited in Hird, 2000, p. 585). Gender is something that is
‘done’ or ‘performed:’
“Behavioural manifestations are prior to gender identity and sexed body (rather than the other way
around). The illusion of a stably sexed body, core gender identity and (hetero) sexual orientation is
perpetuated through repeated, stylized bodily performances that are performative in the sense thay they
are productive of the fiction of a stable identity, orientation, and sexed body as prior to the gendered
behaviour.” (Bettcher, 2014)
Thus gender is produced through performative enactment, which in turn creates the illusion of a
biologically-grounded sex essence (Bettcher, 2014). Queer discourse critiques the perception of sexism in
radical feminist’s approach to trans individuals. The subversive potential of trans identity is in its potential to
“expose this concealed imitative quality” and “expose the mechanisms by which the fiction of normative
heterosexist gender is created” (Bettcher, 2014). Thus the queer perspective celebrates any transgressive
identity that disrupts the heteronormativity. But placing emphasis on having a “critical relation to
hegemonic gender ideals” through “the visible crossing of gender boundaries that interrupts taken-forgranted views of congruence between sex and gender,” subordinates certain trans identities (Elliot, 2009,
p. 10-11). Specifically, self-identified transsexual individuals who seek gender congruence are charged
with reinforcing binary gender presentations (Davis, 2008). This has the effect of creating a hierarchy of
trans individuals:
“Transsexuals locate themselves within the categories of a binary system in order to establish
congruence between sex and gender and to claim their right to live as men and women…. In annexing
transsexuals to the category of transgender, which is praised for its opposition to sex-gender congruence,
Butler and others render aspects of a specifically transsexual experience invisible.” (Elliot, 2009, p. 9)
The transsexual individual, does, however, engage in both “hegemonic and transgressive actions,
thereby replicating and challenging the gender order in subtle ways” (Davis, 2008, p. 109). It is
transgressive to claim that gender identity is not grounded in natal sex category, and that for the
transsexual individual, this desired congruence necessitates a re-association with the body (Davis, 2008;
Elliot, 2009). On the other hand, transsexual individuals may sometimes engage in rigid and hegemonic
gender rules. Thus a tension is created:
“The cultural emphasis on gender differences between men and women and on the innate, continuous
nature of gender is reaffirmed through essentialist narratives and self-presentations; however, to the
extent that trans individuals are socially accepted as authentically gendered, the categories of gender
may be widened to include individuals with differently sexed bodies and histories. This results in a
contradictory situation in which the power of regulatory frameworks is reasserted while these frames are
also modified to incorporate new configurations.” (Davis, 2008, p. 124)
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Kaleidoscope 6.2. Special Issue, Rebecca Duke, “Rendering ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’
Intelligible: Three Regulatory Discourses of Trans Individuals within Society”
Furthermore, the transition process is not necessarily a conscious political decision. In Davis’ (2008)
examination of compulsory gender performance, most trans respondents complicated the binaries of
fluidity/stability, ambiguity/coherence and transgression/hegemony in their interactions. Moreover,
transsexual individuals’ disclosure of their trans status is not the same as being consciously politically
transgressive (Davis, 2008). Problems arise when “stable coherent identification is conflated with the
hegemonic reproduction of gender ideologies,” as some trans individuals subject-positions are then valued
as more transgressive than others (Davis, 2008, p. 125). As some trans writers have argued, this type of
judgment not only validates some trans subjectivities while refusing others, but also fails to recognise the
unique challenges of trans individuals living in society without the conceptual language to fully capture their
experience and subject-position. Such a focus on the trans individual’s potential to destabilize gender “not
only ignores the social pressures and presentations that may hide gender diversity but also disregards
individuals’ subjective attachments to identity and discounts their desires for a sense of sexed/gendered
location” (Elliot, 2009, p. 116-7). Thus, the queer theory discourse on trans experiences also privileges
certain identities above others.
Conclusion: Looking Forward
“We find the epistemologies of white male medical practice, the rage of radical feminist theories and the
chaos of lived gendered experience meeting on the battlefield of the transsexual body.” (Stone, 1998, p.
10)
This essay has examined three socially pervasive threads of discourse on trans individuals and their
experiences: the psycho-medical establishment, radical feminist theory and queer theory. Each has
operated in different ways to eliminate certain types of trans subject-positions as unviable, illegitimate or
unworthy. As discourses that regulate which types of personhood are valid, what all three strands of
discourse fail to consider is the diversity of trans individuals themselves. If society fully engaged with the
diversity of transgender and transsexual narratives, this wide range of experience of sex and gender would
be revealed, and perhaps more appreciated in their complexity (Hird, 2002). The failure of these various
social discourses to incorporate the trans individual into a conceptually intelligible subject-position would
thus be revealed and possibly rectified. These three social discourses have constrained and even harmed
trans identity and experience in society. Only when this is acknowledged can these discourses incorporate
the diversity of trans identity and experience within our society.
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Rebecca Duke
The University of Melbourne
Rebecca Duke is a third-year international exchange student from The University of Melbourne
reading Psychology, Philosophy and Spanish at University College, Durham University. She returned
to Melbourne in July 2014 to continue her studies and hopes to pursue a career in clinical psychology.
This paper was prepared as part of ‘The Sociology of Gender and Sexuality’ module under the
guidance of Dr Mark McCormack.
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