From Study of Trans Phenomenon to Trans Studies: Agnes, Stone, and Stryker

Posted: Mon, Mar 30, 2026

Today

Medical sciences

(1) “Transsexualism” or “gender identity disorder”

Problems: Allergic rhinitis; Asthma; non-binary - amab
  • Renamed “gender dysphoria” (DSM-V, 2013) and “gender incongruence” (ICD-11, 2018)
  • Standards of Care published by Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (renamed “World Professional Association for Transgender Health” in 2006)
  • Formerly a “sexual deviation” alongside “homosexuality” (DSM-II, 1968; “homosexuality” was removed in 1973)
  • Traditional/gatekeeping model of care: Access to medical care is used as both carrot and stick
    • Managed as a mental disorder: Trans people are fundamentally confused
    • Agenes’ case: Trans people are manipulative and will do anything to get medical care, so doctors must determine whether a patient is really trans and should be allowed medical care
    • Goal is maintenance of the dominant gender/sexuality system:
      • Passing (racialized): Attractiveness/fuckability as perceived by male doctors
      • Compulsory heterosexuality: For trans women, no interest whatsoever in masturbation or sex with women, only heterosexual penetration from a man
      • “Role appropriateness”: Perfect gender performance [Cassidy]
      • Compulsory invisibility: Forced fabrication of plausible non-trans personal history
    • Traditional “eligibility” requirements:
      • Psychiatric diagnosis
      • “Real-life experience” (RLE)
      • One referral letter for hormones & top surgery
      • Two referral letters for bottom surgery
  • New/informed consent model of care: Popularized by high-volume LGBTQ+ community health providers such as Callen-Lorde (NYC) and Fenway (Boston).
    • Standard practice for university and community providers in the US
    • Not standard practice internationally
    • Does not generally extend to gender-affirming surgeries
  • Weird, masculinized “playing God”: The surgeon’s power to create manhood/womanhood itself
  • Trans people’s responses:
    • Play into doctors’ expectations in order to access medical care
    • Play into a medicalized “cruelly trapped in the wrong body” narrative for public sympathy

(2) “Autogyniphillia”

  • Special treat for trans women in DSM-V: “Transvestic fetishism”
  • Ray Blanchard (U Toronto)’s typology of trans women:
    • “Homosexual transsexuals” (true, classic archetype): Fetishizes their “biological sex” ⇒ confused ⇒ naturally feminine (“attractive”), strictly attracted to men, no “fetishism” (attraction) toward women
    • “Autogynephilic transsexuals”: Fetishizes femaleness ⇒ confused ⇒ cross-dressing, paraphilia directed toward having a female body
  • Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979; rep. 1994, Teachers College Press): Appropriation, fetishization, “rape”
  • Joe Rogan
  • Helen Joyce

Trans studies

Sandy Stone: “How, then, can the transsexual speak? If the transsexual were to speak, what would s/he say?” (1991, 295)

The people who have no voice in this theorizing are the transsexuals themselves. As with males theorizing about women from the beginning of time, theorists of gender have seen transsexuals as possessing something less than agency. As with “genetic” “women,” transsexuals are infantilized, considered too illogical or irresponsible to achieve true subjectivity, or clinically erased by diagnostic criteria; or else, as constructed by some radical feminist theorists, as robots of an insidious and menacing patriarchy, an alien army designed and constructed to infiltrate, pervert and destroy “true” women.

Susan Stryker: Trans studies positions trans people as subjects rather than objects of study/knowledge.

  • “Yet if trans people are denied the tools to speak, how can their inability to produce a counterdiscourse be held against them?” (Danielle)

The problem: On what terms can trans people speak? [Marionna]

  • Not medical terms
  • Not cis lesbian feminist terms
  • Stone’s call: Be visible (~come out), reject cissexuality as goal
    • “I find Stryker’s refusal of respectability powerful, but also slightly unsettling. Rage can demand attention, but it doesn’t necessarily produce understanding. It made me wonder whether being seen—especially as something disruptive—is the same as being understood on one’s own terms.” (Sitian)
  • Stryker’s call: Reclaim monstrosity [Micaella, Bobby]

The move: Denaturalize cissexuality

  • Cis people’s genders and bodies are just as “unnatural” as trans people’s. [Xinyuan]
  • Gendering is a process that violates all of us—it is a “universal cultural rape of all flesh” (Stryker 1994, 250). [Eva, Tiffany]
    • “[T]he seemingly ordinary statement ‘It’s a girl’ [is] something politically and materially forceful rather than observational. . . . [Stryker] is not only talking about later discrimination against trans people, but about the violence built into the act of making a body socially legible in the first place.” (Eva)
  • There is a kind of transformative power to be gained by owning one’s artificiality and monstrosity, unleashing one’s rage, and naming and defining oneself on one’s own terms, rather than hiding in the comfortable intelligibility afforded by the dominant social order.

G.L.O.S.S., “Masculine Artifice”

Agnes: This is all just talk; you seize the material basis of your own survival.