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    Axiomatic: Constituting ‘transexuality’ and trans sexualities in medicine

    Access Status
    Fulltext not available
    Authors
    Latham, Joe
    Date
    2018
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
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    Citation
    Latham, J. 2018. Axiomatic: Constituting ‘transexuality’ and trans sexualities in medicine. Sexualities: studies in culture and society.
    Source Title
    Sexualities: studies in culture and society
    DOI
    10.1177/1363460717740258
    ISSN
    1363-4607
    School
    National Drug Research Institute (NDRI)
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/71331
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    © 2018, The Author(s) 2018. This article argues that medicine misunderstands the necessarily complex ways trans people experience sexuality. Despite revisions to treatment guidelines and diagnostic descriptions, transgender medicine continues to be based on a paradigmatic narrative of ‘being born in the wrong body’. This narrative performatively reproduces sex, gender and ‘gender dysphoria’ as static, predetermined and independent of medical encounters. It also constructs trans sexualities as limited by and dependent on gender/genital ‘alignment’, which necessarily neglects many trans people’s sexual lives. By mobilising critiques of singularity from science and technology studies (STS), which emphasise how discourses and practices produce both what is knowable and materially possible, this article explores how medicine understands and constitutes ‘transexuality’ as a singular phenomenon that limits trans sexualities. By analysing contemporary medical guidebooks alongside the foundational text of trans medical treatment – Harry Benjamin’s (1999 [1966]) The Transsexual Phenomenon – I argue that medicine constitutes transexuality and understands trans sexualities via four axioms: 1) Transexuality is a disjuncture between mind and body; 2) Transexuality is hating having the wrong genitals; 3) Transexuality is painful and debilitating; and 4) Transexuality is resolvable with hormonal and surgical body modifications. In so doing, medicine flattens out the complexities of trans people’s experiences of gender and sexuality, and simultaneously disavows many trans people’s sexual lives.

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