Entering Transmasculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse

By matthew heinz

Entering Transmasculinity is a holistic study of the intersecting and overlapping discourses that shape transgender identities. In the book, matthew heinz offers an examination of mediated and experienced transmasculine subjectivities and aims to capture the apparent contradictions that structure transmasculine experience, perception and identification. From the relationship between transmasculinity’s emancipatory potential and its simultaneously homogenizing implications, to issues of gender-queerness, sexual minorities, normativity and fatherhood, Entering Transmasculinity is the first book to synthesise the disparate areas of academic study into a theory of the transmasculine self and its formation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783205707

matthew heinz

matthew heinz is dean of the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences and professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia.

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2016 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2016 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Cover image: TRANSformation © Damian Siqueiros (www.damiansiqueiros.com)

Production managers: Claire Organ and Matthew Floyd

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-568-4

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-569-1

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-570-7

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents

TRANSformation: Damian Siqueiros

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1:  The Transmasculine Patient

Chapter 2:  Norming Abnormality

Chapter 3:  Finding One’s (Male) Self

Chapter 4:  A Man’s Man

Conclusion

References

Index

Permissions Granted

The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation of online contributions granted by Tim Chevalier, Sunny Drake, FTM Australia, Davy Knittle, Thomas McBee, Stefan de Villiers and Max Zachs.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from Morty Diamond’s (ed.) 2004 From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond, San Francisco, CA: Manic D Press.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from Nicholas Teich’s 2012 Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue, New York: Columbia University Press.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission for citation from translation of Franz Kafka’s works granted by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University.

TRANSformation: Damian Siqueiros

The cover photo is part of my new photo series, TRANSformation. The series does not deal directly with transgenderism but with the intriguing questions that arise from it. It raises questions about what sex and gender mean, questions that would be unimaginable without the existence of trans bodies.

Trans bodies are vessels for asking larger questions about the social need to superimpose the myths of gender unto the body according to its sex. The process occurs almost seamlessly as long as sex and gender align in a heteronormative and binary way. Destabilization, conscious or unconscious, arises from discrepancies within the anatomy itself and of course from its relationship with social gender norms. TRANSformation challenges the idea of the seemingly natural concordance between sex and gender in which female equals woman and male equals man, contesting the historical paradigm of biology as destiny.

TRANSformation archives a beautiful aesthetic resolution through the appropriation of the language of figurative painting, referencing painters such as Michelangelo and the Mannerists. Using an aesthetic that belongs to the past to speak about contemporary topics, it invites us to look at the latter from a historical perspective, and to look in retrospect at art history for signs of non-conforming depictions of the body (as it is the case of women in the Sistine Chapel).

Exploring the topic through dancers in movement, the images shift from being descriptive to being narrative. We are obliged to see these transgender bodies in social and historical context. Superposing the bodies against the backdrops of Renaissance and Baroque period churches completes this exercise. The technical process by which the images are created and the use of churches (a public space, religion) become a metaphor for the constructed character of gender.

This project strives to suspend the rules and question the myths that oblige us to believe that gender and sex are natural and fixed traits. The purpose of this confrontation with the spectator is to produce conversations that lead to an understanding of gender diversity, as well as a way of achieving equality for the sexes that goes beyond a narrow binary notion or beyond narrow binary notions of gender.

Damian Siqueiros (www.damiansiqueiros.com) is a Montreal-based photographer and visual artist.

Foreword

I remember the exact moment in which I consciously decided to move forward with medical transition.

It was a sweaty summer in the bay area, and like the previous mornings that season, I had spent it sitting at my desk for hours watching video after video on YouTube of testimonials from young transmen. At the time, I identified as ‘transcurious’ – an identity I felt reflected my deep interest but fear of transition – and was enamoured with the way that so many of the young men candidly expressed their journeys to anonymous audiences.

I was in love with their audacity to be free.

That particular day I watched a video of a very popular vlogger who reminded me of myself: talkative, philosophical and cocky. Like most of his videos, this one was shot in black and white and had an experimental arthouse feel to it. But unlike the other daily tellings of facial hair growth, or how his voice has dropped, he shared a poem he had written about self-acceptance and its possibility of creating a new type of masculinity. A masculinity that doesn’t harm but loves. One that is liberating instead of restrictive.

This person years younger than me understood my fears and I allowed myself to listen. It was then that my soul shifted and it was then that I knew that I would be ok.

And I’ve been ok.

I remain grateful to the stories of the young men who have inspired me to live openly, honestly and without shame – many of who line the pages of this book.

This text is a wonderful theoretical inquiry into the lives of a community of people that have created ourselves in images that sometimes challenge and other times are complicit with gender norms.

matthew, thank you for providing men like me a document of our agency.

Kortney Ziegler, PhD

Preface

One of the key pieces of literature that has shaped my understanding of the world, from the time that I was a young, idealistic, and politically driven ‘alternative’ girl in a German high school to now, a pragmatic, politically worn male-identified Canadian university dean in my late forties, is Franz Kafka’s (1919/2003) Auf der Galerie (Up on the Gallery). Interpretations of the piece, which consists essentially of two long sentences offering contrasting versions of a circus moment in time, abound. My own understanding is perhaps closest to that of Bianca Theisen, whose interpretation maintains the centrality of the text’s ambivalence and its success in not just juxtaposing but maintaining parallel realities. This, in essence, is what this book is about – the inevitability of being oriented and orienting others by competing discourses about transmasculinity. Theisen (2002, p. 178) argues that ‘Kafka’s circus turns doubly transgress the reality of cultural codes already transformed in the circus, a mass medium still very popular in Kafka’s time’. Whether we are surrounded by scholarly critical cultural studies texts, television portrayals, medical diagnoses, sociopolitical analyses or informational counseling pamphlets, what remains is the irrefutability of living in a world that forces us to physically respond, much as Kafka’s circus spectator does, to manifestations of gendered lives, be it in our sensory perceptions, everyday conversations, processing of mediated information or intellectual understandings. It does not seem to matter so much whether the mass medium is the circus, reality television or Web content – all offer culturally mediated constructions of identities that are, at least partially, grounded in our physical properties. ‘The ambivalence of the text’s final gesture offers no clear exegesis to the incongruities and contrasts set up by the two paragraphs’, Theisen (2002, p. 175) suggests in regard to Kafka’s text. Being doomed to, or privileged by, such permanent double vision could lead to an existential paralysis of sorts were it not for the basic human needs that inevitably drive us to make choices. This inevitability of entering discourses, in this case, discourses of transmasculinity, can also be meaningfully illuminated by the perspective of Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1966) philosophy of being. His central tenet – that existence precedes essence – forces us to take a critical look at the ontological assumptions of transmasculine articulations of being. As this analysis will demonstrate, a fundamental belief in an essential, innate identity that lies at the core of transmasculine lives provides a compass for many in the contested terrain of transmasculine representations. At the same time, however, manifestations of transmasculinity that focus on the self-reflexivity revealed by human consciousness populate this discursive landscape. Sartre’s notion of ‘nothingness’, with its emphasis on the necessity of negation, sheds light on rhetorical strategies and discursive approaches to understanding one’s own transmasculinity as that which it is not, one’s consciousness always being consciousness of something. His philosophical approach acknowledges the impossibility of escaping discourse, perhaps most effectively in his play No Exit (1944), which stages the futility and inevitability of human freedom to make choices, capsulized in the famous exclamation ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’. The spirit of this utterance appears mirrored in the query ‘Does it matter what your gender is when you never leave the house?’ posted online by a frustrated female-to-male transgender individual (Captain Awkward 2013). Transmasculine people, like other trans-identified people, are acutely aware of the conundrum that, according to Sartre, characterizes the human condition. Our visibility to others ruptures our self-understanding, necessitating incessant symbolic acts that give rise to constructions of transmasculinity we may or may not desire to inhabit but which, regardless, shape our everyday being. The simple acts of purchasing this book, ordering it online, or reading it in a coffee house scatter into meaning constellations, depending on whether we construct our interest as scholarly, personal or scholarly and personal, whom we perceive to be watching us, how or which company is digitally tracking our consumer choices. It is in intellectual affinity to Kafka and Sartre, then, that I am approaching this topic. While technology and our biological–cultural understandings of sex and gender have changed – and will continue to change in unpredictable ways – the human condition has not. It anchors all of us in the sum of mundane communicative acts we engage in all day long, from checking in at the doctor’s office to presenting at a meet-the-teacher night to describing ourselves on online dating sites to posting transition selfies to determining which set of clothes to pull out of the closet in the morning. While I have no hope of successfully unravelling the myriads of meaning-making systems involved in all of these communicative acts, I hope that my examination illustrates the complexity of arriving at transmasculine self-understandings and representations leaving some of us, at times, simply speechless or, as Kafka might have it, ‘sinking into the final march as if into a difficult dream’, weeping, ‘without realizing it’ (trans. Johnston 2003).

Up in the Gallery (Franz Kafka)

If some frail tubercular lady circus rider were to be driven in circles around and around the arena for months and months without interruption in front of a tireless public on a swaying horse by a merciless whip-wielding master of ceremonies, spinning on the horse, throwing kisses and swaying at the waist, and if this performance, amid the incessant roar of the orchestra and the ventilators, were to continue into the ever-expanding, gray future, accompanied by applause, which died down and then swelled up again, from hands which were really steam hammers, perhaps then a young visitor to the gallery might rush down the long staircase through all the levels, burst into the ring, and cry ‘Stop!’ through the fanfares of the constantly adjusting orchestra.

But since things are not like that – since a beautiful woman, in white and red, flies in through curtains which proud men in livery open in front of her, since the director, devotedly seeking her eyes, breathes in her direction, behaving like an animal, and, as a precaution, lifts her up on the dapple-gray horse, as if she were his granddaughter, the one he loved more than anything else, as she starts a dangerous journey, but he cannot decide to give the signal with his whip and finally, controlling himself, gives it a crack, runs right beside the horse with his mouth open, follows the rider’s leaps with a sharp gaze, hardly capable of comprehending her skill, tries to warn her by calling out in English, furiously castigating the grooms holding hoops, telling them to pay the most scrupulous attention, and begs the orchestra, with upraised arms, to be quiet before the great jump, finally lifts the small woman down from the trembling horse, kisses her on both cheeks, considers no public tribute adequate, while she herself, leaning on him, high on the tips of her toes, with dust swirling around her, arms outstretched and head thrown back, wants to share her luck with the entire circus – since this is how things are, the visitor to the gallery puts his face on the railing and, sinking into the final march as if into a difficult dream, weeps, without realizing it.

Introduction

Female-to-male (FTM) transsexual people are the least studied group of all when it comes to masculinity.

– Jamison Green (2005)

This book seeks to immerse the reader in a nuanced and context-rich consideration of the discourses shaping transmasculine consciousness and communication, allowing not just ‘a story of emergence from a set of representations’ (Halberstam 2005, p. 20) but stories of emergence from sets of representations. It offers an examination of mediated and experienced transmasculine subjectivities and aims to capture the ostensible contradictions that structure transmasculine experience, perception and identification. By analysing competing discourses about transmasculinity, it illustrates some of the ways in which people arrive at transmasculine self-understandings. By placing specific instances of blog posts, YouTube narratives, media portrayals, anecdotal scholarship and counselling literature from the United States, English-speaking Canada and the United Kingdom in context, it explores the negotiation of the meta-discourses of innate transmasculinity and discursive masculinity. I begin by contextualizing the topic, introducing the reader to the scope of the analysis, and providing a snapshot survey of current transmasculine articulations. In four chapters, the book describes the motif of the transmasculine patient, the rhetorical continuance of underlying abnormality, cultural constructions of selfhood, and visions of masculinity. The conclusion provides a holistic reading of the discursive realities constructed, expressed, challenged or omitted in transmasculine discourses.

My text uses the term ‘transmasculine’ to loosely describe people who were assigned to the female sex at birth, who do not perceive this sex designation to be an appropriate representation of their gender or sex, and who may identify as AFAB (assigned female at birth), affirmed male, bi-gender, boi, boy, FAAB (female assigned at birth), f2m, F2M, female-bodied man, female-to-male (FTM), guy, M2M, male, male-identified, male of centre, man, man of transgendered experience, man with transsexual history, new man, non-binary guy, trannyboi, transboy, transfag, transguy, transmale, transman, transmasculine, or transmasculine-leaning. This is not meant to be an exclusive list of the identity labels transmasculine individuals may create or select to describe themselves, which vary greatly in meaning and usage (Bhanji 2012; Diamond & Butterworth 2008; Norwood 2012; Spencer 2014). Indeed, networks such as FTM Australia, which is composed of men who have transitioned, are transitioning or considering their options for transition, advise avoiding identity labels altogether and instead focusing on the ‘tools of transition’: ‘Your true self will emerge as you develop in transition’ (FTM Australia 2011). However, two markers vitally identify the subject of this book: original assignment to the female sex at birth and self-identification towards maleness, manhood or masculinity. While some might argue that none of these nouns, and their accompanying adjectives (male, manly, masculine) are interchangeable, popular language use appears less discerning. Definitions of masculinity emerged, primarily in sociology, in the 1980s (i.e. Carrigan et al. 1985; Franklin 1982; Gilmore 1990; Kimmel 1987; Morgan 1981) and today are dispersed in the academic literature, including concepts such as hegemonic masculinity, hybrid masculinity and female masculinity. Nick Trujillo’s (1991) definition of American hegemonic masculinity as identified by five characteristics (physical force and control, occupational achievement, familial patriarchy, frontiersmanship and heterosexuality) is often cited in critical communication studies, and recent reincarnations appear in popular media, as when Mitch Kellaway defines the concept as ‘the mainstream vision of an ideal masculinity within patriarchal, white-dominant societies, such as those in the Western world’ (Kellaway 2014, 2 December) for readers of The Advocate. Jack Halberstam (1998, p. 77) introduces the notion of female masculinity, which she separates from imitations of maleness and defines as a ‘specific gender with its own cultural history’. Anna Cornelia Fahey’s discourse analysis (2007, p. 142) stresses that hegemonic masculinity ‘is defined both by and against the concept of femininity’ and positioned as superior to femininity. Gary Dowsett et al. (2008) summarize masculinity as a generally understood way of organizing maleness. Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe (2014, p. 246) refine the notion of hybrid masculinity as ‘selective incorporation of elements of identity typically associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities and – at times – femininities into privileged men’s gender performances and identities’. R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt (2005) offer the perhaps broadest and deepest review of research and scholarship on masculinity in a comprehensive yet concise manner. Although their assessment does not include the significant developments of the last ten years, they succinctly elaborate on the evolution of the concept, its varied applications, and critiques related to these applications and extensions. They illustrate the continued relevance of masculinity, and in particular, hegemonic masculinity, as a conceptual tool but also demonstrate that the intellectual value of the concept derives from its flexibility, rejecting ‘those usages that imply a fixed character type, or an assemblage of toxic traits’ as an oversimplification that is incompatible with the original understanding of hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s work as much as with ‘the present moment of gender politics’ (p. 854). Connell and Messerschmidt further observe that the literature on masculinities reveals ‘a great deal of conceptual confusion as well as a great deal of essentializing’ (p. 836), detracting from the value of masculinities as ‘configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular social setting’ (p. 836). It is no surprise, therefore, that language use pertaining to masculinity in online and mediated transmasculine discourse is inconsistent, reflects culturally specific understandings, and sometimes adopts essentialized or oversimplified understandings of concepts introduced in research and scholarly literature. Online dictionaries consider ‘masculinity’ synonymous with manliness, maleness and machismo (Masculinity 2014), and as examples of naturally occurring online discourse will show, some go to great lengths to differentiate, for example, male and masculine, while others treat these terms as synonyms or use them in slightly different contexts only.

The acronym FAAB (sometimes also presented as AFAB), adopted on Stanford University Vaden Health Center’s website (Vaden Health Center 2014) as ‘FAAB transgender-identified people’, is interesting in this context because its need was foreshadowed years ago in one of the earlier texts on transmasculine identities, Jason Cromwell’s (1999) Transmen & FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders & Sexualities. In his epilogue, Cromwell wrote about a Seattle-based support group reaching out to a variety of transmasculine-identified people noting that the support and discussion group was for any person who was ‘assigned female at birth but has masculine gender expression (we keep trying to come up with an acronym that will encompass this statement but so far to no avail)’ (1999, p. 147). While both ‘transmasculine individuals’ and ‘FAAB transgender-identified people’ contain a certain amount of political and cultural appeal at the time of this writing, neither is likely to stay en vogue for the duration, and neither allow for ease of writing or reading. I have chosen, therefore, in instances to shorthand, essentially, to ‘transman’, ‘transmale’, ‘FTM’ or similar referents as appropriate to the context.

Although identity labels by their very nature constitute unstable, conflicted zones of cultural contests (Adams et al. 2014; Pultar 2014; Ridanpää 2014), the use of the word ‘transmasculine’ as a linguistic container denoting those who were assigned to the female sex at birth but are identifying on a male spectrum is consistent with current social scientific research and humanistic scholarship in this area (e.g. Factor & Rothblum 2007; Hansbury 2005; Iantaffi & Bockting 2011). Colloquial use by individuals and groups also reflects this practice, as evidenced by the ‘transmasculine genderqueery’ name of the Gendercast site (Gendercast 2014), the ‘transmasculine people of color photo project’, (Transmasculine POC 2012) or the ‘Transmasculine Program’ of the Southern Comfort Conference (Southern Comfort Conference 2014). That said, a growing number of transgender individuals identifies as genderqueer, non-binary, trans*, trans or transgender only (Waszkiewicz 2006); some of these individuals were assigned to the female sex at birth and present as transmasculine but prefer an identity category that does not reinforce the binaries of male and female. There is no consensus on what it means ‘to be trans’, an identity cluster whose complexity is increasing as visibility of transpeople expands (Pardo 2008) across ages, classes, cultures and countries (Ekins & King 2006; Salamon 2010; Stryker & Aizura 2013); the most recent need to reflect such diversity is embodied in the move to adopt ‘trans*’ as a symbolic representation (Killerman 2014). The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2014, p. 9) survey of LGBT respondents used the term ‘trans person’ to ‘avoid confusion with one of the possible identity groups from which the respondents could choose (‘transgender’)’. Of the 6579 trans participants, 631 identified as ‘transman’ as opposed to ‘trans woman’, ‘transgender’, ‘gender variant’, ‘queer/other’ or ‘cross dresser’.

The search for inclusive umbrella labels derives from several trends: the proliferation of identity labels generated by individuals and communities across the globe, which prohibits a complete listing of all potential identifiers in even just one majority language; the impossibility of arriving at culturally appropriate translations or aligning culturally specific understandings of gender variance across languages or time; the emergence of a knowledge field that rests on a set of keywords, hyperlinks and metadata; the need for a shared human rights vocabulary (Bender-Baird 2011; Valentine 2007); and a political awareness that greater numbers translate into greater political power (i.e. Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) notion of strategic essentialism). An intriguing, interwoven and complicated set of narratives pertaining to gender variance is a by-product of these trends, and author after author prefaces writing, whether intended for academic researchers or popular audiences, by meta-communication about the linguistic choices made. Pagan Kennedy (2007) offers the following rationale for her language use in the biography of Michael Laurence Dillon, explaining in her author’s note why she uses the word transsexual rather than transgendered, attributing this both to language use prevalent in the 1950s and to differentiation of surgical and hormonal treatment choices. ‘My use of the word transsexual is not intended to strike any particular political tone, but rather to avoid confusion’, she writes. Kennedy also comments on her use of pronouns, stating that for clarity’s sake, the pronouns she used to describe pre-transition individuals ‘did not match Dillon’s or Cowell’s internal sense of themselves before they transformed their bodies’, adding that she tried as much as possible to use the pronouns that would have been preferred by the individuals. Her note reflects the awkwardness of telling transmasculine life stories choosing language that satisfies current preferred language use, remains intelligible to diverse audiences, approximates the biographical subject’s personal preference and remains aligned with the historical–cultural frame for that narrative. Measured against such complicated expectations, subject to localized understandings of gender and sex, and unable to provide lengthy articulations in truncated news spaces, mass media coverage often falls short.

Seventeen years after the killing of Brandon Teena in Nebraska, that state’s largest daily newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, referred to Brandon as ‘a woman’ and used female pronouns to refer to Brandon, who presented as male (Bass 2011). In response to critique by members of the public and advocacy groups, including GLAAD, the Omaha World-Herald adjusted its online version of the article by eliminating all gender-specific pronouns. GLAAD, and others, objected to the paper’s refusal to use male pronouns in reference to Brandon, a practice which the editor justified by arguing that use of the male pronoun would be confusing to readers. In an 30 April 2011 letter to the editor of the Omaha World-Herald, Diane Amdor, President of Allies and Advocates for GLBT Equality at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law, argues that criminal prosecution of Brandon’s killers does not suffice to make young transgender people feel ‘safe and respected in Nebraska now’ because the ‘World-Herald can’t even bring itself to write the word he’ (Bass 2011). As John Sloop’s (2000, p. 181) analysis shows, most of the public discourses surrounding Brandon ultimately functioned to ‘discipline the transgendered’:

Whether positing himself as a hermaphrodite or as a preoperative transsexual, Brandon Teena, and reports about Brandon Teena, work within the same gender constraints that we all are faced with. To be male demands the presence of a penis, and Brandon was metaphorically adding one with either rhetorical strategy.

Arguably, though, the rhetorical battle for pronouns in the Brandon Teena case served as a site of more complex argumentation. Coverage of this news story was challenging, as perhaps best illustrated in Shu Lea Cheang’s ‘BRANDON’, a 1998 multi-artist multimedia art project commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum for a World Wide Web project ‘exploring issues of gender fusion and techno-body in both public and cyberspace’ (Cheang 1998). The website describes Cheang’s work in the following words: ‘BRANDON derives its title from Brandon/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, USA, a gender-crossing individual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was revealed’. The language in this statement is carefully crafted (‘Brandon/Teena Brandon’; ‘gender-crossing individual’; ‘his female anatomy’) to allow for external intelligibility as much as to leave room for whatever Brandon’s self-identification might have been. The discourse surrounding the Brandon Teena case has been examined by academics, advocates, activists, critics and educators and given rise to the ‘Brandon industry’ (Halberstam 2005, p. 16); it is referenced here to illustrate the intricacies of writing about transmasculine representations. As the discussion to follow will show, Brandon Teena appears in many locations in transmasculine discourses and in discourses about transmasculinity, and representations of Brandon Teena’s gender identity continue to conflict with each other.

The labels individuals choose to describe or understand themselves often change over time; the labels others choose to describe or understand us may or may not match the labels we choose for ourselves; and others may understand the labels we choose for ourselves differently from us. Efforts to resist labels often result in either invisibility of transmasculine-specific consciousness (Teich 2012) or inadvertent creation of a new label. Wherever possible, I have tried to maintain the language individuals have chosen as self-referents in samples and excerpts of discourse. I have tried to apply the same principle where other identity markers, such as skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality or religion, are concerned. For example, excerpts from discourse generated by self-identified black transmen is identified as such, but YouTube contributions in which the ethnicity of the presenter is not referenced by the individual himself are not designated as being generated by a member of a particular ethnic group. Racial and ethnic identifications are constructed in highly different ways in the national and cultural contexts from which this analysis draws (see, for example, the difference between ‘people of colour’ and ‘racialized people’ in US and Canadian contexts) and also are subject to political and generational self-understandings. In other words, I have tried to draw from diverse cultural co-locations but in respect of self-representational choices have tried to provide such identifications only when they were foregrounded by the individual, and only in the language chosen by the individual. It is illustrative that the referents individuals choose to describe themselves are not necessarily consistent in time or place, subject to rapidly evolving linguistic practices as much as to rapidly changing senses of identity. In a UK context, for example, preference for the label ‘non-binary’ over ‘transmasculine’ or ‘FTM’ appears to be evolving. In keeping with current English-language trends, I am using the terms cisgender, cismen and ciswomen (the Latin prefix cis denotes ‘on the same side’ and has come to be understood as an antonym to trans) to denote individuals whose assigned birth sex matches the gender with which they identify. It is relevant to keep in mind, however, that the longevity of the concept ‘cis’ is inextricably tied to the success or failure of trans discourses to overhaul entrenched conceptualizations of gender and sex. Its existence is predicated on the social practice of assigning sex at birth, a practice that may become to be understood as non-scientific or non-empirical as assigning racial categories at birth, as sociologist Aaron Devor offers in a recent Canadian documentary (Transforming Gender 2015).

While at first glance, most trans discourses appear to naturally overlap in their integration of gender variance or gender nonconformity as a key component, the nature of such gender variance or nonconformity often remains embedded in these individual discourses, which ultimately conflates contradictory and even exclusionary understandings of gender and sex. This arguably compromises the reformatory and perhaps revolutionary potential of some of these approaches to thinking about and thinking in gender and sex, as their individual contributions remain politically untapped, subsumed in a sea of gender variance consensus. The very notions of ‘gender variance’ and ‘gender nonconformity’, tacitly assumed in much trans discourse, invoke a discourse of gender order that likely constrains our ability to experience the range of our gendered beings. The binary distinction between transsexual and transgender discourses no longer stands the test of contemporary language usage as some of those who identify primarily as transsexual see transsexualism as part of a range of gendered identities and some of those who identify primarily as transgender orient their self-understanding and external representation along discrete binaries. Contemporary use of the label ‘transsexual man’ could signify an individual who orients himself along a binary gender system as much as it could signify an individual who does not. Such rhetorical flexibility increases the significance of contextualized understanding. This organically occurring language use defies efforts at classification, even if broadened to present a tri-partite scheme, such as Alain Giami and Emmanuelle Beaubatie’s (2015) notion of essentialist, trans-identified, and non-binary identities presented at the first European Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Ghent, Belgium. This discursive shift is arguably bigger than a mere expansion of the range of transmasculine identities that manifest themselves in society or that are theoretically postulated by scholars (Rubin 2003), but because transmasculine people themselves are a living part of this discourse as much as the scholars who seek to examine these trends (and of whom a considerable portion identifies as transmasculine themselves), this larger shift may not be visible to those living in this particular moment of trans consciousness. Although we are generally aware that our specific cultural, historic, temporal and linguistic context shapes our understanding of ourselves and that of others, our analyses often focus on the manifestation of specific instances, or articulations of consciousness, rather than the contextual frames (van Dijk 2008, p. 217). Both, however, would appear inextricably linked, and the contextual frame likely of more importance in regard to social change at a national or global level.

Scholars from a range of fields of study have examined the portrayal of transmasculine characters in music, visual and literary media (e.g. Ballard 2014; Krell 2013; Love 2001; Prosser 1998). Such analyses by default offer singular perspectives, the lens of a particular scholar’s epistemology and ontology focused on a particular media moment, whether that is Brandon Teena’s representation in Boys Don’t Cry (Halberstam 2001) or The Brandon Teena Story (Cooper 2002), the character of Stephen Gordon in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Love 2001), Jackie Kay’s black Scottish trans novel Trumpet (Richardson 2012) or the performative aspects of the music of Lucas Silveira (Krell 2013). At the same time – and the emphasis here literally lies on the coincidental nature of such work – researchers study isolated aspects of transmasculine lives such as vocal quality in FTM transition (e.g. Constansis 2008); psychoanalysts, psychologists and sociologists organize transmasculine identifications (e.g. Hansbury 2005; Levitt & Ippolito 2014; Suchet 2011); health scholars investigate transmale demographic characteristics, social support and experiences of violence from a sibling-comparative perspective (e.g. Factor & Rothblum 2007) or adaptation of perinatal nursing practice for pregnant transgender men (e.g. Adams 2010); and medical scholars inquire into hysterectomy and oophorectomy experiences (e.g. Rachlin et al. 2010) or testosterone regimens of FTM individuals (e.g. Molo et al. 2015; Steinle 2011). Within the field of communication studies, trans communication scholarship is slowly emerging as a distinct area (e.g. Spencer & Capuzza 2015) but draws, as is customary in emerging fields, from widely diverging theoretical frameworks and sites of study, whether in the form of sexual communication research (Kosenko 2010, 2011), family communication (Norwood 2012), or queer studies approaches to the body (Yep 2013). This growing body of research meets a well-established body of work in media studies that addresses transgender representations (e.g. Fink & Miller 2014; Mocarski et al. 2013; Shaw 2012; Willox 2003) and, in instances, proposes a distinct transgender perspective. Leland Spencer (2014), for example, extends queer rhetorical criticism by proposing transgender rhetorical criticism as a new approach and offers a transgender reading of performative gender identity in ‘The Little Mermaid’.

In the last century, much research and scholarship has emphasized specialization and deep fields of study, so it is not surprising that much scholarship orients itself within a fairly circumscribed set of referents, despite the growing awareness that disciplinarily siloed scholarship cannot satisfactorily address today’s global problems. Film scholars will orient themselves primarily in a landscape of other film scholars; literary critics focus on the work generated by other literary critics; social scientists primarily cite other social scientists. Although some transmasculine-specific scholarship offers a departure from traditional disciplinary approaches and reflects a broader, rather than deeper, examination of topics, much knowledge available to transmasculine people remains segregated by seemingly irreconcilable epistemologies. Even professional bodies that acknowledge the relevance of multiple epistemological perspectives invariably segregate knowledge as a function of time and space by offering conference streams, prohibiting communication where it is most needed if the ultimate goal is to facilitate social change and improve practices. Deep and focused research is essential; it constitutes the building blocks of scholarship and thereby knowledge, knowledge that exists beyond our selves and with which we find ourselves in constant dialogue, whether directly or indirectly. However, these worlds of knowledge, and their applications, collide in our daily lives. An endocrinologist may prescribe particular dosages of testosterone based on biomedical research involving transmasculine ‘subjects’ or ‘patients’; a community-based support group may invite us to meetings in gender-neutral, gender-free, or genderqueer zones; a transmen resource website may promote Chaz Bono’s autobiographical account as a narrative familiar or relevant to our lives; a YouTube video may chronicle an individual’s decision to start and then abandon testosterone therapy. Advocacy groups solicit our participation in anti-discrimination efforts, locally and globally, positioning us in victimized or at least structurally marginalized locations manifested in Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter hashtags. Throughout all this, we file words, symbols, gestures, photos and videos away, retrace our steps in digital tracks that quickly trap us in unintelligible circuits, and form webs of understanding through associations we may only be partially aware of and that manifest themselves in sudden product placement on our browsers. Out of this, a level of transmasculine awareness is forged that has the potential to keep us paralyzed in permanent self-reflexivity. The question arises as to how to study, how to reach and articulate an understanding, however tentative, of transmasculine discourses given the ubiquity and transience of their elements. I will consider some of the social meanings in images, texts and language individuals use to communicate their (trans)masculinity. My analysis will show particular core symbolic alignments that exist across texts, and although such a discourse analysis cannot seek to generate generalizable claims, I can confidently suggest that the discourse analysed here reflects at least part of the contemporary reality of transmen, similar to the ways in which my earlier work examined the discourse of meat consumption (Heinz & Lee 1998), environmental discourse (Heinz et al. 2007) or global constructions of gay and lesbian identities (Heinz et al. 2002). In line with this earlier work, my analysis draws, in part, on the analytical tools offered by Kenneth Burke (1973), such as associational clusters and symbolic alignments, and those offered by critical discourse analytic scholars such as Teun van Dijk (2008). I arrive at the themes, narrative structures and tropes identified in this book by using a variety of rhetorical-critical and discourse analytic tools. These tools can be traced back to highly divergent research traditions, including critical cultural studies, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, semiotics, applied linguistics, speech act theory, postcolonialism, feminist studies, pragmatics, and rhetorical criticism. van Dijk cogently expresses the Janian nature of discourse by defining its position ‘at the interface of the social and the cognitive: It is itself a social practice, but at the same time it is the major way we acquire ideologies’ (van Dijk n.d.); as such, it manifests how ideologies are enacted, reproduced and resisted. Avi Marciano (2014) presents discourse analysis, in the context of Israeli online trans spaces, as focusing primarily on the ways in which individuals produce reality while also addressing what reality means for individuals.

Both discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis are concerned with what is present but also need to address what is absent (Gee 2011). In this vein, I explore how rhetorical devices, visual representations and other manifestations of symbolicity work together to privilege certain understandings of transmasculinity over others and to co-create transmasculinity as a current cultural practice. Finally, I examine the political and cultural implications of such symbolic constructions of transmasculinity. The discourses of transmasculinity are intertwined with the discourses of masculinity, but scholarship and research in both areas do not necessarily reference each other. Transmasculine articulations of transmasculinity often are dominantly informed by lesbian-feminist writing, queer theory and activism or men’s studies perspectives; less frequently they aim to (or are able to) integrate aspects of these perspectives into a meta-discourse of masculinity. As Lee Monaghan and Michael Atkinson (2014, p. 3) review, masculinity itself is in a state of upheaval. While ‘boys and men are the subjects of intense academic, governmental, private sector, public and media scrutiny’, their voices remain muted:

Young and older men report the lowest levels of life satisfaction and security in more than a half-century, and stress how their voices, concerns and identities often fall outside of popular discourses about gender equality in society. Other boys and men exist quite happily, but routinely suggest their identities or styles of living are neither understood nor appreciated as normative.

In as far as discourses of transmasculinity are informed by discourses of masculinity, the opposite should also apply, but this would require a rhetorical saturation of masculinity discourses with concepts generated within transmasculine discourses. The new and divergent manifestations of transmasculinity evident in the articulations of transmasculine experiences play off changes in understandings of masculinity and both reinforce and challenge social and cultural understandings of what it means to be a man. E. Tristan Booth (2011) analyses the representation of Miles Goff, who identifies as transsexual and bisexual, in a 2006 episode of the US reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Booth finds that the Queer Eye team interacts differently with Goff than it does with other participants, ‘betraying an underlying awkwardness concerning Goff’s liminal social status as a man’ (p. 192). Richard Mocarski et al. (2013) examine both Bono’s chosen self-representation and the ways in which the US show Dancing with the Stars framed his participation, which was one of the first primetime network appearances of a post-operative transgender person. Their analysis suggests that Bono is presented as ‘a different kind of man’ – a presentation that marks progress in terms of transgender (and, in particular, transmasculine) inclusion and visibility, but one that also uses a subtly transphobic lens by framing Bono as unsexed. The authors also engage with the concept of transnormativity, noting that Bono offers a ‘safe subjectivity’ by virtue of being a white, upper-class, post-operative heterosexual man. The recent genesis of transgender studies (Stryker & Aizura 2013), formalized in the publication of the first non-medical academic journal on transgender issues (Transgender Studies Quarterly), not only offers a way of bringing