Radical Feminism is for Transmen.
My work focuses on feminist theory, sexual violence, and the experiences of transmen. I examine how rape is understood and narrated when gender identity language replaces attention to sexed embodiment. The core claim guiding my research is that the sexual assaults of transmen follow the same structural patterns that materialist feminism has long identified as male domination of female bodies—yet current discourse often makes these experiences difficult to name.
Methodologically, I use meta-theoretical analysis and feminist narrative inquiry, which treats knowledge as relational and co-constructed rather than extracted. The stories of transmen I work with are interpreted in dialogue, with attention to how power, identity, and vulnerability shape what can be spoken.
Theoretically, I draw on materialist feminist analyses of sexual domination (Brownmiller, MacKinnon, Dworkin), alongside scholarship on survivor discourse (Alcoff, Serisier), and work that distinguishes masculinity as a structure from men as a sex class (Halberstam). This framework allows me to show why transmen are disproportionately victimized, not because they are “exceptions,” but because sexed vulnerability is not erased by identity.
My research argues for the continued necessity of sex-based feminist analysis—not to deny gender identity, but to make sexual violence intelligible. Transmen do not stand outside feminist politics; our experiences clarify its central insights.
Professional Backround
Prior to becoming a graduate researcher, I worked as a Registered Nurse specializing in psychiatric care. I held roles across acute and tertiary settings, including staff nurse on a psychiatric stabilization unit at St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver), Clinical Nurse Educator with the BC Provincial Tertiary Eating Disorders Program, Clinical Supervisor at Foundry Kelowna, Clinical Instructor for the School of Psychiatric Nursing at Brandon University, and staff nurse in Geriatric Psychiatry at Brandon Regional Hospital. Across these roles, I worked closely with individuals navigating trauma, dissociation, suicidality, issues of self-relation, and the search for language to make sense of overwhelming experiences.
This clinical background strongly informs my research. Psychiatric nursing requires an attunement to the relational dynamics of care: how trauma is carried in the body, expressed through narrative fragments, and negotiated between survivor and listener. It involves noticing not only what is said, but what cannot yet be spoken. These practices translate directly into my approach to feminist narrative inquiry. I understand traumatic storytelling as uneven, cyclical, and shaped by the listener’s presence. I also recognize the cultural pressures that shape whether survivors feel permitted to speak at all.
My research draws on this clinical grounding to examine how trans men narrate sexual assault in contexts where the language available to them may obscure rather than clarify their experiences. In this way, my nursing practice and academic work form a continuous trajectory: both are concerned with how trauma becomes legible, to oneself and to others, and what conditions enable that recognition.
