Radical Feminism is for Transmen.
In a broad sense, my project is to establish transmen as legitimate subjects of feminism, in which both sex and gender expression must be brought into meaningful dialogue. To accomplish this, I have personally and analytically reclaimed Jack Halberstam’s concept of female masculinity. To meet the challenges of the day, feminism must integrate the backbone of materialism with the flexibility of poststructuralism. Sex remains the central axis of oppression; gender is the mechanism that mediates it.
My research examines sexual violence against transmen across narrative, historical, and legal contexts. I focus on how sexual harm becomes intelligible when sex is displaced by gender identity as the primary classificatory frame. My central claim is that the sexual assaults of transmen follow structural patterns long identified in feminist analyses of male violence against female bodies, yet these patterns are frequently obscured in contemporary discourse through shifts in language and interpretation.
Methodologically, I use feminist narrative inquiry, treating knowledge as relational and co-constructed rather than extracted. Survivor accounts are interpreted dialogically, with attention to how institutional settings shape what can be said, heard, and recognized as harm.
My current legal work examines Canadian sexual-assault law following the 1983 reforms (Bill C-127), which replaced rape with a formally sex-neutral offence of sexual assault. While liability may be correctly adjudicated under this framework, I argue that the replacement of sex with gender identity in interpretation can reorganize the intelligibility of harm. I describe this process as epistemic substitution: a shift that leaves offence elements intact while obscuring sex-based patterns of vulnerability, flattening motive, and redirecting institutional response.
Across this work, I draw on feminist rape theory (Brownmiller, MacKinnon), socio-legal analysis (Smart, Naffine), and theories of epistemic injustice (Fricker) to argue that sex-based feminist analysis remains necessary for making sexual violence intelligible in law and policy. Transmen do not stand outside feminist politics; our experiences often 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 transmen 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.
Profiles:
