Sexual Violence, Female Masculinity, and the Interpretation of Harm
I am a PhD student in Sociology at McGill University. My research examines sexual violence against transmen, focusing on the relationship between social patterns of harm and the frameworks through which those experiences are understood. North American studies report high rates of sexual violence among transmen and transmasculine respondents, yet qualitative research on its mechanisms, contexts, and interpretation remains limited.
My MA work brought feminist narrative inquiry into conversation with socio-legal analysis. Sexual assault adjudication provides an especially revealing site for examining how violence is narrated and made intelligible within Canada’s sex-neutral sexual assault doctrine. Although sex is not an element of the offence, it may nevertheless be relevant to how courts understand vulnerability, coercion, and harm. Their published reasons illuminate a distinction central to my research: determining criminal liability does not necessarily settle what the violence means or how it relates to broader social patterns.
Through this work, I developed the concept of epistemic substitution to describe how gender identity can displace sex as the primary framework for interpreting harm. My analysis of Canadian judicial decisions examines how this shift can obscure patterns involving female embodiment, dependence, and the regulation of gender nonconformity. Such misrecognition may influence credibility assessments and, in some cases, legal outcomes. It may also have downstream consequences for risk assessment, access to services, and data collection. This raises the question of how institutions can recognise gender identity while retaining the distinctions needed to understand the social conditions and patterns of violence.
My proposed PhD study will combine an online survey with in-depth interviews involving people in Canada and the United States who currently identify, or have previously identified, as transmen or transmasculine. It asks three connected questions: what social conditions and mechanisms may shape vulnerability to sexual violence; how survivors interpret their experiences; and how those interpretations relate to patterns identified in the study. Guided by critical realism and informed by feminist scholarship on sexual violence, sex and gender, and female masculinity, my study draws on sociology of knowledge and classification studies to assess competing explanations and examine the strengths and limits of epistemic substitution.
Professional Background
Before becoming a graduate researcher, I worked as a Registered Nurse specializing in psychiatric care, with experience across acute, tertiary, community, and educational settings. My roles included psychiatric stabilization, tertiary eating-disorder treatment, youth mental health, clinical supervision, and psychiatric-nursing education.
This clinical background informs my research on trauma, narrative, and recognition. Psychiatric nursing requires close attention to how people make sense of overwhelming experiences: what can be said, what remains fragmented, and how the listener shapes what becomes speakable.
My academic work extends this clinical attention to listening, meaning-making, and interpretation. Across both nursing and scholarship, I am interested in how people give form to difficult experience, and how institutions respond when that experience does not fit familiar categories.
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Public Statement (February 2025)
