Major Themes: Transmen and Sexual Assult

My independent study explores the sexual assaults of transmen through a feminist narrative inquiry lens, seeking to understand how survivors make meaning of violence across time, embodiment, and identity. The inquiry is grounded in the conviction that sexual assault is not merely a personal or psychological event but a structural expression of gendered power. Drawing on feminist theorists such as Brownmiller (1975), MacKinnon (1989), and Marcus (1992), the analysis situates these narratives within a broader materialist framework that understands rape as a mechanism of social control. Yet by situating these frameworks alongside the lived experiences of transmen, the study demonstrates the inadequacy of contemporary discourse to furnish a grammar capable of naming these realities. Through storytelling, participants illuminate how gendered violence functions as a tool of correction—reasserting patriarchal order upon those who transgress femininity—while also demonstrating the transformative potential of narrative itself as a feminist act of resistance and reclamation.

The analysis of data is ongoing; results will be finalized upon completion of the research, but several major themes have been identified at this stage:

Summary of Themes

1. Early Gender Nonconformity and Gender Discipline

Participants’ childhood experiences consistently revealed how early expressions of masculinity in female bodies provoked social punishment. Their stories show that gender nonconformity drew surveillance, coercion, and violence meant to enforce femininity. This pattern demonstrates that gender discipline begins long before adulthood, affirming feminist analyses of compulsory heterosexuality and the policing of sexed embodiment.

2. Puberty, Sexualization, and the Body as a Site of Control

Puberty marked a turning point where participants’ bodies became sexualized and newly vulnerable. Female bodily features—especially breasts—emerged as focal points for violation and shame. Feminist phenomenology helps clarify how bodily changes expose individuals to patriarchal objectification, making visible the connection between sex, power, and vulnerability.

3. Relational Violence and Recognition as Female

Most assaults were committed by known individuals—family, peers, partners, or community members—who recognized participants as female. These assaults functioned less as acts of desire than as assertions of dominance. The violence reinforced a social order in which female bodies are available for regulation and control.

4. Corrective Violence and Gender Enforcement

A central theme was the use of sexual assault to punish gender nonconformity or lesbianism—acts aimed at forcing compliance with femininity. This confirms feminist accounts of rape as a gendering act that reinscribes hierarchy through the body. The assaults were explicitly corrective, communicating that female-bodied masculinity must be subdued.

5. Disbelief, Blame, and Political Silencing

Attempts to disclose assault were often met with disbelief, punishment, or expulsion. Even feminist and queer communities sometimes replicated patriarchal silencing by prioritizing ideological commitments over survivors’ credibility. This dynamic exemplifies testimonial injustice: when survivors’ voices are dismissed not because of evidence but because of who they are.

6. Coping, Dissociation, and Survival

Substance use and dissociation were recurring strategies for surviving trauma. These coping mechanisms were less about self-destruction than self-preservation—ways to endure overwhelming bodily and emotional pain. They align with trauma theory’s understanding of dissociation as a survival response when safety and validation are unavailable.

7. Continuum of Exploitation

For some participants, early abuse led to later vulnerability to sexual exploitation, including sex work and pornography. These experiences underscore feminist critiques that such industries often capitalize on pre-existing trauma and social precarity, normalizing the commodification of violated bodies.

8. Masculinity as Defense and its Limits

Masculinity was frequently adopted as protection against further violence. However, participants found that masculine presentation could not erase sex-based vulnerability. Female masculinity challenged patriarchal order but did not confer male privilege. The result was a paradox—masculinity offered psychological strength but also provoked new forms of danger.

9. Trauma, Identity Rupture, and Isolation

Sexual violence disrupted identity continuity, trust, and belonging. Participants described fractured selves and social alienation, illustrating how trauma extends beyond the body into the narrative and relational fabric of life. The inability to find recognition deepened this rupture, producing isolation and epistemic harm.

10. Reconciliation with Female Embodiment

Despite differences in identity trajectories, participants ultimately recognized the role of sexed embodiment in their assaults. This acknowledgment was not a rejection of gender identity but an acceptance of material reality—a reconciliation between bodily experience and personal meaning. Such reflections extend feminist thought by integrating transmasculine perspectives into material analyses of power.

11. Narrative Activism and Solidarity

Each participant expressed a desire for their story to help others. Storytelling was both healing and political, transforming private pain into collective knowledge. Their narratives form a feminist archive of experience, turning trauma into testimony and fostering solidarity among marginalized survivors.

12. The Global Grammar of Correction

When compared with accounts from Human Rights Watch’s study of violence against lesbians and trans men in South Africa, the participants’ experiences reflect a universal structure of “corrective” sexual violence. Across contexts, perpetrators used sexual assault to reassert heteronormative gender hierarchies, revealing that patriarchal control operates through a shared global discourse.

Conclusion: Feminist Theoretical Integration

The themes emerging from these narratives reaffirm foundational feminist insights while extending them into new terrain. Classic feminist theorists such as Brownmiller (1975) and MacKinnon (1989) argued that rape is not an act of individual pathology or sexual desire but a mechanism for maintaining sex-based hierarchy. The participants’ stories confirm this analysis: their assaults were not random or erotic but disciplinary acts that sought to enforce femininity and reassert male dominance.

At the same time, these findings challenge feminist frameworks that universalize “woman” as the sole category of victimhood. The experiences of transmasculine survivors demonstrate that patriarchal power punishes deviation from femininity itself—whether expressed through lesbianism, gender nonconformity, or transition—thereby expanding the scope of feminist analysis beyond categorical boundaries of identity. This dynamic aligns with Marcus’s (1992) theory of rape as a “language of gender,” through which social meaning is inscribed upon resistant bodies, and with Halberstam’s (1998) concept of female masculinity, which exposes how masculinity embodied by females threatens patriarchal coherence and is therefore subject to correction.

Furthermore, the narratives highlight how epistemic and testimonial injustice compound sexual violence. Survivors were disbelieved, blamed, or ideologically silenced within both feminist and queer communities—illustrating the mechanisms described by Alcoff (2018) and Serisier (2018), who argue that the politics of recognition and belief are central to how sexual violence is socially mediated. Their exclusion reveals that feminist and progressive spaces are not immune to patriarchal logics of disbelief when structural analysis gives way to political dogma.

Reintegrating these insights, the narratives call for an inclusive material feminism—one that retains attention to sexed embodiment and structural power while also acknowledging the diverse ways bodies are disciplined through gender. Such a framework refuses the false choice between identity-based inclusion and material analysis. It reaffirms that gendered violence operates through the social reading of sexed bodies, not the declarations of identity attached to them.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates that sexual violence functions as a global grammar of gender: a communicative act that enforces hierarchy, silences dissent, and reinscribes patriarchal order across cultural and political boundaries. The assaults of transmasculine individuals and butch lesbians, like those documented internationally, show that the subordination of the female body remains a central organizing principle of patriarchy (MacKinnon 1989; Human Rights Watch 2011). Yet through the act of storytelling, survivors disrupt this grammar. In narrating their experiences, they enact what Clandinin (2013) describes as relational responsibility—transforming trauma into testimony and private suffering into political knowledge.

In this sense, narrative inquiry itself becomes a form of feminist praxis: an embodied methodology that not only analyzes but also resists domination. By restoring speech to those long excluded from both feminist and trans discourses, these narratives extend the analytic reach of feminism, reaffirming its most radical insight—that the personal is political, and that the power to name one’s violation is the first step toward transforming its structure.

The expected completion date for this study is December 2025.

References

Alcoff, L.M. (2018) Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Clandinin, D.J. (2013) Engaging in Narrative Inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Human Rights Watch (2011) “We’ll Show You You’re a Woman”: Violence and Discrimination against Black Lesbians and Transgender Men in South Africa. New York: Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/12/05/well-show-you-youre-woman/violence-and-discrimination-against-black-lesbians-and (Accessed 18 October 2025).

MacKinnon, C.A. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marcus, S. (1992) ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’, in Butler, J. and Scott, J. (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, pp. 385–403.

Serisier, T. (2018) Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-98749-6