Study on the Sexual Assaults of Transmen: Summary of Findings

My study on the sexual assaults of transmen has now been completed. The conference paper can be found here: https://ualberta.scholaris.ca/items/4c4efa33-17c2-48ed-9f18-5828e8de501f

Below is a summary of the study design and it's key insights:

Background and Research Questions

Sexual assault against transmen is extremely common—approximately 50–55 percent report lifetime assault—yet most research stops at prevalence figures. Existing scholarship rarely explores when assaults occur in relation to transition, who perpetrates them, or how survivors interpret the violence they experienced. This leaves transmen conceptually unanchored between feminist rape theory and male-rape scholarship. The study addresses three central questions:

1. What social and relational factors enabled these assaults?

2. How do transmen interpret their experiences?

3. How should their stories be situated within existing theoretical frameworks?

Methodology

The study is grounded in radical, interpretivist and critical feminist epistemologies, treating knowledge as embodied, partial, and shaped by power. Using feminist narrative inquiry, stories were approached as relational meanings rather than data fragments. Three transmen participated in trauma-informed, semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed and analysed through thematic, structural, theoretical, and dialogic methods. To extend the analytic frame beyond the U.S. context, testimony from the Human Rights Watch report We’ll Show You You’re a Woman was used comparatively. That archive offered a wide base of narratives from gender-nonconforming women and transmen in South Africa, facing corrective rape, community punishment, and class-constrained vulnerability, allowing identification of patterns that recur across cultural settings.

Taken together, this approach allowed the analysis to move beyond description toward an integrated account of how sexual violence against transmen is experienced, interpreted, and structured. The synthesis of interview narratives and comparative testimony revealed three suprathemes that organize the findings. These themes capture, respectively, the developmental arc through which gender nonconformity was policed, the relational and material pathways that made participants vulnerable, and the embodied and affective consequences that shaped their survival. Each is outlined in turn below.

Theme 1: The Policing of Female Masculinity Across the Lifespan

Theme 1 traces a continuous developmental arc rather than a series of discrete assaults. From early childhood, participants’ female masculinity exceeded socially tolerated “tomboy” boundaries and drew immediate forms of correction—mockery, discipline, and intrusive monitoring aimed at steering them toward conventional femininity. Puberty sharpened this scrutiny: the developing female body became an object of unwanted attention, coercion, and shame, and participants’ refusal or inability to perform femininity intensified the policing of their appearance and behaviour. In adulthood, the same pattern culminated in sexual assault. Across all three narratives, violence functioned as a lifelong mechanism for enforcing sexed hierarchy on female bodies marked by masculinity—a continuous trajectory from childhood gender regulation to adult sexual violation.

Theme 2: Relational and Structural Pathways to Vulnerability

Theme 2 examines how relational dependence and structural conditions made participants’ lifelong vulnerability actionable. None of the assaults were committed by strangers; every perpetrator was male—including one transwoman—and already embedded in the participant’s social world as a family friend, intimate partner, or housemate. All three participants grew up working-class and in religious households where femininity was framed as a moral duty and compliance as evidence of virtue. This moralized femininity narrowed the space for refusal and cast resistance as selfish or sinful. As adults, material precarity, housing instability, and early involvement in pornography or prostitution further limited their ability to leave unsafe situations. When participants did attempt to name what happened, they frequently encountered disbelief, dismissal, or punishment—including within LGBT+ communities—which operated as a secondary form of violence. Theme 2 demonstrates that vulnerability emerged through the convergence of relational dependence, classed and moral expectations, epistemic invalidation, and economic constraint.

Theme 3. Embodiment, Disconnection, and Strategies of Survival

Theme 3 examines the embodied consequences of sexual violence and the strategies through which survivors remain intact. When coercion cannot be resisted, survival often involves turning away from the body; dissociation functions not as fragmentation but as adaptive protection, allowing the self to endure what the body absorbs. This distancing reflects not a failure of integration but an embodied intelligence.

A central dynamic in this theme is the repudiation not of femaleness but of the meaning imposed on the female body through violation. Under sustained coercion, the body becomes something acted upon, prompting survivors to distance themselves from it or reshape it. Male-passing—through hormonal or surgical means—can serve as an attempt to escape the social conditions tied to female embodiment, though such strategies may introduce new vulnerabilities when underlying power relations remain unchanged.

This theme also highlights the epistemic rupture that occurs when available conceptual frameworks cannot account for the violence. When language or ideology fails, the violation is both physical and conceptual, deepening disconnection from the body.

Overall, Theme 3 shows that embodiment is simultaneously the site of harm and the ground of survival. Over time, survivors move from disconnection toward reclaiming their sexed bodies on their own terms, restoring interpretive sovereignty and reinhabiting bodily meaning after it has been shaped by coercion.

Synthesis

When read together, the three suprathemes show that the sexual assaults of transmen are not anomalous but follow a coherent, sex-based pattern: early correction of gender nonconformity, intensified policing at puberty, and adult sexual violence as punishment for refusing femininity. Vulnerability arises not from transgender identity but from the social meaning of the female body and the structural conditions that make it available to men. These findings align with and extend feminist rape theory (Brownmiller, Cahill, Dworkin, MacKinnon) by demonstrating that the policing of female masculinity is a key mechanism through which sexed hierarchy is enforced. Narrative inquiry makes visible both the continuity of harm and the forms of meaning-making through which survivors reclaim interpretive power.

This study has implications for policy and service provision:

• Sexual-assault services should recognize transmen as part of the broader population of female survivors who face elevated risk when they are gender-nonconforming.

  
  

• Intake procedures, screening tools, and staff training should acknowledge sex-based vulnerability rather than relying solely on gender-identity categories.

  
  

• Service providers should avoid assuming that masculine presentation indicates lower risk or male patterns of victimization.

  
  

• Reporting mechanisms must address testimonial injustice and protect survivors who name male violence, including when the perpetrator is a transwoman.

  
  

• Policies should guard against ideological or community pressures that silence certain victims or penalize disclosure.

  
  

• Frontline workers require training to identify soft-coercion dynamics—emotional manipulation, religious conditioning, dependence, and community power structures—since these patterns commonly precede or replace overt force.

  
  

• Health services should incorporate awareness of how sexual trauma interacts with gender nonconformity, including dissociation, suicidality, and the use of masculinity, androgyny, or transition as protective strategies.

  
  

• Prevention efforts must address early vulnerability among gender-nonconforming girls, especially during puberty, as well as environments where grooming and corrective violence occur.

  
  

• Policies should consider structural contributors to risk: religious teachings that normalize male entitlement, poverty, precarious housing, and exposure to the sex industry.

  
  

• LGBT+ organizations need formal, impartial procedures for handling allegations of sexual violence, including confidential reporting routes and protections against retaliation.

  
  

• Data-collection practices should disaggregate experiences of transmen by sex, stage of life, context of assault, and perpetrator sex to reveal accurate patterns of vulnerability.

  
  

• Policy and service frameworks should integrate sex-based analysis with attention to gender-presentation dynamics to ensure that transmen’s experiences are neither minimized nor misunderstood.

I wish to express my sincerest thanks to my participants: Jessi, Josh, and Sammy for untrusting me with their stories. Narrative inquiry became more than a methodology; it became a form of epistemic repair and political solidarity. We offer this work to our community first and foremost. We want sexual violence to end.