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 widely reported, with about half saying they have experienced it at some point in their lives. Most research stops at reporting these numbers. Much less is known about when these assaults take place, who commits them, or how survivors themselves make sense of what happened. As a result, transmen often fall between existing areas of study, such as feminist research on violence against women and work on male victimization.

This study asks three main questions:

1. What social and relational factors made these assaults possible?

2. How do transmen understand their own experiences of violence?

3. And how should these accounts be understood in relation to existing theories about sexual assault?

Methodology

This study uses feminist narrative inquiry to examine how people describe and understand their own experiences. Rather than treating interviews as sources of isolated facts, the analysis attends to how participants interpret events over time and in relation to others.

Three transmen took part in trauma-informed, semi-structured interviews. These conversations were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for recurring themes, patterns in how events were described, and connections to broader social contexts. To situate these accounts within a wider frame, the analysis also draws on testimony from the Human Rights Watch report We’ll Show You You’re a Woman, which documents experiences of corrective rape and other forms of violence against gender-nonconforming women and transmen in South Africa.

Bringing these sources together made it possible to move beyond describing individual incidents and toward a clearer understanding of how violence against transmen unfolds and is interpreted. Three broad themes emerged from the analysis. These reflect the ways gender nonconformity was policed over time, the social conditions that increased vulnerability to assault, and the lasting effects of that violence on participants’ lives.

Theme 1: The Policing of Female Masculinity Across the Lifespan

Theme 1 describes a pattern that unfolds across the life course rather than as a series of isolated assaults. From early childhood, participants’ masculine traits drew attention once they moved beyond what others considered acceptable “tomboy” behaviour. Responses included teasing, punishment, and close monitoring intended to steer them toward conventional femininity.

Puberty intensified this pressure. As their bodies developed, participants described increased scrutiny, unwanted sexual attention, and growing shame. Their discomfort with femininity, or refusal to perform it, often led to further attempts by others to regulate how they dressed, acted, or presented themselves.

By adulthood, this pattern appeared in the form of sexual assault. Across all three accounts, violence functioned as part of a broader effort to discipline female bodies read as masculine, linking early gender policing with later sexual harm.

Theme 2: Relational and Structural Pathways to Vulnerability

Theme 2 examines how close relationships and broader social conditions created vulnerabilities that others could exploit. None of the assaults were committed by strangers. In every case, the perpetrator was male—including one transwoman—and already known to the participant as a family friend, partner, or housemate.

All three participants grew up in working-class, religious households where femininity was treated as a moral obligation and compliance as a sign of good character. This framing made it difficult to refuse unwanted attention and cast resistance as selfish or sinful.

In adulthood, financial insecurity, unstable housing, and early involvement in pornography or prostitution further limited participants’ ability to leave unsafe situations. When they later attempted to describe what had happened, they frequently encountered disbelief, dismissal, or punishment, including within LGBT+ spaces. These responses constituted a second layer of harm.

Theme 2 shows how vulnerability emerged through a combination of dependence on others, classed expectations about behaviour, moral pressure, economic constraints, and the absence of recognition when harm occurred.

Theme 3. Embodiment, Disconnection, and Strategies of Survival

Theme 3 explores the bodily effects of sexual violence and the ways survivors manage to continue living afterwards. When resistance is impossible, survival often involves creating psychological distance from the body. Dissociation can function as a protective response that allows the self to endure experiences that the body undergoes.

Participants described distancing themselves from the meanings attached to their female bodies through violation. Under ongoing coercion, the body could come to feel like something acted upon by others rather than fully inhabited. Some responded by withdrawing from it, while others sought to change how their bodies were interpreted by the world.

Living as male, including through hormonal or surgical transition, sometimes functioned as a way of moving out of the social conditions associated with female embodiment. These strategies could reduce certain forms of risk while leaving broader relations of power intact.

Participants also described moments when existing language failed to capture what had happened to them. In these cases, the harm involved both the assault itself and the difficulty of making sense of it afterward. Over time, several participants described a gradual movement toward reclaiming their bodies on their own terms.

Synthesis

The three suprathemes show that the sexual assaults of transmen follow a consistent sex-based pattern rather than occurring as isolated events. Violence appeared within a broader process of regulating female masculinity across the life course, beginning with childhood gender policing and extending into adulthood.

Participants’ vulnerability did not arise from transgender identity itself but from the social meaning attached to female bodies and from the material conditions that made them accessible to male violence. These findings support and extend feminist rape theory (Brownmiller; Cahill; Dworkin; MacKinnon) by illustrating how the policing of female masculinity functions as one mechanism through which sexed hierarchy is maintained.

Narrative inquiry helps bring these patterns into view and demonstrates how survivors make sense of their experiences in ways that restore authority over their own accounts of what occurred.

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.

• Frontline workers require training to identify soft-coercion dynamics—such as emotional manipulation, religious conditioning, dependence, and community power structures—since these patterns often 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 strategies of protection.

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

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

  
  

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwcR6BGifs