Major Themes: Transmen and Sexual Assault

National data indicate that transmen experience sexual assault at disproportionately high rates, with a lifetime prevalence of 50–55% (James et al. 2016). The prevalence is known. What is missing is not awareness, but analysis.

My independent study examines the sexual assaults of transmen through a feminist narrative inquiry lens, exploring how survivors remember, interpret, and make meaning of violence across time, embodiment, and identity. Grounded in materialist feminist theory, the project begins from the premise that sexual assault is not a private or psychological aberration but a structural expression of gendered power. Drawing on Brownmiller (1975), MacKinnon (1989), and Marcus (1992), the analysis situates participants’ experiences within established feminist understandings of rape as a mechanism of social control.

Through narrative, participants reveal how sexual violence functioned to discipline the female body, punish deviation from femininity, and reinscribe patriarchal hierarchy. Their stories also show how narrative itself becomes a feminist act—transforming traumatic memory into testimony, reclaiming agency, and creating new possibilities for shared understanding. While the analysis remains ongoing, ten major themes have emerged:

1. Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Discipline

From early childhood, participants’ expressions of female masculinity were met with ridicule, coercion, and attempts at correction, demonstrating that gender discipline begins long before sexuality or identity categories are articulated.

2. Puberty and the Marking of the Female Body as Sexually Available

Puberty intensified surveillance and vulnerability. Breasts and other sexed features became targets of violation and shame, revealing how the social reading of the female body produces sexual availability.

3. Intensified Violence When Female Masculinity Persists into Adulthood

As participants carried masculinity into adulthood, gendered aggression escalated. Female masculinity was interpreted as defiance, provoking assaults that sought to restore the “proper” ordering of sex stereotypes.

4. Trauma and the Fragmentation of Embodiment

The assaults fractured participants’ relationships with their own bodies. Dissociation, bodily estrangement, and hypervigilance emerged as survival strategies, illustrating how trauma disrupts continuity of self and embodiment.

5. Reclaiming Bodies and Identities

With time, participants reinterpreted their histories and reclaimed their bodies on their own terms—not through a return to femininity, but through recognition of what the female body means under patriarchy and how they had been misread within it.

6. Dependent Relationships and Eroded Agency

Most assaults occurred within relationships of dependence—family members, partners, peers, or communities. Within those relationships, perpetrators had intimate knowledge of the survivor's female anatomy and targeted them on that basis. Structurally, these events are consistent with female rape, not male rape.

7. Femininity as Moral Obligation and Survival Strategy

Within religious contexts, femininity appeared both as an imposed moral duty and as a strategy for survival. Periods of enforced or performative femininity emerged in response to grooming, financial need, or the promise of protection.

8. Disbelief and Epistemic Violence

Disclosures were frequently met with disbelief, dismissal, or ideological censure. This pattern constitutes testimonial injustice, where survivors’ credibility is undermined not by evidence but by identity and ideological commitments.

9. Economic Disparity and Configured Vulnerability

Poverty and class precarity shaped participants’ exposure to risk and constrained the participants’ ability to refuse or escape. Unstable housing, financial dependence, and limited access to support made them more vulnerable to exploitation, including within the sex industry.

10. Narrative as a Site of Meaning and Resistance

Storytelling became a means of survival and political action. By narrating their experiences, participants transformed private suffering into shared knowledge, contributing to a feminist archive of transmasculine experience and disrupting dominant accounts of who can be a victim.

Conclusion

These themes reaffirm central feminist insights—that sexual violence functions to maintain sex-based hierarchy—while extending them into new terrain. The participants’ stories challenge frameworks that prioritize identity over materiality—showing instead that patriarchy punishes deviations from femininity itself, whether expressed through lesbianism, gender nonconformity, or transition. Their narratives also reveal how epistemic and testimonial injustice compound sexual violence when survivors are silenced by the very communities expected to provide safety.

Taken together, the findings call for a more inclusive material feminism: one that retains attention to sexed embodiment and structural power while recognizing the diverse ways gender is disciplined across lives. Narrative inquiry thus becomes both method and feminist praxis—restoring speech to those historically excluded, transforming trauma into testimony, and expanding feminist analysis to account for bodies and experiences long rendered unintelligible.

The expected completion date for this study is December 2025.