“Treating trans women as sexual deviants has done them real, concrete harm.”
Noah Berlatsky has an interesting article on the sexualization of trans identities over at The Establishment. Noah looks at how the pseudo-scientific theory of “autogynephilia” has been used to invalidate trans women in particular:
As activist Julia Serano writes, “Reducing a person to their sexual bodies or behaviors sexualizes them. And in our culture, sexualizing someone (i.e., reducing them to their sexuality, rather than seeing them as a whole person) is one of the most effective ways of invalidating a person.”
Feministing editor Jos Truitt writes that that the diagnosis of autogynephilia presumes that “the concept of autogynephilia has had a cruel impact on trans women who aren’t straight, telling us our genders are actually just sexual perversions.”
Berlatsky argues, correctly in my view, that sexual “embodiment” fantasies are quite normal among cis as well as trans people:
In romance novels, in fashion magazines, in spy stories, in porn, men and women and others imagine themselves in different bodies, whether of the same gender or of a different gender. In most cases, these fantasies are not seen as wrong because they are part of cis sexuality, and cis people aren’t seen as abnormal. Trans people’s fantasies are labeled as deviant because trans people themselves are seen as deviant—and then, in a perfect (read: twisted) circle, the “deviant” fantasies become a way to say that trans people, and in this case especially trans women, are broken.
Illustration photo: Boggy 22