Michel Foucault has famously argued that social and in particular sexual identities are historically specific, and are shaped by discourse. Since the publication of his landmark History of Sexuality, this has become a widely accepted tenet in social science and cultural studies: that our conceptions of ourselves and our lives are informed by the discourses current in our society -- that discourses have the power to shape us inasmuch as they give us a vocabulary with which to speak about ourselves.

This is as true of transgender and transsexual individuals as it is of anyone else. What's more, due to the relative isolation of trans individuals, the social stigma of gender variance, and the invisibility of gender variance in everyday life, printed literature has been a primary source of information for understanding oneself for a great many trans individuals. Many of us first encountered others somewhat like ourselves in books painstakingly located in libraries, publications ordered through the mail, or more recently, online publications. Christine Jorgensen was the first transsexual of many to relate in her autobiography that she pored over a great body of medical texts, hidden away in corners of university libraries, trying to puzzle out her cross-sex feelings and what to do about them. For thousands of transsexuals in the 1930s through the 1970s, media reports about sex changes -- especially Jorgensen's -- were, in the words of one MFT, "like a revelation.... Talk about your shock of recognition. Man, this was it!" (Masters 1966, quoted in Meyerowitz 2002:95-6). "For some," comments historian Joanne Meyerowitz, "the growing coverage in the popular press shaped their inchoate desires to transform their bodies. For others, the news stories renewed their hopes that doctors might actually respond to their already formulated requests. In the 1950s and afterwards they used the press and the medical literature to label their longings, to place themselves in a recognizable category, and to find the names of doctors who might help them" (130). In subsequent decades, tabloid television and transsexual autobiographies played similar roles. By the 1980s and '90s, many had some awareness of transsexualism but could not understand their own gender-variant feelings, which did not seem to fit with descriptions of transsexualism. For me, it took reading Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook (1998) to realize that yes, I was transgendered. (Subsequently I came to understand that the term transsexual had become somewhat more variously applied and broadly defined by many trans individuals than in previous decades, and when I decided to pursue hormone replacement therapy I also decided to apply the term to myself. It's another example of how current discourses shape our conceptions of self, but it's also another story.)

Within this context, a long look at the available literature -- not simply the kind of review of the sociological literature necessary to any research inquiry -- is especially critical to understanding the ways that trans individuals articulate and perform sexuality. While there are large and rapidly growing academic and popular literatures on the lives and experiences of transgender and transsexual people, until very recently relatively little attention has been addressed specifically to issues of sexuality. Early sexologists conceptualized gender variance as a form of sexual pathology, and ever since Christine Jorgensen's sex change became news, popular media have displayed a prurient, exoticizing interest in trans people's sex lives; despite the protestations of transpeople and of more recent sexological and psychological "experts," trans identity is still tied up with sexuality in the popular imagination -- to be expected, perhaps, given the intricate connections between gender and sexuality. (See Footnote 1)

Transsexual autobiographers appear to have had relatively little interest in sex, little sexual activity during or after transition, or at least little to say on the matter (Jorgensen 2000, Morris 1974, McCloskey 1999); Mark Rees's virtually only reference to sexuality in his autobiography is that he wished he had been asexual and was "troubled" by a sex drive he could not satisfy in a female body (Rees 1996:40). Mario Martino (1977) and Renee Richards (1983), however, describe sexual fantasies, masturbation, and sexual relationships in detail, and more recent narratives by transpeople give much more voice to sexual desire. Sex radicals like Kate Bornstein, David Harrison, Patrick Califia and Christopher Lee have had much to say about sexuality; along with co-directing a documentary on FTMs that focuses heavily and exuberantly on sexual matters (Trappings of Transhood), Lee created the first porn films starring transmen (see below). Transsexual activist and filmmaker Mirha-Soleil Ross makes transsexual sexuality a central theme in her works, as well.

More open discussion of sexuality may be seen as part of a kind of generational shift in trans experience more generally. Anne Bolin (1988) adapted the "breastplate of righteousness" theory -- proposed by Laud Humphreys in discussing male homosexuals -- to explain the remarkable conservatism regarding gender roles and sexual matters she observed among MTF transsexuals as a kind of compensation for being part of an ostracized social group. More recently, Bolin (1998) and other authors such as Bornstein (1994), Hubbard (1998), and Boswell (1998) have described a paradigm shift among at least some transpeople away from traditional understandings of sex and gender identity and towards fluidity and free expression. This can be seen in the increasing visibility of non-operative transsexuals, the claiming of gender identities outside the male/female binary, and the emergent notion of a broad "trans" community incorporating disparate groups of gender-variant people -- and, as will be shown here, it may also be seen in the area of sexuality.