Remapping the Body
C. Jacob Hale has observed that "many transpeople must remap the sexualized zones of our bodies if we are to be sexually active," meaning that sexed erogenous zoned must be proactively resignified and renamed in ways consistent with an individual's gender identity (Hale 1997:227). Tala Brandeis, for example, describes her body this way:
My body is female. ... It just had inappropriate hormones and aberrant primary and secondary sex characteristics for my gender. I was an intensely androgenized version of female, a metamorph, a changeling. I was born a woman irrespective of my physical traits. (Brandeis 1996:52)
Discussing her lesbian sexual life, she hesitantly refers to lovers wanted to be penetrated "using my ... clit?" (58). Becky Adelman similarly describes, in her analysis of erotic texts by female-born genderqueers and their partners, the "imaginative labor " through which these sexual actors "queer the language of the body," describing testosterone- and (and sometimes surgery-) enlarged clitorises variously as "clit," "dick," and "clit dick" (Adelman 2001:22-29).
Describing the processes of body "transgendering" used in transgender narratives to harmonize physical features with gender identity, sociologists Richard Ekins and Dave King add to "substituting," "concealing" and "implying" the "more subtle and multi-layered" process of "redefining." Along with the broader redefinition of gender categories and personal identity
the nature of the body and its parts may be redefined. The male to female transsexual may redefine her beard growth as facial hair. The penis may be redefined as a "growth between the legs," as in "I was a woman who needed some corrective surgery. The growth was gone and my labia, clitoris and vagina were free" (Ekins and King 1999: 584; quotation from Spry 1997).
Hale describes such practices specifically within the context of "daddy/boy" role-playing scenes among S/M women and genderqueers (aka "leatherdykes"). While not all leatherdykes (or other S/M practitioners who play with gender) are trans or gender-questioning, for those who are an emergent male identity may be explored or consolidated through role-played experiences of masculine endurance or dominance, and within such play it is also possible for, in Hale's terms, "resignify sexed bodily zones."
Thus, if the body part a leatherdyke daddy is fisting is that which a physician would unequivocally deem a 'vagina,' it may be resignified so that its use for erotic pleasure is consistent with male masculinity. It may become a 'hole,' 'fuckhole,' 'manhole,' 'boyhole,' 'asshole,' or 'butthole,' and a leatherdyke boy pleading, 'Please, Daddy, fuck my butt!' may be asking daddy to fuck the same orifice into which a physician would insert a speculum to perform a pap smear.... For some FTMs who used to be leatherdykes, our abilities to rechart our bodies -- I would even say to change our embodiments without changing our bodies, that is, to change the personal and social meanings of our sexualized bodies -- began in the queer resignifying practices available to us in leatherdyke culture. (1997:230)
Thus, while some trans individuals simply deny any contradiction in being a man with a vulva and vagina or a woman with a penis and testes, for others the body is made consistent with gender identity through processes of resignification.
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