Congress Paper Abstract

Authoring Trans-Subjectivity: trans narratives and the need to think again the relationship between medico-psychiatry and trans-subjectivity

JO FLANNERY, UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

The contemporary narrative of plot of transsexualism can, contrary to much gay and lesbian histiography, be traced back to the sexological era of the late 19th century, as evidenced in the words spoken of and about those individuals categorized as ’inverts’. Such a re-conceptualization of trans histiography has, in its turn, had major ramifications for the ways in which we are to understand trans becoming. Theorists such as Billings and Urban (1982) and Hausman (1995) contend that transsexualism only becomes meaningful once the technological means by which the subject could ’change sex’ became possible. However, by recognizing the existence of trans desires and practices prior to the medico-discursive naming of transsexualism, we can begin to rethink the relationship between medico-psychiatry and trans-subjectivity, whereby trans people do not reproduce, or reify medicalized conceptualizations of their self, but are instead speaking from a self-authored subject position, which has come to be colonized by medico-psychiatry. Moreover, by looking at contemporary trans narratives we can evidence some of the sometimes subtle, yet nonetheless radical ways in which trans people articulate a sense of their own becoming outside of established medico-psychiatric borders, thus further calling into question the misguided assumption that trans people either blindly reproduce standardized medico-psychiatric discourses, or are duplicitous in their relationship to them.

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