Content area
Full Text
Little attention has been paid to the transmasculine (female-to-male [FTM] transsexual and transgender) community. When we hear the word transsexual, most of us immediately think of male-to-females. However, the FTM community is thriving and rich with variety. This essay provides an inside look at the little-examined identities within the almost invisible world of FTMs. Positing that the transmasculine community does not subscribe to just one mode of identification, I illuminate the varied experiences of transmasculine individuals by organizing the plethora of defining FTM labels into three broad categories: Woodworkers, Transmen, and Genderqueers. Within the admittedly limiting confines of this taxonomy, it becomes possible to gain a better understanding of the people behind the labels and achieve insight into their individual therapeutic needs.
What can be meant by "identity," then, and what grounds the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent?
-Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
In recent years the transmasculine community has become increasingly heterogeneous, including not only subgroups with special needs (youth, seniors, people of color, substance users, etc.), but also those with special identities (Raj, 2002). A multitude of such subgroups, which sprang up in the sex-positive 1990s, continues to evolve today, each with its own therapeutic needs. It is therefore essential for clinicians who work with transmasculine persons to understand more about those subgroups. In this paper, in an effort to simplify a complex web of identity, I attempt to contain and name these subgroups in three broad categories.
One transpositive clinician divides the subgroups broadly into "those who subscribe to a concept of self that is both 'essentialist' (biogenic) and binary-gendered (male or female) and those who adopt a 'constructionist' (sociogenic) and nonbinary-gendered self-concept (both/neither male and/or female)" (Raj, 2002, p. 5). Here, I focus on these two extreme ends of the transmasculine continuum, as well as on a middle group, one that straddles both the essentialist and the constructionist concept of self. The labels I have chosen for the three subgroups are, from most essentialist to most constructionist, (1) Woodworkers, (2) Transmen, and (3) Genderqueers.
To posit such a taxonomy is dangerous business. It presumes that there are such things as "identities" and that they must be, as Butler says in...