therapy room


togetherness. Historically, biological sex and gender were seen as one and the same thing: entirely biological, at ributing all sex diff erences to essential biological variance between males and females, with gender as the natural social roles that followed from sex. In this view, all people born with penises are assigned male and grow up to be masculine men, and all people born with vulvas are assigned female and grow up to be feminine women. Whilst this may seem archaic, it is arguably still the dominant discourse around sex and gender. T e additional norm of compulsory heterosexuality is also a vital historical context for thinking about trans sexualities today (for example, Rich, 1980; Bem, 1995) – but more on that later. Sexual dimorphism, (the diff erences in


appearance between males and females of the same species) has been rendered incorrect by the presence of intersex people, of which around one in a hundred of us are (Blackless, et al., 2000, Fausto- Sterling, 2000). Humans have an array of biological diff erences at both the chromosomal, hormonal, and genital level, rendering the male/female binary nonsensical. T e presence of trans and gender-diverse people also falsifi es the notion that gender is the static role tethered to a predetermined biological sex. T is is why theorists argue that biological sex (as well as gender) is socially constructed (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Feminist theory also held this


essentialist framework to account. Second- wave feminism sought to reject gender as essential and biological, theorising instead that gender is a set of socially constructed roles and norms, which serve to oppress women. De Beauvoir’s eminent quote “One is not born but becomes a woman” (T e Second Sex, 1949) is considered the earliest ut erance of feminist social- constructionism; she theorised that any perceivable behavioural diff erences in men and women were culturally acquired, with no basis in physiology. T is shiſt in understanding was, in one sense, vital for trans and non-binary people, for whom biology was never destiny. However, an exclusively constructionist account


Context 155, February 2018


proves problematic when it fails to take into consideration the very real, subjective experience of what being trans and non- binary feels like. T e very existence of trans and non-


binary people problematises yet another binary: the essentialist/constructionist one. If we state gender and sex are entirely separate, and that gender is detached from biology – wholly socially constructed – how can trans people who seek surgical and hormonal intervention make sense of their desires and choices? Whilst social constructionism does make space for the potential and actual lived-realities of women with penises and men with vaginas (and any number of gendered beings with any confi guration of bits and bobs), it oſt en neglects the fact that, for many trans people, “Embodiment is as much about feeling one inhabits material fl esh as the fl esh itself ” (Prosser, 1998, p. 7). In other words, bodies are important. If we argue, instead, that gender and biological sex are one and the same thing, then it either follows trans people don’t exist, or that if they do, they must undergo physical transition to ‘correct’ the ‘misalignment’. Neither position is suffi cient in making space for the plurality of trans and non-binary experiences. We must, therefore, adopt a both/and position that eschews this binary: one that gives trans people the autonomy to affi rm to what extent biological sex (and the physical body) impacts their gender. For some people, it will be signifi cant, and for others it will be totally absent. T is variation tells us nothing about a person’s ‘transness’. In her thinking about use of self-


practices, Hardham off ers a systemic framework to delve into the space between the discourses created via social constructionism, and the experience of being embodied (1996). She and the authors agree it’s a theoretical faux pas to view individuals as separate atoms, each distinct from the next, and yet we also defi ne our discreteness as individuals via our bodily selves. Our experience of embodiment is mediated by context, connectedness, and relationships, what Hardham terms ‘embeddedness’. T is


in turn creates our “ felt reality” (p. 76). Embodiment is a process we all engage to explore, experience, and confi rm our own genderedness. For trans and non-binary folks, embodiment is an important site in which the narratives of their trans identities circle around, come back to and leap from. Embodiment is the site where people


oſt en look to validate or dismiss someone’s trans identity. For example, trans people’s experience of being regularly interrogated about their genitals, and the current conversations about appropriate use of public toilets being reduced to normatively gendered embodiment. In therapy, the task becomes to fossick through the embedded constructs, stories, and artefacts of gender, and the embodiment of gender, in the lives of trans people and their partners. T e risk for systemic practice is that trans and non-binary people’s embeddedness is oſt en prioritised over embodiment in our conversations, replicating the dominance of medicalised discourses about trans bodies and rendering less visible the subjugated stories of trans embodiment. Once we have understood that biological


sex and gender are both not-together and not-separate, and that our felt reality encompasses both our embeddedness and embodiedness, we can start to unravel our assumptions about normatively gendered and sexed bodies: that is, the assumption that men are masculine and have male bodies and women are feminine and have female bodies, and that each desires its opposite. T is alignment is oſt en assumed as the desire or goal for trans people. However, this is not always the case, just as it is not always true for non-trans people. And this leads us on to the act of sex itself…


Part 2:


Sex in two parts: Bodies (sexual behaviour) and desire (sexual orientation)


Firstly, to navigate us through this


‘word soup’, we must draw at ention to the fact that sex and sexuality have multiple, interwoven meanings. In this section, we are leaving sex-as-in-biology behind to talk instead about S-E-X. We might think of sex as the stuff we do sexually (for example,


45


Trans sexualities in the therapy room


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