Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics

Transsexual women provide rich data for feminist theory but have had a conflict-ridden relationship with feminism since the 1970s. Deconstructionist theory and transgender politics mean greater acceptance but have not escaped the problem of identity. Feminist social science offers vital resources for understanding transition as a gender project, starting with contradictory embodiment. The intransigence, not the fluidity, of gender is central. Transsexual women’s lives unfold through gendered structures of family, economy, and state, in which new embodied relationships must be built in an ontoformative process. Social realities of poverty, vulnerability, and gender violence point to a politics of social justice as the basis for a new relationship between transsexual women and feminism, both within the metropole and internationally.