UC Irvine

Transgressing Trans analyzes the formation of the wrong body narrative (a man trapped in a woman’s body and vice versa) within sexological discourse. Drawing from sexological literature, anti-abolitionist texts, theology, black studies and transgender studies, this dissertation attempts to address the role (anti)blackness played in the creation of the wrong body narrative. How does the depoliticization of the wrong body narrative continue to inscribe trans politics and identity with anti-black racism?

Utilizing a Foucauldian genealogy, I reinterpret the history of sexology by showing how certain events were indeed historical processes caught in specific cultural, political, and economic times. Karl Ulrichs was the first person to construct a scientific theory of same-sex desire (he coined the term “Urning,” who was a male-bodied individual with a female soul) in 1864, around the time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was “abolished” (1859) and the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). I posit that these landmarks are not coincidental; the notion of being trapped in the “wrong body” became legible through the structures of slavery and the scientific racism that followed.

Organized around a series of case histories, the first chapters examine the historical, political, and cultural context of the formation of the “scientific” field of sexology, specifically through the early manifestations of the “wrong body” narrative within nineteenth century American and European biological science, psychiatry, theology, and anthropology. In the later chapters, I move to the 1950s when the term transsexual first became popular in both medico-science and the media in the United States, and then to the 1980s when transsexuality became an official mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (DSM-III). The discourses used to describe the transsexual continued to rely on the language of degeneration and pathology through reiterating not only the spirit/flesh duality, but also incorporating narratives of the primitive and the savage within the codification of transsexuality.