Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Gay Female-to-Male Transgenderists Negotiating Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Abstract

Gay female-to-male transgenderists (gay FTMs) are women who become men, and who then form erotic relationships with other men. Analysis of interviews with five gay FTMs depicts how they rely upon and reproduce distinctions between sex, gender, and sexuality in order to make sense of their bodies, their feelings and their interactions. Sex, gender and sexuality are produced as distinct and real through a range of interlocking material, discursive, and interactional practices. These categories of intelligibility function in relation to each other and serve to mutually constitute and reinforce each other. Although the distinctions drawn between sex, gender, and sexuality are real, the veracity of these distinctions is limited given their inextricability in the contiguous terrain of actual human lives.