Experiences of Sexual Assault Among Transmen: A Feminist Narrative Inquiry
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This study examines the sexual assaults of transmen through a feminist narrative inquiry that integrates embodiment, female masculinity, and structural analyses of gendered violence. Despite exceptionally high prevalence rates, transmen’s narratives remain largely absent from feminist rape theory, legal scholarship, and policy discourse. Drawing on in-depth, relational, trauma-informed interviews, the study analyzes how participants made meaning of their assaults and how their accounts illuminate the structures that produced vulnerability. The findings show that sexual violence against transmen followed well-established feminist accounts of rape as the enforcement of sexed hierarchy and the punishment of gender nonconformity. Participants’ experiences indicate that vulnerability did not arise from identity labels or transition status but from the social meaning of the female body, the policing of female masculinity, and the conditions that rendered their assaults misrecognized or narratively unintelligible. The analysis also identifies forms of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice that constrained participants’ ability to name their experiences. By situating transmen’s accounts within feminist theory and narrative epistemology, the study argues that their experiences are neither anomalous nor marginal but continuous with global patterns of sexual violence against gender-nonconforming girls and women. Centering these narratives strengthens feminist understandings of sex-based vulnerability and challenges discursive shifts that obscure the material and embodied dimensions of sexual violence.
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http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_93fc
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en