Intimate standards: Medical knowledge and self-making in digital transgender groups

Abstract

Although recent scholarship focuses on the increasing significance of processes of standardization in contemporary social life, much less attention has been given to how standardization impacts intimate life, and how intimate standards are made meaningful in interaction. This article draws from participant observation in online transgender groups to examine how the medical standardization of transsexuality, known as the ‘wrong-body’ model, impacts the way users understand and communicate their gendered self. I show how rather than simply adopting the wrong-body model, participants use its language and logic in ironic and playful ways that carve out spaces for ways of knowing the self that feel authentically their own. This case shows how intimate standards become part of the language of the self in ways that may be unexpected.