Penis as Risk: A Queer Phenomenology of Two Swedish Transgender Women's Narratives on Gender Correction

Abstract

Based on narratives from two transgender women with experiences of undergoing a Swedish gender correction, this article offers important insights in a cultural context situated in a time and space when Sweden's transgender population was legally obligated to leave their reproductive capabilities behind, and if married divorce, as they struggled for legal gender recognition (the rigid legal terms being newly abolished from the law in 2013). I argue that ‘real’ preoperative transgender women are expected to be well-behaved, modest, and sexually passive, in line with the white, middleclass standard of respectable femininity that informs the obligatory psychiatric assessment required to alter legal sex. Such respectability is intimately bound to the cultural genealogy of the penis of flesh. Ideas of original, non-performative, sexually active, white and superior masculinity clings to the penis of flesh, just as the penis of flesh always sticks to its history – the phallus. As a result transgender women who desire legal gender recognition but not genital surgery are positioned within the sphere of the unthinkable, uninhabitable, unintelligible and less human. Thus, I argue, the penis, and transgender women's acceptance of it, becomes a risk. Swedish authorities have been consistent in requiring vaginoplasty as obligatory terms for transgender women's legal gender recognition. Importantly, transgender men do not face these conditions. They have the possibility to be legally acknowledged as male without undergoing genital surgery. Thus, I ask: What alternatives do transgender women who undergo Swedish psychiatric gender assessments have for articulating and embodying alternative forms of femininity?