The disabling affects of a sexed system: an exploration of intersexuality, transgender and sexual citizenship

<p>Transgender bodies and disabled bodies occasionally cross paths in disability studies as illustrations of the medical model’s negativity towards unsound body morphologies. Dehumanisation, or at least infantilisation, of disabled and transgendered bodies through medical discourse shape cultural perceptions of people with impairments and structure social interactions between nondisabled and disabled bodies and nontransgendered and transgendered bodies. Medical discourses endorse the normatively gendered and nondisabled body as nature’s ideal and the transgendered or disabled body as metaphors for moral and physical degeneracy. We can assume from this that medicine and uncritical people regard a body that is transgendered and disabled as doubly ‘broken.’ What if the transgendered-disabled body also identifies as queer? Assumptions and attitudes, such as these above, deny autonomous citizenship, which underpins a pluralistic society, and which offers space for diverse identities. The need of exposing these attitudes and assumptions is an ongoing task. Therefore, in this chapter I will draw on the phenomenological experiences of Radcliff, a transman who is disabled and identifies as queer. Radcliff’s complex story illustrates the ways in which he negotiates his gender and sexual citizenship through various sexual, social and phenomenological body images. Radcliff’s negotiations are structured in relation to the (dis)abling effects of social institutions, such as medicine, law and family that have much power in whether they grant him social legitimacy or not. An intersectional framework of disabled, transgender and sexual identities is utilised to offer nuanced explanations of how Radcliff employs his autonomy and agency in securing a coherent identity in the face of institutional constraints, even if psychosocially his intersectional identities are dynamic and adaptive.</p>