Gender, Place and Culture

Vol. 17, No. 5, October 2010, 579595

Trans geographies, embodiment and experience

Catherine J. Nash*

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Department of Geography, Brock University, Mackenzie Chown Building, St. Catharines, Ontario,
L2S 3A1, Canada
Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality
and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made
substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment
and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how
trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research
subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and
social constitution of what are now called traditional LGBTQ or queer urban spaces
and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the
body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in
part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer
communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical
and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms
of embodiment in play in these spaces.
Keywords: gay; lesbian; queer theory; trans; queer geographies; sexuality; gender

Introduction
Transfolk are an increasingly visible presence in many North American queer communities.
In Toronto, the addition of the T in the naming of various lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and
queer (LGBTQ) political and social organizations is largely viewed as a positive and
welcome, although not completely uncontested, recognition of that trans presence. Many
trans individuals experience unsettling combinations of reification and celebrity and/or
exclusion and rejection in LGBTQ spaces (Halberstam 2005; Stryker 2006; Browne and
Lim 2010).1 Such experiences suggest that despite the political and social struggles waged to
foster inclusivity in spaces variously represented as gay, bi-sexual, feminist, lesbian and
women-only, LGBTQ and queer, transfolk are sometimes taken as transgressing
spatially specific gendered, sexualized and embodied expectations. In Toronto, several
transfolk participating in trans friendly, queer womens bathhouse events, report receiving
hostile glances and derogatory comments seemingly because they were not immediately
legible as normatively female (Nash and Bain 2007). The long-standing battle between
trans activists and organizers of the Michigan Womyns Music Festival (Browne 2009) and
the case of Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman excluded from volunteering for a feminist-based
sexual assault crisis centre, attest to the fact that North American LGBTQ spaces are not
inherently inclusive either. Trans men often experience a mixed reception at gay male
bathhouses, suggesting that even spaces understood by some as libratory and transgressive

*Email: cnash@brocku.ca
ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online
q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2010.503112
http://www.informaworld.com

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(Tattleman 2000; Warner 2002) may have limits on who may be present to experience such
radical imaginings (Syms 2007; see also Doan 2007).
These troubled spatial experiences mirror long standing and often acrimonious
debates between some feminist, queer theorists and transfolk over the political, social and
theoretical implications of the increasingly visible (and vocal) trans subject
(Raymond 1994; Stone 1991; Hausman 1995; Nestle et al. 2002; Devor and Matte 2004;
Currah, Juang, and Minter 2006; Stryker 2006). Largely excluded (self-imposed and
otherwise) from feminist, gay/lesbian and to a lesser extent, queer studies, trans scholars
have carved out a mainly independent field of study cutting across both the humanities
and social sciences (e.g. Bornstein 1994; Cameron 1996; Califia 1997; Prosser 1998;
Cromwell 1999; Rubin 2003; Macdonald 1998; Noble 2004, 2006; Stryker 2006). Such
scholarship provides rich explorations of lived trans experiences both within and beyond
the traditional North American urban gay village. Such work often reflects complex,
although not necessarily reconcilable conceptual work around gender, sexuality and
embodiment as well as race, class and ability/dis-ability.2
While attention to trans issues has surfaced in the geographical literature, we have yet
to see a truly sustained engagement with the distinctive intellectual and conceptual threads
emerging in trans scholarship utilized in queer geographies and geographies of sexualities
(Browne 2004; Doan 2007; Nash 2010). This article offers a very broad and preliminary
sketch of some of the more intriguing possibilities and challenges of trans scholarship for
geographical work on sexuality, gender and the body. This is by no means a proscriptive
discussion or call to set some sort of research agenda; rather it is an attempt to work across
semi-permeable disciplinary boundaries, established, at least in part, through the particular
vagaries of North American scholarly and grassroots histories and politics.
This article begins with a brief overview of contemporary geographies of sexualities
and queer geographies in order to provide a backdrop for subsequent discussions on select
aspects of trans scholarship. I then consider three selected themes from a diverse body of
trans scholarship that engages with central issues of ongoing concern in feminist and queer
geographical research notions of subjectivity/performativity, experience/embodiment,
and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called traditional
LGBTQ or queer urban spaces. Drawing on my ongoing research on trans mens and
trans womens experiences in various gay and lesbian spaces in Torontos gay village,
I sketch out how the particularities of these experiences mark points of engagement
and divergence with some contemporary geographical scholarship. I conclude with
some final thoughts on queer geographical engagements with various strands of trans
scholarship.
Considering sexuality and space: gay/lesbian and queer geographies
Beginning in the late 1970s, geographical research on space and sexuality took as its
primary focus the historical, social and political development of gay and lesbian identified
commercial and residential neighbourhoods in western cities. This research, grouped as
geographies of sexualities, generally assumes a constructed but largely essentialized and
stable gay (and lesbian) subject, defined largely through straightforward assumptions about
gender, embodiment and same-sex object choice (e.g. Castells 1983; Lauria and Knopp
1985; Adler and Brenner 1992; Valentine 1993; Rothenberg 1995). Research on gay
and lesbian experiences in urban space, particularly the focus on urban residential
neighbourhoods was more pronounced in North American geography. As Knopp argues
(2007, 48), scholarly attention tended to fix on sexual minority experiences from

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a geographical perspective where identities are largely fixed and aligned unproblematically with particular spaces. By contrast, research in the UK, while interested in sexuality
in urban spaces, looked more broadly at notions of performativity and the subversion of
normative sexuality and gender assumptions (e.g. Bell et al. 1994; Binnie 1995). Work by
Australian and New Zealand scholars over the last decade has explored the particularities
of gay and lesbian experiences in both urban and rural locals, across the public/private
divide and in more overtly considered colonial and postcolonial contexts (e.g. Hodge 1993;
Taylor 1998; Shale 1999; Markwell 2002; Johnston 2005; Riggs 2006; Hutchings and
Aspin 2007). More recent work considers contextual similarities and important differences
between Anglo-American and Australasian geographies of gender and sexualities
(e.g. Waitt and Markwell 2006; Gorman-Murray, Waitt and Gibson 2008; Gorman-Murray,
Waitt and Johnson, 2008; Johnson and Longhurst 2008).
In the geographies of sexualities scholarship as a whole, with some notable exceptions,
gender was largely understood as those social behaviours and practices linked to
presumed bodily difference (either male or female) while sexuality tended to be understood
as falling on one side or the other of the heterosexual/homosexual binary (but see Valentine
1993).3 More recent geographical work, grouped under the heading queer geographies
and drawing on a range of theoretical, ideological and political commitments, theorizes
more unstable and oscillating intersections between identity/subjectivity, sexual desire,
embodiment and spatial organization (Nash 2006; Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007;
Nash and Bain 2007). Drawing on a vast but not necessarily reconcilable body of
postmodern and poststructuralist thinking, queer theorists critique essentialist categorizations of human subjects, arguing that human cognizance of lived possibilities is more
complicated and subject to variation than essentialized, binary categories of male/female,
man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual admit. Geographers queer conceptualizations tend
to adhere to postmodernist precepts that distrust certainties, universal truths and reject
mechanical ontological versions of reality that ignore the multiple ways in which people
experience the world (Knopp 2007, 48; see also Turner 2000). Queer geographies focus on
how non-normative sexual practices operate to both queer space and constitute various
formulations of queer subjectivities. This work operates beyond essentialized gay and
lesbian identities through an exploration of non-normative practices, behaviours and
desires that are not commensurate with identity-based understandings. More recently,
scholarship has turned toward a consideration of how traditional gay and lesbian spaces are
being queered through the presence of queer practices and behaviours although debates
about the efficacy and limitations of this queering have also surfaced (Prichard, Morgan,
and Sedgley 2002; Browne 2006a; Nash and Bain 2007).
Within these historical contexts, North American gay and lesbian, urban-based political
and social organizations have increasingly conceptualized their constituency as selfidentifying beyond the hetero/homo; masculine/feminine and male/female binaries.
Organizations strategically employ a variety of acronyms (exemplified, for example, by
LGBQQT lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, queer, questioning, trans, two-spirited) that strive to
embed non-exclusionary practices in both community building and activism. In Toronto,
traditional gay and lesbian neighbourhoods, built on a more essentialist and assimilationist
identity politics, increasingly contains bodies, genders and sexualities that queer the
stable categorization of these spaces as straightforwardly gay and lesbian (Nash 2005,
2006). Queer practices and experiences challenge the hegemonic, normative binaries that
initially organized contemporary gay and lesbian villages (and arguably remain a dominant
aspect of social and political life) and disrupt the neat division of more traditional gay and
lesbian geographies (Knopp 2007). In much queer geographical research, questions of

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gender usually only surfaces in work focused on the distinctions in gay male and lesbian
experiences in urban space (Adler and Brenner 1992; Valentine 1993; Rothenberg 1995;
Nash 2001; Podmore 2001). While queer scholarship questions the supposedly stable
relationship between sex, gender, sexual desire, and sexual practice (Browne, Lim, and
Brown 2007, 49), scholars tend to portray queer geographies as centrally concerned with
sexuality. Knopp explicitly argues that queer geographies might be expanded to include a
queering of the spatialities of gender, foregrounding queer geographies primary interest
in sexualities (2007, 48).
Critiques of queer geographies point out that despite its conceptual commitment to
move beyond essentialist notions of sexual subjects, much of its scholarship continues
to focus mainly on gay and lesbian subjects and spaces (Oswin 2008). The failure to
recognize that queer spaces are themselves always complicit in the reproduction of
normativities around class, gender and ethnicity challenges queer (anti-normative)
pretensions. Also, queer aspirations to render subjectivities fluid, unstable and capable of
obliterating boundaries is often compromised when queer is taken up as an identity and
politic and attains a disciplining fixity that belies its desire to be ethereal and uncontained
(Browne 2006a, 888; see also Nash and Bain 2007). Queer theories impulse to dissolve
boundaries and render identities fluid, partial and unstable works to make certain groups
such as lesbians disappear and render invisible the very diversity it strives to highlight
(Jeffreys 1997; see Anzaldua 1991 in Goldman 1996). Both Knopp (2007) and Oswin
(2008) urge queer geographers to move beyond a general focus on sexual minorities,
sexuality and sexed spaces (usually gay and lesbian spaces) towards a more fully integrated
consideration of gendered, racialized and classed experiences of space (Besio and Moss
2006; Browne 2004, 2006b).
Taken together, there is a rich body of geographical work that attempts to work
through the political, social and spatial implications of gendered and sexualized identities,
practices and behaviours. With the increasing visibility and activism of transfolk in gay
and lesbian communities, new possibilities (and points of contention) have emerged in
how we think about the spatialized experiences of particularly gendered, sexualized and
embodied individuals.
Trans geographies: queer tropes, experience/embodiment and LGBTQ spaces
Trans experiences in LGBTQ spaces attest to the complex and contested interconnections
between sexuality, gender, embodiment and the (re)constitution of spaces and
subjectivities. Trans scholarship argues pointedly for the need to seriously consider the
body, sentiment, emotion and desire as coequal to reason, rationality and the mind in the
production of knowledge (Knopp 2007, 53). Such sentiments reflect trenchant critiques of
postmodern and poststructuralist engagements, with their focus on texts, discourses and
representations that seemingly fail to produce understandings about the lived, material
experiences of the everyday. Despite the argument that queer geographies are attuned to
the material experiences of their queer conceptualizing, they too sometimes appear
detached from the material in favour of the representational (Knopp 2007). Some trans
scholarship is quite critical of queer theories poststructuralist proclivities and seeks
alternative modalities for understanding the inter-layering of gender, sexuality and the
sexed body. In this section, I undertake a selective, but detailed, examination of three key
themes in trans scholars critiques of queer scholarship the themes of subjectivity and
performativity; questions of experience/embodiment; and experiences in traditional
LGBTQ or queer urban spaces.

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Subjectivity and performativity: queer tropes

Over the last 20 years or so, a rich and diverse body of work has been loosely consolidated
under the rubric trans studies or trans scholarship (Stryker 2006). In North America,
trans scholarship developed relatively independently from Womens Studies programmes,
feminist scholarship, gay and lesbian and queer studies despite overlapping areas of
interest. As Sue Stryker (2006, 7) argues, trans scholarship has a rather vexed
relationship with both feminist and queer theory due, in part, to the animosity exhibited by
some feminists to trans-identified individuals. That the increasing visibility of transsexual
and transgendered people met overt hostility from the feminist movement is notably
exemplified by Janice Raymonds Transsexual Empire (1974). The hostility generated by
Raymonds book and much of trans scholarships distaste for both feminist and queer
theorizing spans several generations. Attempts at reconciliation have been ongoing but
with varying degrees of success (e.g. Butler 1990, 1993, 1997; Nataf 1996). As queer
geographers take up the challenge of understanding queer spaces as contested sites in
which racializations, genderings, and classed processes take place, trans scholarship
offers potential insights into how some of these processes are lived and experienced
(Oswin 2008, 100).
According to Stryker and Whittle (2006), trans scholarship encompasses a broad array
of subject positions, behaviours and practices that far exceed a narrow focus on either
same-sex desire or gender inversion. Stryker and Whittle (2006, 3) claim trans scholarship
has as its purview:
[T]ranssexuality and cross-dressing, some aspects of intersexuality and homosexuality,
cross cultural and historical investigations of human gender diversity, specific subcultural
expressions of gender atypicality, theories of sexed embodiment and subjective gender
identity development, law and public policy related to the regulation of gender expression and
many other similar issues.

Trans theorists have been highly critical of many of queer theorys foundational texts,
including the work of Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997), Marjorie Garber (1992) and Eve
Sedgwick (1990). The main critique is the way these authors take up the transgendered
subject as the key queer trope by which theorists has challenged sex, gender, and sexuality
binaries particularly through Butlarian notions of performativity (Prosser 1998, 6). Such
critique mirrors work by feminist scholars such as Biddy Martin (1982) who argue that we
can never really regard bodies and psyches as merely discursive effects within power
relations and that invested with the historicity of lived experience, they exert pressure on
the normalizing tendencies through which they are constituted (Elliot and Roen 1998, 234).
While queer notions of performativity have been a productive conceptual move, trans
scholars argue that notions of performativity, deconstruction and signification have
rendered the transgendered subject an imaginary, fictional and merely metaphorical
presence in the service of a larger intellectual project. In a particular trenchant example of a
grassroots acrimony to the way performativity has been deployed in certain queer spaces,
Kyle Scanlon, Trans Services Coordinator for Torontos 519 Church Street Community
Centre, no longer gives interviews to feminist researchers who traffic in the trope of queer
performativity. Ray argues, being trans is not a fashion statement. Trans-ness is not a
fucking playground for the trendy, elite and hip members of academia (Scanlon 2006, 88).
Being transgendered as it has been utilized in some queer theorizing seemingly
means being an ethereal and disembodied subject apparently capable of shape-shifting at
will in ways that deny, for some trans folk, the subjective experience of gender, sexuality
and embodiment as stable and unchanging. Such theorizing also opens a rift between

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transsexual and transgendered subjects through a reification of transgendered individuals

supposed fluidity as transgressive and resistive which positions transsexual subjects
as apparent prisoners of medicalized gendered systems (Prosser 1998; Rubin 2003).
Poststructuralist deconstructions of gender and sexuality as fluid, contingent and open to
multiple variations also dissolves important political and social categories that matter,
including, for example, the differences between men and women, the difference between
those who occasionally play with the trope of transsexuality and those for whom it is a
matter of life and death (Felski 1996, 347; see also MacDonald 1998). While perhaps
overstating the matter somewhat, Namaste (2000, 16) asserts that queer theory, at its
worst, is a kind of academic enquiry that is contemptuous and dismissive of the social
world and exhibits a remarkable insensitivity to the substantive issues of transpeoples
everyday lives.
Trans scholarship also troubles queer research that takes as its starting point the
hetero/homosexual binary, that is, taking up an exclusive focus on sexual object choice.
Sue Stryker (2006, 7) points out that queer theory loses coherence to the precise extent
that the sex of the object is called into question, particularly in relation to the objects
gender. Put another way, Stryker is arguing that queer studies, with its focus on same-sex
object choice, is ill-equipped to deal with conceptualizing alternative differences from
heterosexist cultural norms. Transgendered individuals, in this argument, constitute
another axis of difference that cannot be subsumed to an object choice model of antiheteronormativy and their presence suggests as yet unexplored modes of queer difference
in place (Stryker 2006, 8).
Current queer geographical work tends to see the hetero/homo binary as the primary
defining spatial moment and focuses on non-heterosexual spaces as the main object of
study (but see Hubbard 2000). Arguably, this reinforces an artificial and readily collapsible
boundary; effacing the multiple incursions that occur across and between normatively
understood heterosexual and homosexual spaces (Bell et al. 1994). As Jasbir Puar (2002,
935 6) notes, in most queer research:
the assumed inherent quality of space is that it is always heterosexual, waiting to be queered or
waiting to be disrupted through queering, positing a single axis of identity which then reifies
a heterosexual/homosexual split that effaces other kinds of identity race, ethnicity,
nationalism, class and gender.

Queer research on sexual minorities is largely focused on the experiences of gays and
lesbians in traditional gay and/or lesbian urban spaces and homogenizes the vastly
distinctive experiences of bisexuals, transfolk and queers in both hetero and homosexual
urban spaces (e.g. Hemmings 2002; Oswin 2008). Research on the specificity and
disciplinary properties of some queer spaces and their homogenizing tendencies (Nash and
Bain 2007) as well as work on trans experience (Halberstam 1998, 2005; Noble 2006)
demonstrates the need to pull apart the term LGBTQ, and/or queer space, in order to get
at the relational and subjective experiences and constitution of space.
While queer geographers are concerned with the queering of spaces through
alternative non-normative practices and behaviours, some trans scholars argue that queer
as it is currently explicated may not be the best conceptual lens through which to understand
trans spatial processes and experiences. Work by Bobby Noble on the entwined emergence
of FtM and drag king culture in Torontos lesbian community in the 1970s argues that
spaces typically understood as lesbian now reflect a post-queer (rather than queer)
sensibility although queer conceptualizations may still circulate. Noble (2006) argues that
drag king performances of gender transitivity arguably deploy complex performances of

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masculinity that move beyond the anti-misogynist, butch-femme and female masculinities
of queer conceptualizations towards an illegible post-queer incoherence. Audiences for
these performances are themselves increasingly queered through the complicated meanings
circulating in traditionally lesbian space through their being read against the grain of
hegemonic gender and desire (Noble 2006, 61). Although drag kinging may have
originated within a lesbian aesthetic and place, what is in play now, according to Noble, is
not lesbian identity as ontology but the beginnings of a very clear and eventually post
queer desire. For Noble, this is not a queering of space in terms of rejecting or
overcoming the heterosexual/homosexual binary, but a transformation where spaces and
subjects cannot be rendered familiar through ontological gender (male/female); sexuality
(hetero/homo) or biological (male/female) bodies. While one can debate whether the
Nobles term post-queer captures shifting formulations of desires, eroticism and practices
more fully than notions of queer, his argument illustrates the conceptual complications of
an increasingly gender-variant presence in LGBTQ spaces.
Embodying experience/experiencing the body
A second major theme in trans scholarship addresses the importance of the narration
of lived experience in understanding transsexual subjectivities, in particular, as they
emerge outside of authoritative medical and legal discourses on gender, sexuality and
embodiment (Prosser 1998; Rubin 2003; Stryker and Whittle 2006). For some scholars,
understanding transsexuals as a product of medical intervention casts transsexuals as
medicines passive affect, a kind of unwitting technological product and as lacking
any agency or self-determination (Prosser 1998, 7). Transsexual historical narratives
claiming the veracity of subjective experiences support the contention that transsexuality
constitutes an active subjectivity that cannot be reduced to either technological [medical]
or discursive fact (Prosser 1998, 7; see also OHartigan 1997; Wilchins 1997; Roen
2001a, 2001b). The importance of experience and agency in understanding subjectivity
and embodied experiences raises challenges for some feminist and queer geographers
conducting research within poststructuralist approaches who tend to deny the possible
efficacy of cognitive human resistance and intervention. Dominant theorizing associated
with various strands of second wave feminism tended to valorize or reify experience as a
way of giving voice to or recovering the knowledges of marginal or subjugated groups,
particularly women (Rose 1993; McDowell and Sharpe 1997; Moss and Al-Hindi
2008). By valorizing and recording womens experiences, second wave feminist scholars
sought to dislodge what was regarded as hegemonic masculinist ways of knowing.
A substantial body of research recorded the first-hand experiences of a broad range
of marginalized women and was designed, in part, to demonstrate womens common
experience of oppression in western patriarchal society (Canning 1994; Hall 1991; Scott
1988a, 1988b, 1993).
Feminists employing postmodern and poststructuralist approaches have critiqued the
use of experience as the foundation of certain knowledges in ways that challenge trans
narratives of the experience of gendered embodiment (Scott 1993; Canning 1994; Dias
and Blecha 2007). Within poststructuralist approaches (including various versions of
queer theorizing), subjects and identities are understood as discursively constructed within
multiple, intersecting systems of meaning embedded in language and including the
physical arrangement of things, architectural plans, clothing and any other entities (Scott
1993, 36). Discursively constituted social categories such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, or black/white organize our understanding of ourselves within social

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relations. Understood this way, the record of our subjective experience is merely a record
of the particular discursive constitution of the self we have selected, demarcating a limited
form of agency (Scott 1993; Canning 1994). Poststructuralist projects have largely
(although not completely) rejected experience as representing an authentic, reliable or
transparent mirror to reality and portraying subjective knowledges as partial, situated
and constructed (Dias and Blecha 2007, 7 8). In more recent scholarship, feminists and
others have taken up the challenge of thinking through the interconnections of emotion,
experience and place (e.g. Davidson, Bondi, and Smith 2005; Smith 2009). This marks a
potential crucial point of connection between trans scholarship strongly influenced by
experiential and subjective accounts of the self and work by geographers on embodiment,
emotion and queer formulations of self-understandings.
For queer theorists, language and discourse are central to the constitutive
understandings of subjective experiences of embodiment. In most versions, queer
theorists draw heavily on Judith Butler and her rejection of the notion of the body as
assuming materiality prior to signification and form (1990, 130). Butler suggests that our
conceptions of our bodies come to us through language: the belief in the pre-culturally
material body as the ground for identity itself depends on the circulation of meanings
in culture (Turner 2000, 114). Bodies become sexed through continual gendered
performances that render the body intelligible in social relations. We experience our
bodies through the systems of meaning available through language and discourse and not
through some a priori state.
Some trans researchers take exception to feminist and queer studies which, with its
distrust of experience, have managed to detach subjects (gays, lesbians, queers and
transfolk) from the knowability of their everyday lived experiences. As Rubin (2003, 13)
asserts, any conceptualization of internalized essentialist subjectivity has been strongly
critiqued as a fiction of our combined cultural imaginations. Yet many trans researchers
advocate a return to a consideration of experience and the production of knowledges at the
level of the individual (Prosser 1998; Namaste 2000; Rubin 2003; Stryker 2006). This is
driven in part by a desire to wrestle the narrative of transsexual subjectivity and identity
away from the medical profession and to place agency, resistance and self-constitution
back in the hands of those experiencing and living trans lives. Namaste (2000) argues that
queer theory begins with transfolk as a starting point and dismisses individual agency by
limiting its focus to how subjects are constituted in and through social institutions and
discourse. Namaste cites the work of sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987) who proposes that
we develop ways of knowing and ways of doing research that begin from the perspective
of the lived experience of the people under investigation (cited in Namaste 2000, 47).
Trans scholars often reject queer discursive approaches that seemingly mask the real
of the biological. The apparent usurping of bodily sensations and desires to manifestations
of linguistic effects denies some trans experiences of the body as present and pre-figurative
to an understanding of the self. Some trans scholarship calls for a radical recorporealization
of the understanding of the everyday lived experiences, or a return to what some call an
unvarnished materiality of bodies (Prosser 1998, 9). For example, Henry Rubin (2003, 11)
argues that bodies are a crucial element in personal identity formation and perception
and that bodies, including secondary sex characteristics are integral and central to
the recognition of a core gendered self. So while Butler (2001, 622) argues that the
performative gesture of a legible gender is a presupposition of humanness and governs
the recognizability of the human, others argue that performance-based theories of gender
cannot account for the ways in which transfolk conceive of gender as an internal, persistent
identity that is not in accordance with the biological body (Cromwell 1999, 48).

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For many transfolk, embodiment in a physical body legible to others as either male
or female in no way negates a subjective sense of being other gendered in ways not
in tandem with their biological selves. For some individuals, in order for there to be
coherence within socially legible configuration, some form of physical alterations may be
desired in order to live unambiguously (Stryker 2006). For others, trans marks emergent
categories of new configurations of genders and bodies that do not require any stability or
fixity in order for there to be subjective compatibility, particularly around heterogendered
constructs. Noble (2006, 3) argues, for example, that the prefix trans itself:
captures what we imagine our various levels of sex and gender crossing, in various levels of
permanence to these transitions, seeming to signify everything from the medical technologies
that transform sex bodies to cross-dressing, to passing, to a certain kind of life plot, to being
legible as ones birth sex but with a contradictory gender inflection.

While Nobles comments have resonance with aspects of queer theoretical positions, this
work nevertheless gives new perspectives on notions of subjective embodiment beyond
queer theoretical notions denying or at the very least calling into question the possibilities
of pre-discursive subjectivities. Work by trans scholars contains a diverse array of
theoretical and conceptual approaches to notions of embodiment and experience that might
extend geographical scholarship concerned with gendered, sexuality and embodiment and
in relation to other markers of the self including race, class and age.
Transfolk and LGBTQ spaces
The preceding discussion about subjectivity and embodiment signal the need to attend to
the specificity of trans experiences in myriad spaces including LGBTQ spaces. In this
section, I link some of these theoretical considerations with material from interviews
with trans individuals to highlight how trans experiences in LGBTQ spaces open up new
avenues for research. The individuals cited here give breadth and materiality to the
historically specific possibilities and incoherencies of lives lived in gay, lesbian and
LGBTQ spaces that emerged in North America in the post-World War II period. Twelve
individuals from the Greater Toronto area, ranging in age from 20 to mid-60s, participated
in in-depth, semi-structured interviews exploring differing experiences in LGBTQ
and queer spaces in Toronto over the last decade. Several participants identified as
unambiguously male and heterosexual while others employed a range of terms that crossed
normative categories, including heteroflexible, intersex, queer, transsexual and
genderqueer. Collectively, participants largely identified as white and middle class
although several understood themselves as currently living a working class life based
on income and employment. Most have some post-secondary education. Participants
shifting self-understandings and changing or transformative embodiments raise complex
methodological questions. Being legible as the self one understands oneself to be, can be
influenced by the expectations and practices of the inhabitants of the places one is in
(Butler 2004; Nash, forthcoming). For trans folk in particular, shifting self-presentation,
the potential contradictions for the experiencing self in place and the possibility of being
illegible to others suggests the need for research that can grapple with more flexible and
unstable realities and slippery and unstable knowledges (Butler 2001; Stryker 2006).
Further, and as I have discussed elsewhere, researcher positionality, experience and the
shifting nature of the field in queer geographical work complicates the constitution of
geographical knowledge across and between differently embodied folks (Nash 2010).
For feminist geographers focused on both gender and sexuality, the body and embodied
experience is seen to anchor feminist geography at the dawn of the twenty-first century

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(Nelson and Seagar 2005, 1). Both queer and feminist geographers also acknowledge
difficulties with Butlers notions of performativity, noting that a focus on discursive
formulations constitutes a performative subject abstracted from the personal, lived history
as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness (Nelson 1999, 332). Bodies
and spaces thus simultaneously (re)create one another and while bodies are understandably
biological, the meanings attached to bodies are always historically and spatially located
(Longhurst 2005, 388; Longhurst and Johnson 2005; Nast and Pile 1998).
Trans scholarship demonstrates that in North America at least, many trans lives are
experienced at some time or another in and through gay, lesbian and queer spaces in ways
that reconstitute subjectivities, embodiments and spaces themselves. Some of this work
contests the exclusions and oppressions at work in these spaces that make it difficult to
make visible the historic specificity of trans lives. Henry Rubin, in his examination of
butch-femme culture in lesbian spaces in the 1950s and 1960s, argues that the so-called
butches of that era might better be understood as trans men although such possibilities have
been eradicated in the histories of gay and lesbian spaces that dominate scholarship
including geographies of sexualities and queer geographies. Also contentious are the
histories written about so-called passing and cross-dressing women (e.g. Brandon Teena)
that claim these individuals as lesbians and for a lesbian history. Some trans scholars
argue, these individuals might just as easily be recuperated as transgendered men (Boyd
1997, 422; see also Noble 2004). Such re-visionings of gay and lesbian political and spatial
histories challenges queer geographers to reconsider some of their own historical narratives
about the emergence of gay and lesbian spaces in terms of who was present, how they
understood themselves (as gendered, sexualized, racialized and embodied) and who has
arguably been erased by these accounts. This raises important questions about the power
relations inherent in the production of knowledges about spaces and about how
our theoretical or conceptual frameworks (and our political and activist leanings) are
implicated in how we, as scholars, tell particular tales that might fail to see the others in
the spaces we study.
The overlapping histories of butch/femme social organization in Torontos working
class bars of the 1960s and the more contemporary debates over trans presence in
womens spaces such as Torontos womens bathhouse events illustrates the alternatively
contested and accepted gendered (and embodied) permutations in lesbian spaces. For trans
men, whose pre-transition social and cultural lives revolve around lesbian communities,
the process of transition often comes with dissonant experiences in lesbian spaces prior to,
during, and after transition (Hines 2007; Nash and Bain 2007). For some trans men,
butch lesbian or dyke identities are the first or preliminary identifications through which
they struggle to reconcile embodiment with social categories of gender and sexuality
despite their sense that lesbian does not accurately describe their sense of self. In such
cases, lesbian spaces such as bars, restaurants, sports teams and university womens
centres become primary social spaces. For example, George, who self-identifies as
a heteroflexible man, notes that:
I came out as gay. I didnt know why I had an issue with the word lesbian but I did. Like that
was definitely one of those like gut feeling that word doesnt work for you . . . . I assumed that
my attraction for women which is what I recognized explained my gender . . . But the whole
time . . . like I said, the word lesbian was just like no, Im not a lesbian. I somehow felt better
with the word dyke, Im not sure why. (11 October 2006)

For trans men who initially took on a lesbian identification and socialized within the
lesbian community, transitioning can mean discovering that one is no longer welcome in
lesbian social and political spaces. For those trans men who are increasingly embodied or

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589

legible as masculine and male, participating in lesbian spaces can grow awkward when
others object to the presence of individuals sporting so-called male attributes (e.g. facial
hair). This disapproval sometimes forces trans men to leave the lesbian community and to
establish new social networks beyond or outside that community. As Kyle, a transsexual
man notes:

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I actually kind of felt like the lesbian community abandoned me. There I was all alone wanting
support, wanting friends and suddenly people stopped calling. I had one friend who stuck
around . . . But because she was still part of this bigger group, I wasnt welcome at the group
anymore . . . So I began staking out my claim in the FtM community, so to speak. It sounds
awfully territorial, doesnt it? I dont mean it quite like that. I guess I mean more of like trying
to find a place in the FtM community. (3 August 2006)

For other trans men, transitioning meant a rejection of lesbian spaces as no longer relevant to
their lives and a seeking out spaces that supported shifting self-identifications. For some trans
men this meant frequenting exclusively heterosexual spaces, exclusively straight male spaces
and/or gay male space. This decision was sometimes grounded in the experience of being
members of lesbian communities and developing sensitivity or commitment to feminist
precepts. Denis noted that through his experiences as a member of the lesbian/feminist
community, he was prepared to recognize the importance of lesbian-only spaces.
Id rather see it be the guys excluding themselves, just saying okay, thats womens only
space, Im not a woman, Ill respect that. It seems like a lack of respect to fight your way into
womens space. (3 March 2007)

Queer geographers and trans scholarship share a growing concern with understanding
how race and class, as well as other markers of social positioning are implicated in
understanding gender and sexuality and embodiment (Oswin 2008; Valentine 2007).
In considering trans subjectivities and embodiment, Emi Koyama (2006) argues that
lesbian feminists and trans activists contestations over the presence of transsexual women
at the Michigan Womyns Music Festival is easily read as both racist and classist although
such perceptions are rendered invisible and unspoken. In attempting to resolve matters, the
festivals organizers and trans activists have an de facto no-penis policy that permits some
trans individuals access to the festival grounds although the controversy (and its practical
ramifications) has by no means been resolved. This policy clearly ignores the fact that
minority trans women are far more likely to lack the financial resources to obtain the
necessary surgery. Richard Juang, in a more nuanced argument, draws on Kimberle`
Crenshaws (1993, 705 706) conceptualization of intersectionality to argue for a
transgender politics that would acknowledge how constellations of forces constitute
forms of racialized, classed and gendered discrimination that result in unique kinds of
physical and representational violence. This offers the possibility of teasing out how, for
example, sexualized racial stereotyping combines with racialized gender stereotypes in
ways that prompt distinctive and unique forms of oppression (Crenshaw 2006, 709; see also
Valentine 2007). This work echoes calls by Gill Valentine (2007, 10) for geographers to
consider the concept of intersectionality to theorize the relationship between different
categories: gender, race, sexuality and so forth.
Because of the social and political history of LGBTQ activism in Canada, trans political
aspirations have largely been yoked to gay and lesbian community-based organizations. In
places such as Toronto, with a well-established gay village and a well-funded community
centre, trans out-reach and support groups operate through gay and lesbian spaces and
organizations. Major government funding for trans services is funnelled through these
organizations, embedding trans issues (and lives) within gay and lesbian social and

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C.J. Nash

political organizations. This has not been an easy road to follow and there is a sense that trans
interests may not best served under the umbrella of LGBTQ organizations despite the
obvious commitment of those organizations. Trans interests do not always mesh with gay
and lesbian political aims such as gay marriage and same-sex health benefits. As Nick
points out:

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trans issues and people do not resonate with the majority of gay and lesbian people . . . On the
trans side, most trans people have a problematic relationship with the gay and lesbian
communities as well. So its not a happy marriage if you will. But its sort of some type of
family, like theres a relation. But its not easy or simple. (10 October 2007)

Trans presence in LGBTQ spaces is a complicated experience and can only be understood
through paying particular attention to the specificity of historical, locational and spatial
contexts. Terms such as butch-femme, transvestite, cross-dressers, gay men, lesbians,
FtM, MtF, transsexual and queer are subject positions made available and operative in
particular ways and disappear, re-emerge and transform both those so identifying and the
spaces they frequent. The various strands of trans scholarship briefly touched on here offer
intriguing challenges to queer geographers to position their queer perspective as the site
of difference in order to articulate the historical and material specificity of gendered and
sexual practices.
Final thoughts
Some three decades of scholarship on sexual and queer geographies has produced a
theoretically diverse body of work examining gender and sexuality. More recently
conceptualized queer geographical scholarship, drawing on feminist research and
postmodern and poststructuralist ideas, has expanded our formulations of how identities
and subjectivities are spatially constituted and specifically embodied in historically and
culturally particular ways. However, critiques of queer geographical research suggest that
geographers have perhaps stepped far away from what Knopp calls the messy realities,
including fluidity, hybridity, incompleteness, moralities, desire and embodiment and that a
queer perspective ought to be informed as much by embodied experience as by theory (Dias
and Blecha 2007, 7). What I suggest here is that certain strands of trans scholarship intersect
with and trouble certain aspects of queer geographical scholarship in productive ways. We
need to pull apart what we mean by LGBTQ spaces and identities in order to get at the more
particular, historical and transformative operations of subjectivities, identities and forms of
embodiment in play in these spaces. Trans scholarship potentially challenges the histories
and geographies we have written about what we initially called gay and lesbian spaces.
Trans scholarship also suggests intriguing possibilities for understanding how some
conceptualization of the queering of space finds itself trapped by its dependency on sexual
object choice (as opposed to notions of desire eroticism) and how, at this historical juncture,
alternative subjectivities grounded in differently gendered and embodied ways of being,
challenge this notion of space as queer. Scholarship suggests that these differently
gendered and embodied ways of being not only contribute to the queering of space but have
taken those spaces to a post-queer incoherence. We need to press forward with work
considering the intersectionality of subject positions that are compilations of gendered,
sexed, racialized and classed experiences and the spatial implications derived from this.
These transformations in identities and spaces need to be considered within the
political, economic and social processes in what we call traditional gay and lesbian villages
(and beyond of course) places that support the currently successful conservative and
assimilationist gay and lesbian politics in places such as Canada. While these political

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gains protect gay and lesbian subjects through human rights legislation and inclusion in
mainstream institutions such as marriage, such a politic has difficulty supporting those who
are not legible as the subjects these initiatives are designed to protect. Trans political
interests are often starkly at odds with mainstream gay and lesbian political agendas and
have, in recent years, been used by anti-gay right-wing groups to further oppositional
political goals. While a queer politic has been about building alliances across difference,
the multiplicity of subject positions begs the question of whether it can bear the weight of
its own contradictions. For geographers interested in grappling with these issues, trans
scholarship has much to offer.

Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper given at the American Association of Geographers Annual General
Meeting, in San Francisco, April 2007 and is funded in part through a grant from the Faculty of
Social Sciences Deans Fund for Research, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada. Many
thanks to Kath Browne and Sally Hines for their thoughtful and engaging comments and to the two
anonymous reviews and Robyn Longhurst for their careful assessment and suggestions.

Notes
1. I use the term transfolk as an umbrella term for an admittedly diverse and not necessarily
commensurate series of gender variant subject positions encompassed by myriad terms (e.g.
transgendered, transsexual, FtM, MtF, gender variant, bois, cross-dressers, drag kings, drag
queens trykes; trannyfag, boychik). In this article, I adhere to the terminologies used by the
participants who generously took the time to speak with me. I use the term transsexual for those
persons who so identify and who desire complete physical transformation from female to male or
male to female through medical and surgical intervention. I use the term FtM (trans men) or MtF
(trans women) to refer to those individuals who so identify and who may have various surgical
and medical interventions and may live primary as men and women while refusing the total
disappearance of a trans identity. I use the term transgendered or trans for those individuals
who so identify or where the term makes sense given the nature of the discussion.
2. Trans scholarship is an umbrella term for a sweeping range of research and writing on, by and
about transfolk. This article is not intended as a thoroughgoing review of that body of work
and draws on a selective set of writings that offer points of interesting engagements for feminist
and queer geographers among others.
3. While bi-sexuality and heterosexuality have been the focus of geographical research on sexuality
and space, it is largely eclipsed in volume by work on gays and lesbians (but see, for example,
Hemmings 2002; Hubbard 2000).

Notes on contributor
Catherine J. Nash is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Brock University,
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Catherine has published articles in a number of journals including
Social and Cultural Geography, Antipode, Canadian Geographer, Documents dAna`isi Geogra`fica
and elsewhere and has contributed a number of book chapters to various projects. Her research
interests include urban and regional geography, urban development, feminist, trans and queer
geographies, and urban social movements with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and social relations.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATION
Geografas trans, corporizacion y experiencia trans
Hace mucho tiempo que las y los geografo/as queer han estado interesado/as en las
interconexiones entre sexualidad y espacio. Con la teorizacion queer como su sello distintivo,
la investigacion geografica queer ha hecho sustanciales contribuciones a nuestras formas de
entender los generos, las sexualidades y la corporizacion y sus constituciones en una
produccion de espacio y lugar. Este artculo examina como la investigacion academica trans
se intersecta con varios temas centrales a la investigacion del trabajo de la geografa queer
subjetividad/interpretatividad; experiencia/corporizacion, y la constitucion historica, poltica
y social de lo que ahora se llaman espacios urbanos tradicionales LGBTQ o queer y
ofrece a los geografos y geografas interesado/as en intersecciones entre sexualidad, genero y el
cuerpo, caminos alternativos y provocativos de investigacion. Esta investigacion academica
trans resalta, en parte, las discontinuidades y los silencios encerrados en las as llamadas
comunidades y espacios LGBTQ o queer y senala la necesidad de explorar
una conceptualizacion mas particularmente historica y poltica de las formaciones de
subjetividades, identidades y formas de corporizacion en juego en estos espacios.
Palabras clave: gay; lesbiana; teora queer; trans; geografas queer; sexualidad; genero