ABSTRACT
Nonhuman animals supposedly exemplify human animal qualities like the family, fidelity, selfless care for young and, perhaps above all, sex complementarity. Nonhuman animal morphology and behaviour are most often cited to confirm our assumptions about the nature of things and human beings' relationship to this nature, even though these meanings may indeed have very little to do with the biological and social realities of nonhuman animals. This chapter focuses to contribute to the growing interest in new materialist approaches to understanding sex, gender and sexual difference. It brings together two hitherto largely mutually exclusive literatures, new materialism and transsex or transgender or trans, in order to suggest that the study of nonhuman trans might make a useful contribution to a number of debates engendered within the trans literature. The chapter presents a short review of feminist approaches to trans with a view to then exploring how animal trans might usefully inform these approaches.
