ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the difficult subject matter of sexual violence and its relationship to transsexuality. This relationship is not causal or symptomatic, but speaks to gender as a formation that defends against uncertainty and vulnerability to ontological difference and otherness. Transsexuality from this viewpoint is understood not as the exceptional experience of those who identify as “trans” or who have changed sex but the universal condition of negotiating gendered being from the “trauma” of sexual difference. Drawing on Chase Joynt’s nine-minute video Akin (2012), which explores the family secrets that surround his shared experience with his mother of sexual assault and the birth of two transitions, this chapter will help demonstrate why it is important to think about transsexuality capaciously beyond the minoritizing logic of identity. Transsexuality here is defined as the psychic place from which gender is both achieved and imaginatively rewritten in transition. As a method of inquiry, transsexuality offers a way to make insights into how the unconscious shapes gendered subjectivity and also helps us see that transition is an aesthetic achievement.
