ABSTRACT
A barrier to gender variant people's 'finding of themselves' through narrative and discourse can be extrapolated from a theme to be found in The Will to Knowledge by Michel Foucault. Foucault described how, following the 'age of repression' that commenced in the seventeenth century, the Victorian era imposed 'taboo, non-existence and silence' on sexualities and gendered behaviours classed as deviant. Georgina Turtle apparently found indications of a refusal to grow up in the tendency of some 'O-sexual' subjects not to marry, and in efforts to seek careers if 'O-women'. When commencing visits to a trans men's support group in adulthood, autobiographer Dhillon Khosla noticed that the visitors presented a range of gendered and sexual dispositions, unlike any uniformity that might be expected from stereotypes of trans men. A 'refusal to grow up' would be attributed to trans subjects when society was blind to the trans subject's own particular gendered growing.
