As I sketched out in Chapter One, transgender practices have been the subject of much debate within feminism, lesbian and gay scholarship and queer theory. Moreover, trans sexualities have been subject to intense medical gaze. As Schrock and Reid comment: “Most people [however] do not have their sexual biographies evaluated by mental health professionals who determine whether they can inhabit the bodies they desire” (2006: 84–5). Moreover, these studies have largely neglected the subjective meanings and lived experiences of sexuality for transgender people. The dominance of a medical model of transgender has frequently positioned transgender people, and transsexuals in particular, as asexual. As Cromwell states: “Medico-psychological practitioners insisted that ‘true transsexuals’ had low libidos, were asexual or autoerotic. They were also said to feel disgust and abhorrence for their sex organs” (1999: 124).

This chapter addresses the relationship between gender transition and sexual desire, identity and practice. The first section of the chapter explores the negotiation of sexual desire and identity through transition. Initially, it considers how sexuality is located as a fluid process within participants’ narratives. It then moves on to look at the ways in which sexual desire, identity and practice may be understood as stable factors within other participants’ narratives of transition. Here I examine the links between sexuality and gendered experiences of embodiment. The second section considers the links between transgender identities and non-heterosexual practices by examining subjective understandings of similarity and difference. The third section builds upon this theme in relation to understandings of commonalties and divisions between transgender and lesbian and gay politics.

Negotiating sexual identity and desire through Transition

Fluidity of sexual identity, desire and practice

In discussing theoretical approaches to transgender in Chapter One, I examined how lesbian and gay theorists and radical feminist writers in the 1970s and 1980s critiqued transgender practices by arguing that transgender people assumed conservative gender and sexual roles, which left dominant relations of power intact (Ekins and King, 1997). Yet, in this research, 16 of the sample group identified as non-heterosexual. Del (age 44), for example, explicitly articulates a queer sexuality, as shown in the following section of our interview: