Boys Will Be Boys: Transsexual Discourse and Embodied Knowledge (1988–2004)

Drawing on the archival newsletter Boys Will Be Boys (1992–1994), historical laws and psychiatrist Herbert Bower's medical data, this article illuminates transsexual discourses that sought to mould trans people along heterosexual and binarily sexed lines between 1988 and 2004 in Australia. It adopts a critical discourse analysis to study the language of these primary sources, highlighting that state governments (in SA, NSW, WA, and VIC) viewed trans people as what Clare Sears and Susan Stryker have called ‘problem bodies’ to silo into extant sex categories. These laws maintained that if trans people were to be legally recognised with a new sex marker, they could not be married and had to undergo surgery on reproductive organs. This article argues alongside Jules Gill-Peterson that trans people were agentic subjects aware of these medico-legal transsexual discourses, underscoring their own ‘embodied knowledge’ in constituting their corporeal forms. It highlights trans people’s compliance with and rejection of these discourses and their adoption of what Paul Preciado names ‘alternative’ models of embodiment via prosthetics. Theoretically informed by Stryker, Joseph Pugliese and Nikki Sullivan's somatechnics, it brings ‘to light the operations of power’ that constituted trans subjects; and positions trans people as knowledge-holders of their own embodiment.