MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Online transgender communities have struggled to achieve consensus around the parameters of authentic trans identity. Many transgender people, often called “transmedicalists”, argue that one must face extreme discomfort (dysphoria) with one’s assigned gender to have a legitimate claim toward transgender experience. Through this claim, transmedicalists define dysphoria as a biological phenomenon, and the parameters for trans experience are maintained by medical and scientific professionals. Unfortunately, scholars have failed to pay critical attention to this discourse. While Alexander Wijnants accounts the ideological parameters of the debate, communication scholars have barely scratched the surface of its implications, even as more people turn to online transgender communities to establish inter-subjective and trans-subjective answers to the questions of gender. However, with the publishing of a psychoanalysis-centered edition of Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2017 and the continued dialogue between scholars of gender and psychoanalysis, Lacanian theory may offer a heuristic to evaluate these debates. Thus, I examine transmedicalist argumentation through case studies chosen from a predominantly-white transgender YouTube community. Trans YouTube creators and their commenters sit in a contradictory position: While YouTube offers accessible content and discussion, it remains notorious for its moderation of LGBTQ creators. As such, the trans YouTube community offers few non-white creators with larger audiences. As such, I examine transmedicalist argumentation as a function of lack: not only of creators gesturing toward non-Eurocentric models of gender, but of a collective account of dysphoria that perceives gender as a structural symptom of colonization rather than an individual phenomenon. While sympathetic toward transmedical anxiety toward dismissing dysphoria, I suggest that thinking dysphoria through colonization offers preferable grounds to parametrize trans identity. By working through transmedicalist digital discourse, I center dysphoria through colonization to bolster a burgeoning Lacanian framework that sees transition as an act of the subject in the wake of dysphoria.