The Rise of the Transmasc Researcher
Until around 2000, transfems were mostly studied by "chasers," men fascinated by trans for academic-sexual reasons that are difficult to disentangle [1]. This essay is about another kind of dude. The late 1990s saw chasers and gays lose (reject) their claim to the transfeminine subject, and the term "transgender" sutured transfemininity to a new group: transmascs/men. By 2025, this shift was more or less complete, with transmascs/men serving as the primary stewards of transfemininity, maintaining dominant positions in trans studies, health programs, and NGOs. Our question is how exactly this has changed trans research. Both gays/chasers and transmascs/men have a connection to transfemininity, gays through common sexual circuits, transmascs/men through the common framework of "gender variance." They have, historically, wanted different things from us: gay research has often positioned racialized transfemininity as a kind of "living past" of modern gay identity, a consequence of needing a dress to fuck men, while for transmascs/men transfemininity has served to negotiate medicalization with feminism.
Most immediately, transmasc/male researchers maintain strong divides between trans medical and social organization: essentially, the "social" contains feminist potential, while the "medical" can (at most) avoid getting in the way. This involves a series of (often-assumed) moves: the detachment of DIY from formal medical knowledge, the partition of "medical advocacy" and (nonmedical?) "activist" groups, the racialization of trans-medicine as white, and the disconnection of trans-medicine from the actual day-to-day of how we are treated in the world. In practice, hormones/surgery are intimately tied to trans employment; more "respectable" positions, even, but more clearly in forms of beauty/gender work which require you to advertise, or have great tits, or to have a dick, or to have it get hard [2]. Seeing Don fucking Kulick (1998), prick and chaser extraordinaire, actually discuss this when I have never once seen it in any recent academic text is utterly infuriating. It turns out that unlike the noveau-academic tboys, chasers care very much if you can get hard or not.
Simultaneously, the new transmasc/male research aims to split good from bad trannies with the aim of providing a model for ethical transgendering. Because it is so common for transmasc/male researchers to transmasculinize over the research process itself, the chronic guilt of daring to trans in their rancid academic environment ends up being rather anxiously negotiated through their studies of transfemininity. Their task is to discover and embody a trans(femininity) that is both radical and palatable to their colleagues; this requires (1) a strong separation from all prior attempts to devour transfemininity, (2) an evacuation of the "new" transfemininity of both context and content. The result is a rapid-fire of piecemeal transfemininities that carry different names and contexts, painstakingly sealed from one another, largely framed in terms of each researcher's personal gender negotiations.
All this results in a strange set of common tropes rooted in the gender negotiations of a specific subset of transmascs (the academics). Because academic transmasc/manhood is so often rooted in feminism, medical transition is almost invariably antisocial for them, and so medical and social organizations are split. Transmasc/man negotiations in this context center on "proper" transition while maintaining feminist subjecthood; so studies sharply demarcate proper and improper feminist subjects.
The clearest example of this is in Aren Aizura's "Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment." Aizura is studying medical tourism in Thailand, and he mainly discusses Australian trans women getting surgeries done in Thailand after trying (and failing) to receive such authorization from Australian medical authorities. On its face, this is a clear case of medical injustice (solved using another privilege), but Aizura argues that his informants "tended to phrase their issues in terms of dissatisfaction." When an interviewee described looking for services outside Australia after her doctor demanded unusual procedures in order to receive care, Aizura argues that she (and his other subjects) were simply "understanding themselves as consumers," in contrast to Aden, an interlocutor who (after being refused by a doctor) describes his treatment as "bigotry" (and who never attempts DIY!). After deciding to seek care in Thailand, the social-medical regulation of trans women simply vanishes, and it's a question of neoliberal economics. Aden, who is refused care and actually listens to his doctor, remains a proper feminist subject, capable of undergoing injustices like "bigotry."
If his trans women exist as economic and paradoxically non-medicalized subjects, Aizura's kathoeys appear as a vague radical shape in the distance, difficult to study because "surgeons performing GRS for a Thai clientele tend not to advertise as widely online." This allows them to be the perfect radical subjects in his analysis; kathoey apparently have little chance to obtain GRS due to lack of "professional employment," and anyways are "not defined within Thai popular discourse by a demand for GRS," with only 40% (!) undergoing it, in stark contrast to the incessant vagina-lust of Anglosphere trans women. More generally, there is a "relative absence of medicalization and pathologization" in "Thai cultural understandings of gender nonconforming embodiment;" he immediately follows this up by discussing "kathoey and sao praphet sorng who begin taking hormones in adolescence." By making a rapid set of unstated moves between "medicalization" (is this psychiatrization?), "GRS," and apparently nonmedical practices like hormones, Aizura is finally able to disentangle good from bad trannies: the proper transfeminist subject either listens to the doctor and rots (as Aden), or undergoes cosmetic/hormonal operations in the same (presumably unproblematic?) ways as cis Thai women ("in lines with broader ideals of modern Thai femininity").
Aizura's bad subjects are socially sutured; there is no discussion of the ways that doctors' reviews are traded between trans women, no discussion of the community funding and care around these surgeries; they exist in a closed loop of advertising and individual consumer practice. His good subjects are lobotomized, split from their own reality in order to allow Aizura to collapse them into cisfeminine Thai beauty practice under the apparently unproblematic assumption that (citing Natiya Sukontapatipark) "many kathoeys work in industries like cabaret or sex work, where maintaining physical beauty is necessary to continue working." Kathoeys are basically just a kind of cis woman that's inclined to sex work, oh thank you, you fucking lunatic.
So the new transmasc frameworks are heavily invested in splitting medical from social practice and splitting good from bad trannies. Crucially, this is largely absent from gayguy/chaser studies of us: they are very interested in exactly who's on hormones (they need to know who they can fuck), and they're less interested in salvaging "good trannies" because we've mostly been useful to them as a living trainwreck that overdoses on estrogen and dies. Tguys do some things the chasers can't, but ultimately their assumptions about what "trans" is, adopted from years of negotiating semi-willing testosterone poisoning with their shitty academic coworkers, have been pasted onto the trans mass in ways which ruin most of their work. The reality is that trans life is deeply social, entwined with passing off hormones and funding surgeries and warning people off that shitty fucking doctor. Just as critically, gender has consequences: having a shitty twisted gender leads to a lot of shitty twisted social interactions, and trying to make the "good tranny" has led, repeatedly, to the casting of racialized trans women as "third genders" who are unproblematically accepted and social and are also inherently inclined to sex work and begging for some reason and are also basically women but also not women (can't get preggo) in a way which is very respectable, and also sacred, which is why they can't touch normal people. Fuck off.
[1] Among others: Don Kulick, Lawrence Cohen, Tom Boellstorff, Walter Williams.
[2] Pezzutto, "From Porn Performer to Porntropeneur" discusses this a bit.