This paper argues that gender can, and does, act as a mode of enslavement, by which is meant that it can both (a) reduce one''s freedom; and (b) force one into specific forms of action. The main reason for this are the dualistic, exhaustive binaries and normative ideals built into socio-medical understandings of gender. The contingency of these, as well as their oppressive, enslaving effects, are brought into sharp focus by the transsexual phenomenon. The phenomenology of transsexuality, namely a strong desire to ‘escape’ one’s current sexed and gendered body, frequently causes the individual to seek surgical intervention. This places the individual under the regulating control of medical institutions, which enforce strict codes of sexual and gendered identity (leading to familiar rebuke of transsexuality as complicit with traditional, patriarchal conceptions of sexual and gendered identity). Rather than simply dismiss transsexuality, the paper argues we must understand the transsexual’s body as a discursive field in which competing conceptions of the self and gender play out. Understood as a crossroads of power, the body reveals the ways that gender norms are enforced in order to reproduce the current gender system. The phenomenology of gender is identified as an internalisation of this discursive model, with the consequence that the notion of experiencing and needing to express an authentic gender is the result (not cause) of gendered norms that are, from the outset, coercive, exclusionary and oppressive. However, the paper concludes by arguing that, in their appropriation of alternative gender norms, transsexuals reveal the ultimate contingency and malleability of gender. In its reworking, and thus undermining, of these gender norms, transsexuality can be read as containing the subversive potential to emancipate itself from the very model of gender enslavement which generated it in the first place.
