The Masculine Vaginal: Working With Queer Men’s Embodiment at the Transgender Edge

Turning away from the conspicuous phenomena of transgender experience, with an eye toward locating and illuminating the transgender edge in cisgender, this paper explores the relationship between men and the Vaginal, both material and fantasized. Positing the Vaginal as a counterpart to the Phallic allows a delinkage of vaginal psychic and embodied states from the strictly female so that, like the Phallic, they can be accessed by people of all genders and sexes. This concept goes beyond the conceptual to the fleshy, embodied experience of many transgender men, who live in whole, partial, and/or temporary “female” bodies. It can also be applied to the physio-psychic reality of many cisgender men. Included is a discussion of a case in which a gay cisgender male patient experiences and fantasizes his anus as a vagina.