Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex - Riki Wilchins

For decades, trans studies and queer theory have treated the trans body as a theoretical construct – a site for identity, dysphoria, and gender politics – leaving erotic realities largely unexamined. Desire, pleasure, and real sex has been pushed to the margins, rendered almost unspeakable.This book challenges that silence. It asks why sexuality – once a privileged site of inquiry in queer theory – has all but vanished from trans scholarship, and what this erasure reveals about the politics of respectability, cisnormativity, and the lingering discomfort with bodies that refuse to behave “properly.â€Through rigorous analysis and intimate narrative, the book explores how bodies do things – and how different bodies do different things – shaping possibilities for desire, sensation, and intimacy. It interrogates the cultural and academic forces that have de-sexed trans subjects, examines the aesthetic and linguistic struggles around naming and eroticizing trans bodies, and charts a path toward a trans studies that embraces the messy, fleshy, and truly human dimensions of sexuality.Both provocative and personal, this book insists that there can be no real account of gender without a reckoning with sex. It is a call to bring pleasure back into the conversation – not as an afterthought, but as a vital site of knowledge, resistance, and joy.