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Masculinity's Interior: Men, Transmen, and Theories of Masculinity

This essay describes paradoxes and contradictions in treatments of masculine psychology in men, masculine women, and female-to-male transgendered persons. Using object-relations psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow explained the complementary and opposing psychologies in men and in women, emphasizing competitive and inhibited aspects of masculine psychology. Similar psychological theories are still being advanced today as applicable to most men and women. However, some contemporary gender scholars reject psychoanalysis as not only outmoded, biased, and sexist, but also as intrinsically inapplicable to gender variant people. They may resist all psychological theories on the grounds that such theories inevitably pathologize their subjects, with the paradoxical results that transgendered subjects, in particular, are accorded no psychological interiority at all and that all descriptions of the non-normative are considered pathologizing. Even more paradoxically, theorists of female masculinity like Judith Halberstam and scholars of transgender studies, including Henry Rubin, Sally Hines, and Bobby Noble, imply that people born female may make better men than people born male. Along with therapists of transgender clients, transgender studies scholars claim that gender is innate and biological in origin, yet they seek to facilitate gender transition through social changes, including new technologies and new queer ideologies. Although generally decrying essentialist prescriptions for human behavior, moreover, these scholars may conclude that they are ethically bound to essentialist explanations of gender.