Los Angeles County HIV Mental Health Task Force

Click here to read the entire article, which will be available in Signs (Vol. 39, No. 2, Winter 2014).

Talia Mae Bettcher’s “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance” reevaluates the two prevailing models of transsexuality—the wrong-body model and the transgender model—finding existing articulations of both unsatisfactory. Drawing from María Lugones’s “model of multiple meanings” and “recent literature on the transphobic representations of trans people as deceivers,” Bettcher reanimates the resistant potential of the wrong-body model from a transfeminist perspective, arguing that a reorganized version of this model has the capacity to resist the principle of reality enforcement and its centrality to “dominant ways of doing gender.”