‘Transing’ fitness and remapping transgender male masculinity in online message boards

Abstract

There has been a recent growth of events and discourses related to transgender men’s health and fitness, including bodybuilding competitions, Olympics participation and appearances in Men’s Health Magazine. In addition, transgender men have formed Internet collectives to share information and support about fitness and transitioning. Based on a content analysis of a Reddit message board on transgender men’s fitness and interviews with transgender men, this paper argues that fitness is a ‘trans practice’, or means through which people may modify their bodies, personal identifications and genders. Transgender men engage in strategic fitness habits to pursue their ideals of the ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ body, illuminating both the stronghold and malleability of sex and gender norms. Simultaneously and recursively, they may share resources in virtual collectives, creating narratives that reflect and augment their ‘offline’ experiences, and transcend boundaries of space and time. This paper remaps transgender male masculinity by positioning online terrains as spaces in which sex, gender and the body are co-constructed. In addition to structural interventions to protect transgender people’s health and safety, I gesture towards possibilities in which all people may choose alternatives beyond institutionally and culturally defined borders of sex, gender and the ‘fit’ or ‘healthy’ body.

Keywords:

• Sex
• gender
• embodiment
• fitness
• virtual technologies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number DGE-1247312].

Notes on contributor

Reya Farber is a doctoral student in Sociology and Gender Studies whose work addresses the intersections between sex, gender, health and technologies in a global era.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Japonica Brown-Saracino, Catherine Connell, Joseph Harris, Ashley Mears, Carrie Preston, Patricia Rieker and K.J. Surkan for their helpful comments throughout each iteration of this paper. In addition, the author is grateful to two anonymous reviewers, the participants of the Boston University Sociology Work-In-Progress paper workshop, students and faculty in the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program and participants at BOS-CONN Graduate Student Conference for their feedback.

Notes

1. For instance, Chris Mosier was the first transgender athlete to make the US men’s Olympic team and was featured in a Nike advertisement in 2016. FTM Fitness World, a non-profit organization in Atlanta, has held annual transgender fitness conventions and male bodybuilding competitions since 2014.

2. Except in the cases of ‘big’ African-American men who are targeted by police; in these instances, size and strength do not afford a man privilege and can instead shape unequal interactions between state authority, leading to undue violence or death (Jones, 2016).

3. Users of social media platforms can use the hashtag ‘FitFam’, an abbreviation of ‘Fitness Family’ to label their fitness pursuits and connect with others.

4. ‘Sport’ and ‘fitness’ are interrelated but distinguishable terms. ‘Sport’ has historically been studied by sociologists as a conglomeration of discourses, practices, people and institutions that comprise organized activities. While fitness has been associated more with femininity, Dworkin and Wachs (2009, p. 95) found that men’s health magazines stated that strength, speed, endurance, power and agility were the ‘five pillars of fitness’ and featured male athletes across different sports. This signals the interrelationship between the two terms and their associated practices, discourses and technologies.

5. Gender dysphoria is a psychological condition currently categorized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a handbook used by the American Psychiatric Association (2013), as ‘strong desires to be treated as the other gender or to be rid of one’s sex characteristics, or a strong conviction that one has feelings and reactions typical of the other gender’.

6. The process of ‘cutting’ is commonly used in fitness and bodybuilding communities to describe dieting to reveal a more muscular body, particularly after ‘bulking’, which refers to the act of eating in caloric excess to gain muscle.

7. This discourse counters a common trope of the ‘thigh gap’.