Chronicling: The failure of narrative-construction in the study of a transmasculine cyber community

Life history narratives, as colorful and dynamic as they seem, often belie the complexity of transgender men’s lives. In academic discourse, trans men’s embodied experiences of time and space are typically represented in linear, heteronormative terms; the trans man emerges as a modified version of the normatively gendered man. As a discursive strategy, the narrative form organizes and presents the milestones of “transition” as a kind of scaffolding: rendered as progressive, undifferentiated moments in the evolution of the trans man, name changes, surgeries and hormone injections define the transgender man as an identifiable type, while the messy, brick-and-mortar details of everyday life—all those things that cannot be reduced to the narrative of trans men’s lives—are discarded. Even the most careful qualitative work sometimes falls into this trap by framing research and interview questions around social acceptance and the struggle to attain “authenticity.” Such strategies, embedded as they are in orthodox gender norms, predetermine their findings and necessarily fail to apprehend the complexity of trans men’s lives. In fact, trans men are not distorted reflections of “normalcy” (a set of expectations that no one, in truth, fulfills); they move through time and space in different ways that diverge from the cleanliness and order of the narrative form. By adapting these stories to the demands of narrative, scholars have obscured a rich landscape of unexpected trajectories and fluid encounters with time