Transmen, Sexual Violence, and Interpreting Harm
I am a PhD student in Sociology at McGill University studying sexual violence against transmen and the relationship between patterns of harm and their interpretation. North American studies report high rates of sexual violence among transmen and transmasculine respondents, but qualitative research on its mechanisms, contexts, and interpretation remains limited.
My MA work combined feminist narrative inquiry with socio-legal analysis. Within Canada’s sex-neutral sexual assault doctrine, adjudication offers a revealing setting for examining how violence is narrated and understood. Although sex is not an element of the offence, it may inform courts’ understanding of vulnerability, coercion, and harm. Criminal liability does not necessarily settle what violence means or to which patterns it belongs.
I developed epistemic substitution to describe how gender identity can displace sex as the primary framework for interpreting sexual assault. My analysis of Canadian judicial decisions examines how this can obscure sexed power relations, dependence, and the regulation of gender nonconformity. Potential consequences include effects on credibility assessments, legal outcomes, risk assessment, access to services, and data collection.
My proposed PhD study combines a survey and in-depth interviews with people in Canada and the United States who currently identify or previously identified as transmen or transmasculine. It asks: What social conditions and relationships are associated with sexual violence? How do survivors interpret, categorize, and explain their experiences? How well do established theories of sexual violence explain the findings? Guided by critical realism and informed by sociology of knowledge, it will compare participants’ interpretations with patterns across the data, assess competing explanations, and examine the explanatory value of epistemic substitution.
Professional Background
Before becoming a graduate researcher, I worked as a Registered Nurse specializing in psychiatric care, with experience across acute, tertiary, community, and educational settings. My roles included psychiatric stabilization, tertiary eating-disorder treatment, youth mental health, clinical supervision, and psychiatric-nursing education.
This clinical background informs my research on trauma, narrative, and recognition. Psychiatric nursing requires close attention to how people make sense of overwhelming experiences: what can be said, what remains fragmented, and how the listener shapes what becomes speakable.
My academic work extends this clinical attention to listening, meaning-making, and interpretation. Across both nursing and scholarship, I am interested in how people give form to difficult experience, and how institutions respond when that experience does not fit familiar categories.
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Public Statement (February 2025)
