Sexual and Spatial Relations: How Transgender and Nonbinary Individuals Navigate Sexuality and Satisfaction

Sex research positions sexual satisfaction as divorced from the social world, singularly constructed by individuals and their personal experiences. This individualistic lens erases the norms, expectations, and assumptions that create the ways sex is done and the positionalities individuals bring to their sexual experiences. The scant sexual satisfaction research on transgender or nonbinary (TNB) individuals combines this individualistic view with the medical model, thereby reshaping transness into a static, objectified experience dependent on medicalization. This project utilizes ten in-depth interviews and eighty-one qualitative survey responses to move past negative, medicalized, and individualized narratives of transness and sexuality. This project demonstrates that there is no clear delineation between the sociopolitical world and a TNB individual’s sexuality and sexual satisfaction. For interviewees, sex and the social world are highly relational. That is, non-sexual domains and sexual domains are always in conversation with each other, informing the autonomy and agency that characterizes interviewees’ sex lives. Every interviewee was sexually satisfied and highlighted how medicalized narratives were far from their truth. This study directly counters transnormative perspectives and shows the value of viewing sexuality through a spatial lens.