How Trans/itions Assemble | Arranging Gender/Sex

Ph.D. project in the Research Training Group Doing Transitions at Goethe University Frankfurt funded by the German Research Association | 2020-2024 

The project looks at how gender/sex transitions come about in Germany today. By transitions I generally mean ways of changing gender/sex that do not adhere to the medically assigned, legally enforced, static male/female dichotomy. I conducted a new materialist ethnography in Germany in 2020-2023: I interviewed transitioning individuals, collected data related to their transition processes, participated in community spaces, talked to activists, counsellors and medical practicioners, and studied medicolegal regulations.
I am interested in how gender/sex transitions are constituted and become evident as transitions: When is a transition a transition? How are its boundaries defined, and what gets excluded in the boundary-drawing-process? And what do these boundaries imply for the possibility to be/come trans/itioning? And for contemporary gender relations more broadly? To analyse how transitions are composed and conditioned, I employ a new materialist methodology and draw on relational understandings of differentiation from Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference-in-itself, and the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of Assemblage/Agencement.

Forming Trans/sexuality
at the Frankfurt Institute for Sexual Science (1973–2006)

Research project funded by the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and the Arts in the programme „Dimensionen der Kategorie Geschlecht – Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in Hessen“ | 2024-2026 


The project looks at the formation of trans(sexuality) in Germany, focussing on the Frankfurt Institute for Sexual Science as a pivotal site for creating understandings and regulations of trans/gender/sex/uality. The project provides a discourse-historical analysis of the Institute’s role in shaping and conditioning trans/itions in Germany. I investigate how notions of gender/sex, body, health and identity were formed and modified over time at the institute, and inform treatment models, clinical guidelines and practices, as well as law making and public views and debates on trans/itions to this day. I take the institute as a vantage point to trace lager shifts in the medicolegal regulation of gender/sex and contextualise current debates around trans(sexuality) and gender self-determination, especially with regards to the Self-Determination Act and recent changes in diagnostic manuals, medical guidelines and practices.