By probing the processes of exclusion of transsexuals from the political sphere, this article offers contributions to social and political theory through an examination of the processes of exclusion from the category "human." This article considers how the erasure of investment in their own embodied sex constructs a platform from which to blame others for sex/gender variance, as well as to justify that blaming. Bringing together Giorgio Agamben, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, and Nikolas Rose with transphobia, medicalization in psychiatry, law, and ethopolitics, this article questions whose investment in sexed embodiment counts and why that investment might be seen as "crazy."

Antidiscrimination legislation is the vehicle most commonly used by communities to demand equality, but how should such law best be employed? In this article, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal decision in Hogan v. Ontario (Health and Long-term Care) is examined in relation to the removal of sex reassignment surgery from the Alberta Healthcare Insurance Plan in order to better understand the legal strategies designed to remedy different kinds of discrimination. This article argues that trans issues (involving people who identify as transgender, transsexual, or trans) ought not to be seen as additions to gay and lesbian issues legally or politically. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the fight for formal inclusion in legislation as a discrete or insular minority should be rejected by trans activists, as other legal strategies are better positioned to combat the processes of transphobia, thus potentially offering important steps towards substantive equality.

This article discusses the use of art mediums as methods to enhance the theoretical and political intentions of an academic work. More specifically, it traces the author’s moving from one artistic method to another, in order to show how the engagement with the theory that is afforded by each is different. Taking performance ethnography as a methodology, the author argues that two different artistic mediums (performance text and art installation) function as significant tools of method that inform his research on various forms of transphobic violence. The author discusses the ways in which the author’s experience as a transsexed (transsexual) researcher and artist informed the move into this methodology, and the ways in which the chosen method of art installation allows the work to perform and be performative more effectively than the original paper-based performance text method.

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