Trans men’s stealth aesthetics: navigating penile prosthetics and ‘gender fraud’

Abstract

This article examines trans commercial production of penile prosthetics, the efficacy of such products in personal and sex-segregated spaces, and their negative valence in the public sphere. Responding to his own experience of gender dysphoria, Transthetics founder Alex designs and produces products for the reparative and enabling embodiment of trans men. Penile prosthetics reflect the longstanding tension between aesthetics and function in the history of prosthetic limbs. The author posits ‘stealth aesthetics’ as a function-injected realism that pushes into reality via utilization of prosthetics in the performance of real life. For some trans men, the phenomenologically incorporated prosthetic is tantamount to a corporeal penis. Cisnormativity, however, outlaws this equivalence. Recent prosecutions of penile prosthetic embodiment as ‘gender fraud’ punitively restrict trans men’s claim on reality, instead exposing their private bodies to public judgment, where genitals produce gender. By contrast, the author advocates the authorization of gender to produce genitals.