For decades, trans studies and queer theory have treated the trans body as a theoretical construct - a site for identity, dysphoria, and gender politics - leaving erotic realities largely unexamined. Desire, pleasure, and real sex has been pushed to the margins, rendered almost unspeakable.

This book challenges that silence. It asks why sexuality - once a privileged site of inquiry in queer theory - has all but vanished from trans scholarship, and what this erasure reveals about the politics of respectability, cisnormativity, and the lingering discomfort with bodies that refuse to behave "properly."

Through rigorous analysis and intimate narrative, the book explores how bodies do things - and how different bodies do different things - shaping possibilities for desire, sensation, and intimacy. It interrogates the cultural and academic forces that have de-sexed trans subjects, examines the aesthetic and linguistic struggles around naming and eroticizing trans bodies, and charts a path toward a trans studies that embraces the messy, fleshy, and truly human dimensions of sexuality.

Both provocative and personal, this book insists that there can be no real account of gender without a reckoning with sex. It is a call to bring pleasure back into the conversation - not as an afterthought, but as a vital site of knowledge, resistance, and joy.

RIKI WILCHINS is a founder of modern transgender rights. She is the author of 15 books including The Second Coming: Trans Women Talk About Sex After Surgery (forthcoming, 2026), BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens (2023), and Burn the Binary! (2017). Wilchins' work has been profiled in the New York Times, and TIME Magazine selected her among "100 Civic Leaders for the 21st Century".