Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Phenomenology and the Multiplicity of Trans Narratives

Being transgender involves unique relationships to one's body and the question of narrative in subject-formation-both key Merleau-Pontian themes. But even if we go beyond the stereotypical "trapped in the wrong body" story, both within trans communities and the wider public discourse there is generally an unfortunate tendency to universalize such narratives-in spite of the apparent heterogeneity we find in individual first-person accounts. And so the question arises: How can we philosophically account for this first-person difference while aiming for a politics of solidarity? This essay aims to utilize Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in a prac-tical sense, focusing on his account of the "body schema" as a way to mitigate this tension. For while Merleau-Ponty provides us with a general set of tools through which to understand the relationship between embodiment and comportment, his phenomenological examples are often intensely singular. In the context of transgen-der subjectivities, therefore, the aim is to carve out further this discursive space, as a prologue to a praxis that is more responsive to the lived experience of trans people.