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Abstract

Packing is a practice undertaken by some trans men and transmasculine people, involving putting something into your underwear to provide the feeling or impression of a bulge or to emulate the shape or function of a penis. While there are DIY solutions to this, a niche industry has developed around the commercial provision of devices for this purpose, ranging from foam padding to highly detailed multi-functional prosthetic penises. Drawing on historical community newsletters, and archived and contemporary brand websites I analyse the development of this market from the 1980s through to the end of 2022. Taking an actor network theory informed perspective on market emergence, I centre the devices themselves to ask what makes a prosthetic intended for trans consumers different to materially very similar objects like dildos. Through attending to the development and organisation of this market, I argue that the diverse networks of discourses and material relationships that make up the market for prosthetics enact them as specifically trans products, and thus as distinct from closely related objects like dildos. In doing so I attend to how the prosthetic market historically helped to solidify a trans male subjectivity, as well as to constitute trans people as consumers of specifically trans products.

Keywords

Trans marketisation packing prosthetics packers

Introduction

What makes a prosthetic used by a trans man in the practice of packing different from a dildo? Take, for example, two similar products. The first is made by the company Banana Prosthetics and is described as a ‘Hard Packer’ (2023a), the second is a ‘Mustang’ dildo made by Vixen Creations (2023). They are, materially very similar; both are handmade out of silicone, are similar dimensions, and are intended to visually resemble an erect penis, replete with veins and skin detailing. The base models of both have a flat back, where the product sits against the wearer. Both also have options available at a higher cost to get a ‘sensation plug’ in the case of the Hard Packer, and ‘saddle base’ for the dildo; these provide additional sexual stimulation to the wearer. Given this, the main intended usage for both is to be worn with underwear or a harness that attaches them to the body to allow them to be used to have sex. There are some differences too; the ‘Hard Packer’ has testicles and a larger ‘tab’ that could also be used to adhere it to the body with medical glue. Yet, despite this difference, I would also suggest that these two products are largely interchangeable in usage. The trans scholar JR Latham (2016), in his discussion of trans men’s sexual narrative practices, also points to something similar. In his analysis of trans men’s autobiographies and how his subjects enact themselves as male in their sexual encounters, Latham writes of one:

Regardless of the physical make-up of Martino’s ‘false penis’ or what it was when first acquired (a dildo, a prosthetic, and so), what it is intra-actively to him and his lover is a penis, even if a ‘false’ one. (Latham, 2016:356, my emphasis).

In this, Latham is gesturing to how such products, prosthetics and dildos, are both able to be incorporated into their wearers’ masculine embodiment. Given their similarities then, why might a trans man want to buy the ‘Hard Packer’ specifically, rather than a dildo called ‘Mustang’?

In this article, I attend to the diverse networks of discourses and material relationships that make up a market for packers and prosthetics, which I argue enacts them as distinct from dildos, and co-constitutes them as a trans product with a trans consumer. I refer to these products collectively as ‘packsthetics’ to describe a variety of closely related products; the hard packer of the example above, as well as ‘soft’ packers for day-to-day wear and a range of multifunction devices that may be referred to as stand-to-pee (abbreviated as STP), 2-, 3-, and 4-in-1 devices (named for how many different kinds of functions they possess, with the four functions being pack, play, piss, and pleasure). The language used to describe all these products is flexible and differentially applied by both trans individuals and manufacturers; even within a single company’s website the same product might be variously referred to as a packer, a prosthetic and a 3-in-1. By referring to them collectively as packsthetics I refuse clear or neat distinctions between product description, intended use and use in practice. Narrating the development of the packsthetics market over the previous 40 years, I draw on Michel Callon’s (2021) conception of ‘market agencement’ to understand how it is organised. Throughout this period, I explore how packsthetics are encountered in this market and how this market sutures together packers and prosthetics (again, hence my use of packsthetics) as terms to describe such products to their intended trans consumers, as well as rendering them different to products called dildos. In doing so, I also describe some of the interwoven materialities and discourses involved in the constantly shifting enactment of this market, including silicone, pleasure, medico-legal regimes, newsletters, transness, sex toy stores, and e-commerce.

I start by briefly attending to the commodification of trans embodiment and the existing literature on packing, before laying out the conceptual approach I take and how it differs from these previous studies. I present my main discussion in sections that are broadly chronological, but are predominantly thematically organised. In the first, I consider the rise of a figure I term the trans entrepreneur, who with the help of materials like latex, foam, and silicone, came together to constitute the start of the commercial packsthetics market. I then explore how exchanges within FTM newsletters sought to distinguish the prosthetic from the dildo through both identity and the framing of the prosthetic as a medical device, rather than a pleasure device. Building on this, the next section attends to the legitimation of the prosthetic, through its association with medicalisation. Finally, I cover discourses of pleasure and the ‘technological imaginary’ of packsthetics, which valorises the process of improvement (Jones, 2008), and enacts them as always in motion towards the next, better version of themselves.

Trans embodiment, materiality and market agencements

Relationships between consumption, commodification, and forms of trans embodiments have received some scholarly attention (such as Lewis and Irving, 2017; Hegarty, 2017). Aren Aizura’s (2009) scholarship on feminisation surgery in Thailand attends to what he describes as ‘somatechnical capital’. Drawing on Stryker’s (2006) description of somatechnics as the inseparability of embodiment and technology, Aizura argues that there is also a nexus between embodiment and the commercialised technologies through which bodies are made and transformed, ‘according to the shifting values of what is desirable, commodifiable and in demand.' (Aizura, 2009:305) Though I take a different conceptual and theoretical approach than Aizura—he draws in part on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital while I look to actor network theory (ANT) scholarship—I follow his suggestion that attention must be paid to the tangle of relationships between trans embodiment and modes of consumption. I argue that packsthetics must also be understood as a commercialised technology, and I attend to how they are enacted as such.

The literature on packing has to date paid little attention to them as a commercial technology or to the market through which they are bought. Packing and packsthetic products are often contained within relatively brief mentions (Burford and Orchard, 2014; Reddy-Best et al., 2022; Straayer, 2020). Where packing as trans embodiment is discussed in more depth, existing scholarship has largely focussed on language and discourse (Edelman and Zimman, 2014; Latham, 2016) or media depictions (Cole-Kurz, 2022). By my count, only two works focus on packers as material technologies. Plis and Blackwood (2012) report that for their ethnographic participants packers are ‘cultural genitals’, drawing on Kessler and McKenna’s (1985) notion. Straayer, 2020 discussion advances a theorisation of their use as a ‘stealth aesthetic’, suggesting that the prosthetic’s ability to mimic the function of a flesh penis, above its look, are what make it ‘real’. While Straayer briefly notes the niche prosthetics industry and that many of the companies that populate it are trans-owned, it is not the focus of his analysis. My aim is to build on this limited scholarship to fully outline the contours of this industry, and to engage with packsthetics as a commodity.

Because I seek to centre the packsthetic as a thing within my analysis, I draw on ANT and its focus on material networks of things and practices which ‘hang together’ to bring bodies and worlds into being (Law, 2009; Mol, 2002, 2016). I primarily draw on Callon’s (2021; see also Çalışkan and Callon, 2009, 2010) deployments of ANT concepts to study the formation of markets. Callon argues that these are best understood as ‘market agencements’. In describing them as ‘agencements’–a French concept typically translated as assemblage–Callon is drawing on an ANT conceptualisation of networks of heterogeneous components, each with agency to influence the shape of the overall assemblage. In contrast to what he critiques as abstracted market models based on buyers and sellers, and supply and demand, Callon suggests market agencements as a richer way to think through the complex tangle of relationships and actors that contribute to the formation of anything as a commercial good.

Callon (2021) describes five ‘frames’ through which market agencements can be studied. In this article I focus on the second of these frames which he describes as ‘market encounters’. This calls for the scholar to attend and describe how goods, vendors and buyers are put into relation with one another through all the components involved in the process of an encounter with a good we might potentially buy; from marketing through to the spaces, be it online (as it almost always is for packsthetics¹) or a physical store in which we come into direct contact with the good. This frame, Callon writes, invites us to consider both the more obvious factors like marketing, as well as a wide variety of intermediation devices that become near invisible to the end consumer. As Callon notes, this can involve everything from those who design the thing, its materials, and those who market it through to the web of regulations and laws with which the goods, their design and their market must comply. These all must cohere, however unknowingly and unintentionally, for the market to come together and for the customer to encounter it. Callon’s ideas have been taken up in studies of markets as diverse as livestock cattle (Enticott and Little, 2022), graduate admissions (Bloch and Mitterle, 2022) and period products (Cochoy, 2021). This builds on scholarship that drew on Callon’s earlier publications in which he was developing this concept of markets as assemblages, and includes studies on early phone banking apps (Maurer, 2012), on-demand food delivery (van Doorn, 2020) and cannabis markets (Huff et al., 2021). Callon’s work on markets is thus malleable to a wide range of different settings that seemingly have little in common with one another. What they share is that in each case, the goods or service in question cannot be understood in full without consideration of the networked relationships that go into enacting them.

Methodology: Tracing the emergence of a packsthetics market

To illustrate the emergence of this commercial market, and explore how its products are described, I developed a timeline documenting the first appearance of packsthetics companies, shown in Figure 1. I began this timeline in 1989 with the first commercially advertised packsthetic I have found and carried it through to the end 2022; the end of the data collection phase of this project. To build this I have relied on three primary sources of information. Firstly, for the early pre-internet years I rely on newsletters produced by emerging ‘F2M’ and ‘FTM’ groups from the 1980s to the early 2000s who provide first-hand discussions of packsthetics at the moment in which they are emerging as a commercial possibility. I have utilised the Toronto-based publication Metamorphosis which began in 1982, California-based FTM Newsletter from 1987, London-based Boys Own, which started in 1991, and two Australian publications Boys Will Be Boys from 1991 and Torque from 2001. I scoured every issue for the product reviews and advertising contained within them to track when packing products began being marketed to such FTM men. Secondly, for the early days of the internet I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to access older, archived versions of sites that shared information for trans men and that sold packing products. Utilising these sites and the Wayback Machine I was able to identify several early brands that no longer exist. Thirdly, and finally, I have used current websites operated directly by packsthetics companies to identify when they first came onto the market and how they frame and term their products.

Figure 1.

Timeline showing the packsthetic market over the period 1989–2022. Years are noted on the x-axis, each blue bar represents a different company that makes packsthetics. Bar placement and length indicates the year the company began (and ended, where relevant) offering packsthetics products. Companies noted with an asterisk (*) appeared to be active during the preparation of this timeline in 2022, but seem to have become inactive around the end of 2022 during timeline finalisation. Figure 1 shows only companies whose major focus is packsthetics products for trans customers while Figure 2 shows sex toy manufacturers who also make packsthetics in addition to a range of other product categories.

To construct this timeline I searched for the first appearance of a product, either in one of the identified newsletters, the early online resources, or on contemporary social media and e-commerce sites for more recent products. I then determined whether it was still available during the data collection period, or if not, when it ceased appearing in one of these sources. This method is imperfect; I may have missed products that were not advertised in the newsletter sources I have looked at. Additionally, the Wayback Machine has many gaps and absences that may contribute either to missing products entirely or to the dates presented here being slightly off. Likewise, given my geographic locale, my sources are all English-language, or companies whose websites have in-built English translation functions, and thus there may be regionally-specific companies that primarily operate in another language I have missed. Despite these limitations, I suggest this is the most complete academic record of packsthetics producers assembled to date.

In keeping with Callon’s ANT approach, I focused on the newsletters and websites as texts that are not just the reflection or representation of reality, but an enactment of reality. Methodologically, I follow Nimmo’s (2011) suggestion to read such texts on multiple levels, at once seeing both their content and intention, but also the role of the texts in defining, and thus constituting, their content. Therefore, the analysis I undertake is not to discover the ‘truth’ of these texts but to make sense of them within their contexts and what they might do (Leavy, 2007; Reinharz, 1992). Part of this also requires consideration of these texts’ intertextuality; how they relate to, draw upon and incorporate other texts, as well as the assumptions and presuppositions embedded in them (Fairclough, 2003). Using this approach, I weave together multiple layers of information into a picture that describes, interprets and analyses the development of the packsthetics market.

FTM Newsletter and the emergence of the trans entrepreneur

The early period of the packsthetics industry is characterised by both distinct types of producers and distinct product materialities; as I outline here early trans owned businesses utilised foam and latex, while medical prosthetists introduced silicone which has now become the standard throughout the packsthetics market. However, the first commercially available packsthetic by my count was made by neither, instead being produced by ‘Parivarto’ a woman described as being sympathetic to FTM men. This was first advertised in 1989 in the California-based FTM Newsletter, which had quickly become the go-to source for trans men across the USA and remained so until the internet slowly took hold towards the end of the millennium (Stryker, 2017). This first product was not described as either a prosthetic or a packer, but simply as a ‘Willie’, and was made of foam and moulded from ‘an actual phallus so the look is exactly what it should be (it’s even circumcised)' (FTM International, 1989:4). The next device to appear in the magazine, in 1992, was similarly a packer made of foam. However it was produced by one of the newsletter’s FTM members under the business name Creative Growth Enterprises, and described as a prosthesis even though the device is functionally and materially similar to the ‘Willie’. This is an early indication of a key trend I illustrate throughout this article, where prosthetic is a term widely employed by trans men to identify their products, while materially near-identical products made by those outside this group use other terms; most commonly packer. It is with this product that evidence of trans men as not just potential consumers, but as entrepreneurial producers, comes into focus.

Shortly after this, also in 1992, Creative Growth Enterprises introduced a second type of packsthetic, promising ‘the ability to stand and urinate, create an endless erection, be personally stimulated during intercourse, and look and feel totally normal' (FTM International, 1992:5). Though there was contestation in commentary in the newsletter about whether it worked as intended, I believe it to be the first such multifunction device (FTM International, 1994a; 1996a). The product was not cheap (USD$500 in 1992, equivalent to over USD$1100 at time of writing), though it was marketed as a replacement for surgery and thus as an attractively priced alternative to the far more expensive phalloplasty. In contrast to the earlier foam products, these were made of ‘latex and plastics' (Boys Will Be Boys, 1992:1). Similar materials were used by other early entrepreneurs of this period. For example, another FTM member formed a company in 1992 that made ‘female-to-male ‘Fantasy Genitalia’ that look real, feel real and stay put in your clothing’ (FTM International, 1992:5). Yet another FTM man advertised in 1992 what he called the ‘Transitional Prosthesis’, a product consisting of a latex skin filled with ‘gak’; essentially a viscous gel that could be made at home (FTM International, 1992).

The emergence of these early devices points to the development of a figure I call the trans entrepreneur. I draw this name in part from a disclaimer offered in the newsletter accompanying its advertisement section: ‘the FTM Newsletter does not necessarily endorse any products or services advertised or reported on within its pages, though in principle we support entrepreneurial FTMs' (FTM International, 1992:5). This support was buttressed by a long-standing policy in which advertisements in the newsletter from FTM businesses were free, while non-FTM businesses needed to pay. This policy is an early example of how organised FTM groups explicitly and actively promote supporting and buying from in-group businesses. This kind of promotion assists small businesses owned by and catering to FTM men to get off the ground, providing them with an in-built customer base. Part of catering to this in-built base is, I suggest, describing products in terms of language that those customers were expecting: packers or prosthetics. Other terms related to packing practices were circulating in the same period. For example, ‘padding’ (Sullivan, 1985), or ‘crotch-filler’ (FTM International, 1994a); neither of which seems to have caught on for a product description. These trans entrepreneurs, as I return to later, are also recognisable as ‘prosumers’ who collapse the role of producer and consumer (Ertz et al., 2025). As Straayer, 2020 describes of the current-day company Transthetics, the business owner Alex views himself as the first customer and initially developed products based off his own desires in a packsthetic; this is almost certainly true too of these historical trans entrepreneurs.

The materials, largely foam and latex, of these early products were what was readily available to the trans entrepreneurs that populated this cottage industry. By contrast the first commercially available silicone packsthetics I have found available were both developed by medical prosthetists. A packsthetic developed by the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in conjunction with the Dutch medical prosthesis firm De Nijs Prosthesen was first advertised in FTM Newsletter in 1992, and is the only packsthetic developed by a medical institution that seems to have had any success. Attempts were made by multiple ‘gender clinics’ across the USA in the 1970s (Raj, 1982), while the UK newsletter Boys Own documents an account of a prosthetic made for a trans patient by the National Health Service in the 1980s (FTM Network, 1993). Yet these seem to be largely contained to prototypes that were abandoned due to their lack of functionality and problems with the realness (Raj, 1982). By contrast, the De Nijs packsthetic was available by mail order, and from 2000 online, to FTM men in both Europe and the USA (De Nijs Prosthesen, 2000). The other early silicone device from this period was similarly developed by a medical prosthetist from South Australia who was asked in 1995 by a doctor to make a device for an FTM patient. He subsequently began selling these commercially under the company name Camouflage Prosthetics; later renamed to FTM Prosthetics. Coming onto the market in 1996 and still available through the end of 2022, I believe that FTM Prosthetics is the longest-running packsthetics company.² While today it offers both flaccid, erect and ‘dual’ prosthetics, it initially offered just a flaccid version. Though this product, functionally, only packs, it was described as a prosthetic and ‘not just a ‘packy’, it looks and feels real’ (Camouflage Prosthetics, 2001). The term prosthetic here thus helps to frame its ostensible aesthetic and tactile realism as superior to ‘the Packy’, another product on the market at the same time.

First advertised in 1996, the Packy was a silicone product ‘developed by and for FTMs, in association with Vixen Creations' (FTM International, 1996b:14). Vixen Creations is a sex toy manufacturer based in California that still makes a silicone packer today in an updated and renamed form. The company was created by a former employee of Good Vibrations, a pioneering woman-founded sex toy shop that first opened in 1977 in San Francisco. Good Vibrations also began making a packer around 2000, called the soft pack, with other women-owned brick-and-mortar sex toy stores across the USA, including Early to Bed (opened 2001 in Chicago) which today has a trans-specific off-shoot store called Trans Essentials, following suit. The production of a packsthetic by Vixen Creations and the stocking of such products historically by women-founded and focused sex shops points to slippages between the developing language and understanding of sexual and gender identities throughout the 90s, and packing’s fluidity as a practice across these. As I describe next, discussions within the FTM community newsletters demonstrates concerted efforts to distance the prosthetic from the dildo.

The butch/FTM ‘border wars’ and the identity of the packsthetic

Though I am focused on packing as practice undertaken by trans-identified people, packing might also be done by women, and it has also been associated with butch identities in particular (Rothblum, 2010; Rubin, 2006). While this could mean ‘hard packing’ (as in wearing a strap-on under one’s clothes), ‘soft packing’ is also a recognised practice. From a material standpoint, I would suggest that there is little significant difference between butch packing and FTM packing; if there is something that makes them distinct, it is the identity of the person doing it and potentially the intention of that person in packing. Packing then is an example of the overlap between butch and FTM identities, an overlap that contributed to what Jack Halberstam would term ‘border wars’ in 1998. That is, contestation over whether butch identities were transgender (as in the older usage of transgender to denote a social gender transgression or transition, see Stryker, 2017), and how butch identities overlapped or diverged from specifically transsexual (as in seeking to alter one’s sexed body) FTM identities.

In ‘F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity', Halberstam (1999[1994]) explores the diversity of masculine embodiments, arguing this illustrated gender’s operation as a kind of fiction. In this, Halberstam included a discussion of phalloplasty surgery and its silicone alternatives, asking ‘If penises were purchasable, in other words - functional penises, that is who exactly might want one?' (1999[1994]:129) This essay earned a rebuke in FTM Newsletter from one of its editors, James, who objected to this suggestion, responding to Halberstam:

Our gender and our lives are not fiction: we struggle every day with the realities of legal and medical identities that we cannot take off like strap-on dildos… (FTM International, 1994b:12)

Halberstam, in a subsequent 1998 journal article addressing such responses observed that in his reply James is claiming the seriousness of FTM men’s masculinity. In James’ accusation that strap-on dildos can be taken off, he suggests butch masculinities are disposable and performative by comparison (Halberstam, 1998). While James’ comments could be read as about the permanency of phalloplasty, I suggest they might also be read as about the prosthetic; while butches might use strap-ons, FTMs use prosthetics–one merely for pleasure, the other ostensibly a serious medical device. Further, James’ invocation of FTM as partly a medical identity, by extension frames the prosthetic as a medical device. As I focus on in the next section, this medical framing conveys multiple meanings, among them necessity and legitimacy, while obscuring the fact that the prosthetic can be as much a device for pleasure as a dildo. This also points to part of the co-constitution of packsthetics and trans consumers. It ostensibly re-affirms the identity and experiences of trans men to use a device called a prosthetic specifically, differentiating them from women’s usages of strap-on dildos, and distancing them from butch identities through the medicalised nature of the term. The framing of the prosthesis as fulfilling a medical purpose by the owner-operator of HomeGrown also connects such products with complex discourses about transness and medicalisation, as I return to below.

A slightly later exchange in the Australian newsletter Torque offers similar insight into how a medicalised distinction circulated in the language used to describe these devices. The owner-operator of the Australian business HomeGrown Prosthetics, who advertised in Torque, was interviewed in 2005 by one of the newsletter’s editors, with a number of the questions focusing on what distinguished prosthetics from strap-on dildos:

[HomeGrown] A dildo only caters for one aspect of a penis. [sic]

[Editor] Righto - so, clearly theres [sic] a difference between a prosthesis and dildo?

[HomeGrown] Of course there is a difference… [sic] the first is for medical purposes and the other is for pleasure! :) [sic] A prosthesis is made to enhance and correct. It allows a masculine identified person who chooses to wear one the comfort of knowing that to the naked eye they are no different to any of their male counter parts [sic]. (FTM Australia, 2005:18–19)

These comments provide insight into how the use of the term prosthetic is explicitly conceptualised here as both medical and a matter of personal choice, and as not for pleasure. This rejection of prosthetics’ erotic potentiality also fits within broader trends in which trans people’s access to medical transition is partly dependent on their disavowal of their sexual pleasure to medical gatekeepers who expect trans narratives that present genital hatred and a lack of a sexual life (see Latham, 2018; Stone, 1991).

Following early entrants like Vixen Creations, in more recent years quite a few larger manufacturers who make a variety of sex toys have also begun making packing products, as illustrated in Figure 2. Notably, most of these companies use a sub-brand that is packer-specific. For example, the Gender X packers are a sub-brand made by Evolved Novelties, whose main lines of sex toys are marketed towards ‘women and couples' (Evolved Novelties, 2023). Using a coded sub-brand like Gender X enacts sex toy manufacturers’ packsthetics as intended for a trans and, as its use of ‘X’ in the name suggests, non-binary audience.³ Similarly the naming of packsthetics products throughout the industry typically frame them as masculine. For example, the Packy, which I noted above made by Good Vibrations, is know today as the Sailor while the names for packsthetic models made by the New York Toy Collective include Archer, Jack, and and Pierre. That the packsthetic market is not merely a subcategory of products in the sex toy industry but is clearly recognised as a distinct market and audience, into which sex toy manufacturers are venturing with specific sub-brands and targeted product names, points to the importance of language within the packsthetics market. The commercial descriptions and labelling of products have a relationship to whom these products are enacted as being for. Further, they play a role both historically and today in constituting a specific trans-male identity. This is part of what the term prosthetic and packer do as part of the assemblage of a market for packsthetic products. People who are butch and non-binary, among others, continue to pack today, and indeed are explicitly included as potential customers and users by some packsthetics companies. However, the predominant discourse surrounding the term prosthetic and packer, and how such products are positioned, mark them first and foremost as a trans object to be used in a trans practice. Beyond this, as I have alluded to above, prosthetic as a term also carries particular medical connotations concerning trans men that I elaborate on further in the next section.

Figure 2.

Timeline showing the entry of sex toy manufacturers into the packsthetic market over the period 1989–-2022. Years are noted on the x-axis, each blue bar represents a different company. Bar placement and length indicates the year the company began (and ended, where relevant) offering packsthetics products.

Prosthetics, medical devices and legitimacy

To enter into a discussion about packsthetics’ potentiality to be medical devices, and the legitimation that this might afford, I turn to the only contemporary example of a packsthetic that can be paid for through a health care system; t2 prosthetics which was developed ‘by and for trans + individuals' (t2 prosthetics, 2022a:paragraph 1). t2 prosthetics’ website describes itself as a community collaboration to design ‘the perfect penis-scrotum prosthesis' (t2 prosthetics, 2022a: paragraph 1). While the t2 prosthesis is commercially sold, their website makes it clear that ordering one is also buying into a research project, one that is ongoing and with the expectation that users will provide feedback and become part of the design process. In 2022, they offered one product, the Phase4 prosthesis with its name referring to the iterative development of the product starting from Phase1 in 2005. Because of its purpose as a research project, t2 has what it terms a ‘No hype policy’; refusing to actively market products through advertising or social media. Due to this, information about t2 is hard to come by, outside of what is offered on its website (t2 prosthetics, 2022b).

What can be gleaned is that t2 is based in Germany, predominantly sells within the European Union (EU) and appears to be the primary initiative of one person. It is also the only product I have come across that is a registered medical device, ‘in accordance with the EU Medical Device Regulation (EU) 2017/745' (t2 prosthetics, 2022b:paragraph 1). What this does is make the t2 prosthetic eligible to be covered under some EU countries’ medical insurance plans and thus paid for by health insurers. The details on how to claim such reimbursement are outlined on the t2 website. This example is illuminating both about prosthetics’ potentiality to be caught up in the regulatory systems of the medical-industrial complex, and the tensions inherent in the term prosthetic in this context. Yet, I suggest that it is because, outside of this lone case, the packsthetic is not in such systems that the commercial market I describe has flourished. As I argue here, the medical-industrial complex is both a part of the enactment of the packsthetics market and, because the vast majority of these are not registered medical devices, a part of its condition of possibility (Callon, 2021).

For any of the products I discuss in this article to be formally registered medical devices they would have to adhere to, as t2 points to, the relevant government legislation that defines what a medical device is. Further such regulations adhere to medicalised language that a medical device be used in ‘diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, predication, prognosis, treatment or alleviation of disease[…] or compensation for an injury or disability' (Australian Government, 2023: Chapter 4, Part 4, Division 2 41BD). For packsthetics to be viewed as a medical device under such legislated definitions, then, transness itself must be conceptualised as a disease or disability for which the packsthetic is a treatment, alleviation or mitigation. Conceptualising transness in this way is, to put it mildly, contested. As both advocates (Feinberg, 1999; Global Action for Trans Equality, 2023; Zwickl et al., 2022) and academics (Eisfeld, 2014; Lane, 2018; Stone, 1991; Stryker, 2017) have repeatedly argued, trans peoples’ identities are not diseases to be pathologised.

However, a number of scholars, including Jasbir Puar (2014, 2017), Alexandre Baril (2015) and more recently Cameron Awkward-Rich (2022), have also argued persuasively for the productivity of understanding transness in conjunction with disability, mental illness, or ‘maladjustment’ (in Awkward-Rich’s terms). Baril (2015) in particular, points to how being trans can be experienced by some as a ‘debility’ that is neither medical (in the sense of trans being pathological) nor purely social (in the sense of this debility being the result of social stigma). Packsthetics in this context are prosthetics that have the potential to address the debilitating effects (such as genital dysphoria or needing to pee standing up) that some trans people experience. Baril (2015: 62) notes this explicitly, writing that cis men without penises are considered disabled while trans men’s lack of a penis is seen as ‘normal according to a cisnormative ontology’, and concluding that ‘prosthetic penises are regarded as medical devices for cisgender men and sex toys for trans men.’ That the term prosthetic is widely and commonly used by trans people points to how they are experienced by their wearers, and how for some they can address one ‘debility’ of being trans. Despite this, it is precisely because they are not prosthetics in the sense of a regulated medical device that packsthetics can be made by trans entrepreneurial businesses and circulated transnationally.

With the sole exception of t2 prosthetics, none of the products I discuss are formally registered as prosthetics and thus they are not subject to the same regulatory administration and oversight as other types of medical devices. Indeed, several companies include disclaimers somewhere on their sales websites to explicitly distance their products from medical devices. For example, Banana Prosthetics, a Canada-based company that opened in 2020, has terms and conditions that state ‘Buyers agree to use this item at their own risk. This item is not a medical device, and no medical use of this item is stated or implied' (Banana Prosthetics, 2023b: paragraph 3). This distancing of the packsthetic as a medical device helps producers skirt regulatory regimes and has contributed to the flourishing of the trans entrepreneur and handmade products; getting a product approved as a medical device for use can be a bureaucratic and expensive process. This could potentially come with higher standards relating to production, as well as increased difficulty in the products’ movement across transnational boundaries due to different requirements in different jurisdictions.

Yet if these packsthetics products are called dildos, or product descriptions widely used within the sex industry like adult or novelty toy, these communicate something different. A toy is not framed as (medically) necessary in the same ways that a prosthetic is, as the quote from Baril (2015) above demonstrates. As some marketing scholars have argued, producers take on activities of legitimation through strategic language use and framing (Humphreys, 2010; Lee et al., 2017), though consumers are also engaged in this through sense-making and shared meaning (Huff et al., 2021; Rosa et al., 1999). The term prosthetic in this sense is also part of the creation of value and of communicating that value (Callon, 2021). The function of the term prosthetic in this market is multiple and complex; it speaks to how it might alleviate some debilitating effects that trans people might experience (Baril 2015), even as it requires raising the spectre of medicine and the legitimation that medicalisation offers, as well as the disavowal of the packsthetic as a medical device to avoid the regulatory regimes that might bring.

Market proliferation, innovation and pleasure

Beginning around 2010, there was a marked uptick in the number of new brands coming onto the market, accelerating after 2015 with some 26 new brands and products entering the market in the years between 2015 and 2022 (see Figure 1). Coupled with the longevity of some of the slightly older brands this has led to an increasingly crowded marketplace and to the need for brands to better market and differentiate themselves from each other. One company that rose to prominence in this period is Reelmagik. As its name suggests, this company was founded as a film and television special effects company, providing make-up and masks. In 2009, it produced a prosthetic penis for a friend of the owner, who was so happy with the result that he encouraged the business to sell them, precipitating the company’s shift to be focused solely on packsthetics. Reelmagik then is not a trans entrepreneurial business, though it describes itself as ‘LGBT Owned & Operated', tapping into a sense of being ‘by and for’ even if not trans specifically (Reelmagik, 2023). Alongside this, Reelmagik also presents itself as an innovator in the market in several other regards:

We pioneered new techniques that had not yet been done in the trans prosthetic industry (multi-layered movable silicone prosthetic skin, free-floating movable testicles in a liquid silicone gel), as well as created new product features that did not yet exist (the Flex Rod). (2023:paragraph 5)

Despite these claims, they are neither the first to advertise free-floating testicles—the company Lola.Jake was offering this from 2008 (Lola.Jake, 2011, see also Plis and Blackwood, 2012)—nor to use a bendable rod—Pack n’ Play Prosthetics were offering this around 2005 (Pack n’ Play Prosthetics, 2005). Both these companies are now-defunct so it is not possible to compare the products or assess these claims.

Yet what it illustrates is a trend in which many companies, ReelMagik among them, present themselves as the innovators of a new product or technique. I am not particularly interested in evaluating who was the originator of this or that product or advancement. Rather, my focus is what this framing reveals about the companies themselves and the organisation of the market more broadly. In the first instance, it points to the way almost all of the companies from the pre-2010s period became defunct (see Figure 1), with packsthetics needing to be repeatedly re-made as piecemeal knowledge about making them came and went with little likely being passed on or shared. More importantly, though, it also suggests how the ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ of the prosthetic figures it as a work-in-progress that is always in motion towards a more advanced, and ostensibly better, version. Drawing on Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s (2009; see also Jasanoff, 2015) use of the term, by sociotechnical imaginary I mean collectively held ideas and visions of the packsthetic as a technology and of its potential futures.

These packsthetic futures are related also to Jones’ (2008) concept of ‘makeover culture’, which she describes as a glorification of ‘becoming’, where the focus is not on the creation of a finished product but about demonstrating constant improvement. While Jones elaborates on this in her work on cosmetic surgery, she notes it is a cultural logic that applies across many parts of contemporary life and which I suggest includes packsthetics. As an example of such logics at work in the packsthetics market, another prominent brand in the market is PeeCock, a Singaporean company opening in 2010. It offers a range of FTM products, including binders, harnesses, and its flagship PeeCock, which is a multifunction device with what it terms ‘packing, peeing and playing’ functionality. ‘PeeCock is the FIRST ever FTM product to feature a 3-in-1 feature' (PeeCock, 2023:paragraph 2). PeeCock’s framing of itself through innovation is reinforced in the naming of iterations of the product, with the Gen3, Gen3S, Gen4, and Gen4 and GenX among them. In the naming of their products, (PeeCock, 2023b), PeeCock thus follows a rubric highly reminiscent of tech products like the Apple iPhone and a well-entrenched marketing tactic for products of all kinds and categories, to develop successive products with marginal improvements, such that a consumer feels the need to upgrade an existing product even while it is still useable (Guiltinan, 2009; Taffel, 2023).

While this is far from unique, in the case of trans prosthetics I suggest it has the effect of framing products in a particular way; if the one you currently have fails to fulfil your desires or address your gender dysphoria, buy the next one which that will be better. If the product you have right now is not working for you, the problem is that it is not sufficiently advanced, not that the device or even packing itself might be an issue. This is further reinforced by speculative projects like the company Transthetics’ ‘Bionic Penis’ (2023:paragraph 1), which promises an ‘all-in-one super realistic penis prosthetic' that can move between a flaccid and erect state, though it remains only a prototype. Yet despite the lure of such advances, as Myriam Winance (2010:110) has observed in her ethnographic work on the fitting of wheelchairs, ‘This perfect (a new chair) might prove to be a worse [sic]'. In this, Winance is building on work by STS scholars (for example, Mol et al., 2010) that argue that devices like these, a wheelchair in her work or a packsthetic in mine, are always a negotiation and assembly of various attachments, objects, discomforts, pleasures and so on. The idea that the more advanced is inherently preferable and will work better does not always hold, though consumerism makes it hard to resist (Jones, 2008)

A final point about innovation that I want to make here is about the role of pleasure in the packsthetics market. One of PeeCock’s claimed innovations is a ‘pleasure rod’ that can be inserted through the hollow shaft and allows the prosthetic to become erect. The widespread adoption of such rods in the packsthetics market, as well as in brands offering 4-in-1 products, with the 4th function referring to ‘pleasure’, points to how sexual pleasure has become central within the market. Far from the owner of Homegrown Prosthetics describing a prosthesis as for medical purposes as I illustrated earlier, the notion that the packsthetic can also be a pleasure device is now widely acknowledged. As I noted earlier, the disavowal of sexual desire was entangled in medical gatekeeping under past diagnostic regimes (Latham, 2018; Stone, 1991); the easing of such strict regimes is something that has likely contributed to this. One other factor in this emergence of pleasure as a common function is also the fact that the trans entrepreneurs who operate the majority of packsthetics businesses are also ‘prosumers’. Alex, the owner of Transthetics has reported that his own sexuality was the inspiration for the development of his product the ‘Joystick’, and that it helps him ‘feel like I am a male in a male body that can have sex the way I want to’ (quoted in Straayer, 2020: 258). That Alex is both producer and consumer allows him to design a product that fulfilled his sexual desires.

As well as rods that allow packsthetics to become erect and used for penetration, many companies now offer various options for providing physical stimulation for the wearer. This can range from vibrators in the Transthetic Joystick, through to small silicone ‘nubs’ on the back of the packsthetic and one of PeeCock’s newer ‘innovations’ which have inbuilt ‘masturbation sleeves’ (essentially smaller versions of products made and marketed towards non-trans men). Such products seem to assume a trans wearer who uses testosterone and has experienced genital growth to be stimulated as intended by such a design. The increasing introduction of such features into packsthetics products is thus yet another part of its enactment and co-constitution as a trans male product. With the emergence of products like this, the idea of sexual pleasure has now become thoroughly entrenched in the contemporary imagination of packsthetics. Further, the idea of innovation embedded into all of the brands and their products I have mentioned here speaks in part to how this is a market, even if it is one populated largely by trans entreneurs. It may be providing something of potential need and it is generally positive for consumers that packsthetics continue to develop in interesting ways, but in the repetitive introduction of updated versions, it is, like many other product categories, also generating desire and motivation for repeated purchase.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have charted the development of packsthetics from the first commercial product in 1989 into a market featuring hundreds of product options in 2022. What this reveals about the organisation of this market is its dependence not only on the trans entrepreneurs who started making these products to sell to other trans people but on a much broader array of things that contribute to its coherence. My attention towards this reflects Callon’s argument that the successful purchase of a product within a market is not merely an encounter between seller and buyer, but an ‘agencement’ or assemblage that is organised across many sites and otherwise unaffiliated, and often unknowing, actors (2021:261). The value of tracing the market agencement of packsthetics over time, as I have done here, is that it highlights the complex array of contributors to the seemingly straightforward purchase of a packsthetic.

This differentiation between packsthetics and dildos that I have illustrated here is not just about product categories, but also about the identities of the people who might use them. The packsthetics market could have only cohered in the wake of the emergence of FTM and trans male identities as users of these products and as distinct from the butch communities that they were historically intertwined with. What I am getting at is the co-constitution of consumer and product, which Callon also writes ‘must go so far as to make the good and the agent reciprocally constitutive of one another' (2021:59). In suggesting this, I do not mean to say that transmasculine identities are dependent on packsthetics for their existence; they are not, and many trans men and trans masculine people do not pack. However, part of what I am illustrating is that a trans man buying a prosthetic is neither mere chance, nor pure personal desire, but the result of a market agencement in which the packsthetic is constituted as trans and the trans man is constituted as in need of a packsthetic. Callon suggests such a reciprocal constitution ‘is a shared adventure that is deployed in many sites, over the course of which the co-profiling of goods and agencies takes shape like a seamless cloth' (2021:261). It is the threads of such a cloth that I have tried to pull on here, pointing to how silicone, community newsletters, medical device regulation, and sex toy manufacturers, among others, are bound up in the packsthetic market and the bringing together of the trans consumer and a packsthetic product.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you the journal editor and the reviewers who provided generous feedback during the development of the article. This research comprised part of my PhD completed at the Australian National University under the supervision of Professor Celia Roberts,Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen,and Professor Catherine Waldby. I am grateful for their support throughout my canditure. Thank you also to my friend and colleague Dr Jessie Liu who read and provided suggestions on a draft of this work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

ORCID iD

Tate Morgan

Notes

Tate Morgan is a researcher operating at the intersections of gender and trans studies,and feminist science and technology studies. He completed a PhD in Sociology at the Australian National University,and is currently a postdoctoral researcher working on trans health as part of the project ‘Pharmaceutical Geographies of Self-Managed Sexual Health’ at Queen Mary University of London.

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