Various technologies and techniques are disclosed for transacting accesses via unmanaged pointers in a transactional memory system. A transactional memory system is provided. Source code is analyzed to identify operations that create unmanaged pointers. Information is tracked about the targets of unmanaged pointer values in pointer variables. The target information is used to determine how accesses through an unmanaged pointer argument are to be transacted. When an unmanaged pointer is created, a descriptor of the target with the resulting pointer value is associated with the location. Within the method that creates the unmanaged pointer, the target can be identified using the descriptor, thereby enabling accesses to be transacted. When an unmanaged pointer is being passed as an argument, a descriptor is also passed as an argument to allow the unmanaged pointer target to be identified.