Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors: An Informal Review

I read Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg around December 2023, and I’ve vaguely gestured towards having opinions about that book in the two years since. I didn’t write a “review” (loosely speaking) of it because I started devaluing my own time spent writing then, and I felt that my feelings about the book could be boiled down to me not being the primary audience (or, rather, the subject about whom Feinberg speaks). These feelings did inform a certain analysis I wrote of trans discourse, and a FAQ but I did not refer to Feinberg or her work directly. So, this is a chance for me to actually get into the book, which solidly had me in the first half. It’s also a chance for me to exercise writing again, since I feel like I’ve lost some capability since I stopped blogging actively, especially in the context of what they call critical theory (makes jerk-off motion with my hand).

Trans History

The first part of the book is REALLY good. I was constantly gagging at the wealth of historical material which Feinberg collected and contextualized. I would text my partner while reading shit like, "Oh my God, there's records of hormonal and genital modification going back since forever." Feinberg's basis thesis here is that transgender people—writ large, put a pin in it—have existed throughout history and across cultures, but were gradually repressed and oppressed through the rise of patriarchy and totalizing religions such as those in the Abrahamic family. Meanwhile, some aspects of transgender practice were internalized or reified—one interesting suggestion by Feinberg being that castrati in the Catholic Church were ritual memories of eunuch priests in Roman paganism).

Other suggestions seem particularly bold, such as Joan d'Arc's cross-dressing having implications for her self-identity or concept of self, but that's both explained and problematized by Feinberg casting a wide net over phenomena she considers transgender based on what patriarchal society considers transgressive of norms ascribed according to one's gender or sex (Feinberg treating the difference or lack thereof variously throughout the text). That by itself makes sense, but runs into issues when attempting to construct a common trans-subjectivity and ascribe it to individuals both historical and present. What the fuck is "transgender" anyway, a word first popularized by a heterosexual crossdresser who sought to distinguish himself from drag queens and transsexuals whom he considered degenerate, and how does Feinberg end up applying it to all of the above? Is that a good thing? Mmmmmm.

Trans Ontology

I am transgendered. I was born female, but my masculine gender expression is seen as male. It’s not my sex that defines me, and it’s not my gender expression. It’s the fact that my gender expression appears to be at odds with my sex.

Feinberg’s account of trans people across history and cultures is illuminating with respect to the sheer evidence she presents of trans people’s existence and her argument that, contra some contemporary theorists, trans people (and variance in gender-sex broadly) were targets rather than products of patriarchy from its inception. However, Feinberg’s attempted analyses of transgender phenomena from a historical materialist perspective felt skewed towards her own personal experience as a masc/butch lesbian (analogous, in her view, to drag queens). This is a difficult angle of criticism because the entire discourse surrounding “gender”, that stupid fucking word, is fraught with disagreements about what gender is or how it functions, owing to subjective differences between how individuals experience gender—keeping in mind that the extensions of gender, norms and roles and expressions and so on, are probably best understood as distinct from gender as the thing which generates those extensions by which people interact with gender on an individual and social level.

Jesus fucking Christ, I hate this. See? Gender’s nothing because it’s fucking everything. Please check out the handy dandy discursive algorithm above and tell me which of the four mathemes below is gender. Is gender a subject’s representation in and w.r.t. society? Is gender the signifiers with which the subject is associated by virtue of the abstract role to which society has assigned them? Is gender the subjective experience of embodying, or fulfilling, an abstract function as a concrete being? Is gender the very discourse, that is, symbolic system which generates and regulates these terms? Fuck you!

Moving on. Feinberg conceives of transgendered ontology (being) from the standpoint of patriarchal society as a subject whose gender expression contradicts their sex assignment and its corresponding signifiers of gender. This conception elides the subject’s internality, a wager Feinberg makes for theoretical and practical reasons: theoretically, a patriarchal society does not distinguish between reasons why a subject would betray their birth sex, so the transsexual and drag queen/butch dyke reject patriarchal norms of gender more-or-less equally (in Feinberg’s own view); practically, the more individuals who fall under the transgendered umbrella, the greater bargaining power they have as a ‘class’ to fight for their own interests (whatever those collective interests might be). This language gets synthesized with Dr. John Money’s discredited hypothesis of gender identity socialization and eventually evolves into the predominant ideology of trans ontology in our time, but it must be emphasized that gender identity qua imaginary self-image is outside the scope of Feinberg’s analytical model which rests purely in the symbolic realm.

The problem with this approach however can be illustrated another of Lacan’s discursive algorithms, namely of hysterical discourse—yep, all that up there wasn’t a throwaway bit! Feinberg speaks from the position of the split subject itself, to criticize the discrete (if not necessarily binary) terms of gender which patriarchy imposes onto a subject, in order to map the symbolic system of gender and how it attempts to create subjects out of once blank slates (shout-out to the university’s discourse which, in this and many contexts, can be read as a subject factory). But Feinberg elides her particular desire which is the basis of her discourse and the position she takes within it, as well as the variety of desires which she aggregates under the transgendered umbrella. Sure, all transgendered subjects are narrativized by patriarchy in terms of having betrayed their birth sex but, by accepting that most superficial thrust of patriarchal ideology, she also accepts its terms that gender is a matter of expression relative to sex, regardless of whether some expression should be restricted to one sex or another. In other words, she projects her personal self-image as a gender nonconformist onto the whole category she constructs of transgendered subjects based on a looser category of transgendered objects from patriarchy’s vantage. There is no critical analysis of the supposed transgendered subjectivity, and Feinberg thus fails to construct a new revolutionary identity. Instead, a whole universe of queer identities proliferates.

Feinberg’s approach was a strategic wager for strategic reasons at the time which, I think, has since failed to accomplish anything materially. The identification of trans-sex subjects with the transgendered non-category under patriarchy generated a liberal political project concerned with the right to expression based on a mutual respect of others’ self-identity, equating trans-sex individuals with drag queens and butch lesbians on a subjective level, reducing the former’s interests to those of the latter and surrendering material gains. This ideology, I have argued, was even accepted essentially by conservatives who were happy to also take the transgendered non-category as a category to rationalize their reactionary crack-down on specifically trans-sex healthcare and legal recognition. Feinberg’s analysis is missing a critique of sex per se as a supposedly immutable category which is socially mediated but importantly not strictly generated by society except in the symbolic register of gender which encapsulates (and thus overdetermines) it. Dialectics, bitch!

(De)Trans Reaction

Shaping my body was something I had long wanted to do and I’ve never had any regrets. But I started taking hormones in order to pass. A year after beginning hormone shots, I sprouted a full, colorful beard that provided me with a greater sense of safety – on the job and off. With these changes, I explored yet another facet of my trans identity.

What’s interesting is that Feinberg is no stranger to sex modification. For some time, she took testosterone and lived as a man, even getting top surgery. But she seemed to be, on a deep level, uncomfortable with her female-to-male transition. As per the quote above, Feinberg felt that she had no choice but to transition because her gender nonconformity as a woman rendered her as a target of patriarchy. She tells a story at one point of feeling unsafe because a cop pulled her over, full beard and all, with an ‘F’ on her driver’s license. That experience superficially relates to trans-sex people, especially now in the US where we can no longer get official documentation matching who we are, putting us at great risk by exposing our tea to people wielding the power of the state.

The similarities, however, end there. Feinberg doesn’t want an ‘M’ on her driver’s license, and more generally she didn’t want to transition her sex to male. By her own account and self-identity, she just wanted to live as a masculine female and butch lesbian. Transition to Feinberg was almost more of an imposition upon her: a compromise between the gender expression she desired and the sex with which she was born (it’s hard to say “assigned” in this case except that she did, for a while, change her sex—I also must distinguish between objective reality and subjective experience). This is not to accuse Feinberg’s entire project of personal bias, especially because self-expression in the late twentieth century was the premise of radical LGBT politics writ large at the time, but I feel as though the short-sight of that larger movement echoes in Feinberg’s own psyche and lived experience.

Despite the revolutionary posturing of the LGBT movement, this is where the liberalism intrinsic to the project jumps out: the supposed conflict was one of social constructivism versus individual self-determination, on the side of some pre-social subjective essence as imposed upon by society. Let’s pull out my favorite Marx quote: “[…] the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual [much less specific to any individual]. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” You didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. You live in a society. It’s not that Feinberg tried transitioning in order to escape patriarchy. Rather, and almost diametrically, she saw her attempted transition as a reaction against patriarchy that would have been unnecessary in another social context where expressive variance is accepted rather than repressed.

There is an authentic kernel to Feinberg’s complaint: that nonconformity is perceived by society as a desire to change one’s sex. The problem arises when this genuine complaint is generalized towards the act of transition itself, such that the desire to change one’s sex is narrated as a reification of gender with respect to sexual characteristics (“You are only transitioning because you feel like you just can’t be a masculine female / feminine male!”), which tends to be phrased in woke terms as discourse about whether “binary transgender people” have privilege over non-binary transgender people, or whether gender dysphoria is an internalized vector of transphobia centered on regulating the correct association of gender expression with sexual characteristics. In non-woke contexts, the same argument is employed by trans-exclusive radical feminists to mostly the same effect.

The truth is that patriarchal society hates both sex transition and gender nonconformity, and for it to reduce one to the other says nothing about the reality of one versus another. We know from the first half of Feinberg’s book, as well as recent political events, that sex modification is one of the most highly regulated acts in patriarchal societies across history and geography. What’s more, as per Talia Bhatt (book review incoming!), the presence of third-gender/sex categories in non-western cultures functioned less to carve out niches for gender nonconformists than to mark those who modified their physical sex (especially from male to female) for ostracism. Patriarchy qua regulatory system of gender roles and expression relies upon and is inseparable from cissexism, the overdetermination of sex as essential and static. If sex is mutable, then gender roles and expressions cannot be reified on the basis of sex as a stable category. Though I tend to advocate for a unified model of sex and gender—that is my strategic wager—it’s more accurate to describe the two terms in patriarchy as a dialectical contradiction: not between real substance and social fiction, but between supposed essence and enforced expression.

The key, I think, is to advocate for sex transition and gender nonconformity, rather than allowing one to be the scapegoat of the other. Just as importantly, rather than conceiving of a strategic umbrella which elides the specific interests of either group per se (keeping in mind that it’s entirely possible for an individual to transition their sex and not conform to their gendered norms, much to the confusion of cissexist patriarchy), we should advocate for the specific activities and being-modes for which either group is specifically targeted. Reference to identity in either case only obscures the materiality of either issue. Feinberg at least understood that, to her credit and in spite of her shortsightedness with respect to transition specifically.

Conclusion

Transgender Warriors falls under the category of books which I’m glad to have read, since it contexualized the LGBT mass political strategy of the last ~30 years (especially the “T”), but I can only recommend it as a contextual work and not a didactic one. The liberal LGBT rights movement has basically failed, and this book offers an internal perspective on what they were trying to accomplish and why. My favorite feminist authors still remain Luce Irigaray, Angela Davis, and Julia Serano, with Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler as helpful aids more so than Leslie Feinberg. I think part of it is that I don't register Feinberg as particularly feminist except vis a vis female gender nonconformity?

One last point I want to make is that "transgender" is such a useless word by virtue of "gender" also being a useless word. The reason why I often say I'm criticizing the discourse around some "thing" rather than the "thing" itself is because often it's language that obscures what the "thing" is (an unavoidable problem since the "thing" is only accessible via language). This is why, once you dig out the real thesis of Feinberg's critique, there's something real there which is just bound with associations and presuppositions.

Thank you to my partner who talked about all this with me (and was ready to criticize Feinberg before I was!), and encouraged me to continue writing.