Transgenderism & Class Realness

Try to guess context from this bit from a conversation I had with my friend Ènziramire:

when they figure out womb transplants we’ll be back to square 1

gonna be the first tbitch to be denied an abortion and they’ll be like why did you want it you stupid bitch

He had shared with me a recent article called “Reject Transgender Liberalism” by Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child. We knew someone who was going to see her at a guest university lecture, so we read up on her out of curiosity and felt like that new article was in contrast to certain tendencies in the introduction to her aforementioned book. Earlier, she over-historicized cultural expressions of trans-female experience such as the hijira so as to emphasize differences between those expressions and conceptualize them as categorically distinct:

Clearly there have been people in nearly every recorded human culture who have lived in the roles of women, or between specific understandings of manhood and womanhood, despite not having inherited that role at birth or through anatomy. However, to deduce that trans women as we know them today have “always existed” would be foolish for several reasons. First, there is no meaningful way to land on a definition of trans femininity that could apply to all places and times, much like there is no way to agree on a single definition of womanhood. It has largely been people from the global North who have romanticized non-Western, indigenous, and ancient societies into a self-serving and ethnocentric definition of trans femininity that mirrors their own.

Is the above passage not chock-full of ideological humiliation rituals, not only towards the author’s own self-admitted privileged demographic, but towards non-white trans-females who live in the global South, apparently too ethnic to be trans according to our modern, western frameworks? Such is le wokisme. I could deploy Talia Bhatt’s particularly good article, “The Third Sex”, against Gill-Peterson’s noble savage position: that even if experiences are mediated through culturally relative expressions of gender/sex, there is some underlying continuity in trans-sex subjectivity as well as shared experiences of violent repression due to the patriarchal relations underpinning our societies regardless of whiteness, northness, and modernness. However, I don’t need to cite Bhatt; I can cite Gill-Peterson’s new article which pits proletarian transsexuality against bourgeois transgenderism:

Transgender partisans […] elevated a deliberate incongruence between physical sex and gendered personality as more sophisticated than transitioning from one sex to another and living unmolested for it. Over time, the position has stretched into several of the core transgender claims that conservative justices took advantage of in Skrmetti:¹ that one need not experience dysphoria or even try to change sex to be transgender; that transgender identity involves endless and shifting personal identification, making it impossible to define; or that everyone might be, in fact, a bit transgender because anyone can adopt an androgynous style or challenge stereotypes about women and men.

The paragon of transgender liberalism is the rejection of transition as what distinguishes transgender people from the rest of the population. Instead of political liberation taking the form of redistributing the means of transitioning sex, liberation would now be from gender as such—a proposition so abstract that it appeals to people who don’t transition, are afraid to, or who try to cope with how difficult it is by recasting their suffering as noble. The blame thus heaped on the lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union since Skrmetti was handed down is superficial and wrongheaded. This historical process formed neoliberal gender politics long before the ACLU took its first transgender case.

I agree with Gill-Peterson’s general sentiment. She has her finger on the pulse of a new, burgeoning awareness in trans circles of the failure of LGBT or queer politics to actualize medical care and legal protections for trans people, and of a developing perspective that trans people are more akin to intersex people—that they are essentially intersex on some neurological level w.r.t. other sexed bodily components like genitals, gonads, or genes—than being contrarian performers of socially expressed gender. But Gill-Peterson makes an awkward structural analogy “between middle-class transgender politics and working-class transsexual politics”. She attributes the difference between the trans narratives to be one emanating from class antagonism, ever since the 90s.

Look at me going to bat for Feinberg. I agree that gender ideology is a liberal bourgeois expression of anti-patriarchal frustration (which one might call feminist, though I’d not). However, I had a realization a few months ago that we often mischaracterize Feinberg’s mission statement despite having decades of hindsight. The individuals whom Feinberg had known as transsexual were not the subjects of her transgenderism. No. It was drag queens and butch lesbians, gender non-conforming homosexuals and even heterosexuals whose contributions to the gay rights movement were quickly historically erased because they were not appealing to the ascension (or domestication) of the movement, which had become preoccupied with marriage qua property relation (specifically of inheritance) and with open participation in bourgeois social relations. Feinberg was an honest proletarian and communist revolutionary. She was butch-butch. But she was a masculine-presenting female, in her own words, who proposed a tactical association between cross-dressers of various stripes and transsexuals on account of them being painted by patriarchal society as all being (for one reason or another) de-gender-ates.

That tactic failed. Not only was it eventually also domesticated into the form that has since become culturally dominant even in reactionary discourse, but we cannot attribute the now-historical failure of gender ideology to capitalist roaders because it was from the very beginning, in its very DNA, a movement which sought authenticity in mere aesthetic (if even that) expressions of counterculture, and which attributed trans-sex subjectivity to a reification of inauthentic gendered norms from which they had to be liberated for their own authentic actualization. It is a hysterical discourse on the basis of the ideal ego pitted against the ego ideal. Note a tendency continuous from Feinberg to Gill-Peterson (in both of her articles, despite their content-wise disagreement): authenticity-seeking. Everyone wants realness attributable to race, class, geography. Gill-Peterson thinks transgenderism is bourgeois because it’s alienated from the material experience of dysphoria, whereas I’m sure we’ve all seen others say so-called transmedicalism² is bourgeois because it requires that trans people have the material means to transition.

Stop it. We’re so close to articulating material demands and yet keep getting caught up in authenticity-seeking bullshit. We don’t need to dress up our hormones in miners’ clothes, and we don’t need to act like it’s woker to forgo them. The reactionary state is restricting access to hormones and procedures, and has ceased legally acknowledging trans people, because it hates trans people and doesn’t want anyone to change their sex. Do you want to change your sex without compromising your legal personhood and/or personal dignity? Good! Advocate to expand access to trans medical care (monetarily, geographically, etc.), and for the state to allow individuals to update their legal identity. You can’t seek realness because that fundamentally makes you less real, and it doesn’t matter anyway. As Ènziramire pointed out, just as patriarchy and capitalism reified homosexuality, and just as it reified transgenderism, so can it reify this supposed proletarian transsexuality. Hence the punchline.

Incoming review of Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat (2024).

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1. Justice Barrett ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that restricting access to hormone replacement and puberty blockers as treatments for dysphoria does not discriminate against trans people because having dysphoria is not definitive of being trans. ↩︎

2. In the vulgar sense that undergoing medical transition (or just wanting to medically transition) is definitive of being trans, rather than in the original sense of wanting to restrict access to medical transition via strict diagnostics ↩︎