Redefinition
How transphobia limits us all
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“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“And I don't think we would be where we are today—encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame—had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly, effectively, resist prisons, and jails, and police.” - Angela Davis
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The woman who used anti-semitism to invent wizards has been saying a lot about us trans folk recently. I don’t think I care. I know these impacts of this transphobia all too well. When people who are handed megaphones get to yell about how monstrous I am (and also by extension, how few megaphones they think they have), it directly justifies and increases individual and institutional acts of violence against me and mine. That transphobia is very real, very damaging, and very boring to me. I’m interested in exploring some of the more nefarious ways transphobia limits all of our imagined possibilities, whether we’re trans or cis.
Every so often on twitter, someone will ask what would be possible if transphobia didn’t exist. A good 80% of answers will be about embodied things trans folks want to do: dancing, swimming, going to the gym, etc. That certainly was my answer last year when I participated in the meme, and is still a sentiment I hold today. But much like my transness is more than society’s understanding of me as a woman, our understanding of transphobia has to look like more than material disallowances of individual trans behaviors like swimming or using public restrooms. When I woke up this morning and saw the question again, I was thinking about a much bigger freedom.
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Redefinition
We all are always redefining ourselves. We’re always growing, learning, and changing, whether we’re being dragged through popular narratives we absorb, or we’re fighting to take hold of the reins. This is as true for the disaffected 20-something on twitter who decides to become a leftist, as it is for the second grader who decides they have a different dream job, as it is for the person who decides to leave their birth-assigned gender behind. Yet each of these decisions is met with different levels of anxiety, social punishments, and barriers to entry. The thing that makes them different isn’t how important they are to us as individuals; we all have our own unique priorities in our understanding of who we are. I, for example, feel like my role in the movement is more important to me than understanding myself as a woman. The difference is the stakes, which are always invariably set by outside forces. When we transition, we expose ourselves to institutional and individual violences different from the covert violences we faced in the closet.
It’s November 2015. “But why can’t I just be cis and sad, that’d be way easier” I wail nightly into Steam chats with my now wife, then exceedingly patient friend. “Because that’s never a real choice” she responds. I’ve bitten from the fruit of understanding what’s possible for me, my body, and my suicidality. All that’s left is either giving into my fear and dying, or accepting my fear and living. In December I message the group chat letting them know they were right. “I’m probably a girl.” My resistance was learned and internalized transphobia. It was fear of becoming a disgusting monster I truly knew nothing about, but there was more than that. I was afraid that there was something better in the world for me. I was afraid of deserving my life.
I talked about my gender on a recent episode of Gender Reveal (it’d be cool if you listened to it and supported Tuck’s work!) In it, I talk about how becoming trans gave me freedom to explore new possibilities for my life. I explored dresses, hormones, and she/her pronouns, and those worked for me. I explored regularly wearing make-up, turns out that wasn’t my jam. Because I gave myself freedom to try these things with incredibly high social stakes, it became much easier to try anything at all. If I’m already existing in the most terrifying way I can think of existing in the public eye, I can try anything at all. That’s included publicly speaking truth to power, facilitating intense social justice dialogs, doing labor activism, community care work, and so much more. I tried all these scary things because I tried being trans, and in my eyes, it’s impossible to separate the two. My gender is everything I’ve given myself the freedom to try to be.
Getting Free
Angela Davis recently brilliantly pulled this idea out of the framing of individual permissions, which is the most common framing for understanding trans justice, and into discussions of massive social change. She understands abolition to be possible because transgender people exist. The reason the stakes are so high for trans people is because gender lives so deeply entrenched in us all. Transition is so scary for us to do and for you to see precisely because it upends everything we know about how we’re supposed to exist. When “men wear skirts,” as the dominant narrative goes, they (in particular Black trans women) suffer violence because we as a society can’t make sense of this way of being, so we forcibly remove it. Gender in and of itself is a societal, shared understanding of how we’re supposed to perform one of two roles; that understanding is a force in our head that pushes us to judge and punish ourselves and other people. (As an aside, many trans folks I know advocate for maintaining some radical vision of gender in the future that’s separate from transphobia. It’s hard for me to grasp onto that because the only vision of gender we’ve ever known is this version of judgment and punishment. Gender effectively is transphobia. I’d like to think there’s something better in the future of course, but I’m not attached to calling it gender and I don’t think it will at all be recognizable as our current conception of gender.) “How we’re supposed to exist” is much more than our performance of gender roles in public, however; we’re also raised to internalize powerful carceral and capitalist modes of being. Our values around productivity, relationships with one another, and the role of punishment in society are all shaped by these deep logics, and these values shape a large portion of the decisions we make. We’re forever focused on maximizing our output and winning in a competition we didn’t choose to be in. Angela is arguing that if we can excise the deep logics of gender from within us, we can excise these other deep logics too. If we can share in the process of that struggle together, we can use that solidarity as a tool to change the world.
So what do I think is possible in a world where transphobia doesn’t exist? I think giving trans people the complete freedom to be honest with ourselves will mean giving *everyone* the freedom to be honest with themselves. I think both cis and trans people will have complete freedom to explore who they are, in gendered and ungendered ways. I think personal autonomy would be held as a sacrosanct, widely shared value. I think we’d be in a world where instead of being punished by neoliberalism for caring about one another, we are celebrated and rewarded for enabling each other to be the most authentic people we can be. I think when we know ourselves authentically, it’ll be much easier to see shared struggles and linked fate. We’ll care about each other’s freedoms as much as we value our own. When transphobia doesn’t exist, we’ll all finally have permission to.