By popular demand - 2. Race and transness

Ok, so one of the most commonly used comparisons in feminist discussions about transness is comparing trans* people to transracial people (ie those who modify their bodies to change their race). It’s been used from at least Janice Raymond on and seriously needs to be given the arse.

Now, I do want to take the question seriously—in particular, transness in the wider context of cultural appropriation and an ethics of body modification—but I nevertheless think it’s a problematic comparison.

What is being suggested by the comparison? Well that depends. Sometimes the analogy is between transpeople and people of colour becoming white. So transgender is internalised oppression, self-mutilation in homage to a culturally idealised whiteness (this one seems to be most often applied to transmen). I think this problematic in that it equates one’s self-identity with both self-hatred and disdain for the gender one was assigned at birth. What if it is not that you hate your body, but that doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t fit. That doesn’t of itself emerge out of internalised oppression I think. One can value something without being it, no? It’s like equating being straight with homophobia, or being a gay man with hating women. One can go with the other, but it is not necessarily so.

Most commonly though, transpeople are analogous to white people becoming black, illegitimate appropriators of identities not theirs. This is the rad-fem version of MTF transsexuality, right? Boys in dresses are stealing what’s ours.

There’s problems common to both these comparisons. First, they presents both race and gender as innate and eternal. By presenting the scandal of crossing, it works to secure the (ultimately undeliverable) boundaries of categories—and in doing so, squeezes out those subjects who inhabit the margins, whose identities are complex, multiple or mobile. This reminds me of what bell hooks says (somewhere) about how identities and inequities are not so much intersectional as working to secure one another (recall also Butler’s point that gender works to secure heteronormativity, and vice versa). In this case, the very real inequities produced in the racist West is used to rhetorically shore up cis-privilege.

So in this kind of (particularly radical) feminism, sure, the meanings of those two genders can be reworked, but not the basic premise. At birth, we’re either given one or the other, and THAT is it. This argument starts from the premise that transpeople are not—and can never—be the gender they claim to be. Depressingly, it limits the scope and possibility of feminist activism to two (and only and ever) genders. This squeezes out intersexed, genderqueer and other diverse manifestations of gender from the beginning—just as it squeezes out bi and multiracial people (as my earlier examples show, I think often, if not always, it disguises a black/white race binary).

The problem is it reduces gender to the sexed body one is assigned at birth. Now, we know gender is more complex than that. Feminist theorists have long pointed out the complexities of identification, gesture, clothing, psychic and emotional investments inherent in the production of gender. We should know by now that gender is a cultural production, a series of cultural interventions, a cited performance. But some kinds of gendered performance are more legitimate than others it seems and - who knew – it turns out that it’s in the genes after all. Uh huh uh huh. Similarly, the complexities of trans* identities becomes reduced to, solely, the body modifications of transsexuals. It’s worth stating the obvious here—gender is not just about genitals. NOT EVEN (or maybe, most especially) for trans* people.

Second, as Cressida Hayes says in an article I’ve left in my office, the trans/race comparison precludes the possibility of a double consciousness of trans* people of colour. As someone (little light? Marti? Nexy? Pants, I can’t remember) recently said, there’s two types of transwomen present in the public consciousness—the white middle class man-lovin tranny, and the dead, murdered transwoman of colour. In most of the feminist conversations about transness I’ve come across, it is only the first in discussion, the presence (let alone voices) of transwomen of colour are erased and silenced. The comparison between transsexuals and transracial people implicitly relies on a normatively white transsexual, and as always, transmen are largely ignored.

In summary, the comparison suggests that by definition, it is not possible to legitimately cross boundaries.

Bullshit.

Now, I am not suggesting that every kind of boundary crossing is, of itself, necessarily desirable, or that there aren't serious issues to do with appropriation. But I believe that while there are profound affinities between raced and gendered inequities, these are different regimes in operation, and it is worth talking about the ways these wax and wane. It just that these kinds of comparisons, in the long run, aren't very useful, and it's about time we feminists (yes, we dammit) got past them.

I know there’s a lot here that I haven’t dealt with—it’s so a paper—but I would like to see there be more of a discussion, particularly among trans people of colour. Maybe bfp or little light could start a thread? Cos you know, not really the most widely read blog here.