T as in Troy?

Sexual difference and the transgender present

Thomas Laqueur: To be sure, difference and sameness, more or less recondite, are everywhere; but which ones count and for what ends is determined outside the bounds of empirical investigation. The fact that at one time the dominant discourse construed the male and female bodies as hierarchically, vertically, ordered versions of one sex and at another time as horizontall ordered opposites, as incommensurable, must depend on something other than even a great constellation or real or supposed discoveries.¹

Camila Sosa Villada: Durante muchos años el mundo solo estuvo interpretado de forma binaria, por lo que la situación de las mujeres estaba contemplada en el lenguaje. Y su existencia también, aunque con absoluta desfachatez.

En cambio, las travestis no estábamos ni siquiera nombradas, es decir, se parecen y no se parecen, en tanto y en cuanto las travestis surgimos y ponemos una cuña entre estos dos polos que son los hombres y las mujeres. Por supuesto que luego identificamos que el enemigo era el mismo: el patriarcado.²

Joan W. Scott: [I]ndeed, I want to insist that the term gender is useful only as a question.³

_____________________

I wonder if I’m, like, the first person to notice men and women seem to be kind of different -- a kind of sexual difference, or something?

I

In historical scholarship, a trend appears: first, x collective, be it identitarian, class-based, an ethical community, tries to learn its history. What women writers were there? Why did people emigrate from their countries and settle in new ones? Did Ancient Greeks really do that much man-on-man butt stuff? But at a certain point, these questions are answered, the conversation kind of stagnates, and new, broader questions arise. The history of women becomes gender history. Gay and lesbian history becomes (sort of) the history of sexuality. People move from studying racialized people to studying racialization itself. The colony is revealed to be not a place or an event, but a system.

For trans studies (if we want to call it that) this shift was light-speed. In part, this is because trans people really only exist in extremely specific political and technological conditions. Of course, people have always done trans things: modifying their bodies, crossdressing, occupying third-gender social and sexual roles, becoming monks and nuns, joining a goddess cult...you know the deal. But for historians trying to document trans life in the past, it’s very difficult to find and nearly impossible to name with certainty. I don’t know what the trans equivalent of “they were just really great gal pals” might be...she just wanted male privilege? He just liked wigs? Because transexuality/transgender subjetivity and identity is really a very contemporary phenomenon, trans theory has sort of transcended the actual lives of individual trans persons extremely quickly. This has left some people confused, frustrated, and feeling excluded. Trans historiography has, in a lot of ways, left out the trannies!

I recognize the very understandable feelings of disappointment this may cause but still insist that, in order to be meaningful, honest, and frankly in order to keep its edge, trans studies (and politics) must think beyond *transgender people*. How? What is *trans* beyond the T they added on in the 90’s to that alphabet community invented in the 1980’s by the most boring gay people alive at the time? I never really understood people who complain about the “they were just really close gal pals” thing -- what do we/you gain from seeing our/your very precise identity exactly reproduced in the past? On a psychological level, I understand why the blurring or reducing of queerness is upsetting. But real politics and deep thinking begin, I think, exactly when and where we are able to abandon our traumas and insecurities to think and act with clear minds and in unity.

Let’s back up: what does the T in LGBT mean? Most people will tell you that a trans person is somebody who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. I guess they’re right. Of course, this is assumes a lot: that cultures of gender assignment are transhistorical, transcultural, universal; that even within modern, Western cultures, every individual is assigned a gender in the same way, that they have a body (at birth but also throughout development and into adulthood) that is easily sexable; and that people who transition or have otherwise trans lives, bodies, or sociabilities have something called a “gender identity.” A close look at this definition of T reveals that this definition makes historical transness basically an impossibility, not even in the sort of Foucouldian notion that sexual identities are invented and contextual, so they therefore can not be parallelled across time and space, but in a very just literal sense: there is literally no way somebody could have been “trasngender” before not long ago. Gender identity, unlike “sexuality” does not have an easy set of practices that can be atribued to it, either -- fucking is to sexuality that what is to gender identity? Clearly there is some work to be done, new questions to be asked.

So let’s pretend there isn’t an impending environmental catastrophe and the year is 2040. A significant number of governments have implemented legislation that protects trans rights and the wellbeing of trans people. Trans scholarship has covered a wide range of inquiries into trans life. Something like this has happened for LGB -- of course, the world continues to produce trauma for these people, violence continues, progress is uneven and asymmetrical. But is this world -- where trans people have protections and representation and rights, even where we have employment and people loved us openly and transition was a lot easier -- the real goal of our movement? The current focus of a significant amount of trans activism and scholarship is leading precisely to this dead-end. The advancement of T individuals must be our starting point, not the end goal of our thought and politics.

What would it mean to trans the world? What would it mean to think about history through trans -- not simply through the eyes of trans persons, but in a trans light? I think this can begin by thinking about a few things. First, we can bring our attention to the ways in which technologies are used to reproduce, at the individual and collective level, specific regimes of sexual difference. Black studies has pioneered this inquiry (e.g. C. Riley Norton, Hortense Spillers,Saidiya Hartman). Second, we might think about the way discourses sexual difference is challenged, by specific individuals but also by historical processes, technologies, and the formations of collectivities. While regimes produce difference, racial, sexual, and other, these differences become challenged not only by the march of history, or something, but by specific actors and groups. While feminism have taken on (succesfully, at least partially) the hierarchization of the sexes, many feminist politics actually reproduce sexual difference (often in accordance with other regimes like racism or specific agendas like integrating women into STEM). This is where trans must step in, politically, and it is also the place where trans history is particularly set up to make interventions.

II

The other day I was reading this trans woman’s blog from the 1990’s about hair removal (as one does). I was struck by the way she worded something. For those of you who do not know, body hair removal is a journey that a woman begins and never ends. You never really get to zero hairs, and for trans women, this poses a serious philosophical dilemma. This woman diligently documented her transition -- hours spent doing electrolysis, with whom and where, her hormone regiment, and so on. She admits that after a certain number of hours, the hair removal became cosmetic. Although she continued with the treatments, chasing perfectly smooth skin, she observes that the hair removal stopped being transition-related. This phrase has terrorized me ever since LMFAO.

Trans women spend way too much time talking about transition when we’re together (I’m trans women), but there is an inevitability to it. In the world as it currently is, each of us takes on transition in a very isolated way. It’s life-saving when we share knowledge, experiences, and expertise among ourselves. So the other day, I am talking with a friend about the pros and cons of t-blockers, a group of pharmaceutical drugs that inhibit testosterone production and/or its uptake in the body. This group of drugs, the most common of which are cyproterone acetate (called androcur in Spain and LATAM) and spironolactone (mostly given in USA), causes serious short and long-term side effects, from memory problems and frequent urination to cancers and kidney problems. Alex Verman has talked about this.⁴

My friend is worried about body hair and undesired changes in mood and mind, but excited about the return of her libido and perhaps some other health benefits. The conversation arrives at a juncture. I say something like: Look, most cis women have these same concerns, these same body features. She says: I don’t compare myself to cis women. I agree, but I don’t understand this perspective -- I compare myself all day to cis women, but not in the sad tragic tranny way! I compare myself to cis women because I often see myself reflected in them, I feel that our fates are intertwined, and maybe this isn’t PC but some of them are pretty cool! I understand my friend’s desire to resist mentalities of mimesis -- states of mind where we try to emulate, replicate, and embody cis femininity, discourses where our transness is defined by this mimesis -- but I also think it might be important to disregard those ideas rather than sort of doing the inverse, by not thinking about cis women at all. 

Contemporary trans discourses have (and I’m thinking beyond my friend ( LOL if you’re reading te quiero hermana muah!) articulated a new sexual difference, what I’ve heard referred to as the trans vs. cis binary. Of course, trans and cis are useful descriptor. Anti-trans and specifically trans-exclusive feminist ideas about this distinction must be opposed (“I’m not cis, I’m a woman,” say radfems). Trans and cis people are different, we have different experiences and more than one point of tension between us, but what would a trans poltics that tries to take on this (new) kind of difference look like? What role does the trans/cis binary have in the way we identify, socialize, and do politics? What would denaturalizing cisgender mean? I don’t know, I’m just a girl with a blog :P

If we trans the world, we might have to lose the T. All around us, in so many ways, this is already underway. It will be worth it.

1. LAQUEUR, T. W. (1990). Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press.

2.  https://www.efeminista.com/camila-sosa-villada-travestis-lenguaje/

3. Joan W. Scott, “Unanswered Questions” (The

American Historical Review, 113-5, 2008),

4.  https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/spironolactone-hormone-trans-women-side-effects.html