So I went and checked this out, because I'd read her writing before and found her work on transmisogyny informative, although I've been disappointed by her lack of discussion on the complexity of historical transmasculinity.
and uh. Fucking yikes? (pre-emptive apologies to Velvet, I saw this post before going to sleep and got so angry it derailed my entire night).
The real antagonism concealed within the movement for transgender rights since the 1990s is class-based. The material struggle to transition has given way to the concerns of a small transgender professional class who have popularized their own interests and values as if they were universally emancipatory: self-actualization, cosmopolitanism in style and language, and personal declarations of being above or beyond the gender binary. Far from radical, let alone critical of liberalism, these values are conventionally American, deeply rooted in the culture of consumerist individualism. Since the early 1970s, stagnating wages, rising income inequality, the dismantling of the New Deal welfare state, and the ravages of deindustrialization have spurred the dramatic growth of personality expression, therapeutic culture, and the private individual as a sacred refuge from a crumbling public.
The transgender iteration of this political culture, which Iâve termed âtransgender liberalism,â has over those decades erased the interests and worldview of working-class people. For most people, transition raises an immediate economic problem, rather than psychological or aesthetic questions; it triggers economic insecurity and downward mobility, and it takes significant private wealth to cushion the blow. The cost of medical care, finding and keeping a job in a gendered labor market, and the frequent loss of family support or other inherited resources combine to make changing sex both expensive and risky. The transgender position was, historically, invented by people who deliberately declined to transition so that they could conserve their jobs, marriages, private wealth, and social status.
In the 1990s, there was a pointed political confrontation between middle-class transgender politics and working-class transsexual politics. The strongest materialist critiques were often tendered by transsexual women who understood transitionâs downward mobility, like scholar Viviane K. Namaste, whose 2000 book Invisible Lives offers a bracing account of the conflict. Though they were unpopular for it, transsexual women denounced transgenderâs flight into the elitist idealism of college-educated radicalism. Transgender partisans, meanwhile, 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: 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.
And then she goes on to say this:
Skrmetti has made painfully clear two things I have long argued, albeit for very different reasons: First, that the legal protection of transition cannot successfully be derived from medical expertise. Nor can it derive from the political invention of âtransgender status,â which is vulnerable to judicial critique not just from conservatives but for its flagrant class antagonisms. Instead of clinging to a losing strategy, we must find the courage to engage the law on its own terms. We should not keep pressing for liberal transgender rights; we should wield the historical foundation of what Andrea Long Chu wisely calls âthe right to change sex.â
And goes on to talk about a very important figure in US trans history, Frances Thompson, a Black trans woman who transitioned while enslaved and became the first trans person to speak in Congress when she testified about being raped during the Memphis Race Riots. And I don't disagree with the importance of the "right to change sex" âI am a nonbinary transsexual and love changing sex!âor the importance on multiple levels of Thompson's story and legacy. BUT WHY IS ANY OF THIS OUR FAULT!
Frances Thompson died shortly after completing her sentence, no doubt overcome by the cruelty of the chain gang. But she left a profound legacy. The political reaction against the constitutional amendment that her testimony helped bring about demands we recognize that transitioning sex contributed to the creation of the equal protection clause. The argument that equal protection applies to transition is not a new idea invented by lawyersâand the kind of discrimination for which conservative justices expressed skepticism in Skrmettiâs concurrences is not only old but foundational to the legal fight for equal protection. Even though this argument that any unequal treatment of transition is sex discrimination is similar to the argument made by the plaintiffs in Skrmetti, it stands on a historical foundation, or originalist grounds. The equal protection of transitioning women and men under the law does not require new legal inventions, like âtransgender statusâ or medical and scientific certification. It can confront popular legal methodology on the federal bench on its own terms.
Her point here is that the act of transitioning is the legal basis for protections, as far as I understand it. And I get why she's making that point. And, to her credit, Thompson's transition was (afaik) entirely social, so she's not just talking about medical transitioning that exists today.
But she is, transparently, telling so many people to get fucked and that we do not have the right to assert the same sense of being that binary trans people do, and that any efforts we take to do so is "class antagonism." It's no surprise that she only says "transitioning men and women." She clearly has no problems with the gender binary when it can benefit her.
Nonbinary people do not want to shake up social ideas of gender just for the hell of it. It is the only way we can survive as nonbinary people. We will never ever ever ever have our sense of self seen and recognized if society does not change in major ways. But, again, these people do not conceive of nonbinary people as having genders like them. THEIR dysphoria matters, THEIR gender matters, it is vital for THEM to be gendered correctly, but nonbinary people simply do not exist to them. They do not care about understanding nonbinary people as being people with feelings and needs like them, we must be some Other Thing they can strawmen into whatever they want.
This is why the fight for medical transitionâa working-class issue of economic redistribution at its heartâcan be portrayed as the elitist imposition of a corrupt ruling class ideology. The ease with which conservative justices took advantage of transgender liberal concepts and platitudes in the majority opinion and concurrences makes as much clear. Justice Roberts cleverly adopts the liberal definition of âtransgenderâ as describing people for whom âtheir gender identity does not align with their sex,â and relies on the liberal truism that only âsome transgender individuals suffer from gender dysphoriaâ to uphold Tennesseeâs right to restrict medical care without it technically discriminating against all transgender people. Justice Barrettâs concurrence goes even further, citing the extremely broad âumbrellaâ definitions of being transgender used by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the American Psychological Association as evidence that transgender people are not discrete enough to be a suspect class that has faced discrimination. These adoptions of liberal definitions, which stress the sovereignty of personal identity over social reality, and which the court pins on expert organizations, made the plaintiffsâ case vulnerable. They are emblems of what conservative thinkers decry as neoliberal corruptions: the exalting of anti-social individualism over tradition and the coercive exercise of bureaucratic expertise over private life.
She's ilterally just doing what we've criticized Democrats for doing to all trans people. "Republicans are able to attack us because YOU PEOPLE are making us look bad with your wacky gender nonsense!" I'm sorry but if somebody talks like this there's no way you can convince me you care about nonbinary people. Not when you treat our entire sense of being like it's a trend we're putting on to feel smart and not a genuine expression of our gendered desires. And I don't really care if conservatives see me as a neoliberal corruption, because fuck them. I don't want to live in their world and I plan to use my time on this Earth to change their world as much as I reasonably can.
The field of academic transgender studies has, unfortunately, been overwhelmingly devoted to the middle-class values of the professoriate. Like the transgender liberalism out of which it emerged in the 1990s, the fieldâs class bias has tilted against transitioning sex, vainly championing the ostensible superiority of androgyny, or, today, a kind of immaterial, nonbinary idealism. Unsurprisingly, scholars have not been much of a source of actionable political analysis during the rising tide of anti-transgender legislation. That must change. We must study history and strategize accordingly.
Fuck you, Jules. I practice nonbinary materialism and it's called I'm a real fucking person with a real human body and my gender is not "immaterial idealism" it's MY EVERYDAY EXISTENCE. Also, I do not know where people keep getting this notion of nonbinary people being this class of snobs who drink champagne in our penthouses looking down at the blasé normie transsexuals of the street. But I live in the real world where the vast majority of out nonbinary are disrespected and insulted to our faces on a daily basis and just have to put up with it because showing the slightest amount of upset means people will see you as a massive whiny controlling bitch-slash-predator. Like Jules PLEASE show me where the institutions championing nonbinarity are!!!!!!!!!
Hell, if we want to get really really real. A mixed race nonbinary child recently died by suicide after months of bullying by students and faculty. I mean, a different one than Nex Benedict. That's the material conditions nonbinary people experience.
If you can't understand that being nonbinary actually materially impacts your mind and your health and your life and that it changes how you are treated by society and it matters that we are given a voice and place in the society we already live in, why the fuck should cis people make that effort for any trans person?
Sacrificing nonbinary people will never save you. This behavior is cowardice.
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