A Short History of Transmisogyny
A Short History of Transmisogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson is a provocative history of transmisogyny and with the rise of transmisogynistic violence the concepts in the book are more important than ever. What follows is my chapter by chapter summary of it though I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, it’s well worth it and not very long. Rather than focusing on the details of the chapters, I have tried to summarize their key themes and selected quotes illustrating that.
First two key concepts on which the book hinges:
- Transmisogyny: “refers to the targeted devaluation of both trans femininity and people perceived to be trans feminine, regardless of how they understand themselves.”
- Transfeminization: refers to subjecting people who did/do not understand themselves as trans women to transmisogyny. It is a process dispossessing people of Indigenous ways of life, kinship structures, languages, social roles, and political value.
Introduction: Femmes against Trans
The introduction opens by examining the history of the category of “trans”, which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area as a specifically political, non medical, word to describe the trespassing of enforced gender boundaries. Later the word was institutionalized by the NGO industrial complex, entrenching a white, middle class, Western understanding of gender. This is important to note because those subjected to transgender violence do not necessarily understand themselves as trans and in many cases the uncritical application of transgender as a category to such people acts as a colonial imposition.
The chapter then shifts to discuss how poorly transmisogyny has been theorized by mainstream feminisms; we are all acutely aware of the violence faced by transfeminine/ized people yet the ability to explain why leaves a lot to be desired. Why do trans feminine/ized people experience so much violence? Why is it so often intertwined with homophobia? In what ways does it intersect and diverge from misogyny broadly?
The quote the method the book uses to address this question:
“In this way, the method of this book is deceptively simple: it uses the history of trans misogyny to understand where trans-feminized people were lit up by the clutches of violence and how they responded to its aggressions. In doing so, we learn what makes trans misogyny unique and get a glimpse at how wildly diverse people around the world have come to find themselves implicated in trans femininity and trans womanhood, whether or not they wanted to be.
For these reasons, I maintain a difference between trans femininity and trans womanhood or trans women. The first is meant to signal a broad classification by outside observers, including aesthetic criteria and the history of ideas attached to people who have been trans-feminized. Trans womanhood and women, on the other hand, name people who saw themselves as intentionally belonging to a shared category—in other words, who tried to live in the world recognized as women, whatever that category meant to them contextually. Everyone in this book may have been trans-feminized, and all may have been brought into the orbit of trans femininity, but only some considered themselves to be trans women in response.”
Chapter 1: The Global Trans Panic
The chapter examines the trans-feminization of the Hijra in India, the two-spirit peoples of Turtle Island, some case studies drawn from New York (Jennie June, Loop the Loop, and Nancy Kelly), and finally the murder of Jennifer Laude in the Philippines.
The main premise of this chapter is that as colonial powers encountered Indigenous lifeways contrary to the western gender order (public life for men, private life for women) these lifeways were moralized through their conflation with male femininity, sodomy, and sex work and painted as inherently threatening to colonial sovereignty:
“The misgendering of trans femininity as male sexual aggression, particularly when racist fantasies about Black and Brown sexuality are encoded in the conflation, allows people to respond to trans femininity with as much preemptive violence as they desire. All they have to do is claim panic after the fact…
Through the hypersexualization of trans femininity, trans women are seen as inviting not just sexual interest but any violence required to reassert straight men’s position over them in the social hierarchy. The sexualization of trans women, ironically, threatens men by association, like a boomerang of desire…
Trans misogyny formed first as a mode of colonial statecraft that modeled for individuals how to sexualize, dehumanize, and aggress trans-feminized people through panic, beginning with police officers.”
Chapter 2: Sex and the Antebellum City
This chapter follows case studies of Mary Jones, Sally Bines, Laguna Edwards, Mary Ann Waters, and Lavinia Edwards, paying particular attention to anti-Black racism to discuss how trans feminine/ized people became so closely intwined with sex work:
“For centuries, around the world, there had been as many ways to live something approximating trans-feminine lives as there were human cultures. Many built that trans femininity directly into kinship, the household, or imbued upon it spiritual and political meaning, so that it didn’t stand apart from a normal life…
But by the early nineteenth century, the global reach of European and American slavery and colonialism had stolen so many bodies, and severed so many people’s relationships to land, that the urban, lumpenproletarian model of trans womanhood began to replace all others. Increasingly, trans womanhood was a common strategy that leveraged the mobility of gender and race in the wake of dispossession into something livable. Sex work was its most practical and ubiquitous route…
But she [Mary Jones] lived in the antebellum city, and her life—along with those of Mary Ann Waters, Sally Binns, Lavinia Edwards, and their contemporaries —testifies to how tightly trans womanhood tracks with historical changes in state power and political economy. Like the hijras in British India from chapter 1, Jones is part of the story of how Euro-American forces trans-femininized people around the world without any regard for who they might have otherwise been, pushing them into similar lines of work out of which something resembling trans womanhood emerged as a play for mobility.”
Chapter 3: Queens of the Gay World
The third chapter discusses the legacy of drag queens, their role in queer culture, and the subsequent betrayal of trans feminine/ized people by wider queer movements in a bid for respectability from cisheterosexual power structures.
The problem was, though, that street queens weren’t transsexuals: they were far too poor to transition like that. Now pushed out of the mainstream gay movement, they didn’t have the wealth it took to get a transsexual diagnosis in the 1970s. The new medical model explicitly kept out poor girls who didn’t pass well, who did sex work, or who couldn’t promise to live a middle-class, heterosexual life after surgery. Most Black and Brown queens didn’t even bother with the clinics selling high-priced surgeries and hormone therapies…
Rivera and Johnson are often celebrated today as trans women of color, as if that were a clear-cut category that was different from gay men. However, neither of them made that sort of distinction at the time. In an interview recorded at the end of 1970, both use a range of different words to describe themselves, including gay, drag queen, and transvestite. Indeed, for many street queens, the philosophical difference between being gay and trans was irrelevant. As noted above, they were too poor to afford medical transition; they also likely would have been turned away from any of the doctors prescribing hormones in New York. More importantly, the concrete conditions of their lives weren’t organized around a difference between gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing was illegal, and so was sex work—and both were based entirely on public perception. The police didn’t much care whether someone identified as a woman or a gay man; in jail, they would be treated horrifically either way…
Fighting the oppression of men and the institutions that maintained their hegemony, like the police, was something Rivera understood to ideally unite street queens with feminists and gay activists, not separate them…
Like a wedge, trans misogyny had fractured the political solidarity of the gay liberation banner in less than four years. The abandonment of the incarcerated was also the abandonment of street queens, considering they were hit the hardest by police violence and violence from men…
In the era of trans hypervisibility, the mere presence of a Black or Brown trans woman is supposed to leap into good politics. The trans woman of color appears as a symbol, invoked as the figure in whose name activism, or intersectional consciousness, is conducted. But the trans woman of color is still just that: a figure for other people…
Centering the trans woman of color has not resulted in sustained engagement with her everyday life, expertise, and activism. Had liberal trans-inclusive political movements, or academia, done so, their primary concerns would be prison abolition, police violence, and sex work—not a politics of overcoming the gender binary; and not, at its narrowest, the highly conservative claim that the trans woman of color deserves to be rescued from death.”
Conclusion: Mujerisima and Scarcity Feminism
This chapter examines some aspects of the political philosophy of travesti people in Brazil. While this chapter contains some interesting points it should be noted that there are some important criticisms of this section that can be read here.
“When movements claim to act in our name, or use our image as their rallying cry, it is often to imagine a world where trans womanhood is implicitly obsolete, no longer needed in gender’s abolition or an infinite taxonomy of individual identities beyond the binary. The use and abuse of trans womanhood secures otherwise-contrary versions of gender-based politics, from intersectional and queer feminism to white women’s fascism and Christian fundamentalism. The cavalry in the global gender wars line up on their opposing sides, cannons ablaze, but each agrees not to admit the premise they share: trans femininity is not integral to the future they are fighting for…
Straight men, gay men, nonbinary people, and non-trans women not only share the world with trans women; they rely on trans femininity to distinguish their genders and sexualities, including through overlap. Gay men’s sexual cultures were forged out of the same historical dynamics and urban spaces as trans womanhood. Non-trans women have long shared experiences of downward mobility under marriage and capitalism with trans women, especially in sex work. Many non-trans women have been disqualified from womanhood on anti-Black or racist grounds in ways that make passing for “cisgender” as laughably irrelevant for them as it is for trans women. Straight men, too, depend on the validation of their desire for trans women’s femininity to consolidate their manhood. Getting too close to trans femininity, despite its obvious allure, reminds people of their fundamental social interdependence with trans women and trans-feminized people, who have been consigned near to the bottom of most social hierarchies…
What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra? Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. What if trans feminism dedramatized and celebrated trans femininity as the most feminine, or trans women as the most women? How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?…
Unlike the international trans politics that homogenize and flatten different ways of life, Wayar doesn’t demand perfection or unity in this vision of trans feminism. Her concept of political action isn’t predicated on finding the right language, or the right identities, to include everyone in their imagined proper place. Instead of demanding that every individual be obligated to find their true self and present it to the state for evaluation, this version of travesti politics rejects the project of idealism and its impossible search for a home in language or law.”