Women’s Spaces, Lateral Violence, and Zero-Sum Approaches to Privilege
I met J— in a focus group. My community college had secured a grant to hire students to identify equity gaps in its operations and facilities and ideate solutions. The focus group participants were culled deliberately from the school’s most marginalized populations: Undocumented students, homeless students, students in the foster care system, DSPS students, and the like. J— had shoulder-length hair and dark skin with cool olive undertones; she had an attractively crooked smile and her winning sense of humor made her popular among her cohort. She was a good decade older than the rest of the recruits, in the early childhood development program with a plan to advocate for the rights of transgender children. Though she was not exactly passing as a woman, she nevertheless exuded an inborn sense of herself that brooked no argument; she seemed at ease in her skin and her identity. Which made the shock I experienced on the second week, when we made formal introductions, the more acute: When asked why she was in school, as all of the students were asked, she responded, without a hint of bitterness, “I don’t like school. But for people like me, it’s either school or prostitution.”
People like me. Her words, I admit, shook me. It’s not as though I’d considered our lived experiences to be the same. But the gulf between them was much wider than I’d considered. I became aware of an internal reorientation to privilege and alterity. My instincts and moral compass tend to nudge me toward radical acceptance of those who suffer marginalization, but I am as guilty as anyone of failing to register marginality when it is right in front of me (part of the tacit training of being white and middle class in America is learning to unsee the injustice on which privilege is built). I have, on occasion, had to fight the urge to defend the territory carved out for women: Space to breathe, free from the male voices that threaten or drown us out in public spaces. I recall an argument in the Women’s Studies Department at my school (now renamed, I am happy to say, “Women’s and Gender Studies”): In a meeting, two older feminists complained that transgender women assume male privilege in women’s spaces without realizing it, and that being with them was essentially being with men. At the time I remained agnostic, launching a lukewarm defense of trans rights without fully committing to—or even understanding—the tenets of trans discourse. J— crystalized the issue for me, indicating that I need to keep learning to see. Women (white women) have societal value, even if we don’t control the terms of our valuation: We are in every sense a protected class. Transgender folks enjoy no such protections: They are the semantic “Others” that, through contrast, define the norm. To say nothing of the intersection of trans identity and other factors like race, class, ablism. When white women like me cling to our privilege at the expense of those with less cultural capital, we replicate the systems that trap us, committing a form of lateral violence: We must seek to elevate and understand, not silence and erase, the voices and experiences of the most vulnerable in the system, else we cling to the letter of feminism at the expense of its spirit.
Setting aside the question of feminism’s spirit, can we even define the letter? No one seems to have landed on a satisfactorily static denotation for gender. In “The Ontological Woman: A History of Deauthentication, Dehumanization, and Violence,” trans-activist Cristan Williams outlines the problem of lateral violence toward trans women perpetrated by feminists, noting that “the move to root feminism in an inherent biological, psychological, or reified ontology was to endorse the very essentialism upon which patriarchy was built” (Williams 719). She observes that trans-exclusive feminists replicate patriarchal structures when they see privilege as a limited, zero-sum resource that must be horded, describing such behavior as an “enfeebled attempt to grasp at empowerment through… an animus directed against one’s peers rather than one’s oppressors” (Williams 720). What makes lateral violence so tempting is its effortlessness: It is easy to project our legitimate grievances onto those weaker than us instead of uniting all marginalized groups against the powerful—an enterprise that involves effort, risk, and the potential loss of privileges we currently enjoy. Trans-exclusive feminists squabble over taxonomy, endeavoring to delimit what constitutes “woman” to some innate biological or psychological feature. But we need only look at the circus of Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown’s recent confirmation hearing of to see the toxic, patriarchal provenance of the delimiting effort. We witnessed a room of white republican men, daring a black woman to define “woman,” and then being unable to satisfactorily do so themselves without lame recourse to wombs, vaginas, births, and chromosomes, none of which are fixed or absolute (what of women with hysterectomies; fertility problems; anatomical injury or malformation; intersex traits?). We want our categories to have clear delineations, but variation and uncertainty creep back in our despite: All definitions are semi-permeable. Besides, almost none of us are perfect specimens of femininity or masculinity to begin with, at least not in our resting state. Most of us change our bodies, behaviors, and dress, in order to construct the gender with which we identify, a fact not lost on Williams, who observes:
Most cisgender people… undertake body modifications to better embody their sexed persona and emulate what is, we are told, a natural sexed body binary. Billions are spent each year on hair care, removal, and maintenance; cosmetic surgeries; workouts; exogenous chemicals; and ‘health’ and ‘lifestyle’ products… trans feminists are… questioning systems predicated upon discrete, natural, and unconstructed body binaries. Such ontological questions threaten the moral landscape that sex essentialists depend on (720).
I might also ask just which benefits “sex essentialists” gain from denying “broken” or “unnatural” women access to women’s spaces—let alone to women’s rights and protections? J— will never need to, say, change her tampon in a women’s bathroom, it’s true. But in a few years, nor will I—menopause is on my horizon. Do I, at that point, cease to be a woman? According to the GOP senators at Justice Brown’s hearing, perhaps I do. When I reach menopause, maybe J— and I can have our own bathroom, and we can prevent menstruating women from using it—a directive as arbitrary as preventing trans women from using bathrooms now. What truly threatens the senators—what they are responding to when they ask a black woman to define “woman” on the national stage—is a profound cultural watershed occurring as I write this in regard to gender formation and trans visibility. The currents beneath the surface of American discourse are changing direction whether we like it or not.
The watershed of the current moment should not, however, obscure a 20th century full of transgender experimentation, on children no less, as Jules Gill-Peterson discusses in Histories of the Transgender Child. She acknowledges that the “seismic shift” in our contemporary understanding of trans experiences is real but cautions us not to think of trans children as a recent phenomenon. Rather, she traces the long, complex history of transgender children in the United States and the way their experiences have shaped our medical understanding of gender. She describes the book’s project as rewriting “the historical and political basis for the supposed newness of today’s generation of trans kids by uncovering more than a century of what came before” (Gill-Peterson 3). Indeed, Gill-Peterson documents decades of medical procedures on children with “ambiguous” sex organs who were “medicalized and experimented upon by doctors who sought in their unfinished, developing bodies a material foothold for altering and, eventually, changing human sex as it grew” (3). The gendering decisions were undertaken by doctors, often before the children were old enough to speak let alone give consent and were predicated on the “plasticity” of gender in early human life. But this plasticity, Gill-Peterson argues, far from being “a progressive vector of malleability or change” that allowed individual agency in asserting, defining, and living self-knowledge, instead grew into one offshoot of the “modernizing violence of medicine,” often dismissing black and trans of color as “not plastic enough for the category of transsexuality” (4). Trans of color were men and women whose self-knowledge was written off as “delusional or homosexuality” (Gill-Peterson 4). Indeed, the 20th century exemplars of trans identity are overwhelmingly white. Gill-Peterson notes that compared to white patients “Black trans and trans of color patients were much rarer because they were by design not welcome within that discourse” (27). Especially vulnerable to erasure, she argues, are transgender children of color, who have existed all through the 20th century but who are sidelined by the historical record. White transness, while often pathologized, is nevertheless visible, indicative of the body’s plasticity—its potential for metamorphosis and evolution. Black trans and trans of color, on the other hand, were perceived as degenerate, the body devolving into something less human. The plastic body, the basis on which transgender identity is medically understood, was “abstractedly racialized by medical science as a synonym for whiteness” (Gill-Peterson 27). So J—’s trans identity is not the only component of her being that winnows her future down to the stark choice of school or sex work: Her blackness has a nonlinear impact on her transness (or vice versa), and her trans identity is thus framed by the medical community in what Gill-Peterson refers to as “atavistic” terms (27).
“The Mothers of Gynecology” Monument by Michelle Browder, Mongomery, Alabama
If white transness is visible because it proves the “plasticity” of white bodies, black bodies are characterized by their “fungibility,” as C. Riley Snorton proposes in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. He traces the medical profession’s reliance on black chattel—a replaceable, mutually interchangeable resource—in the 19th and 20th century development of medical technologies and methodologies. Early gynecologists “borrowed” sick and injured slaves from their masters in order to investigate various maladies, and the conclusions they drew about black bodies were used to either explain or contrast with white ones (Snorton 18). Their bodies could be used for the development and practice of medical procedures that could then be safely performed upon “important” (white) bodies; or they could be used as evidence of white superiority. Or both. According to Snorton, the pelvis was “a critical site for producing racial hierarchies among nineteenth century anatomists and sexologists intent on finding bodily ‘proof’ of black inferiority” (19). Snorton proposes that black fungibility functions as part of “a rubric that situates blackness and transness within the order of things that produce and maintain an androcentric European ethnoclass of Man as the pinnacle of being” (6). While plasticity signifies choice and individuality, fungibility signals the foreclosure of individuality. Further complicating black physical fungibility are instances in which black slaves cross-dressed and/or pretended to be white in their attempted escapes from slavery. These gender and race deceptions speak to slaves’ status as fungible goods whose identities mattered little to and were strategically unseen by their oppressors. Slaves found they could exploit such studied unseeing on the part of white masters (Snorton 79). Black people, at times, managed to survive abuse by playing a kind of musical chairs with their own racial and gender identities, using their own erasure as human beings to fool their oppressors.
J— exists at the nexus of the historical phenomena I incompletely chronicle above, and many more besides that I don’t yet perceive. It is no wonder her future feels narrow, precarious, circumscribed by white, heteronormative, cisgender hegemony. J— is a reminder, to this feminist at least, that having some small sense what systemic alterity feels like compels us to see when we push others to the outside. Given the systematic erasure, abuse, and degradation of fungible black bodies at the hands of white authorities (including the medical establishment), there is no excuse for feminists to pile on more of the same. We claim to care about marginality but we give the marginalized very little space to maneuver. As crusaders for equal rights—feminism’s arguable charter, its “spirit” if you will—it is paramount that we fight trans-exclusion in feminist discourse. “As with any identarian movement based upon rooting out impurity of form,” Williams cautions, “instead of interrogating their ideology, they attack that which questions it” (720). Exclusionary logic always feels like watching a kind of fable play out: A disenfranchised group organizes, acquires power, and then begins to attack “impurity of form” as represented by a weaker group in a pantomime of the systems that oppressed them. It is almost as though we care more about preventing others from acquiring our privilege than expanding and universalizing access to privilege—our putative goal. There should be a transitive property to privilege: If the strong enjoy a right, it should transfer automatically to those less strong within the same system. We are not betraying feminism by welcoming trans folks into our ranks. But we are betraying our most fundamental ethos if we continue to exclude them.
Works Cited
Gill-Peterson, Julian. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, University of Minnesota Press., 2017, pp. 17-53.
Williams, Cristan. “The Ontological Woman: A History of Deauthentication, Dehumanization, and Violence.” The Sociological Review Monographs, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2020, pp. 718-34.