Status Updates From Une brève histoire de la tr...

❝Their common experiences suggest that by the late nineteenth century, trans panic and its characteristic violence were a threat to anyone caught in public visibility, men’s desire, and the retaliatory violence that conflated femininity with sexual availability.❞

❝While the old woman’s Christian charity may have traded in ignorance that Kelly wasn’t the same kind of woman as her, the stares of everyone on the streetcar were proof enough that she was probably using that cover to protect a fellow passenger. Kelly arrived at 1410 unscathed, only to find it was just as bad as everyone had warned.❞

❝Looking trans feminine in public was a huge risk to her safety— it didn’t matter if she was only dressed that way for work. “Everybody that was on the streetcar was lookin’ at me. I didn’t say nothin’, I just sit there and crossed my legs.” ❞

❝Petrified, Kelly was saved by the old lady across the aisle, who beckoned her. “Come here honey. Come here. Come here honey, sit over here.” Kelly took the offer up with a sigh of relief, settling in beside her. “We women are not even safe anymore,” the old lady confided. “That old …” she said, gesturing to the drunk man, “I would like to curse him but I’m a Christian, you know.” ❞

❝What was trans about the panic was not that the people being targeted themselves were inherently trans women, but that they were trans-feminized by the conflation of male femininity with immoral sodomy and sex work.❞

❝The striking similarity between the actions of the police officer in the NWP and the federal agent on the Crow Reservation is evidence that the trans panic of the nineteenth century was global in scope. This doesn’t mean it was coordinated but rather that colonial states were similarly incentivized to target populations through trans panics as a way of securing sovereignty.❞

❝It was in this widespread panic and trans-feminization by the state that individual men learned to experience and wield trans panic, too. Psychology followed the example of the state.❞

❝The colonial state appointed itself the political right to exterminate hijras to satisfy panicked British moral order. As we have seen, doing so meant ending the hijra way of life, but it also empowered men— namely, police officers— to look for and attack hijras in the street.❞

❝Although the intervening history is too complex to reduce to any one cause, the British trans panic in the colonial era seems to have played a lasting role in sexualizing hijras and actually pushing them toward sex work by criminalizing their previous way of life.❞

❝The law manifestly failed in its extreme goal of exterminating the population, and its implementation withered by the end of the century. But the assault on the hijra way of life did have lasting consequences.❞

❝Cloaked in the homophobia, misogyny, and racism of British attitudes toward “sodomy,” sex work, and disease, colonial officials treated hijras as a kind of “doomed race” destined to die out.❞

❝Precisely because the British did not understand what it meant to be a hijra, they invented a story they could understand and that served imperial interests. The idea that hijras were male prostitutes with a secret government became the pretext for a statewide campaign to secure moral order by exterminating them.❞

❝Judge Unwin was wrong about most of what he claimed. Hijras were not predominately sex workers, nor did they have a king. But it was a compelling story, one that incited a trans panic in the colonial bureaucracy.❞

❝One of the features of trans panic— and trans misogyny more broadly— is that it marks populations as trans feminine, or trans-feminizes them, in spite of however they understand themselves.❞

❝British officials feared they might lose the NWP again, especially because they didn’t know much about who lived within its borders. As such, administrators became convinced they needed to pacify Indian society to avoid future rebellion.❞

And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women’s access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women’s presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity.❞

❝When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine.

❝This trans feminism is one that Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking travestis in Latin America sometimes champion to challenge the international order of state power and shallow human rights being codified as the progressive consensus of trans.❞

❝ “As a result, TERFs argued that liberation can only take place if men are absent. Theirs is a white feminist separatism.” ❞

❝ “Trans-exclusionist feminists adhere to a single-axis model of power in which sexism is the basic, underlying, most fundamental social inequality. Capitalism and colonialism, and the racism that fuels their engines, lay relatively inert. Instead, maleness or femaleness alone pins one’s place in the social hierarchy and determines individual behavior,” writes Schuller.❞

❝Morgan’s speech may have presented an aggrieved and victimized woman as the righteous subject of feminism, but her portrayal of trans femininity as violent and depraved could have been lifted from the British denunciation of hijras in the 1870s, or from Nazi propaganda about transvestites in the 1930s.❞

❝The emergence of trans-exclusionary radical feminism in the 1970s, with its own version of trans panic, is only one of many trans-misogynist echoes in recent history. TERFs, as they are now often called, didn’t invent trans misogyny, nor did they put a particularly novel spin on it.❞

❝Morgan, who was white, followed the blackface metaphor by calling women like Elliot rapists, at least in “mentality.” Her keynote speech remains one of the most cited events through which trans-exclusionary feminism, particularly in a lesbian register, came into existence.❞

❝The next morning the conference keynote speaker, a well-known feminist writer named Robin Morgan, gave a speech she had furiously revised the night before, denouncing women like Elliot.❞

❝Street queens, unlike the glamorous and enviable drag performers of the stage, were considered trashy for trying to live as real women, in plain sight.❞

❝By sexualizing, misgendering, and even ungendering some of them as exceptions to the so-called natural history of civilization, the state justified immense violence to consolidate its sovereignty, its claims to stolen land, and its function as guarantor of private property.❞

❝Trans women and trans femininity, from this book’s perspective, aren’t so definitively excluded or erased as they are degraded and punished by those who lust after them in anger, fascination, and affection.❞

❝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 (...)❞