Carolina’s Reviews > A Short History of Trans Misogyny > Status Update

❝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.❞

❝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.❞