💾 Archived View for welovedyou.xyz › janwen › notes › jgp1.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:26:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-16)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
- Two different transgender stories are playing out: adult poc and white children
- Transfeminine BIPOC are "registered through ongoing forms of social death... conversion into objects of necropolitical value"
- white Children are "sanitized, innocent, medicalized" and either heralds of utopia or evidence of the necessity of genocide
- in every case, they are thought to be brand new
- Trans BIPOC children are nowhere to be found
- The trans child, much like the child generally, "underwrites a potent racial innocence"
- These narratives "stage an antinomy between negativity and futurity"
- There's actually an abundant historical record of trans children in the 20th century, which really undoes our whole contemporary frame
- There were a lot, so how have we missed them?
- "made valuable through a racialized discourse of plasticity"
- they were thought of as lab experiments rather than a presence in social life(?)
- children were "reservoirs of plasticity"-- something white about this?
- Trans/intersex kids "mixed or abnormal" development was read thru eugenics, sexual morphology had racial typology to it
- The result: white kids got an inflexible, medicalized, binary, normative transition in early life. bipoc kids were turned away as delusional or "not plastic enough".
- plasticity was their value, their potential to yield experimental data
- But it was also dangerous: plasticity resists total rationalization or prescription, it keeps at least some autonomy in reserve
- ...though historically not enough to actually build political agency, although some glimpses of potential were found
- The idea that trans kids are "new" is incredibly widespread and relatively unchallenged
- The discourse departs from how sensational it is that kids are claiming such profound self-knowledge, then moves to concern about what medical interventions are reversible or irreversible.
- This narrative grants medicine a lot of weight in the possibilities of transness; suggests that trans children could not exist before puberty blockers did
- Because trans kids now grow up in a milieu where childhood transness is a recognized if contentious category, they "may have wider latitude to disidentify with trans history"
- First counterpoint: not all trans kids get the opportunity to participate in this "new" social form, especially considering race and class
- Second: Our misunderstanding of trans history is *enabling* the sense among trans kids that they have no history
- "transgender" didn't appear as a term until the 90s, so we have to take some liberties in describing past events. I'm using "trans" as an expansive term which includes experiences previously described as "transvestite" or "transsexual".
- Transsexuality, specifically, denotes a medical discourse and "biopolitical apparatus, a colonial form of knowledge with racializing and disenfranchising effects."
- Feinberg: "Since I am writing this book as a contribution to the demand for transgender liberation, the language I'm using is not aimed at *defining *but at *defending *the diverse communities that are coalescing."
- Furthermore, I'm using "child" in a specific way, referring to anyone below the age of medical consent. This is pointing towards how "child" is a juridico-medically constructed category and rejecting the notion that it represents a "natural category of human life"
- The child is a "dehumanized social form" designed to minimize agency. "Children" challenge this regime of infantilization, both collectively and through divergent "individual itineraries", but ideology makes this difficult to see or understand
- Some of the people I talk about might not strike readers as "trans"; that's kind of the problem. Today's medicalized definition of transness is restrictive and hyperfocused on etiology (people must constantly prove themselves and the authenticity of their transness).
- Scope of this book: 1900-1980
- 1900: Around when sex brought into modern medical project
- 1980: Childhood GID enters DSM, inaugurates current paradigm
- My historiographic purposes:
- **Debunk the 50s as the invention of transness**
- the 50s show the formation of "transsexuality" alongside Christine Jorgenson's celebrity, but TS is just one configuration of transness
- There was not some technological change that made transsexuality possible in this time, it's just the time when already-existing technology began to be used with trans people in the TS paradigm
- **Undermine medicalist domination by showing that trans people participate in knowledge construction rather than just acting as its objects**
- We know that German trans people were building social life as early as the 20s, but both medical and social historical records are spotty in the US.
- We know about early "sex change" and endocrinology discourse thru medical journals but not through records of clinical practice
- I combed through a lot of archives to try and fix this. Trans people readily sought out gender affirming care without the medicalized TS category available to them as early as the 30s.
- Our ideas of sex/gender/sexuality as separable, discrete categories is very recent. Things get complicated when we examine the past. Example: *Autobiography of an Androgyne *(1919).
- Do we consider this work as queer or trans history?
- In "postware American identity politics", *trans* is sometimes shown as a "successor" to *gay *or *queer*, so let's be intentional about our teleology and not just default to this trend
- Susan Stryker calls this author a trans woman, which is defensible.
- The *Androgyne *author relies on "inversion", a european sexological discourse which doesn't operate on the clean split between "what you are" and "what you want" which is central to queer discourse now
- that sexological discourse had a "staggering misrecognition" of the "rich social reality of transfeminine life and experience"
- Heanie: "Jennie June bridges vernacular and medical understandings of trans femininity." Argues that we see in her the emergence of transfeminine as a category distinct from gay male or cis woman
- The turn of the century didn't see the "teleological apprehension of trans life by science... but rather *the emergence of a distinction between cis and trans femininity that did not previously exist socially."*
- For these reasons, I maintain that it's important to use the specific lens of transness when looking at this history, because otherwise we miss important things.
- Queer historians often look for the emergence of this or that discourse, when this or that identity became legible, but in doing so we overlook what was *curtailed by *these discourses. We lose sight of "any number of broken-off, uncreated futures."
- That is to say that while on one hand reading transness into the 1910s could be "anachronistic", it's also a way of uncovering kinds of life and experience that the period was not ready to name
- Intersex procedures were proposed for trans people *by trans laypeople *long before doctors considered it; trans people have been *in advance *of medical discourse. Their "embodied fluency in medical science far outpaced institutional medical knowledge."
- Trans life had no "causal dependence" on medicine. They brought self-knowledge *to *the clinic.
- The medical model chose the "wrong body" theory and considered trans genders "aspirations" rather than present realities
- **Highlight the intertwined fates of intersex and transness**
- In the 1950s, gender was invented.
- Experimental medicine practiced on intersex kids without consent or knowledge is what founded the medical protocol of assigning a sex, then revising the body to suit it.
- "Reassigning the sex of intersex infants led to a theory of gender that coordinated the development of the biological body with the psychological acquisition of an ineradicable identity, installing a new difference between sex and gender."
- At John Hopkins Hospital, John Money & co were at the center of this process in the 50s. But it's not like he invented gender; he just interpreted decades of work at Hopkins, while also "smuggling in the racialized sense of sex as phenotype into the postwar era, so that gender was designed to function as a phenotype, too." Speaking of which,
- **Show the role of the child body in the medicalization of sex/gender as "racially plastic" phenotypes**
- The transsexual model, with its emphasis on particular surgeries, tends to erase a lot of transmasculine life.
- My stance is clear: trans people *do not need medical knowledge about themselves to understand their lives*.
- The medical record, ironically, is what shows this. Doctors recorded their patients' stories about living trans lives thru childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, frequently with acceptance by local communities
- Medicine oftentimes *followed the lead *of trans lives led without it
- Trans people have played important roles in this story of medicine
- "Several key early figures... were trans men who became doctors and in some cases were able to experiment on themselves."
- Michael Dillon: perhaps first trans man to do T-therapy, published "Self: a study in endocrinology and ethics."
- Alan L. Hart: radiologist, medically transitioned and had surgery in 1917-1918
- Other lay figures
- Louise Lawrence: sanfran trans community leader, challenged medical experts and clinicians. "I see the need to educate the doctors, to give them a thought to work on that doesn't come out of a text book."
- Many lay trans people who (in)voluntarily worked alongside and antagonized doctors. "Vicki" criticizing Harry Benjamin in the 60s.
- Reed Erickson funded Benjamin's work and so much more transsexual medicine research in the 60s-80s, not just throwing money at it but actively shaping it. His ideas about transition, transsexuality, and transmasculinity have traveled much farther than his name.
- Erickson has been marginalized partially because of his paranormal researches, paranoid temperment, and drug addiction. These are held up as failures to "live up to his empirical commitments to transgender science." But what if they were an important part of his transscientific project?
- Lewis: We flatten our trans historical narratives in order to combat our bad reputation. We emphasize "agential, policitized communities of subjects with sensible, self-interested aspirations."
- We overvalue medicine to bolster credibility.
- The record is more complex and stranger. "Trans studies need irrational concepts" which sometimes undercut medical understandings. Erickson had "complex political agendas" and "ostensibly irrational or nonsecular commitments."
- "Trans Animism". In LA, a protest against police brutality against lgbtbipoc involved an attempt to "levitate" the police station and disappear it. Actions like these give us a critique of the non-profit industrial complex and show "accountability to the unborn, the dead, and the living," which might let us "hold more people, more levity, more magic, less isolation, and less shame."
- When trans people lack access to expert education (especially children) we do sometimes resort to magical narratives.
- We found trans people all across the country, but the records were overwhelmingly white. Hmm.
- So, to tell nonwhite trans history, we have to look outside the medical archive.
- STAR house and "street kids" developed trans sociality without wealth or medicine
- Sylvia Rivera was quite aloof from the medical transsexual discourse. She took hormones for a while but decided that *she didn't want to be a woman:* "I like pretending, the whole world for me is a stage I like to dress up."
- The street kids are, too, proof of historical trans youth, but they are excluded from the story because of their radical politics. STAR was trenchant to a gay liberation movement that was dominated by white cis gay men.
- STAR was an apartment of self-taught homemakers where Rivera and Johnson supported members through their own sex work and worked towards education, organization, socialization, and survival of trans youth
- Rivera was excluded from the Christopher Street Lib Day Rally in 1973, physically fighting her way to the podium to indict the organizers for ignoring incarcerated trans people.
- STAR cared little for medical models of transsexuality. They worked with community to have a mobile medical trailer, but not for "gender-affirming care", just survival and general well-being. Rivera also fought with psychiatric institutions where queer people were impounded.
- "Trans of color studies" is not a field per se, it's a way of pointing out that race has always been part of the trans story.
- We can do "collateral geneology": encounter with the past that involves an ethical reckoning with the damage that overlooking that past has caused
- The relation of blackness to trans life, as well as the
relation of antiblackness to transsexuality and transgender, represents polit-
ical problems of knowledge and being to be opened up through historical
and politically engaged scholarship, rather than a frontier of new thinking
to be discovered by more inclusive methodologies. Blackness problema-
tizes the category trans—and vice versa.
- We also have to account for the "hypervisibility of trans bipoc death." This is a kind of *value extraction* that uses trans of color death to vitalise the political movement.
- This critique is important because of a "biopolitical turn" in trans studies. It's been productive insofar as it has identified how trans life has been circumscribed by "normalizing and governmental techniques", but it also follows Foucault in "abstracting the category of 'race' out of its own historicity, abandoning the centrality of colonialism and trans-atlantic slavery to the racialized modernity of the human."
- To decolonize the field, we turn to Sylvia Winter's work on the "overrepresentation of Western Man and the production of alternate genres of the human."
- Transgender and transsexuality are "imperial formations of knowledge that circulate... unevenly across the global north and south." The decolonialist approach is an opportunity to unseat scientific knowledge from its power over "those who suffer the effects of epistemic violence."
- The term transgender, with its baked-in separations of sex, gender, and desire is "simply foreign to most places and times." One of those places/times is 20th century America, in fact!
- John Hopkins was built in a historically black neighborhood for access to black bodies upon which to experiment "that was frequently nontherapeutic"
- Hopkins produced medical protocols not from "white plastic potential" but from "black fungibility"
- A trans of color critique of medicine names the "spectaculary whiteness" of transsexuality, calls transsexuality a "colonial form of knowledge whose claims to jurisdiction over trans life must be contested."
- Donna Haraway's "situated knowledge", a feminist epistemology
- A *feminist objectivity *is one that grapples with "the ethical problem of being held accountable for the production of a standpoint."
- In situated knowledge, you seek *objectivity* (a partial connection), not *identity *(a totalizing grasp).
- We must not pretend to transcendent detachment, nor dichotomize knower and known (?)
- So that "we may become answerable for what we learn to see."
- Dominant epistemology is situated too, it just acts like it isn't. Naming it situated is a critique.
- We have good reason to place more trust in "views from below", but not the license to treat them uncritically. "How to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language as the 'highest' techno-scientific visualizations."
- Chela Sandoval's "Methodology of the Oppressed": Producing situated knowledge from an oppressed perspective risks "reducing that perspective to an identity"
- "minority forms of knowledge" get confined to a "particular identitarian scope that reduces their sphere of applicability"
- Ultimately, what I want is for us to stop looking for causes. Stop treating trans kids as nothing but sources for data. Stop using them as means to ends in some culture war. Simply affirm that they exist in all their complexity and historicity, and that they have a right to exist happily.