Transition
By Carob Chip
What the f**? The anti-cancel culture government says being “transgender” is canceled. Fine by me, I’m over it. Being “trans” is old news to me, I just wanna be a tomboy and I could give a fuck. Are they going to go back to middle school and tell the class that in fact, I was never queer cuz they fucked up my ID back to the way it was? (Are they gonna tell my mom?)
But beneath the tough attitude, I feel deep sorrow. Transition is an act of hope. To find yourself in “trans” is to deeply want what lies trapped within the restrictive and repressive cultural expectations of gender.
Transition becomes all bound up in the acts of others: in the embrace of friends, names on the lips of voices loud and high, the soft curve of a lover’s spine against mine.
These kinds of experiences, even if the specifics and language are different, are widely shared. I don’t think that “trans” is always such a distinct and exceptional experience. Transitions are present and felt in many places: by the immigrant woman at night school teasing her lips into new sounds; immigrant youth re-learning their name in Latin characters; the woman in the dyke bar filling with an unfamiliar want; the belly full with child.
Transitions can happen only in our interactions with each other.
With their presence, the people in the “LGBTQ” library support group showed it was possible. There were those who cried when it became hard, and those whose shoulders they cried on. There were the ones smoking outside after session and flirting.
I remember my grandmother’s stories of escaping the church’s threat of eternal damnation to go to the dance hall and see the boys. I remember giving a ride to the gay trans girl mechanic who swore she would never wear a dress.
Community spaces make many of these transitions possible. They are being threatened to serve commercial and political interests. Many people born today will not know the experience of having a space, besides libraries or schools, to be present and be with others in a non-commercial way. Public schools are fraught with coercion; and libraries are facing censorship and cuts, to suppress challenging ideas and promote a privatized marketplace of services. Only with difficulty can we imagine the land without heavily policed and fortified borders.
Spaces are threatened by the possibility of violence by fascist vigilantes, lonely and unwell people, or the fascist state. In particular, radical spaces are undermined by high rent prices and inequality, which makes it difficult for people — especially working-class people — to engage in participatory projects.
When we talk about these challenges, in addition to book bans and bans on trans identification and knowledge, we must talk broadly of long attempts by both dominant political parties to suppress forms of insurgent working-class education, knowledge and culture. Too often it is just said that “libraries are under attack” or “trans rights are under attack.” No, we are living with the results of decades of violent state-powered demobilization of labor and radicalism.
Capitalism takes the form of cultural death. Feminist memory, labor history, indigenous thought, and even ordinary family stories are all under threat. Life needs have been subordinated to commercial exploitation, and we must survive the devastating consequences. Families are being ripped apart by a social order that invites us to abandon our capacity for love and celebrates engagement in online keyboard wars and right-wing extremism.
We must keep our cultures alive. This is a fight that includes every single person. Every place has culture, left-wing and labor history. Queer people have often been at the forefront of remembering, forming chosen, inter-generational community; making art out of necessity and desire, and fighting back for survival. We look to the past to make sense of the lethal present. Our bodies become archives.
Resisting efforts to erase trans life will require a clear-eyed view of the situation at hand. Trans rights activism beginning in the 1990s challenged the mass media’s denigration and sensationalism of our experiences, and made appeals for recognition and inclusion to politicians and psychiatric/medical bodies. Today, these gains of recognition — which did not stop the economic exclusion and violence experienced by many poor trans people — are being challenged.
The terrain has changed substantially. The mass media is increasingly controlled not only by corporations, but by right-wing billionaires, some of whom are politically motivated to re-animate denigrating anti-trans tropes. Liberal politicians, seeing these attacks, might be sooner to embrace hostility to trans people than a politics of challenging private equity or universal healthcare — which would genuinely challenge the right on new terms. As Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser notes, the policy-making of nation-states has become “more accountable to global capital than to any public.”
In the immediate term, specific efforts will have to be made to help trans people survive.
Alternative access to hormone replacement therapy, and affirming care and community are critical. Finding access to gender-affirming care — just like accessing abortion, healthcare, safe working conditions, and clean water — has already been very difficult. Informal and organized efforts will continue to be needed to try to fill these gaps.
In the long-term, however, we will need to accept that the liberal politics of recognition will never be sufficient. It is not viable against the right-wing, and even if it were, it is incapable of confronting climate change, disenfranchisement, prison, wage, and chattel slavery, and other forms of exploitation and impoverishment.
“Resisting” the new order is not sufficient either. As the latest issue of prison newspaper Under Lock & Key points out, “Those who try to have both capitalism and fewer oligarchs force the imperialists to extract more superprofits abroad, while pushing oppressed nations within U.$. borders out to limit the pool of wealth redistribution.” While I think “the imperialists” is overly simplistic and obfuscates a constellation of imperial interests, there is much merit to the argument that redistributive solutions within national borders will not suffice. Our politics need to extend far beyond electoral maneuvering and statecraft. In recent years the idea has spread that our “positionalities” are so specific, it is hard to co-create politics with other people of different experiences, let alone people in the Third World. In reality, we are already connected politically by the circuits of global capital.
What is necessary is a clear-eyed program that challenges the power and primacy of global capitalism. This will look so very different than the embodied experience of transition. But it may no less involve an embrace of hope and difference, despite uncertainty and a hostile cultural and political terrain.
The distinction between the politics of recognition and redistribution, used in passing here, is adapted from Nancy Fraser’s theorizing in “Feminist Politics in the Age of Recognition.”