Validity is Not Political
On trans materialism
A blizzard of recent Executive Orders includes many searing diatribes with unruly names. Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government was issued the day of Trump’s Inauguration. There’s a clear assault on bodily autonomy in the US. The dominant liberal response has been to interpret anti-transness as a human rights violation. Under such a framework, transness deserves defending in the same way one deserves mercy. It is cruel to crush something so small as a bug. This framing understands transness as a private act or personal choice that occasionally bumps into the public world. These milquetoast diversity proponents argue that it shouldn’t matter what’s going on down there. These are all limited positions. The Left must move against tranness as mere diversity, equity, and inclusion and understand transness as an issue of class, labor, and healthcare.
Already the ACLU has mounted suits to counter this landslide of Trumpian legislation. But bodily autonomy–from abortion to hormones—is already slipping. In light of this grim outlook, the rhetoric that activists and protestors utilize to fight back matters. Trans rights are often seen as a social issue, just another group in search of equality. Under fascism, transness is seen as another deviance from the norm to be litigated to the margins for their failure to conform.
Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the civic and social is instructive for understanding the ways trans people #resist. For Arendt, the social is the interpersonal. This is where social reproduction takes place. The civic is the realm of the political, where arguments about freedom and ethics take place. When we reduce transness to the social, we eschew the idea that transness is intimately intertwined with material issues like labor and healthcare. When transness is merely treated as a social issue, we are often told by liberal politicians and moms on Facebook that we are valid. We are given banal truisms instead of civic rights and responsibilities. Yes, “trans women are women,” as Stonewall and the Human Rights Commission both assert on their respective websites. Stores like the Phluid Project and LGBTQ aggregates like PinkNews peddle their message of radical acceptance to trans and nonbinary individuals using slogans like “radiating trans joy.” Such maxims provide no basis for moving the needle in favor of material needs. In reality these LGBTQ organizations are just selling us products. A sly businessman wrapped in a rainbow-colored flag. Can’t we move beyond social media campaigns like “trans women are beautiful?” Slay queen, these capitalists tell us without providing trans people any meaningful support. Rarely do such organizations or companies put their money where their mouth is.
Validity is not a political identity. No one has won rights by merely insisting on their humanity. Not by such appeals to emotion alone. Of course trans kids are kids. Obviously trans rights are human rights. Such truisms are a defensive strategy rather than a tool for building a worthwhile coalition. Instead of insisting on personhood, trans people should simply live as if such an inane truth is already gospel. Trans visibility, for instance, has not led to greater trans acceptance. Since the Trans Tipping Point, a Pew Research Study has found more people are saying sex is determined at birth. Not less. The face of the other does not inspire everyone to compassion or ethical obligation. Trans people should not wait for a new generation or buy in to vague promises from treacherous Democrats and wishy-washy liberals. We should collect a wider net of interlocutors and allies who are also in search of bodily autonomy. The best trans theorists, such as Kay Gabriel, Paisley Currah, and Jules Gil-Peterson have long critiqued liberal ideas of personal freedom that jettison radical politics in favor of mere tolerance. Often, buzz words like visibility and validity are highly individualistic rather than stridently communal.
Being valid is an interpersonal issue. Usually the trite word comes up during online discourse after some bisexual or trans person claims they don’t feel like they are enough. (Bi.org writes “To Understand Bisexuality, You Must First Accept It as Valid. Reddit and X are littered with similar threads. “Am I trans enough?” is another common discussion post. Many others argue about whether or not nonbinary people are trans.) The truth is that there is not enough, there is only too much. Only after crossing the threshold and tipping into danger does one feel enough. A trans feminine person may not feel like they are being read as “trans” until they are threatened on the street. Such street harassment offers a possible political alliance between trans people who experience the same kinds of violence. This is how validity moves from the social to the civic. The social simply offers fodder for amorphous discourse, while the civic offers a starting point for camaraderie and shared struggle. The Left should choose the latter. We have the ability to advocate for the candidates, positions, and organizations we prefer. This doesn’t need to culminate in electoral politics. It just requires action. Whether that be burning it all down, forming mutual aid groups, or campaigning for Socialists like Zohran Mamdani, we should conceptualize transness as the condensation of material issues.
The Left needs a strong platform built on class, labor, and healthcare. None of these issues are specific to trans people. Including us in such political decisions strengthens coalitions rather than weakens them as some mainstream Democrats seem to believe. Trans people need jobs, we are often disproportionately affected by recessions. Meanwhile, our healthcare is under attack, stripping many of our most vulnerable community members of emotional and physical stability. Plenty of trans people do survival sex work, locked out of traditional careers due to our status. All of these matters provide the opportunity for solidarity.
There are very few trans staff writers in lefty circles and hardly any trans editors. I’m not arguing for a trans CEO girlboss, but a few jobs with benefits would be nice. Instead, our labor is extracted and then paraded around as a harbinger of diversity. Publications can claim progressive ideals for platforming one (usually white and college-educated) trans writer a year. If someone comes after a trans person online for writing an op-ed, as many recently came after me for a piece on bathroom bills, no one circles back to check in on us. Our words are hung out to dry for clicks. Please retweet this article so I can make another $500. The past few years seem to have exacerbated such labor issues. But these are shared struggles, things we can find common ground with many minorities over. Our fates are tied to the same public infrastructure as everyone else. We can turn to the face of the other and act accordingly, as Emmanuel Levinas says, “the face-to-face is a relation in which the I frees itself from being limited to itself.”
Trans people are not members of an intellectual elite cabal that’s seeking to overturn the government. We’re hardly that organized. The idea that trans people are ruining the economy and leaching off national resources is a dangerous form of scapegoating. This is on purpose, Kay Gabriel writes in n+1, a calculated “series of savvy strategic decisions aimed at inhibiting the formation of highly potent political coalitions while bringing others terrifyingly into being.” By siloing transness to the social, one loses a valuable political ally. Worse, it’s infantilizing. Trans people should consider ourselves political agents, not only victims of torrential woe. We are not merely a rainbow minority in need of liberal tolerance. We can dictate a broad, class-centered agenda based on shared civic needs rather than on individualistic feelings of personal fulfillment. I care more about being able to live in an inhospitable world alongside my neighbor than in merely being seen. We need bread on the table. This has never been the job of trans influencers or online discourse, their ideas of liberation are limited to the interpersonal. For better or worse, validity has a funny way of never paying the bills.
Image Credit: Vivian E Browne.
New Yorker piece on trans passports.
On Joan Didion’s Notes to John for Study Hall.
Hannah Zeavin for Interview Mag.