The DIY Gender Police: the surveillance of trans folks by anti-trans activists
This is the first post of a small series on DIY gender police, or anti-trans activists who take it upon themselves to police and harass trans activists, writers, and scholars in order to reverse our access to human rights, public space, and pride and dignity.
Part one: DIY Gender Policing
To be transgender is to be exposed to constant surveillance. Much of the scholarly work exploring the surveillance of trans folks has been fixated on hierarchical forms of watching conducted by state, carceral, and medical institutions. These institutions spy into the everyday lives of folks at various stages of their transition. This form of institutional watching is often rolled out by various experts who act as gate keepers to accessing basic forms of medical treatment and funded aid. Many of these experts are cisgender, heterosexual doctors, psychologists and state bureaucrats who claim knowledge of transgender issues without having ever experienced it.
As Julia Serano illustrates in her book Whipping Girl, these forms of expert intervention gives way to a system premised on ensuring an “authentic” transition (i.e. informed by cisgender expectations) that lead trans folks to overcompensate their gender performance (like, 120% femme) to convince the expert that they are indeed transgender just to get access to medical care, such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
Trans folks are exposed to a profound amount of suspicion ranging anywhere from police and prison guards to friends and family. This suspicion could be as banal as an extra layer of scrutiny when you present your ID card to a liqueur store employee or as extraordinary as rousing suspicion at the border when crossing through airport security. There is an overwhelming sense that a trans person must constantly prove their transness while they are exposed to invasive watching, and if this is not done properly, they can be denied access to important social and medical resources.
A recent example, as reported by journalist Katelyn Burns, is the spike in US government officials revoking passports from trans folks and offloading sometimes extra-legal bureaucratic weight on identity changes.
Though it is important to have conversations about these forms of institutional surveillance, oftentimes these conversations happen in ways that obscure other forms of surveillance which have a great deal of impact on trans folks. Oftentimes, the most impactful forms of surveillance that we face is the surveillance that comes from our friends, family, and peers, and even worse, from Internet trolls, trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and far-right bigots.
Lateral surveillance
This is what the sociologist Andrejevic calls lateral surveillance: “not the top-down monitoring of employees by employers, citizens by the state, but rather the peer-to-peer surveillance of spouses, friends, and relatives.” The use of lateral surveillance in everyday life relies on the hyper-visibility of a networked social media culture where we are all willingly tethered to various social media platforms where we share intimate details of our private lives. These digital publics allow us to post user-generated content for other users to browse through and has led to the normalization of watching each other.
Though I would argue that being constantly watched by friends, family, and peers does have a disciplining effect on people (i.e., you are more likely to act according to societal norms if you’re aware that you’re being watched), that is not what I am interested in here. I am interested in how lateral surveillance can be taken up by trolls and TERFs as a form of political violence that deeply impacts the trans community.
This is often done through doxxing which is commonly defined as the collection of private, identifiable information and its subsequent publication online. It is usually used in harassment campaigns where the person being doxxed receives a slurry of death threats, harassment, and abuse. For a lot of folks, doxxing is limited to actual names, home addresses, and phone numbers. However, I think it’s necessary to expand its definition to include the collection of publicly available information about and by a victim throughout the Internet.
Doxxing as a political violence
As a trans person involved in the public sphere through activism and writing, I’ve been doxxed several times for expressing important issues in the trans community. What caught me off-guard was the fact that all three times I was doxxed, a profound amount of information about my browsing and Internet history was scooped up into amateur dossiers that were subsequently posted to forum boards. Literally, a person (or a group) spent an enormous amount of time and energy scrutinizing my life in order to cause me embarrassment, shame, and to ultimately silence my dissent. This has become a common practice across the political spectrum.
I’ve been working on a concept called do-it-yourself (DIY) policing, a form of digital vigilantism, practiced in left and right digital communities, that harness and weaponize the ubiquitous visibility afforded to us by our constant need for social media attention. The Internet, and the mobile technologies that tether us to each other, allow for the most inexperienced watchers to take on intelligence techniques to interrogate the lives of the people around them by collecting user-generated content that victims have produced over the media they used throughout their life.
It’s pretty damn awful.
In practicing DIY policing, digital vigilantes take on the punitive role of state policing in order to dole out forms of punishment and take justice into their own hands. They conduct intelligence work, google social media posts, plunder public records, build dossiers of potentially embarrassing information, and post those dossiers to their forum boards to encourage their members to harass, intimidate, assault, and dehumanize their victims.
Justice, of course, is entirely relative to the political and cultural orientation of the people orchestrating the doxx. For an instance, antifa groups often use DIY policing in order to doxx nazis and white supremacists to cause embarrassment, public shaming, and loss of work and social connections. The goal behind this form of political violence is to remove their capacity to organize against marginalized communities. This form of DIY policing can seem entirely acceptable as the groups being targeted are literally attacking marginalized folks for merely existing. It can be a form of collective self-defence in the absence of protection from state intelligence and policing agencies.
What I am especially interested in exploring in the next few blog posts I will be writing is how anti-trans groups have taken up DIY policing to embarrass, silence, and intimidate trans activists, writers, and scholars who engage in publicly facing advocacy. DIY policing, in this context, is used as a form of political violence to disrupt the so-called “transgender agenda” put forward by “social justice warriors (SJWs)”. What these vigilantes are working against are gains and protections won for trans rights via the often difficult and tumultuous work of activists engaged in protest and lobbying. They are working to actively marginalize us from public participation and lobbying to have us downgraded to second class citizens.
In more extreme circumstances, these groups want trans folks to disappear from what they consider their corporeal and digital spaces.
In the coming weeks, I will be exploring some key concepts and ideas around how trolling, doxxing, e-bile, and vigilantism over digital platforms have been seriously impacting trans communities in extraordinarily violent ways. DIY policing, and its vast arsenal of techniques, seems largely opaque in cishet (cisgender, heterosexual) society, and because of this, is mostly ignored as a form of active discrimination. We need to make this form of political mobilization visible and start having a serious conversation on how we might collectively address it.
References
Andrejevic, M. (2005). The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance. Surveillance & Society 2(4), 479–497.
Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.
