The Politics of My Trans Identity
How critiques of “identity politics” send the message that certain people just shouldn’t exist.
On the morning after the 2004 Presidential election, I walked out into a cornfield in central Iowa where I was attending college and broke down in tears. I felt shaken and uncertain about my future under a second George W. Bush administration — an unfamiliar feeling for me given my relatively charmed life as a white, class-privileged, formally educated person. I knew nothing of the systematic violence and fear that people of color, immigrants, poor people lived under. That is why I was especially unprepared to navigate the political exploitation of my identity as a queer person. It destabilized me but it also motivated me to invest in a more extensive critique and understanding of structures of white supremacy and the history of political orders designed to maintain them.
I also grew more empowered to embrace my identity as a queer person and later, as a trans person. During the 2004 campaign, I wrote my father a letter imploring him not to vote for George W. Bush who had, in my view, campaigned against my queerness. I had never “come out” to my father though like everyone in my life he likely knew that I was not straight.
“Please, for me, your child, do not vote for a man who believes I am an abomination that should not exist,” I wrote to my father.
He never responded and no doubt cast his vote for Bush that year and countless other politicians who reject or downright condemn my existence in the years since. During the few conversations about politics we have had in the 12 years that followed, his explanation is often something along the lines of “this isn’t personal it is about the economy and national security.” Forget that my father whose jobs in the last decade have included driving an Uber, working at Bass Pro Shops and Home Depot, will see no financial benefit from the politicians he votes into office, the idea that there is no “personal” impact flowing from our political structures or that our identities are not implicated in the social, economic and political structures we put into place is absurd. And while this reductive analysis of politics belongs in the trash heap of history alongside things like colorblindness and trickle-down economics, it has found new defenders among “liberal” commentators explaining the rise of Donald Trump.
In the past month, people have rushed to blame “identity politics” for Democrats’ defeat. And at least New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost and Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla have explicitly suggested that a focus on the experiences of transgender people during the campaign somehow cost Hillary the presidency. To use Bruni’s language, the argument goes that by focusing on such a “boutique” issue as transgender rights instead of issues implicating “the economy” and “jobs”, Democrats alienated voters (implicitly — white, heterosexual male voters) and ensured the party’s collapse at the polls.
There are at least three major problems with this argument.
The first, is that it assumes that white people don’t have an identity or that class-based arguments don’t implicate the so-called “identity politics” the framework critiques. When Trump claims a campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” by institutionalizing a political paradigm of expelling immigrants, doubling down on racial profiling, and registering Muslim people, that is not “ divisive identity politics, apparently,” as Hadley Freeman explains in the Guardian because under this formulation, “white straight voters don’t have an identity — they are just people.” The critique of “identity politics” then, which is really just a call for people of color, queer people, trans people to be quiet, is an argument that just serves to further institutionalize and normalize the subject position of white, heterosexual, men as objective.
The second problem with this argument about “identity politics,” is that, even accepting the premise that Democrats emphasized the “identities” of marginalized communities — a way overblown suggestion — it is simply false that it cost them votes. One need look no further than the likely ouster of incumbent Governor and ‘sore loser’ Pat McCrory in North Carolina. McCrory banked his political career on targeting oppressed communities — particularly Black people and trans people. Rather than silently accept his transparent suppression of Black voters and anti-trans fear mongering, the public, including Democratic leaders in state and nationally, pushed back and aggressively defended the humanity of the groups he targeted. And while Trump took North Carolina, McCrory — though he still won’t concede — plainly did not.
And finally, this argument is morally indefensible because what it really does is tell people that it is their very existence that is the problem and they should wait until white, straight, men are comfortable enough with them to accept their demand to exist. I enjoy a joke a my own expense just as much as the next person but there is something quite unnerving when you are expected to laugh at the systemic forces at work to make it impossible for you to survive.
The idea that my health care, my ability to go to the bathroom, the core of who I am should be compromised and silenced is a request for me to succumb to the darkest impulses of self-hate that have plagued me my entire life.
I carried around enough fear and self-hate even before state legislatures proposed more than 50 bills targeting trans people like me. And when these bills come, and they will keep coming, what are we supposed to do?
If we listen to Bruni or Lilla or Jost, the answer would be to just accept that our lives simply are not important enough to defend against these attacks and we should focus on more important things like “jobs.” But that, of course, means jobs for other people since there is no way I, for example, could have a job if I am forced to use a women’s restroom as these bills would require. Not only would it be humiliating and dangerous for me to be forced into a space that directly undermines who I am, the mandate is really just a mandate that I not go to the restroom at all. And that, of course, is just a demand that I not exist in public space.
For as long as I can remember I have worked to overcome that same impulse within myself — the idea that I should not exist. Because of the health care that I have received, the jobs that have accepted me, the institutions that included me, the communities that have loved me, I have found my way to a sense of beauty and pride in who I am.
I absolutely do not accept the insistence that my trans body is grotesque and dangerous or that my health care is unnecessary or that I should simply not go to the bathroom. If challenging those narratives costs us elections, then those are elections I will gladly lose. We cannot be patient in our demand to lift up the humanity of our siblings in struggle.
When trans people demand safety in public or the ability to go to the restroom, that is a politics of survival.
When Black people demand not to be murdered in the street by agents of the government, that is a politics of survival.
When immigrants demand not to be held indefinitely in detention, that is a politics of survival.
When water protectors at Standing Rock or in Detroit demand clean water, that is a politics of survival.
When Muslim people demand to practice their faith without harassment, violence or forced registration, that is a politics of survival.
That people have an identity does not change the fact that they also have humanity. We all have both. Let us not be lulled into complacency by the thinly veiled calls for our silence by our so-called allies.
As I look ahead to the Trump administration, I know that I will put everything that I have on the line for my communities and for all other communities targeted by government policies or political discourse aimed to cut short life chances and survival opportunities.
When my father casts his vote in defense of a separation between the “economy” and “identity” he quite knowingly erases my identity and undermines my ability to participate in the economy that he so disingenuously defends. But more than that, he misses out on being a part of the beautiful, transformative vision that I, and others, offer for our future.
We will build beautiful spaces; we will claim collective love; we will unrelentingly stand up for each other.
Take away our rights but you won’t take away my fight.
