TL;DR! — Why We Need a Specifically Trans Epistemology

I had the pleasure/privilege of talking with the estimable B. George recently, co-author of the abstruse-sounding but eminently approachable ”Hermeneutical Backlash: Trans Youth Panics as Epistemic Injustice” with Stacey Goguen. which I think says makes some important and unique contributions to how we understand a) the increase of kids identifying as trans, and b) the scurrilous claims as proof of a “social contagion.” [1]

I did some embarrassing fan-girling which B. graceful endured with appropriate stoicism, but it got me thinking again about the intersection of transgender on knowledge.

I think hermeneutics — the conditions by which we come to know what we know — cuts to the core of the transgender project. Take First Person Authority , a central principle of trans scholarship and advocacy: that we can announce our own genders.

But FPA also leads to a lot of strange places which we seldom admit. For instance, if a tall, rangy, bearded AMAB person (like I was at transition) can announce they are a Woman, what meaning does the category retain?

We have already cut Woman loose from Sex. Since I have short hair and dress in jeans and tees, it’s certainly not anything to do with (feminine) gender expression. I do my share of the housework and mothering but I’ve never taken on the traditional “Woman’s role.” So that just leaves my own inner sense of identification: but identification with what, exactly, if it’s none of the above?

And what about the issues of visual knowledge my identity sets up ? 99% of the world understands Men and Women as visual categories they can see, not as invisible internal states. What are the implications when anyone who looks in any way can ask to be acknowledged as a Woman? [2]

I had surgery but many trans women today don’t feel they need it. What are the implications for visual knowledge when we ask for our girldicks to be recognized as feminine genital organs?

As I’ve written elsewhere, visual knowledge is very compelling. FPA asks people to believe what we say, not what they see, which is a profoundly different form of knowledge about the body. Who are you going to believe — me or your lyin’ eyes? was never going to be an easy sell. But it does point to our need to change how people see gender.

Which is another way of saying that trans studies is going to have move beyond simple assertions that “Trans women are women, period” and begin developing a truly transgender theory of knowledge — a transgender epistemology.

The current and virulent frenzy to evict trans women from sports to “protect women’s sports is just one example of how much a ciscentric systems of meaning — what I call “cislogocentrism” — works to obscure and erase our bodies and experiences, rather than describe or represent them.

The fact that transgender children are expect to “prove” that they’re trans, but if they’re cis, asking for such proof would be unthinkable is another.

A more trans-centric system of meaning and knowledge will also force trans theory to confront one of the great contradictions at its core, which is mobilize around the first half of Butlerian deconstruction — Gender is a social construct — while blissfully ignoring the second half — Sex is just as socially constructed as gender.

(Which is NOT the same as saying its un-important or even less important: I pay my mortgage with money, which is about as socially constructed as a thing can be.)

Trans studies wants to essentialize the body as a material fact in order valorize the desires many of us have to medically pursue different forms of gendered embodiment.

But Sex is already a gendered way of looking the body. So the distinction at the center of trans scholarship turns out to be what lawyers call “a distinction without a difference.” And Sex was Gender all along. [3]

Deconstruction is a sword that cuts both ways. Right now trans studies has put itself in the paradoxical position of saying that Gender can be de constructed but Sex is strictly off-limits.

This is a political position masquerading as philosophy.

Trans studies is also going to have finally begin dealing with sexuality. Because at the heart of cisgender rejection of trans women is a ciscentric gender aesthetic which few of us will ever approximate. If every transgender women looked like Kate Moss, I suspect there would be a lot less hostility to us in public spaces and women’s restrooms.

But we don’t. Or at least I don’t.

And I suspect that is a large part of what makes cisgender society uncomfortable around us. Not just because we don’t look “like a Woman,” but because (at least for hetero men) standard Women-type femininity is deeply attached to their sense of arousal and eroticism. And a tall, rangy, bearded guy-type person demanding that they acknowledged her a Woman is a turn-off, perhaps even erotically gross (I need to interject here most days my partner finds me freakin’ adorable.)

The late Mira Bellwether wrote in her notorious ‘zine Fucking Trans Women, “Trans women’s bodies are soft…because we say they are…My body is a woman’s body and part of it is my penis….I don’t think anyone has every complimented me on how sexy my penis looks when it’s soft, but whatever: it’s totally sexy.”

Does and should FPA authority extend beyond identity to how we ask others to understand our bodies’ physical properties and their erotic esthetics?

Whatever the answers I think trans studies must engage with ways that gendered perception is also anchored in people’s erotic sensibilities about the body.

To sum up, the current forms of knowledges we have about bodies, Sex, and desire are deeply disadvantageous to any real understanding of the transgender body [For example, see my piece “Trans Women: What Even Friends (Not Just TERFs) Don’t Get.”[4])

A cisgender epistemology will always see trans bodies (and for that matter intersex bodies) as inferior, derivative, and non-natural. As Natalie Reed has written, it will also assmje that all suspects are presumed cisgender until proven guilty of transsexuality. [5]

If we are to ever see the transgender body fully and clearly in all its rainbow variation detached from the cisgender frame, we will need a truly transgender form of knowledge. Like feminist epistemology before it, it will have to rebuilding significant areas of human knowledge about sex, gender, and bodies from the ground up — but in an even more fundamental way.

Anything less will never get us where we need to go. And it’s a task which I don’t think trans studies has yet realized must be among its core investments. Here’s hoping it will.

[1] https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/13518

[2] I’m writing strictly about women because I are one, not because I’m misogynist, and I don’t think it’s my place to speak for trans men or nonbinary people.

[3[ Okay, yes, I lifted that more or less directly from Gender Trouble but made it sound like my own.

[4] https://medium.com/@rikiwilchins/trans-women-what-even-fiends-not-just-terfs-dont-get-7908e94be883

[5] https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/