Transphobia

Gender, Sex, and Breaking Binaries

How do we understand what gender is? How is it constructed? What systems work to uphold our ideas of gender and binaries? Who benefits? Thinking back to 5 faces of oppression: What oppressions does this system create and maintain? What is our role in this?

Material Covered

• READ: “Why Sex Is Not Binary”; “The Role of Masculinity Threat in Homonegativity and Transphobia”; “Fugitive Flesh: Gender Self-Determination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance”; “N.C. bill would ban treatment for trans people under 21”
• WATCH: “Transgender Rights” (17 min.) — (TW: mention of su*cide)

Listen Up

Shea (“SHE-uh”) Diamond is a Black trans woman who wrote this song while incarcerated. She ran away from an unaccepting household as a child, spent time in the foster care system, and eventually was arrested for robbing a convenience store in order to afford healthcare. She served nearly a decade in a men’s prison where her femininity was punished through isolation and humiliation. She said in an interview that her femininity was a threat to the safety of the hyper-masculine prison.

Yet, the ways that we are multiply marginalized offer opportunities to deconstruct, reimagine, rebuild, and reconsider measures of worth without multiple forms of discipline and violence.

Introduction

• Gender vs. sex: often conflated to mean the same thing
• Biological sex is an imprecise term because, as you read in the first article, dependent on a host of processes which may not always align in tidy ways or ways we’ve been taught to think about biological sex.
• Gender identity — does not refer to the purely social aspect of gender. It is a largely biological phenomenon which is considered by medical professionals to be “durable” and unable to be changed through medical intervention
• Gender identity is not a “preference” or a complete social construction — we have agency in sensing into our bodies and minds to claim our identities
• Gender roles — behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that a society (in a given culture and historical period — remember from The Promise) designates as masculine or feminine and/or a society that associates with or considers typical of the social role or men or women
• Gender expression — this can be how a person communicates gender identity to others through things such as their appearance or mannerisms (though trans people with marginalized class statuses may not always be able to express their gender through their appearance. Further, because of violence or the threat of violence, it may not be safe for trans people to do so)

Why Sex is Not Binary

Anne Fausto-Sterling is a Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. In 1993, she wrote an article called “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough” about intersex people. She argues that the binary way of thinking flattens the human experience — as we considered in the “Five Faces of Oppression” that oppression reduces the ability for someone to be fully human.

In the article for today, she restates the complexity of gender and “sex” — This is a layered phenomenon consisting of “biological” determinations in the womb but also gender socialization and hormones as people grow.

Further, we can connect this back to the Constructing Differences article from last week where we have the process of social construction through externalization, objectivation, and internalization. We can consider gender not as something that is fixed and merely biologically determined. It is also part of a process which is constructed through interaction. We learn how to “do gender”, how to “be” a man or “be” a woman. And we set consequences for those who don’t play their assigned part.

When we reduce people to chemical compositions we can then otherize them and create problems where there should be none. Because what this does is not simply divide people into two categories, but these categories must be mutually exclusive. There is femininity. There is masculinity. There is weakness. There is strength.

What happens when people fail to conform to this binary?

Fugitive Flesh

In this article, the author begins with a description of the events at Stonewall Inn in NY. The literal policing of bodies of gender non-conforming people has a long history — and that the “history of resistance is as long as the history of oppression” (3).

We continue to see gender being defined rigidly and in a binary fashion. As this author points out, these definitions are enforced through structural, disciplinary, and interpersonal domains.

So what is the solution? Assimilation? More policing? More laws? These often simply serve to maintain the present system while ignoring the roots of the oppression and applying the logics of the “Prison Industrial Complex” to people’s mere existence. We can also consider further the way other identities such as race, class, nationality, ability, etc. interact to further marginalize gender non-conforming or trans individuals.

This is measured against the “Normal” or “Unmarked” category. “Normative sexuality and gender [become] organizing structures of the prison industrial complex” — Gender normativity is defined by the interaction between various domains: cultural, political, legal, and religious, etc. When taken together they produce a violence at many levels.

We might ask: What might gender self-determination mean or look like?

Gender identity is formed in relation to other forms of power and is culturally, generationally, and geographically situated. (5)

One of the most compelling things in this article is the connection between gender and the “panopticon”: which was developed to surveil prisoners. The prison cells would be constructed along the perimeter of a circle. A guard tower would be placed in the middle. The prisoners would not be able to see into the tower to know if they were being watched. This would lead prisoners to behave as if they were always being watched. This becomes a form of self-surveillance. Gender is one of the earliest tools of socialization. The combination of gender expression and gender roles work to signal to others “what we are”: boy or girl.

The gender binary is then enforced through various modes of discipline:

• Lack of “formal” employment options; Housing insecurity; Threat of violence; Incarceration for all of these violations; Or even attempts to medically or scientifically “fix” or “cure” a gender variant
• Remember the 5 Faces of Oppression and think about how these connect

Look at the Legislation…

Anti-trans and Anti-LGBTQ legislation introduced from 2018–2022

• Impacts everything from access to healthcare and bathrooms to sports and education
• Impacts parents and caregivers of trans youth as they can face the forced removal of their children or even extreme legal consequences such as jail
• 1/3 of all of these are aimed at trans youth

Transgender Rights

• Trans bodies as curiosities (“What’s in your pants?”)
• Note: trans people do not need to do anything to their bodies to “be trans”; they do not need to undergo any surgeries or other care treatments that would bring their bodies in line with binary cisgender standards
• Weaponizing the threat of masculinity as a form of transphobia
• This isn’t a “trans people” problem — this is a cis problem
• About controlling bodies — legacy of colonialism and white supremacy

***Clarification on insensitive comments about Afghanistan***

John Oliver derides the comment that “Afghanistan is somewhere you can be yourself.” But I wanted to quickly remark (and we will talk about this when we talk about War towards the end of the semester) this ignores the role of the US military in destabilizing countries and imposing particular social constructions on their populations where they may not have previously existed. So I don’t want that part of the message to be read as “Afghanistan is backwards” but — if we remember our sociological imagination — that all of these issues are influenced by history and society.

A (Spoken) Word

E.J. Schoenborn (they/them) is a non-binary and queer performance poet from St. Paul, MN.

The Man Box

What does it mean to “act like a man”?

Picture a box. Everything that is in the box is what it means to be a man.

• Who taught you everything that’s in the box?
• What were you glad or upset about seeing in the box?
• What might happen if someone were to step outside of the box?
• How do the items in these boxes affect the relationships across genders?
• What were some of the assumptions we made about sexuality?
• What do heterosexism and/or homophobia have to do with the box?
• Are people interested in getting rid of the boxes? Why or why not?

The Role of Masculinity Threat

This is a social psychological study which looks at the more micro-level interactions which produce prejudices such as homonegativity and transphobia.

The authors define sexual prejudice as “negative attitudes based on sexual orientation targeting people who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual.” and that “prejudices toward transgender individuals denotes negative evaluation of ‘people who have gender identities, expressions, or behaviors not traditionally associated with the birth sex” (or assigned sex at birth). These can be seen through “traditional homonegativity” (something as unnatural) or modern prejudices (denying discrimination exists, thinking that gay people concentrate too much on their sexuality and make too many demands for social change)

The authors show how many studies suggest that males hold a more negative attitude toward sexual and gender minorities than females. They have identified a mechanism called the “masculinity threat” and describe “manhood” as “hard won and easily lost” and becomes a motivation for “antifeminity” — to be a man is to be against the feminine.

So, in essence, we have manhood set against womanhood. Being, again, mutually exclusive categories that are constructed differently based on your culture. As things change over time, like moving from traditional homonegativity to modern prejudices, we see a move from de jure discrimination (that is through the law) to de facto discrimination (that is the “unspoken rules” or the disciplinary and interpersonal domains of power which keep people “in line”)

Manhood becomes something that needs to be protected. In the case of trans people, men who hold these prejudices can feel even more threatened by the existence of people who do not conform to gender norms. As the authors state that trans people are often depicted as people who “destroy social order” rather than need social support.

Leads to a policing of bodies and human expression. How do these systems harm everyone?

“Let’s get into it”

Watch this interview with Alok and consider the message they are trying to convey. (We focus on 5:35–12:58 in class.)

So consider: how do we produce this kind of violence on ourselves and each other? What might be possible if we think outside of the “Eurocentric dichotomy”?