Surprise! We’ve got another essay in the Transgender Marxism collection up for discussion.
The PDF is here – https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
The intro discussion, with links to all the essay discussions is here – https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Tonight’s essay is How Do Gender Transitions Happen? by Jules Joanne Gleeson
Jules Joanne Gleeson is a Londoner living in Vienna. She has performed lectures and stand-up comedy internationally. Her essays have been published widely, including by Viewpoint Magazine, Invert, TSQ, Homintern, VICE, Oxford Art Journal and Salvage. Jules co-founded the Leftovers communist discussion group, has copyedited several Marxist monographs, and is writing a book about logic and hermaphrodites. She enjoys pop music, mystical texts and kettlebells.
As with previous discussions, I’ll be pulling quotes and making notes.
Feel free to join in and ask questions, make comments, learn something together with me!! (No time limit, I will always come back to these, so don’t feel like you can’t chime in just because you found this post like eight months late).
Edit: The next discussion, on an essay by Nat Raha, is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/408500
This essay opens with a quote from Julia Serano explaining the fruitlessness of allowing cis people to frame conversations of transition with the question “why”
“Eventually, I realized that it is a pointless question – the fact is that I am transsexual and I exist, and there is no legitimate reason why I should feel inferior to a cissexual [i.e. a nontranssexual] because of that. Once I accepted my own transsexuality, then it became obvious to me that the question ‘Why do transsexuals exist?’ is not a matter of pure curiosity, but rather an act of non-acceptance, as it invariably occurs in the absence of asking the reciprocal question: ‘Why do cissexuals exist?’ The unceasing search to uncover the cause of transsexuality is designed to keep transsexual gender identities in a perpetually questionable state, thereby ensuring that cissexual gender identities continue to be unquestionable”
Serano terms this the etiological imperative of framing trans stories with “why,” whereas, Gleeson says, it is much more interesting and fruitful to discuss transition in terms of “how?”
Cis people, Gleeson asserts (and from personal experience I can say this seems generally true) tend to desire a why that requires an exploration of childhood memories and vivid revelations, one that, I say, narrows the possibilities of transition to a specific, cis-approved narrative, usually rife with private traumas they seek to exploit, and that confirm their preconceptions of transness (usually couched in pathologisation, a common thread of trapped in the wrong body and I always knew I was different)
Gleeson mentions here Anglophone feminists who argue against the validity of trans identity (especially trans womanhood) and that has a particular disdain for trans lesbians, as though our mere existence somehow threatens the very foundations of lesbianism itself.
Gleeson is uninterested in framing a discussion of why, and instead chooses to frame the discussion of how. This essay presents two general understandings of transition, neither of which contradicts or conflicts on the other, and both of which many trans people will rely on to one degree or another throughout their transition.
“Firstly, transition as purposefully varying ‘the encounter’ between the individual and society’s gendered expectations. This view identifies ‘determining’ qualities, which taken as a whole amount to an ‘overdetermination’: a certain number of ‘tells’ might make one perceived as a woman, or a man, or as something unclearly inbetween. Trans people struggle with mastering the way they in particular will be perceived, and mastery over this moment of encounter (the aleatory exchange) through exercises, affectations, and physical changes is the focus of transitioning”
This is transition as reproduction (or rejection of reproduction) of normative gender roles. These exchanges are experienced by cis people as well, whereby they reproduce the markers or expectations of their assigned gender. For trans people, these markers and exchanges are performed and succeeded in varying degrees, whether it be an attempt to conform to normative tells, or to subvert them.
“Passing” could, in this way, to be understood as the success of conformation in reproducing the tells of a particular set of gendered expectations.
“Secondly, a view focusing on trans communities, which perform the central work of reciprocal recognition. This view frames identities as arising out of formative relationships and processes within those bonds. These loose collectives provide a context or ‘space’ for the articulation of new language, lifestyle developments, and culture. This view foregrounds the circles that trans identities have tended to arise out of, and which offer support and resources, which only this kind of affinity-based grouping can.”
This view is of transness as a socially reproduced relation to queer culture. By finding affirmation and community within queer spaces, reproducing queer expression and queer ideas, a person transitions from their perception as a cis individual into one of a queer individual.
“View 1: transition as mastery over the encounter”
“The first view of transition is an analytic one: it considers gender recognition to be a process that unfolds socially, and which trans people are tasked with doing their best to take command of, using hormones, surgeries, training in posture or speech, their wardrobes, and formal changes to identity documents. It focuses on the evaluative moments trans people go through in considering themselves, and preparing themselves, and in their encounters with the broader world”
This process of transition is one in which trans people take steps to present to the world (or to be read) a certain way. For many people, this is the view of transition most concerned with “passing” though it’s important to note that there are trans people for whom passing is not the goal (or not possible) and people for whom success in this regard would be to “pass” as nonconforming to either of the cis ideas of gender.
“The focus of those pursuing ‘passing’ is both their own form (body, attire, voice, mannerism, word choice), but also interactions with an observer (assumed usually to be cis, and perhaps relatively uninformed on gender affairs).”
This is a self-directed transition, and one which for some is aimed at creating a state of stealth, in which only a chosen few are aware that the trans individual is not cis. Gleeson notes that for most adult transitioners, this would require a radical change in location.
Anecdotally, I live in a relatively small city, where it usual for people to attempt to locate common connections between everyone they meet. This results in a near-impossibility in going stealth, as someone will always know someone who knew you when.
This also leads to situations in which, while someone may be “polite” about transition on the surface, there is almost always gossip out of earshot relaying not only a trans person’s status as trans, but divulging details of connections from the past, including dead names.
Passing is a tetchy subject, politically. Gleeson notes that there are vocal objections to passing as assimilationist (which is very true), but that nevertheless it represents a common desire amongst trans people. I’ll say myself that passing is also something largely reserved for a a select few privileged transitioners, primarily white. There’s a whole discussion to be had about passing and the way it is leveraged to support ideas of transmedicalism.
While passing is often sought as a desire to escape the violence inflicted on trans people, the overwhelming majority of violence is directed towards poor Black trans women. For them, passing is often a matter of life or death. However, passing is also for them farthest out of reach, due in part to the prohibitive expense of passing, the lack of proper medical care, and the very real truth that Black bodies are more heavily policed and are already (for cis people as well) considered to exist on a spectrum of queerness outside of the cishet white normativity of the gender binary.