A Short History of Trans Misogyny (02/08/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss Jules' new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, which traces the historical roots of "trans panic" as a product of empire, colonialism, and policing.
Find Jules' book here, out now from Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Jules Gill-Peterson 0:01
I've been really interested lately in thinking about asking a question that's often really hard to answer, which is why, why is there so much trans misogyny? Why is there violence against trans women? You know, not just how does it happen, who does it, under what circumstances, but why? And as a historian, I think it often ends up being a kind of radical point to just say, like, no, these things aren't perennial or evergreen or inherent in human psychology, or as vague as just like the natural consequence of the social order that we live in. They had to be invented, you know? Trans misogyny had to be invented. People had to be incited and taught how to engage in these dynamics that are familiar to us. And it took a long time to build the kind of crushing trans misogynistic world that we live in today.
Death Panel 1:03
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:14
Welcome to the Death Panel.
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So as usual, I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton and today I am here with my co-host, Jules Gill Peterson.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:53
Hello. I'm sure you can hear that I have the most gigantic, goofiest smile on my face right now.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:59
Same. And I'm so excited to be here with you today, Jules, because today we get to celebrate the release of your new book.
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:07
And this is the place to do it. I've been so looking forward to this. This feels like the real debut. Yeah, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:14
Yeah, the official launch.
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:14
The like punk debutante ball.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:16
[ laughing ] I love it. Yes. So today, we're gonna be celebrating and talking about A Short History of Trans Misogyny, out now from Verso Books. And like we did with the release of Health Communism, you know, we just thought today, we would take the time and take a whole episode, just the two of us, to just talk about the book, sort of what the central arguments are, and just sort of set up for folks ways to enter the text and ways that you hope that people are going to be able to use this and build on it too. And while we were planning this, we really decided to focus closely today on the introduction. And that gives us actually a chance to talk about the whole book, and really just kind of get into the core argument, because this is a different approach to the topic and engagement with the topic of trans misogyny than any other text that touches on trans misogyny.
So part of what I hope we can do today is kind of set things up for folks who both already know what we're referring to when we say trans misogyny and are like fully read in and aware of the discourse and have read these other things, but also like I want to make sure that we're opening the door for people who also have no idea what we're talking about, because this book has a really important argument. I mean, this book has so much in under 200 pages. It's rich, it's dense, you brought so many parts of these stories to life, you know, from scattered, biased and incomplete accounts that just you breathed this like critical materiality into. The analysis is so sharp, which, you know, from Jules, I would expect nothing less. And I think it's honestly one of your most sophisticated engagements with the theory of the state and state power. And it's also incredibly accessible and fun and really just beautifully written. So it's something that I hope everyone takes a moment to read. Again, it's under 200 pages, you have no excuses.
Jules Gill-Peterson 4:17
[ laughing ] And it's full of really fun stories. I mean, the book is a product of of two contrary things for me. Not contrary as in they don't go together but just two somewhat different streams. And one was me really trying to get to the bottom of where trans misogyny and violence against trans women came from historically. And that led me to somewhere I wasn't expecting, which is the history of the state. But the other part of it is I just wanted to tell damn good stories, because it's always felt clear to me that trans women, trans feminine people, they just end up having to live lives that are theatrical or excessive or larger than life, often for survival reasons, but that's not without its grandeur and pleasures. And so I think, you know, even if we don't dive into some of the chapters today, happy to just sort of tease those to folks as like, I don't know, nice little stories you can follow along and think about some of the chewier things that we'll set up in our conversation. But yeah, I mean, it's like, I just think there is a way to be really sharp and precise, but also to come back to what my favorite part of history is, which is just like telling tall tales, except that they're true [ laughing ].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:32
Absolutely. And also the way that you engage with the limits of being able to tell the truth when you're telling stories that, you know, are based around records that are incomplete. We talked about this with your last book, Histories of the Transgender Child, where we talked about the kind of -- like the politics and the emotional weight of reconstructing personal narratives that honor and center a person who is only represented through court records, or medical records, as a real human being and having to work through that lens of the physician, the police officer, the judge, etc., and how difficult that can be.
And, you know, so many of the stories that you tell, I really appreciate the way that you make really, really clear for the reader, just how sort of subject to various lenses and biases each of these accounts were and sort of what had to be pulled from them and stitched together and kind of built upon in order to reassert personhood for some of these subjects of these chapters. It's a difficult task, but the way that you've told a lot of these stories is so beautiful. And I think the thing that's wonderful is like, if you spend a lot of time with some of the argument in the introduction and you really think about it, the way that the stories play out just to allow you to sit with those concepts that you set up in the introduction, and really kind of see again, material receipts, proof,, right? You prove your argument, definitely. And it just gives you a chance to kind of sit with each of the frames that you propose in the beginning and allow them to really steep, so to speak. And then like the conclusion, Jules, the end.
Jules Gill-Peterson 7:18
[ bashful ] Aww.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:19
I mean, you write a coda, sweetheart, like no one else. And the book's just fantastic. So.
Jules Gill-Peterson 7:26
Aw, well, it just occurs to me maybe, as we start to dive in then head first, like one of the -- one of the reasons why I have to play so intensely with both having overwhelming receipts, having evidence, being able to prove claims, but also being really sharp and mindful of the limitations of truth as a project -- capital T kind of truth, right -- the way that that's a political, or the product of a political struggle, is because one of the forms of trans misogyny that this book is tracking is just the very basic claim that trans women are not real, right? That could mean that they are not really women, right, that they are actually deceptive or misleading, that trans femininity is subterfuge, that it's a way of covering up something that it is not.
And thus, there are so many denials of trans femininity, trans womanhood, that you have to like take that on, right. And one of the ways you have to take that on is not just by arguing the exact contrary, that there is a reality, but you have to then contend with the fact that people, real people in the world, have had to live in that unreality and that they have crafted really sophisticated strategies for managing not just the violence and structural pressure that comes from having your existence sort of per se denied, or kind of turned into a scandal, but that actually, there's like more than just reaction there. There are some really incredible takeaways and lessons, I think, for everyone who has to deal with this thing that we call gender.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:01
Yeah, absolutely.
Jules Gill-Peterson 9:02
Trans women and trans-feminized people just happen to have a really intense vantage point on that because of the way they've been treated. But in that sense, I think there's a larger story here about what to do with gender.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:16
Yeah, absolutely. And I think perhaps this is like a good moment to just touch on really sort of why you wrote the book the way you did, and sort of why you wrote an account that really differs from a lot of these stories and sort of what the impetus is behind the book, because I know we've touched on this before, when we were sort of teasing the book before it came out and things like that, but I think it would be good to just again, sort of revisit what the kind of urgency is behind the text and sort of what your argument is that you set up for people, so we can just like start with a 10,000 foot view before we dive into any of the kind of specifics.
Jules Gill-Peterson 9:52
Yeah, well, you know, at the personal level, long-time listeners of the show can probably -- you could probably go back and just track my angry Jules Rants on Death Panel over the years and just kind of clock like, hmm, you know, where I'm starting to develop some of those ideas, or I'm sort of dropping little hints about what I've been thinking about. But you know, in essence, this book emerged out of my own just rage and exhaustion with the experience of being a very peculiar kind of trans woman, the kind of trans woman who writes and speaks publicly, who's engaging in public discourse, right, and just sort of experiencing the mechanics of that kind of public trans misogyny. That was sort of the original motivation, but part of it then really when we get to a kind of political urgency, I mean, sure, it has a lot to do with the centrality of anti-trans political violence to so many authoritarian movements around the world, but certainly in the United States, or in the Anglo -- in the Anglo imperial sphere that I'm most familiar with. And I was just sort of noticing, like, you know, trans misogyny is I think more of an in-group kind of conversational term, right? Like, it's more of a -- you know, in queer and trans literate left circles. I don't think I see that term on CNN, or in the New York Times yet.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 11:22
No.
Jules Gill-Peterson 11:23
Violence against trans women is this kind of oversaturated sign and trope and rallying cry that does circulate very widely. And so I was interested, both like at the level of urgency, what's the relationship between having a term like trans misogyny and being able to talk about something that is sort of presented to the public as an issue you've got to pay attention to, whether it's because you don't like that violence, or on some level, because you're cheering it on. But when I was sort of sitting down to think about the mechanics, and some of this came through teaching, I was trying to set up a grad seminar on what I was just thinking of as the history of trans femininity. And I was like, damn, this is hard. First of all, because the word trans is this gender neutral term that erases the specificity of trans femininity and trans women among all other categories.
But I was also thinking, well, when it comes to trans misogyny, I mean, we really only kind of have one major reference point. It's Julia Serano's book, Whipping Girl, you know, which does a whole bunch of things and was really generative for a lot of people, including myself at a certain moment in my life, like just activating that, you know, her definition is basically that trans women experience a specific type of antagonistic sexism that's not reducible to either like sort of generic sexism or homophobia, right? Like that there's -- and it's not just generic transphobia. That when trans women are antagonized or aggressed, there is an element of oppositional sexism, devaluation of women and femininity inherent there, that does not happen to other kinds of trans people. And so generic transphobia doesn't really capture the thrust of that kind of experience. So that was great. That book came out quite a long time ago.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:17
2007. Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 13:19
Yeah, right. So I was just like, okay, well, first of all, seems like we need another installment, the more the merrier. But also, you know, that book doesn't necessarily ask a kind of radical question in the sense of root, what's the root of this kind of problem? And I've been really interested lately in thinking about asking a question that's often really hard to answer, which is why, why is there so much trans misogyny? Why is there violence against trans women? You know, not just how does it happen, who does it, under what circumstances, but why? And I think the answers that exist so far, you know, not just like academically, but just sort of popularly, or our own sort of pseudo psychological theories and our pseudo accounts of kind of what is, at the end of the day, sort of a quasi religious concept of like bigotry or hatred, just assumes that like, well, you know, I think it boils down to two things, right, either like some people are just kind of hateful, right, like maybe TERFS. They're just mean, angry people, and they're insecure. There's something wrong with them. It's very much like when you get bullied as a kid, and the teacher is like, aw, it's just -- he's just -- your bully is just insecure. And it's like, excuse me, that doesn't explain why this is happening to me.
But there's either that explanation or it's just sort of this like, well, you know, kind of hand wavy, like, you know, like trans women, they're like the least respected in our society, so of course, they deal with a lot of violence. Like the explanations are just sort of vague and don't really tell us anything about where this form of violence came from. And as a historian, I think it often ends up being a kind of radical point to just say like, no, these things aren't perennial or evergreen or inherent in human psychology, or as vague as just like the natural consequence of the social order that we live in. They had to be invented, you know? Trans misogyny had to be invented. People had to be incited and taught how to engage in these dynamics that are familiar to us. And it took a long time to build the kind of crushing trans misogynistic world that we live in today. And so that was just basically my idea was like, well, what if I could try and just give the kind of actually almost 35,000 feet account of that, looking at it from a really zoomed out kind of point of view, to get a sense of the big picture, and to get away sometimes from the really kind of micro kind of analysis of like individual acts of violence, although I do talk about those, but try to see them in a much bigger context, just to give us that kind of radical reminder that like this did not have to be how things worked out and things can work out very differently in the future. We have that kind of power, because that's just sort of like, you know, square one of materialist history, right?
You know, ideas don't form the world -- human beings, through their actions, give rise to ideas that then we think explain the world. And so we have the power. If trans misogyny at the end of the day is a concept, it's like the idea level explanation or definition of a lived set of inequities, well then guess who has the power to change those? All of us.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 16:31
Absolutely. And I think, you know, what is important too, is like, it's not just that you wrote this book on trans misogyny, because there wasn't one and there needed to be, and it's an unclaimed space where you have expertise, so why not? It's -- I think readers who aren't familiar with the word and the discourse, are going to read it and be like, oh, now I have a term to describe this kind of vague vibe that is pervasive, right? You know, where it's like, there is, I think, a general understanding that there's kind of like transphobia, and then there's like moments where transphobia can get worse, right, and more specifically targeted. And I think the kind of framework that you present here of trans misogyny goes in a kind of different direction than a lot of those ways that I think people are used to thinking about it. And so that's why it's an important intervention, and I think will be really useful to people in terms of just giving them language to describe the stuff that goes beyond the personal and the interpersonal, that goes beyond the individual, the kinds of sort of structural phenomenon that we're talking about all the time on the show, whether it's even just the kind of naturalization of trans misogyny as an inherent part of sociality of human life, that, you know, trans women just inspire this by merely existing, right? Like that the existence will always be tied to the hatred in -- I mean, that's a very eugenic concept, right? It's like straight up, you know, not really saying it's heritable, right, but saying that these beliefs are inherently biological, which is something we talk about all the time on the show, right?
So it's, I think, a really helpful intervention, especially right now, where we're sort of dealing with not only just the sort of like proliferation of anti-trans rhetoric in daily life, but specifically the state taking on additional administrative processes or passing laws that are intended to do certain things, whether that's sort of create lists of trans people, restrict access to care, restrict parts of social life to people who are able to sort of demonstrate that they're not trans, whether we're talking about sports, or like certain other sort of academic frameworks. So there's a kind of way that the state now -- and we've been talking about this for years -- that the state's kind of like retroactively being like, oh wait, we want to sort of codify these vibes into law, right? And trans misogyny, as you present it in this text, I think is really helpful for just sort of naming the vibes that exists sort of beyond the surface level of just sort of describing -- you know, it's similar to how we talk about ableism on the show, that it goes beyond just the idea of like revulsion, right, that the rejection of disability has multiple layers. It's not just an interpersonal distancing, or discomfort, but beyond that, that discomfort has a larger political and economic context, right.
So it's not merely a kind of interpersonal issue. It's something that's reflected socially and in the political economy, which makes it dangerous and totalizing, but it also helps to show, as you said, that this is an ideology. This is constructed, reproduced, and requires consent and repetition in order to be maintained, right. And one of the things that is just so fantastic is I think for anyone that sort of coming into this text, regardless of sort of where you are in terms of like how you identify or where your thinking even is, there's something to get from this book, even if you're someone who's like, I literally know nothing about like trans discourse, I'm like so completely out of the loop. You know, I think those people might feel a little nervous or uncomfortable to sort of dive into a text like this, because it seems like if you look for like -- if you search like trans misogyny on Twitter, then you can very quickly tell that there's like an ongoing conversation that this is sort of coming into, right? But it's really different, right, than a lot of the conversation that's been happening for years around this.
I just want to assert that if you feel like you're completely ignorant and out of the discourse, that this book is like still absolutely for you. And I think that Jules does a really good job sort of holding space for everybody in this conversation, though definitely asserting who needs to be listened to here. And I feel like -- we pulled this quote, this might be a good time to read it. We pulled a quote to sort of set things up from the introduction, from page 20. And Jules, would you want to read that?
Jules Gill-Peterson 21:31
Yeah, this sort of gets to the heart of why this is hashtag “A Book For Everyone,” but the reason is that something about the devaluation of trans women and trans femininity, something about that speaks to how everyone's social position within a system of gender actually depends on trans femininity and on trans women. And I think that's the point of connection, even as much as it will be a description of a system of degradation or a hierarchy, it's also a point of connection. So I'll let this page have the word here. So,
Gender as a system coerces and maintains radical interdependence, regardless of anyone's identity or politics. Trans misogyny is one particularly harsh reaction to the obligations of that system—obligations guaranteed by the state, as much as by civil society. The more viciously or evangelically any trans misogynist delivers invectives against the immoral, impolitic, or dangerous trans women in the world, the more they admit that their gender and sexual identities depend on trans femininity in a crucial way for existence.
Understanding this primary interdependence between gender and sexual positions in the hegemonic Western system, this book pairs trans-feminized subjects in each chapter with people whose relationships to them are disavowed in misogyny. By telling stories through their enmeshment, this book refuses to pretend that trans-feminized people are alone, isolated, and suffering because they need rescue. This book refuses to pretend there is only one form that trans womanhood and trans femininity take, or that the Western model of gender identity and bourgeois individualism, with its simplistic understanding of oppression, is all that useful, except as a tool of discipline and domination. And though it cannot tabulate every relevant entry in what would be an impossibly long list, this book insists on holding everyone accountable for the degradation of trans femininity. The collective power of trans-feminized people, including trans women, lies in how many others rely on us to secure their claim to personhood.
In other words, the dolls hold all the receipts and the time has come to call them in.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:05
So good.
Jules Gill-Peterson 24:07
Yeah, I mean, I think it really -- you know, even reading it back to myself now, I'm kind of having a -- writing is so funny that way, you put words on the page, and then you're like, wow, is that what I was saying? But part of what I want to suggest --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:21
[ Laughing ] I made sense that day.
Jules Gill-Peterson 24:22
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it starts to make sense, you know, over time, too. But part of what I want to kind of get at, you know, at the heart of this dynamic, you know, I'm making this argument that trans femininity is actually -- yes, it's very degraded, it's sort of pushed down to kind of the bottom of the social hierarchy, but that actually testifies to its centrality to everyone. That there's something misogynistic about disavowing how every other gender in our little gender system that the West imposed on the world, everyone else kind of requires a relationship to trans femininity, even if it's a relationship of rejection in order to secure their coherence, right, by pushing or punching down, right, you're solidifying your place in a proverbial pecking order. But that's precisely what creates the possibility for political transformation that there is already this enmeshment, right?
Trans femininity has played a central role in, you know, modern service economy, or in the production of heterosexuality in men or, you know, in the sex work economy, or in the gay movement. All of these things that then people try to disavow, because they're uncomfortable about their dependence upon a group of people who have been relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy. And I think that that, to me, it's that like possibility of vindication from the bottom, or from below, that testifies both to just like the reason why I think this stuff matters, but also why this is everyone's business, you know, everybody already made trans femininity their business, they just don't like to admit it 90% of the time, but like it already is. And so that gives us the grounds to critically read that -- those relationships differently and to contest the politics embedded within them.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:17
Absolutely. And I think, really, what's important is kind of this assertion of the sort of interdependence, right, because I think --
Jules Gill-Peterson 26:25
Exactly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:26
You know, you're positioning this in terms of class, in terms of solidarity, in terms of sort of also recognizing the very real ways that, as you've said, sort of everyone's experience in relation to gender is relational to everyone else's, right, which seems like an obvious thing to say, that our lives relate to each other's lives and our selves relate to each other selves, you know, but it's important because I think so much of the kind of -- well, this is something that we've talked about for a long time, you know, together and on the show and off the show, like, there are a lot of parallels here to the way that Artie and I talk about disability as not something that's necessarily like a fate that awaits us all, but something that we're already enmeshed with in our lives, regardless of whether we're disabled or not, right? That there isn't a kind of separate part of society where subaltern people are sitting over on their little island, like not in the milieu with everyone else, right. And so that's part of why you're using, specifically the term trans femininity here, right?
Can we unpack some of the -- the introduction starts off with a discussion of the limitations of trans in a kind of prefixal political way, and the connections to this flattening that we're talking about. And I think it might be good to just sort of talk through some of those distinctions and like why they're important, and sort of what they bring us towards and what they bring us away from.
Jules Gill-Peterson 28:03
Oh, hell yeah, this is my jam, you know? Like, this is my big soapbox. Jules Gill-Peterson, the anti-transgender trans woman. Like I have a lot of problems with the term "transgender." And just to say, one of them actually is historical. I'm sure, you know, I'm sure even just from some of the different episodes we've had on Death Panel, you know, folks are probably familiar with the contours of this supposed debate, which is people are like, okay, but like, the term transgender is like from the 1990s, so how can someone from 300 years ago be transgender? Like, can we really be that anachronistic? Isn't that just like wishful thinking, right? And it's like supposedly this really -- like professional scholars are like really stressed about this. And I'm like, no, that's not the problem at all. All you have to do is historicize. And by that, what I mean is like the problem is not that the categories of knowledge and life experience that we have today didn't exist in the past.
The point is that there's change over time. And so you could actually just like historicize them, you can track their change over time and understand how say like a 1990s word like transgender starts replacing and revising a whole host or panoply of other terms and categories that existed prior to it. And there's actually a historical relationship, a living relationship that we are inheriting, rather than us sort of being here with our words, having to look backwards in time and try and sort of be, oh, I don't know, like little ascetics about it and not get things wrong. Like that's not really the problem we face. But one of the problems of the word transgender, as I alluded to earlier, is that it's supposed to be radically gender inclusive, right? It's an umbrella. All these people who prior to the introduction of the term as it was used in the 90s, did not see themselves as having convergent interests, right, and I mean interests in that old fashioned sense of class, like, what are your material interests, right, and how do they relate to other classes in society?
Well, there are whole groups of people, for example, trans men and trans women who prior to the late 80s, early 90s, they didn't really hang out for the most part. Their interests were often not convergent, or even within -- you know, I'm talking about the United States here -- even within, you know, trans women, like middle class transvestites who, you know, rarely transitioned full-time and were a little warier of medicine versus like working class people who were really -- you know, suffered a lot of economic ruin and criminalization for their choice to transition. Like all of these things that were internally very, very complex all of a sudden are supposed to be grouped under this one umbrella. And so right from the beginning, the term transgender essentially is, I argue, trans misogynist. It's in part trying to shed the baggage of trans women, especially poor trans women, who just have constantly been the kind of exception or sticking point for social movements as far back as the 70s with gay liberation, but even earlier, you can just see this kind of constant preoccupation with well, this group is really disreputable, right?
I mean, they do the worst thing in the world, they want to become women. Like that's not cool in a patriarchal, sexist society, like who would want to become a woman? That's sort of like the worst thing you could pick for yourself. And so there's like -- you know, to me, I'm sort of recasting the moment of supposed radical pluralism or inclusion, the transgender moment of the 90s, as a moment of exclusion, of covering up trans women and trans womanhood specificities. So I wanted to sort of name that, but from there, you know, even in the passage that I read, you know, could sort of hear some of the -- there's like three different terms that I ended up using.
So sometimes I say trans women or trans womanhood, right, sometimes I say trans femininity, and then sometimes I'm describing a process through like a verb by saying trans feminizes, or trans feminizing, or trans feminization. And this is really my sort of response to all of these dilemmas. I was like, okay, we don't actually have to like pick and choose what we want to focus on. We can have like a systemic material account that understands the relationship of various different groups or, you know, processes or experiences. So, trans women, when I use that term, it's to describe like, you know, like people like me, who would say, like, I'm a woman. I have -- you know, I transitioned to be a woman in the world. I'm a trans woman, right? That's like one group of people, you know, from a pretty particular historical and cultural, right, milieu. It's a Global North -- it's really like a Euro American kind of concept that has since traveled around the world, but it's important for me to mark where it came from.
So there's that. Then there's trans femininity. I mean, I wanted to talk about like, again, I mean, we have all these terms in non trans contexts too. We could talk about women, and we could talk about femininity, right? Well, what's the difference? I mean, you know, femininity is a set of ideas or images, right. It's like often about aesthetics, accoutrement, style.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:28
Embodiment.
Jules Gill-Peterson 33:28
Yeah. And so trans femininity, for me, is a way to isolate just sort of like the sense of the particular kind of femininity attached to certain people, right, but I wanted to think of it especially as like a kind of appearance, an aesthetic expectation of what someone would look like, right? What their voice would sound like, how they would walk down the street, right, what their dress does, what their style is, right? Trans femininity as a kind of aesthetic or image, because part of what I think is really important to understanding trans misogyny and particularly violence against certain people is that trans femininity is sort of an expectation projected onto real people, whether or not they identify as trans women, whether or not they are trans women, right.
And this is what brings me to the third kind of terminological, the most annoyingly academic thing that I came up with, but I really think it's helpful, right? And this, again, goes back to the method of history. I wanted to, in particular, understand where trans panic comes from. And folks have probably heard of trans panic as a legal defense. It's this legal defense that's still permissible in a lot of places, including quite a few states in the United States. Even some of the places where it's been outlawed, people still use it all the time. And trans panic is like a legal defense where if you claim that you essentially were brought to the point of legal -- legal insanity, you know, in an intimate or sexual encounter with a trans woman because you were so shocked by the revelation that she was trans, you can often find that any charges or you know, incarceration time, sentencing, as a consequence of assault or even killing that trans woman can be mitigated, and sometimes people walk free or whatever, right? So there's like this very narrow version of the legal defense of trans panic, but that sort of scenario of, oh, I was so overwhelmed by the intimacy I had with this person, that I acted out in violence as self defense, to protect myself, right? That, as I traced its history, I noticed that that structure, that scenario, that scene, it emerged first like in relation to groups of people who were not trans women. And they were sort of treated this way, but they were not trans women.
So I talked about like different Two Spirit peoples in the Americas, or hijras in colonial India, all sorts of kinds of people, or even like effeminate fairies and other people in the early 20th century in US cities. Like these people aren't trans women in the sense that we use that term, but they were subject to this exact kind of trans panic violence and trans femininity was projected onto them, by which I mean that their femininity, the ascribed femininity, was also sexualized as male and threatening because it was sexualized as male, a totally impermissible combination of maleness and femininity. That's what's been projected onto these people, and then justifies violence against them. And I was like, okay, well, if this form of violence like appeared in the world first without being attached to like literal trans women, well then, we have to be able to talk about that, right? Trans misogyny can affect people who don't identify as trans women, particularly if they aren't from the Global North, of we're talking about 150 years ago, and so I came up with this kind of process term, trans feminization, to talk about a process by which basically, trans femininity is projected onto a person or a population of people in order to construe them as this particular kind of threat that comes from conjoining supposedly maleness and supposedly femininity, that then invites reprisal from whomever.
And so I really thought it was important for us to be able to make those distinctions. Like sometimes all three will line up, right, if they're -- you know, if a trans woman experiences intimate partner violence, right, like she's a trans woman, right, she actually does embody trans femininity, although it might have been projected onto her in a different way than she would understand it, by the person who enacted the violence, and she was trans-feminized by that violence, great. But there are times where all of those things don't line up. And I think it's important for us to be able to talk about that, because that's also where this form of violence emerged historically. For me, it emerged first not from like straight men going out on dates with people and acting out, it emerged first from colonial government trans feminizing entire populations of people in order to cement political power, and often to target them for suppression or eradication, and entire groups of people were trans-feminized. And interestingly, some of them, over time, have had to contend with pressure to basically become more and more like Western trans women.
So part of what I want to understand, you know, all of this is a long way of saying, it seems like trans misogyny historically runs slightly ahead of modern trans womanhood, that is to say, like the kind of trans womanhood that people, especially in the Global North, kind of have access to today, like that sort of particular way of life emerged in the wake of trans panic and trans feminizing violence. But that's like really important to know. It doesn't mean trans women have only existed for a certain amount of time. It just means, like I said earlier, the ways of life, over time, are being sorted more and more and more narrowly. And today, like there's supposed to be only one category for it -- trans womanhood, or transgender, right? One umbrella category. Well, that's part of a process through which like thousands of other ways of life found themselves under pressure.
But in any case, like the main point here is that this particular kind of trans panic violence emerged first in the 19th century, as colonial governments were targeting populations of people who weren't trans women, through a peculiar kind of pattern of feminized, sexualized violence, that then turned into the kind of Ur-Example of an individual man lashing out at an individual trans woman say on the street or, you know, after a sex work transaction,or in a long term relationship.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:49
Yeah. And honestly, chapter one is like a can't miss, and this is the global trans panic chapter. And you open with this example of the kind of like colonial bureaucratic campaign to eradicate the hijras. When the sort of colonial government in Northern India designates this group based on like basically just one judge kind of running with his imagination based on a couple sketchy accounts from like tourists essentially, you know, they kind of run with -- like the the British colonial apparatus runs with this interpretation, and it becomes a law that is described explicitly by the colonial regime as intended to eradicate one single population. And you talk about this not being successful in terms of exterminating actually -- you know, like there's quotes in here, like you know, the goal is to reduce the numbers gradually, you know.
So the thing that I think is really important though, is you talk about like even though technically, this move from the colonial government, that again is sort of like taking a group of people, applying this kind of social and political and economic process of trans feminization to that group of people, and using that as a pretext to basically claim that there's a secret King, and they're like running the country underground, and that it's an imperative to the colonial project to essentially like police, exterminate, and undermine this population. It's not successful in the long-term, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have tremendous consequences, right.
And I think part of -- part of why I'm bringing this up is because obviously, there's so many analogies to so many of the laws being passed at the state level in the US right now, where you have essentially states saying, like, oh, we're gonna make lists, let's make lists of people seeking HRT, let's make lists of people who have children who are receiving any kind of care or whatever. And there's a kind of, I think, attitude where you sort of see like, okay, well, this law gets struck down, or something, right. And people are like, oh, well, thank God, or oh, that'll never pass, it'll be fine. Like, it's not going to make it out of committee. And it's like, well, yeah, but that doesn't mean that there isn't harm done in the mere debate of the thing, right, and the mere proposition of the thing, in the mere reinforcement of the framework, using the apparatus of the state. Because what you kind of show with this example of India under British colonial rule is not that like the policy specifically -- well, obviously, you're talking about a sort of specific economic relationship that changes as a result of the policy. But it also, you know, is part of a broader shift of just colonial subjugation. It is one of a sort of series of tools, right.
And that, in some ways, it also is a really good reminder -- I mean, I've been thinking about this example constantly, because it's a really good reminder that all of our modern relationships to gender, right, kind of tie back into this British model, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 42:59
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:59
And I mean, it's kind of -- I wrote in the margins, on page 34, like, no wonder why the UK is TERF Island, you know what I mean?
Jules Gill-Peterson 43:08
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 43:08
Like, it brought so much clarity, I wonder if you could get into sort of some of the story and sort of some of the I think details are really funny, but ultimately, it is a very kind of scary narrative that I think has so many echoes to our current moment.
Jules Gill-Peterson 43:25
No, absolutely. It's part of this longer history of state power, again, instead of a kind of quasi-religious, kind of vague idea that like some people are transphobic just because they're ignorant, or there's something wrong with them, right? Instead, we can see that oh, no, actually for nearly 200 years, or even longer, states have been consolidating a particular kind of sovereignty over the populations that live within their territories, but also of public space by singling out and trans feminizing certain populations. And that does give us a kind of direct link to what's going on today. So the story, you know, here in colonial India, and part of what was fun about writing this book was synthesizing a lot of incredible work by other historians. So just want to give a shout out to the historian, Jessica Hinchy, who really did a lot of in depth research on this, because this is not my original area of expertise, although I was maybe disproportionately interested because my family, you know, is from India, and I am a child of the British Empire, and I mean that with prejudice to the British Empire. Hate that thing. Fuck you, British Empire.
So what happens, right, is like in the second half of the 19th century, the British colonial state is trying to consolidate power. It's pretty weak. It's not a very strong state. And one of the big issues is British administrators are like, we literally don't even know like who lives in all of this land that we're claiming, you know, falls under our flag, like who lives here, right? And in this particular new administrative region, they've created the northwestern provinces, you know, they're just sort of trying to figure out, like, who lives here, who's a threat to colonial sovereignty, and how can we put them down. And there is this group of people that exist all over the Indian subcontinent, hijras, who are very long, complex history that I couldn't possibly begin to summarize, and frankly, about which we don't know nearly enough, but that, you know, basic -- basic kind of point here is that hijras performed a kind of ascetic relationship, which is to say, a religiously or spiritually authorized one, played a really important role in sanctifying and helping the heterosexual household reproduce. So hijras are people who you might call upon at a wedding, or the birth of a baby, to come and just sort of give a blessing or maybe do a dance, sing and dance, and to whom you would give kind of alms, you know, they were allowed to beg, but it had like a real important kind of sanctified charge to it.
And so hijras were people who were kind of visible in public, you know, who are often in public asking for money, as well as performing. And the British are very alarmed by their presence, right? Because these are people that to the British -- again, this is where the misrecognition starts to come into play -- to the British, these are "men" dressed in women's clothing, and that -- and also, they're in public, right? And remember, for British society in the 19th century, this is the high tide of the ideology of separate spheres. Men can go in public, but women are supposed to be at home, right? And they, of course, don't believe that everyone in British India follows those rules, but like that's their ideological kind of wiring, right? So they're seeing these people who they understand to be just like in their mere presence, just so disruptive. And so they see that as a threat to colonial power -- to colonial power, right? They're not just like, oh, we love keeping men and women separate, or we care so much about what clothes people wear. No, they're concerned about power, they're concerned about being able to retain this vast colonial space, and exploit the hundreds of millions of people living there. And so yeah, they single out hijras under one section of what's called the Criminal Tribes Act -- not a very cool law. And basically, yeah, they see hijras as unreformable, sort of wicked people who need to be eradicated.
And they justify this as part of their sort of lazy, you know, kind of Darwinian sense of like some "races" are destined to die out because they're just so wrong. But basically, the charge they come up with is that, you know, hijras must be sex workers, because they're "men" wearing women's clothing, and just the act of wearing women's clothing will seduce normal men into having sex with them. This part is made up, right, okay. But they go after them on that premise and they basically break up their discipleships, they inventory in all their property and say, you can't pass on your property anymore, they ruin them economically. They empower police to go after them in public, they criminalize cross dressing, all of these sorts of things, right. And that has the effect that -- you know, it doesn't have the effect that they would hope. It does not lead to the genocidal eradication of hijras. However, what it does lead to over time is that hijras lose their way of life, right, they can no longer make a living in the traditional practices that they had been accustomed to prior to this moment, and they also can't pass down their property anymore, right?
Basically, they're living under extreme duress. They're pushed deeply into poverty. And so what happens over time, I'm like summarizing so much history here, is that, in fact, by the 20th century, hijras actually are pushed into sex work, because they have no other viable economic opportunities in the colonial labor market. And today, in fact, the culture of hijra asceticism, as a lot of really good anthropologists, including some from South Asia have pointed out, like the sort of idea of the virtue of poverty has merged with sexual labor in a really interesting way. But so in part, what we could say is like this trans panic that the British had about hijras, in fact, it was kind of prophetic, or it was performative. It brought about the very thing it accused hijras of doing, it pushed them into sex work by eliminating their prior way of life. And I think that gives us two huge clues, actually, three huge clues.
One, like I said, trans panic emerged around people who are not trans woman, hijras are not trans women, even to this day, right. There are plenty of people in India who do identify as trans women, and they and hijras don't always get along. You know, hijras -- some hijras have really interesting political careers, you know, under Hindu nationalism. I mean, there's a lot going on. Really interesting work being done by a bunch of scholars on that. There's a lot going on. But hijras are not trans woman, that's the whole point. They are being mis-recognized as if they were emblems of trans femininity by the British. But part of one of the effects of that over time is that it pushes them into a way of life that is more like trans women in the Global North, or back in the Imperial core. It's more like trans feminine people in London, who are also finding that sex work is the only job they can do.
So part of what I want to suggest is that trans misogyny over time, much like the colonial effects, or the colonial production of a sex gender system by European and American colonialism, over time, it is homogenizing the world. It is replacing many, many, many other ways of lives, with this kind of particular underclass way of life, where sexual labor is often the only thing left when you're so thoroughly criminalized and cast at the bottom of the social hierarchy as disposable or even killable. And, you know, the final sort of maybe data point to think about is one of the things I started to notice that made me think the trans panic was global, because, you know, you could listen to this and be like, okay, well, that happened in British India, but how do you know that's part of this bigger history, is that the British state empowered police officers to go out in public, right, and harass hijras, maybe arrest them sometimes, but more often, you know, there are reports that the historian Hinchy is drawing on, of police officers being like, so, in their reports, saying like well, I go out into the city and I wander around, and if I see a hijra, I'll go up to that person, you know, forcibly cut their hair, rip off their jewelry, and force them into men's clothing. And that specific delegation of power to male police officers who then go out into public, find trans-feminized people, cut their hair, rip off their jewelry, and force them into men's clothing, that's a pattern that starts to appear all over the world, with colonial forms of government.
So I talk a little bit and just like draw that line to, you know, some of the work that US federal agents were doing, going on to reservations, or different indigenous nations have been pushed, due to warfare and federal policy. But you also see that in Latin America, I mean, you see it in so many different places where the police officer now is going out, finding trans-feminized people, not trans woman, but trans-feminized populations, whose gender has been deemed a threat to the colonial order, and is doing this thing of cutting their hair, ripping off their jewelry and forcing them into male clothing. And I was like, oh shit, that's trans panic, and here's the moment where you see it transferring, right, from just being a big kind of like statutory state policy, from being a kind of state level, statecraft kind of abstract procedure, down to the individual, interpersonal level.
The police officer is sort of the first individual man charged with kind of enforcing violence against trans-feminized people. And interestingly, it's only a few decades, like it's just right around the same time afterwards that people in the Global North, in Europe, or Western Europe, or in the United States, who are more like modern trans women start to report that the men that they go on dates with, that the men who buy sex from them, are now acting that way too, that they're also having trans panics and that their lives are getting a lot more dangerous, and that some of those trans women are being murdered. And so that's sort of, you know, just to give a sense of how I reconstructed this history, that's the order of operations as I saw it.
We had this kind of colonial emergence of this population level project of, oh, trans femininity is dangerous to the state and so we're projecting on to this group of people. And that kind of whittles down at the level of the police officer, and then kind of spreads in the culture. And that I really think gives us an important clue, because I think if we were to just like take a random poll, right, like, where do you think violence against trans women came from, I think probably most of us otherwise would just be like, I don't know, from like, yeah, men, right, who buy sex or date trans women, right? Like, probably trans panic just like shows up at a certain point. But I think it's really important to be able to say no, it had this like prior phase, that also did not go away.
The state continues, as you were just saying, Bea, to exercise this role. And that gives us a different way of understanding, right, anti-trans legislation today. In part, what it -- one thing we might say it's doing is it's extending the treatment that used to be reserved mostly for poor trans women and trans-feminized people, right, mostly for people who did sex work, who are criminalized and who had a horrible time interacting with the welfare state and the administrative state, it's extending those powers to all other trans people who used to not get caught up in that very often. And that's a terrible thing, but it really gives us like a much more sharp picture of what's happening right now.
And I think it's like important to be able, and like you said, it really gives us one clue as to why England is just the most trans misogynistic damn place, because the British Empire really cut its teeth on making people into men and women. I mean, so did other empires, but like, you know the British really, really, really went in hard on that. And they really, really had quite a displeasure for trans femininity and for sex work. I mean, one of the things that historians of the British Empire talk about is how in the 19th century, you know, the British are kind of self conscious about the sheer violence of their empire. They're always trying to come up with alibis for why they do what they do, right? And one of their alibis, no joke, they said this with a straight face, was like, well, we have to colonize the world because we're going to bring about the end of the sex trade. Like they really thought they were going to end sex work by subjugating most of the world's population to their power. So, you know, thanks -- thanks for that one too, British Empire.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:07
Well, I mean, the timing is eerie, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 56:10
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:10
Like the campaign, the official policy to reduce the numbers is adopted in 1865. And like that's -- I mean, 1865 is the law of heredity, this is Mendel discovering heredity. And 1869, you have Sir Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius. You know, what is going on in the Imperial core and the heart of the British Empire in this moment, in the late 1860s, is the explosion of the ideas that form the foundation of eugenics, right, and then through the 1870s, 1880s, eugenics becomes not just a philosophy of rich, pseudo-intellectual dilettantes, like Sir Francis Galton, but becomes a ideology and a sort of pseudoscientific theory that the general public adopts, that is broadly popular. This is like high level pop culture.
And so what I so appreciate is, you know, in this first chapter, you connect it to, again, like this moment where specifically kind of you have this milieu of thought that produces eugenics, right, which in Hereditary Genius, the idea that Sir Francis Galton proposes -- this is important to remember is that eugenics is supposed to describe the positive phrase, you know, disabled people, trans people, the deviant sicko fucks, you know, that they don't want in society, we're dysgenic, right? We're not eugenic. Eugenic is an aspirational goal, right. And eugenics, as a goal, and as a social system, and as a political orientation, you know, in order to sort of guide and direct policy decision making, in terms of what populations get what resources, Galton basically proposes essentially like a system of arranged marriages between really smart men and women of wealth [ laughing ].
And the idea was to kind of breed Britain to a smarter, more gifted race. And as part of that, the sterilization of dysgenic people, of lower class people, of poor people, of people without an education, of sex workers, of deviants, of disabled people, you know, was part of the plan, right, to basically only allow essentially the ruling class to reproduce. And the idea was that sort of using and inspired by these sort of moments of legitimate scientific discovery, like Mendel and genetics, right, like, this is not all fake, right. But sort of running and extrapolating from these scientific discoveries, eugenics becomes something that the average person is deputized into participating in, and into policing, and into seeing themselves as a worthy judge of who is eugenic and who is dysgenic, right.
And it's a way of naturalizing the class relationships that exist in the core of UK empire at this time, where as you're saying, you know, the Empire is over extended, it's weakened, right? It's scared and paranoid and hungry to maintain its power. And so this becomes a really important part of sort of maintaining the superior sovereignty of like the British way of life, right, like there's a whole kind of panic in and of itself, and part of this is about again, deputizing someone, in this case, you know, the police officer in the far flung sort of colonial locale that they're attempting to count and they're attempting to control. It's like deputizing the police officer creates the social role in which the police officer becomes a member of society whose duty, right, is to police trans-feminized populations and to police them because of that, right, and then to distribute violence in order to correct that appearance, right. And so you have this one line on page 36, you said
Psychology followed the example of the state.
And so, you know, this is all an elaborate setup to sort of essentially get into, you know, in the introduction, you contrast the kind of psychological definition or psychological explanation for trans misogyny with the one that you're going for, right, and the one you're sort of presenting here about this being also a relationship of sort of politics, economy and empire, and a tool of statecraft, right, and a way of sort of also re-enfranchising populations into the body politic by designating them as judges and cranks to be able to eject people from the body politic. And I think it's a really important sort of example that carries with you throughout the rest of the book, this kind of like paranoid, vicious, and exuberant way that the colonial empire finds relief in targeting populations, right. And sort of how that allows the empire to continue to kind of construct what is ultimately a eugenic narrative as they impose the kind of gender binary that's central to the UK system and to British society, on their colonies and on the rest of the world as a result. It's, I think, a powerful example, but it is also a really very sort of specific reflection of our material moment. And I think that's why this is so useful now, right?
This is an important time for us to take a step and sort of say, okay, yes, there is a psychology of trans misogyny, there is something that does exist, right, but it's not a kind of chicken and an egg phenomenon the way that it's often talked about.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:02:06
Right. Yeah. Oh, I love the way you said all of that. Just wonderful. And it makes me think really concretely, right, this gives us something we can run with, and I'm just thinking about like, okay, psychological arguments I think are -- are at best surface level descriptions in general. No shade on psychology, but jk, lots of shade on psychology. I'm, among other things, a historian of psychology. But think about for example, yeah, like, let's hang on this. Like I actually don't talk about TERFS a lot in this book because they arrived late on the scene. But think about like the sort of TERF -- British TERF account, or anti-trans feminist account of the danger of trans women, you know, the kind of rhetoric that -- and sorry to make people think about this, but the kind of rhetoric you would encounter around the idea of trans women, God forbid, being able to use the bathrooms they already use, or the so-called women's spaces that are obviously the most important in our entire society - locker rooms at the gym.
But part of the way things break down for contemporary TERFS, say people like Kathleen Stock, the philosopher, is that ultimately -- and you don't have to read them very closely to get at this point, you know, their idea is that trans women aren't really women because they all have penises, right? Like that's the claim. They're male, and penises are inherently violent, right? Just having one -- it is a weapon [ laughing ]. All it -- all anyone with a penis wants to do, right, is sexually violate women, and women, in turn, are very helpless because not only do they have vaginas but having a vagina is not having a penis, right? And so it's just this really, really old school, really retrograde idea of hashtag “The Sexes,” right? That like penis equals power, penis is a violent weapon. People with penises have no sovereignty or agency. They're completely overrun by these organs and only use them for harm, right? All sex is violence.
This is like some 1970s radical feminism but like diluted and with much worse writing and rhetorical flair than ever, but like that's a very -- kind of what I would call a shitty psychological argument, right? Like that's -- it's just sort of bizarre. It's pretty contemptuous of everyone involved, right? It's very woman hating, but it's also actual men hating, right? Like it hates men, except -- except, interestingly, right, like, who's then the social problem? Men, you know, of whom there are quite a few in the world? No, no, no, no, it's actually trans women. The one group of people who maybe have thought the most about the role of the penis and have thought about it very thoughtfully. But anyways, right? Like, that's not a very useful -- it's sort -- one of those -- the more time you spend with that rhetoric, right, the more confusing it becomes, the more bizarre it becomes, and I think it just -- it's so distasteful, you kind of end up being like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like who would think this way, right?
But, but, if we connect it back to what you were just talking about, and if we say trans femininity, trans women have been rendered dysgenic over time, there is this legacy and residue of this 19th century project there, that actually, like the woman with the penis is like the failure of biological supposed sex binary, right, or, you know, mutually exclusive male and female categories, that like this is a failure, a biological failure that has to be eliminated from the population, right? That's the sort of charge in the 19th century, and trans femininity continues to bear the residue and legacy of that history. And that could help us explain without having to like become pseudo-Freudians, why trans women are so intensely targeted and why there's such incredible fascination and angst around the idea that some women might have a penis, right, like that it's so extreme, that it can arouse such incredible responses, and can justify such extreme violence. It's because it bears this 200 year history, right. And so I think part of what's helpful there is it gets us away from being like, what is going on in Kathleen Stock's head or unconscious that's making her act out this way. I just like, first of all, we don't know that.
And second of all, I actually don't think that's where the vitriol emerges from. It's much easier to explain if we see someone, you know, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire prize, right, as inheriting this kind of civilizational mission, I mean that with prejudice, of the British Empire, and is actually riffing -- and she doesn't have to know she's riffing, right, because this is actually inherited culturally, right, that there is this kind of dysgenic significance attached to trans femininity as an exceptional problem to be put down, that continues to be a kind of call to arms. And I think that that gives us such a much sharper and more nuanced and honestly, less bizarre understanding of what's going on today and why these TERFS are just so riled up and so successful in appealing directly to the UK state. Because, you know, a certain group of liberal white feminists have a really tight relationship with UK state, that they've developed over decades. It's a very different kind of state than the way the state operates in the US. And so it's like, yeah, all the grounds were set up and built over two centuries.
And I just think that then this gives us a different sense of like, how do you solve this problem, right? It's not by diagnosing Kathleen Stock as having a perverted consciousness and it's also not like -- it's not by trying to -- like we don't have to -- it's actually the problem, right, of -- sex and gender here emerges through a problem of colonialism and racial statecraft. And that means we can't just start at like a conversation about like, some people have this anatomy and they can have any gender they want, right, like trans 101 inclusion, we actually have to have a real brass tacks conversation about power, about statecraft, about racism, about the history of eugenics, right? That the point of entry into transforming these staggering, staggering forms of social and political violence has to actually be as complex as those forms of social and political violence themselves. And I think that's something that, you know, I've definitely been saying on Death Panel episodes for years now about anti-trans politics these days, like, we got to match the scope of what they're actually up to.
We can't just be like trans women are women, whoo. You know, not that any of us do that here, but like some people do. And we can't just appeal to hearts and minds and say like, once you meet a trans person, you'll get over your prejudice. It's like wait, hold on, actually, like trans woman meeting other people often is the place where they start to experience more fallout and violence, so no, no, no, no, enough of that liberal fantasy. We got to really look at the material cause, right, the why hiding behind TERFS is actually yeah, this kind of dysgenic selection of trans femininity as racially inferior, right, as a failure of sex difference, and as something that must be eliminated from the social population to secure state power. And so I just think that gives us a totally different starting point for politics, but also just like I hope that feels -- like I hope this explanation -- I know I just said like the phrase woman and penis like 20 times, which I normally do not like saying, but one of the reasons I feel comfortable saying is that I hope this explanation relieves people's anxiety, because it's not some weird sexual psychodrama we have to work out in our culture. It's like old school fucking state violence and colonial power and race science that has gotten snaked around sex difference over the centuries.
And like, I actually just think that's a less weird place -- just like taking the temperature of our cultural tolerance for certain difficult conversations, I actually think that's just like, I hope, a little less anxiety inducing, right? So you don't really have to worry about all that -- all this weird phallus talk or genital talk. And, you know, it is kind of bizarre that that's what anti-trans people are fixated on, except it's totally not. It's been, you know, centuries in the making. So I hope, I hope something about this shift feels useful to people. But I also hope it feels a little galvanizing in the sense that like, I think one of the reasons trans women are so -- like, no one, there's no politics that advances trans women's interests. Zero. Like never been done, except the ones locally that, you know, trans women put together in their own world, but like there's no major political movement that's ever advanced the interests of trans women.
And I think one of the reasons why the prohibition is so powerful is that people actually do feel all of the weight of this history as angst and queasiness. And they feel all this weird, sexual psychodrama like rising up out of the ether and are kinda like I don't know what to do with that. Maybe we should just -- oh, I know, we'll just say transgender. Oh, thank god. Tthere's no sex there, and there's no genitals. It can mean anyone, yay, you know? And it's like, yeah, we got to stop like doing that over and over again. We have to like wade into what's really going on and where the real root of the problem is here. But I also think that there's something about that, that is ultimately, at least to me, I will just speak in the first person, I find it quite reassuring, especially as a trans woman, I'm like, I can't go out there and wear that sexual psychodrama on my political sleeves. That's nonsense. Like, I could not do that. But I could go out there and say, hey, you know, the way trans women are being treated in the United Kingdom for certain has to do with the British Empire. And it's not a coincidence that it was around the time of Brexit that transphobic politics really had a resurgence.
So like, I just think we're -- we're trying to find that kind of galvanizing and just kind of sharper, more concrete place from which to conduct political struggle. And we have to understand how we got into this dilemma and where the struggle arose from in the first place.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:23
And it's -- you know, I think it's really -- it's not to say that like any of that psychosexual drama is not happening, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:12:31
Right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:31
It's to say that it's not pre-historically programmed --
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:12:34
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:35
Biologically into human beings, and therefore reflected in society, right? And part of what I think you do really is you sort of set up like, okay, so look at these sort of attacks on trans life, and the sort of weaponization of trans femininity as a project of statecraft, right, that allows you to sort of look at, for example, the resurgence in popularity of TERF shit in the UK in the context of Brexit very differently, because this is a fracturing of a coalition that, for example, could push against privatisation of the NHS, that could push against the kinds of extractive logics that are going on, that could push for massive expansions to what the NHS would have to cover. Could you imagine if these coalitions were united to push the British government against anything, right, versus engaged against each other?
This is incredibly convenient for those in power to maintain their power, right. And so what I think is so great is sort of in this first chapter, you know, you set it up in the introduction, you get into the sort of breakdown, you walk through all these other formulations of trans misogyny as sort of psychology and the limitations and the questions that doesn't answer, right. And then you set up the sort of lens in chapter one that allows both, I think, a freedom and a sort of creative engagement with trans misogyny that was just like liberating and not anything like I had ever experienced before. And, you know, it really -- it's not like a bummer, you know? It's not a bummer. It is liberating and it does feel -- this book, I think, feels like -- well, it reminds me of this thing that Tim Faust said about his book, Health Justice Now, which is a text that's very dear to me. And he said, you know, all I hope is that this is a crack in the shield, right? Like I'm --
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:14:38
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:14:39
Trying to pierce the shield and like, I hope that other people are going to do that with me and make this hole wider, right? And so I think this book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, in a mere 200 pages, breaks open an entire line of inquiry, of resistance, of recontextualizing the self in your own relationship to gender and your own relationship to the state and your own relationship to identity or whatever. You know, and it sort of brings maybe us to like a discussion of some of the further chapters, because there's this is part in chapter two, and you end chapter two with this assertion, you say,
The story can't end, because it isn't over. This is not because some "we," in the present, hasn't learned the right lesson from the past, but because trans womanhood weaves stories out of the radical inadequacy of the world that are to live with contradiction, for a simple beginning, middle and end.
So you really kind of open up this line of inquiry, you set up for folks like a great sort of analytical base, and a lot of sort of understanding in a contemporary context of how to think about the positioning of transgender in the context of like the 90s and the NGO industrial complex, right, you get through this kind of distinction between the psychological engagement with trans misogyny, and then a sort of historical materialist look at the broader role that that plays in empire.
And again, that, you know, the state precedes the psychology in some sense. And from there, you sort of really open up into, again, sort of making these very disparate, sort of incomplete histories, bringing them together to make beautiful stories full of people that feel really real and alive, you know, and it also is -- it sort of offers you, I think, all of these different modes for fighting back, but also really important reminders as to why avoiding respectability is important, why these sort of material and political betrayals that have happened over the years, over and over again, you know, things that we've talked about on the show in the past, why they do actually have a broader context than just, you know, the kind of, I don't know, like idea that all movements are doomed to fail, and all movements are doomed to betray each other, right? It locates it, again, outside of this kind of pre-historical biological programming, and right -- you know, pushes it right back onto the plate of empire, which is like always empire is trying to avoid being seen, right? Avoid being seen, avoid detection, avoid accountability.
And so you know, it's like, over and over, each chapter as you build, you're just shoving more back onto the plate of empire, and saying, no, like, let's be real where the responsibility lies, you know?
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:17:41
Oh my God, yeah! I'm like getting very galvanized by -- by your words, Bea. Like, it just -- it comes back to, in some ways, to where we started this conversation. But if we understand, in some ways, right, the condition of possibility of trans politics, this is an explicit argument I make at the very beginning of the book, thecondition of possibility for transgender politics, is, you know, basically leaving trans women behind, in order to emancipate itself from these disreputable, dysgenic, as we've been talking about, groups who suffer the worst reputation imposed on them, right, of any gendered category.
And when we think about how horrific that is, and in some ways how ironic that might be, because we're also living in the era where particularly images, and I really stress that word, images of Black trans women in particular, are supposed to be the icons of the LGBT movement or of pro trans politics. Yeah, but they're images, because these movements do not advance the interests of those very Black trans women or trans -- they're often, you know, trans feminine people, and trans-feminized people who don't necessarily claim a membership in the thing that they're being told they represent. If that very condition of possibility for a trans future, also for queer futures, often anti-trans woman, right, and here I'm thinking of some versions, especially of like white middle class gender abolition discourse -- in any case, if we really want to interrupt this long history of jettisoning trans women to secure a future, right, or to do politics, then one of the reasons why we should not be afraid, right, to embrace the interests of trans-feminized people, is because one, as we were saying, they were targeted first, the regime of anti-trans power cut its teeth on trans-feminized people first, so you can't really leave them behind, right, or like at your own peril, you know, you get rid of, in your coalition, the people for whom the power now training its eyes on you was originally developed, like, that's just a foolish move to make.
But then it brings us to this larger question about being kind of inspired and thinking about, you know, like, as this -- as I was doing, like the first couple of interviews for this book, one of the questions, I don't know why I hadn't thought about it being a question I would get, is like, how can we fight trans misogyny today? And I was like, oh, right. Very grateful to be asked that question, just like truly have never been asked that question before. But my answers are like, okay, well, we have to advance the interests of trans-feminized people, all of them, right. So let's see, well, abolition in the sense of abolishing the police, abolishing incarceration, that would probably be the number one thing we could do to reduce trans misogyny in the world, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:48
Mhm, mhm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:20:49
That's a very different starting point than like, we've got to convince TERFS and straight men who are insecure about their sexuality, that trans women are beautiful, and that -- you know, it's like, no, no, no, no, it's bread and butter, right? It's bread and roses. We got to go back to square one. And, you know, at the -- at the level of like -- at the level of how we feel and react and talk about trans femininity, I think the other leap, and this is where the book kinda ends, so that I could sort of tease, is like, I think we have to -- we have to really think hard and long about how much politics in general is about getting rid of femininity. Like I'm not even talking about trans people here, like just in general, anytime a woman becomes a politician of any renowned, she is sort of like expected to masculinize, to be serious and da da da, but then also, like, you know, fails to be a good woman.
And, you know, it's just like all of these kinds of traps. It's because Western colonial cultures hate femininity, they really do devalue femininity. Trans femininity is part of that history. And so could we embrace like an entirely different accounting system or economy in which we -- we loved what trans femininity can teach us, which is that there's power in being too much, there's power in excess, right. And there's a way to shift from thinking of this kind of anxious defense that like trans women are women, they're the same as all other women, which like, for the record, a lot of the girls reject that line and have for a long time. They're like I'm not the same as any old woman, I've got more. I'm -- you know, you'll hear like, I'm highly desired. I know what I -- I know what I am, and it really is resplendent and divine and powerful. And there is kind of a promise there, about like breaking out of the scarcity mindset of capitalism and thinking about what abundance would look like, and that has to start with material abundance.
But I think that material abundance is what like trans-feminized people have always needed, and so like if we have a politics that produces abundance for everyone, giving up these moral frameworks we have for deciding who deserves what resources, or as we always talk about on this show, like what -- who really gets to have healthcare and how much, you know, who gets to have housing and how much. If we can break out of that mindset and enact transformational change that really serves the interests of trans-feminized people, then I think we're also being treated to a kind of leap of creative invention where we could move towards more what I take inspiration from in the conclusion of the book, from some travesti, you know, cultural producers and movements in different parts of Latin America, the idea, you know, of mujerísima, of being the most woman, that travestis, some of them reject being identified as women, because they're like, no, I'm not just like regular degular woman, I'm the most. I have an excess. I have the superlative version of femininity, right. And that's something that's being positively valued.
And I just think, but also comes with like a politics that's all about reducing police, getting rid of police violence, of finding homes and enough to eat and access to bodily autonomy and techniques and technologies of transition. It's about this material kind of working class led politics that you wouldn't be surprised to hear is often led by sex workers who just have a really, really, really good vantage point on the alienation of capitalist society, right? And I just think the rewards for kind of doing the work of shifting our understanding of the origins of trans misogyny then also pays this huge dividend at the end of saying also, we don't only have to be inspired by people struggling today, for example, in Latin America, but actually can be inspired by trans-feminized people throughout this entire history.
And I just think that there's something for me that has felt really, really important there. I just don't like the common form of politicking, particularly in the United States, which actually is this kind of Christian idea of utopia, and like, look, there's a lot of queer utopianism out there. I don't like it. I'm just an anti-utopian person. And I mean the utopian thinking that's like, the next world to come will be the good world, right? Our reward for all our suffering in this world is that one day, there will be -- you know, one day the kingdom will come down to earth, and we will live in heaven on earth, and like that heaven is sometimes represented as like queer and like freedom from the gender binary, and like all these things about building another world, but like a separate world that we don't have access to, that's often sort of like the beating heart form of politicking in the United States. And I just -- I just don't like that. I think like the conditions for the world that a collective of people might desire, you know, emerge organically out of history and out of people's concrete lived experiences. It's not a -- it's not an ideal society that you dream up first, and then try to implement. It emerges as the groundswell, you know, from the streets.
And that's why the book sort of moves towards the street as the place where, you know, trans femininity is the Queen, very literally, and it's from those people. You know, it's from our queens that we might find something. Also, it's just something worth getting our asses up and fighting for, right. I mean, maybe the last thing I'll say about that is like, I've just been reflecting a lot lately about how depressing trans politics is right now. Like, even just in the US, okay, it's 2024. This is going to be a fucking shit show of the year. It already has been. Like one month down, no good news. I don't even know where the bottom is. Like things could get really, really bad really, really fast this year.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:48
We're in free fall.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:26:48
Yeah. And it's like okay, well, what do we even have worth fighting for in this moment? So far, it's all been defense, right? As we've talked about on the show, it's all been, hey, don't even get up and march, but just politely, you know, signal that you agree that WPATH is our salvation and that sober psychiatrists will protect us from right wing politicians. And like, first of all, that ain't working. But second of all, like, no wonder it hasn't convinced the kind of tired liberal middle of Americans to get off their asses and do something. Why would it? It's like totally flaccid, uninteresting, technocratic, liberal bullshit. And so I just think like, a kind of political movement that had learned how to positively value the fucking royal divinity of trans femininity, like that's a politics that people are going to get up and march for, because it already has been in the past and already is in so many places in the world. Those people are the leaders of this kind of political project for a reason, because they motivate people, they're irresistibly charismatic, they're powerfully persuasive. People desire them, people want to follow them into the streets.
And I think there's something there to really learn from, and to think about, not only in opposing and transforming the world to rid it of trans misogyny, but as we've been talking about, if we really want to do that, we're talking about, you know, genuine world transformational politics, and that I think is going to require us having something that, you know, feels powerful and that we're passionate about. And I just think like one of the reasons that we're getting our asses handed to ourselves over and over again lately is that there's no passion in the thing that is supposedly the pro trans side of this political struggle. It's all boring, it's all sober, it's all expert driven, and it all sucks. It's all stuff we don't even really like. So I just think like, what would be a better time than 2024 to shift to a politics that really advanced the interests of trans-feminized people and of trans women? I just think we have nothing to lose, and we have truly, truly everything to gain.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28:58
Absolutely. And I think you really sum that up so well in a series of questions that you ask in the conclusion. You say,
What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine or more sexual, but because the safer world is one in which there's nothing wrong with being extra. Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra, and having more than enough?
So you know, it's -- I love it because it just, you know, this book is beautiful, Jules. It's inspiring. It's sharp. It's such a good read. I hope folks pick up a copy and enjoy it. And, you know, thank you for writing this and congrats again.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:29:56
Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for reading it so thoughtfully, and for having this conversation. I'm just so excited, you know, for listeners to have the chance to spend time with it. And like, you know, here we all are in our glorious Death Panel world together. So like, you know, reach out with thoughts and questions and things you're interested in, or even if there are parts of the book or things that it sparks that you'd be interested in hearing more from us on, I think that's something I'm really interested in.
I have to say, you know, as we were thinking about like some -- you know, some Death Panel episodes around this book, one of the -- one of the interesting dilemmas I was facing is like, I don't actually know what I think -- I don't have a prescribed sense of how people should get into this text, because the ideas are also new, like even to me, they were new. And so I'm really -- but also because, yeah, like we're just talking about, this is a book that's meant to be shared, and read together and sort of filtered through everyone's own knowledge and expertise.
And I'm really curious to learn how people are engaging with the text. And so genuine, just sort of open-ended call, if folks have thoughts or questions or ideas for places that we could follow up on things that really got fired up for you, or things that you'd love to add to the conversation around trans misogyny, I'd be really, really keen to hear more about that. And then maybe we can -- yeah, we'll have more to come for sure. But yeah, maybe we'll even just go that way.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:31:29
Well, I think -- you know, can't wait to hear what everyone thinks about it. Let us know in the Discord, email us, DM us, whatever, post on Patreon. We'll make sure Jules gets everyone's messages and pass that along to her. And, you know, it's just such a fantastic read.
And I love the kind of trivia too, of the preface. It's dated the day before your official first day as a co-host on the show, September 14th, 2022.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:32:01
[ Giggles ] Wow.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:32:02
And in it, you say,
Frustrated and exhausted by pervasive bad faith, lately I have found myself saying less that I'm not absolutely sure of. I'm not talking about practicing boundaries, or being opaque to reserve some interiority as a writer -- which we all might want to do. I mean something that mixes self-censorship through silence with the arterial hardening that comes from a lifetime of being let down, by racism as much as homophobia and trans misogyny.
And I just hope, at least in the time since then, you know, you've felt more comfortable just letting loose, because I know that the community of listeners has just been so grateful for you joining the show. And we're also grateful to be able to collaborate so closely.
And we just appreciate you, Jules. Just saying.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:32:47
That feeling is so mutual. And no, I mean everyone and I really mean that, because messages from listeners that I get the chance to read really do sit with me. And as much as being a part of Death Panel has helped me just think more sharply and helped me attune my political instincts, it's also been an exercise in feeling comfortable enough to be more vulnerable, to speak more freely. And that's something that I think in light of our conversation today, you can understand how much just personally that means to me. Death Panel is one of the bright spots in my life where I can honestly say I don't ever feel let down and there's something really beautiful about that. And I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that feeling, for so many different reasons. So thank you all and oh, I can't wait for more.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33:43
Love you, Jules. I can't wait for more too.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:33:45
I love you too.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33:46
This is the perfect place to leave it for today. Patrons, as always, thank you so much for supporting the show. If you'd like to support the show too, you can become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. We do two a week, so you'll get access to Monday's bonus episode, which this week is Abby, myself and Melissa Gira Grant, talking all about Melissa's recent article on Joe Biden's campaign strategy to run on codifying Roe and you know, we get into sort of some of the broader discourse on abortion. So that's a really good conversation. Always wonderful to have Melissa on the show.
And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism or A Short History of Trans Misogyny, out now from Verso, or request them both at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.
Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the Patreon feed. For everyone else, we will catch you later next week.
As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
Death Panel 1:34:52
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