Finer Slices
I want to suggest a few concepts for thinking about the political attacks on trans people whose pitch seems to be increasing this year. It seems to me that thought about this frequently breaks down in the same places:
Sizing the threat: are we overestimating or underestimating it? Are we panicking? Are we minimizing?
Indirect responsibility: is there a difference between what you play into and what you are directly responsible for?
Both of these are approaches to a question of understanding an anti-trans coalition but focus in the first case on how I should feel about the threat and in the second case on where to lay blame. These are very coarse questions: how big is it and where is the edge? In particular both ways of thinking stop short of questioning how the anti-trans coalition is put together.
Against this, I would like to suggest thinking through a model of anti-trans politics as braided together from three basic strands: the performative, the legal, and the existential. As with other social categories, you will not find very many pure types in nature, but I nonetheless think that the language of ideal types helpfully draws our attention to how they are entangled.
The performative attack is about transgression. “You can’t make me.” “You can’t stop me.” Scandalizing the scolds. The basic narcissistic contradiction: “I need to show you that I don’t need you.” It’s about flexing. Unfortunately, when you flex your trigger finger, you may fire a live bullet.
The legal attack is broadly about exclusion from bureaucratic and public spheres, but crucially also: invested in the continued legitimacy and function of those spheres. Here one finds an attack on rights in the narrow sense, an attempt to roll back legal interpretations and institutional affordances. And here one also finds an attack on norms: what counts as appropriate or inappropriate? What counts as below-the-belt?
The existential attack is rather simply the attempt to eliminate the possibilities of trans life, and at the extreme, extends to the elimination of trans people themselves. This is a domain of hatred and obsession.
I think that the differences between these positions come out when you think about their tension in coalition.
The performative attacker can be a useful idiot for the legal and existential attackers. Broadly: the performative attacker lets the legal and existential goons into the building, in order to piss off liberals, or to demonstrate the nullity of prohibition. This is what being “based” amounts to. This is a bit different than collaborating as their peer or as their puppet. Notice that this doesn’t require a hateful attitude, a clear strategy, or even a long attention span. This style of attacker more typically presents as an unprincipled agent of chaos, interested in showing force at every turn, but not in applying it toward any particular end.
The legal attacker can be a useful idiot for the performative and existential attackers to the extent that the latter cannot really achieve anything without legitimacy and competence. The legal attacker can also annihilate some of the basis of resilience in the targeted group. However, the legal attacker is also someone with a regard for rules and stable bureaucracy, however nostalgic and false their image of those rules might be.
The existential attacker is there to do the dirty work: here one finds illegal tactics, fixation and hatred, the dirty side of populism.
Each of these players may face the other and ask “am I using you or are you using me?” Each fundamentally is not enough for the other, perceives the other as lacking discipline or strategy or grim resolve.
The performative player resents his peers, because they undermine his room of maneuver.
The legal player resents his peers, because they undermine his legitimacy.
The existential player resents his peers, because they are respectively clowns and cowards.
Still, the coalition drags itself along, and the rest down. I don’t think these tensions necessarily represent anything that will stop the worst, but neither does the presence of extreme elements guarantee the worst.
What one gets out of this analysis, hopefully, is a way of acknowledging the threat in a less paranoid way. If there are extremists and mad philosophers in the white house orbit, that is quite a bad thing, and their mere proximity to power might eventually lead to them having more of it. That is a real problem. But one doesn’t need the proposal that these people are somehow secretly running the show, or that the anti-trans coalition functions smoothly or well. The good news is that it doesn’t. The bad news is that it doesn’t have to.
And how is it with us?
I am finding it interesting at this moment to think about Philip Pettit’s “eyeball test,” a proposal for evaluating non-domination. One simply asks the question of whether a certain social arrangement “enables people, by local standards, to look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference.” Have we got that? Are we starting to lose it? Legal rights are certainly not the only basis in answering the question. The answer might matter a lot.
Anyway, keep your head up,
Jackie