the slow words of june, part 1
yeah, like it says, my words have been coming to me exceptionally slow this month. so instead I’m sharing other folks words that I’ve been reading this month. pride edition.
What is gender and what is it to be gendered? Genders are socially constructed categories that correspond to nebulous parameters surrounding behaviors, sexualities, aesthetics, socio-cultural roles, bodies, et cetera. . . . Gender benefits those who want to control, socialize, and manage us and offers us nothing in return. Every time a person is scrutinized and gendered, society has attacked them, confined them, waged war on them.
Gender itself is used as a tool for centralizing and colonizing. As Europeans moved outside of Europe to further colonial projects, they brought their ideas and conceptions of gender. . . . This isn’t to say that gender didn’t exist in some form outside of colonialism and western cultures. Other forces are surely at play in defining and limiting what gender is, but what is certain is that the current “universal” and “natural” ideas of gender now stem in part from colonialism and a need to centralize and control non-western forms of life.
None of us belong to any gender outside the context of social war. That is to say, gender is a social imposition upon us, a means of keeping us under control (by limiting what is acceptable for anyone gendered in any way). The very existence of trans people of all stripes (especially non-binary people), and of intersex bodies which frustrate efforts to attribute gender to certain anatomical characteristics, calls into question the narrative that gender comprises two stable biological categories that follow from specifically sexed bodies. These realities push us to acknowledge that gender is something that happens to us and not something that we are inherently or “naturally.”
nila nokizaru, "Against Gender, Against Society." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nila-nokizaru-against-gender-against-society-1#fn1
To be clear, when I say that Gender is inherently a violent structure I do not mean to say that gender identity in the abstract is bad. Rather, I mean to articulate the way in which a dominant conception of Gender has been created, deployed, and enforced in such a way that it demands people fit into specific gender-identities that they did not determine. Thus when we critique and call for the abolishment of capital-G Gender, that does not mean the eradication of gender identities that exist outside of said paradigm like the Hijra, Two-Spirit, Fa'afafine, etc. but rather for the destruction of the system that makes said identities unintelligible. (p. 28)
The project of Gender is one that was/is explicitly deployed as a tool of the settler colonial project on the land mass we know as the 'Americas' including 'Canada,' forcibly deployed onto indigenous nations in an attempt to eradicate indigeneity (nokizaru 4-5). This was done due to the fact that a vast majority of indigenous nations not only structured their socialites in non-patriarchal makeups, but specifically had conceptions of gender that did not at all correlate with the European model (Lugones 25). (p. 28)
To elaborate, the idea that bodies are born with either male or female sex organs is the necessary first step for gendered subjectification. Due to the fact that this subjectification is premised off of the injection of a gendered subjectivity (man or woman) into specific genitals, and then facializing that as a body's white wall, that becomes incoherent if there is not first a static construction of what genitals are (i.e. either penises or vaginas) for which the sexing of the body is able to provide. In this sense then, the sexing of the body provides the necessary first step for the internal logics of Gender to deploy themselves – a logic that forms the basis for all transphobic violence to dispense itself, coercively assigning bodies genders at birth. Since Gender claims a 'natural' a-priori operation, bodies are retroactively gendered as fetuses, once they are born, and as they move throughout life. Told that their body, through the prescription of gendered- subjectivity, is nothing but cis womanhood or manhood. This is not merely a discursive process though, but through the aid of a multitude of different apparatuses, most chiefly the medical industrial complex and the police, Gender makes this quite a material one. This proce s is necessarily coercive because bodies have no choice in whether they are gendered or not; they imply are forcibly shoved into a subjectivity of man or woman by virtue of existing and/or not existing with a particular genital makeup. A process such a this means that Gender is always already violent. (p. 28-29)
Chris Coles, “Paradigmatic Bio-Logic: Against Biology and Towards Translife.” https://cedar.wwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=orwwu
One critical factor contributing to the underrepresentation of Black Trans men in statistics is the misclassification of their gender. Many official records, such as death certificates or crime reports, often categorize transgender individuals based on their assigned sex at birth rather than their gender identity. Consequently, Black Trans men may be misgendered and inaccurately listed as women in data collection processes. This misclassification can lead to a skewed understanding of the risks and challenges faced by this population.
The lack of comprehensive data and research on the experiences of Black Trans men regarding death, suicide, and sexual assault is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. By acknowledging and understanding the unique struggles faced by Black Trans men, we can work towards creating inclusive policies, providing adequate support systems, and raising awareness to combat the systemic injustices that contribute to their vulnerability. It is crucial that we strive for better data collection methods and invest in research that accurately reflects the experiences of this marginalized community. Only then can we take meaningful steps towards dismantling the barriers that lead to the disproportionate rates of death, suicide, and sexual assault faced by Black Trans men.
Morales V Benson, “Unveiling the Tragic Reality: Black Trans Men and the Hidden Statistics of Death, Suicide, and Sexual Assault.” https://medium.com/@MoralesSpeaks/unraveling-a-tragic-reality-c2eb26493c77
See, anti-transmasculinity is about the oppression and discrimination faced by trans men. It also includes masculine people more broadly who are not cisgender. This means that those people whose manhood and masculinity are positioned as "going beyond" the biological categories that society typically uses to define gender: these are the targets of anti-transmasculinity.
As far as I understand, the term is relatively new. This is because many people do not believe that transness exists. They appeal to a very flat understanding of natural reproduction, insisting that humans are only male or female. Then, when they do finally think of the word "trans," the first thing that comes to mind are very violent, disgusting, and fear-based representations of trans women and transfeminine people. This is known as transmisogyny: it affects those whose womanhood and femininity are positioned as "going beyond" the biological categories that society typically uses to define gender. The hypervisibility forced onto TMA (transmisogyny affected) peoples often means that the struggles of other gender expansive populations goes invisible (making them transmisogyny exempt or TME).
But even as TME struggles escape the mainstream imagination, they persist, and are often both fueling and being fueled by the war on trans women and transfeminine people. Nothing makes this clearer than in how a Western binary system triangulates that war with Anti-transmasculinity. This is why I say that Anti-transmasculinity is a Trojan horse for Transmisogyny. Like the wooden horse in the Greek myth, it might not seem like what it is, for its actual contents and character are invisible, but at the heart of it, there is a violent campaign going on that is key to how the West aims to lay seige to its civilizational "enemies."
To overcome the fortification of decolonization/class struggle that materialist transfeminism provides, the Trojan Horse arrives: a racial-class paternalism. We see it in how the West’s war campaign has acolytyes within the colonies ready to protect "civilization." The World Council of Families, for example, is openly embraced in the creation of laws while QTGNC orgs in Africa are repressed and any local efforts to secure protections are seen as violation of national sovereignty. In the midst of this, transmisogyny decorates the air waves, the media, the tongues of the citizenry, with trans womanhood made the hypervisible quintessence of a violence and threat to the nation because of how transfeminism unveils the basis of the Family-Marital nexus, the network of the household and gendered labor divisions, the patriarchy and all its imbrication of dominant (colonial and neocolonial) material/power relations. To protect the latter from the former, then, racial-class paternalism must begin misgendering trans men and transmascs. If transmisogynoir is the fulcrum of the West’s patriarchal warfare, anti-transmasculinity is the wheels of the West’s racial-class paternalism, still a form of warfare but not as visible and very secretive about its inner workings.
Paternalism works against trans men and transmasculine people, not on their behalf. Paternalism keeps trans men and transmascs from becoming conscious of themselves as such. Gender paternalism requires that anti-transmasculinity be an invisibilized mode of subjection and coercion. To acknowledge the existence of anti-transculinity would upset the “body-reasoning” built into how Paternalism constructs gendered violence (in contradistinction to gendered victimhood), which is about the imbrication of State power and the colonial-class system."
Nsámbu Za Suékama, “Racial-Class Paternalism and the Trojan Horse of Anti-transmasculinity.” https://medium.com/@riptide.1997/racial-class-paternalism-and-the-trojan-horse-of-anti-transmasculinity-5b22cf66a00e