Degendering and Racialization

Or: Do cis women of color "experience transmisogyny"?

Or: Do cis women of color "experience transmisogyny"?

Part I: Sterilization and Abortion

The Jane Collective was an underground organization of feminists operational in Chicago from roughly 1969 to 1973, dedicated to providing women access to safe abortions. At a time when abortion was illegal in most of the United States, reproductive justice remained accessible only to those who could travel to countries where it was legal or available, such as Japan, Mexico, or England. Members of the Jane Collective ended up taking matters into their own hands—quite literally, with several members learning how to perform safe abortions themselves and helping women who couldn’t afford an overseas trip.

One of the group’s founders was Jody Howard, who had been radicalized by her experiences with the medical industry’s regulation of reproductive autonomy. Howard had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma during her second pregnancy and had been unable to access treatment during term, as said treatment would have damaged the fetus. This allowed the disease to advance unchecked until she’d given birth, which nearly resulted in her death.

To avoid another pregnancy—one that might actually succeed in killing her—Howard sought and was repeatedly denied tubal ligations from various hospitals until she was able to procure letters from ten different doctors. Though she was eventually able to avail of the procedure, she was told when she woke that she was already pregnant. Howard was then faced with the prospect of securing an abortion, or else braving the very nightmare she had been desperately hoping to avoid.

Fortunately, she was able to do so, by convincing two psychiatrists that she would kill herself if she was unable to get one. This intrusion of the psychiatric establishment into matters of gendered autonomy is already quite illustrative of the logics at play, but more telling is an interesting detail about the hospitals that denied and delayed Howard’s voluntary sterilization. Those very same hospitals were, in fact, providing sterilization treatments to women non-consensually, a seeming contradiction that is resolved when one considers an important difference between Howard and the sorts of women who have been subject to forced sterilization in the West.

To the state, Judy Howard’s gestational capacity was of such paramount importance that she could not be allowed to exercise any agency over it, despite her already being a mother of two. All the while, there were entire classes of women whose gestational capacity was curbed, diminished, denied and destroyed. Treated, in effect, as a threat to be managed, or as offal to discard.

Culling the children, the future of ‘undesirables’, has always been core to the project of Nation-building, after all.

Part II: Binary Womanhood

Readers familiar with radical transfeminism understand how degendering is a core component of transmisogyny. Trans women are most frequently denied womanhood on the basis of our lack of gestational capacity, that characteristic that is, under patriarchal society, indelibly and inseparably associated with the class ‘woman’. The similarities between how trans women and infertile cis women are treated—which includes but is not limited to elevated rates of sexual violence, degradation as ‘defective’ or ‘barren’ women, and third-sexing out of gendered categorization entirely—are usually ignored to promulgate this rhetorical violence and maintain cissexist notions of ‘natural’, immutable and dichotomous sex.

From this, it is easy to infer that while ‘woman’ is a term easily defined by its relationship to reproduction and sexed autonomy under the heterosexual regime, it self-evidently remains internally heterogeneous. Most patriarchal societies quite overtly maintain a distinction between women of the hegemonic demographic, who are demarcated as reproductive resources to be parcelled out within the private, domestic sphere, and “the rest”: women who are, to put it bluntly, placed on a lower ‘tier’. “The kind you don’t take home to mama.”

Transmisogyny is far from the only force that destabilizes a woman’s relationship to the patriarchal bargain. Race, disability, and sexuality immediately come to mind (non-exhaustively) as ‘mitigating factors’ that represent a form of downward mobility in the gendered hierarchy, intensifying the misogyny women face through avenues of sexual exploitation or corrective, reclamatory violence.

Given that race is a social technology that encodes certain relationships to citizenship, nationality, ancestry, and/or colonization, it is trivial to understand how it can be deployed as a tool of degendering. When it comes to ranking reproductive resources, or what eugenicists have actually referred to as breeding stock, racialization devalues womanhood, rendering a woman ‘less fit’ for exploitation within the domicile, less able to (re)produce the Nation’s ideal Citizen, its vaunted and valorized (racial) hegemony. Racialized women are thus frequently sexualized, while commensurately being just as frequently excluded from the Nation’s ‘ideal’ pool of broodmares.

If one is tempted at this juncture to try and understand the ‘ranking’ of various categories of woman, a future essay will explicate on why that is a futile endeavor. For now, it is sufficient to understand that such social ‘rankings’ are always highly contextual, and that for the topic at hand, we only need to know that women, by and large, experience a fairly binary categorization: those valued for their gestational capacity, and everyone else.

That is, in fact, the best way to understand how third-sexing functions.

Part III: ‘Masculinized’

This degendering that racialized women are subject to is usually referred to, in the common parlance, as women of color being ‘masculinized’. The term fails to communicate the actual mechanisms at play on several levels, which we’ll examine here.

The first issue is the concept of ‘masculinity’ itself, a characteristic that those who live under patriarchal regimes intuitively understand but struggle to put into words, especially when engaging with feminist discourses. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam defines ‘masculinity’ in the introduction to his book Female Masculinity as “I don’t know, vibes” (paraphrased—but barely). Most people have a tendency to hem and haw and pretend that ‘masculinity’ is some nebulous, arbitrary collection of positive attributes such as “strength” and “leadership”, and stop replying when asked why feminine women cannot embody them.

When peeling back the charade and speaking honestly about patriarchal gendering, however, it is easy to understand masculinity as simply the set of positive attributes that men are both expected to and assumed to embody, characterizing them as possessing agency, as free from patriarchal gendering. It is thus a concept defined entirely through antithesis, antagonism, and mutual exclusivity with the feminine, the womanly, the meek. Strong, masculine, virile, intellectual men are held up in contrast to weak, effeminate, vapid, and penetrable women. Masculinity and femininity are therefore simply social encodings for dichotomous sexed roles, ones that have varied across time and culture. Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl, has dubbed this ‘oppositional sexism’, and those familiar with Christian patriarchy may recognize the concept as complementarianism.

Keeping this in mind, we can now recognize how dubbing racialized degendering as ‘masculinization’ is somewhat logically and linguistically incoherent. For even speakers who talk around the social understanding of masculinity know that masculine attributes are regarded as inherently positive, as conveying notions of greater agency, responsibility, or capacity as a human being under patriarchy. Even when ‘negative’ aspects of masculinity are interrogated, such as men’s violence being enabled or excused by their legal and sociocultural contexts, that capacity for gendered violence is not regarded as a core, defining aspect of masculinity, but as “toxic” masculinity, as an aberration from a noble ideal that cannot fail, but only be failed.

Racialized women are thus hardly being ‘masculinized’ when degendered. They are not being regarded with more respect or afforded more dignity and agency, and are in fact being constructed as less human, marked as acceptable targets of brutalization and sexual violence without repercussion. (We would do well to remember, as well, that masculinity renders men as the perpetrators and not targets of sexual violence, and that men who are subject to such violence themselves are invariably unmanned, effeminized, emasculated—degendered in their own right.) The purpose of this dehumanization is certainly homoousian with transmisogyny, but remains distinct in important ways.

To illustrate this, we ought to consider the recent case of Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. Khelif found herself a prominent target of the global trans panic, inadvertently uniting technofeudalists, wizard kidlit authors, and reactionary wingnuts into calling for her disqualification under the guise of “protecting women’s sports”. As Serano observed in her essay Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?, the rhetoric that is frequently deployed against transfem athletes was used to question Khelif’s womanhood, to dub her a “secret” man covertly “invading” women’s spaces—in short, instrumentalizing transmisogynistic tropes to degender and vilify her.

Surface-level understandings of this phenomenon would seem to lend credence to the idea that Khelif was ‘masculinized’—she was, after all, “called a man”—and also ‘subjected to transmisogyny’, on account of being treated “like a trans woman”. An analysis that runs into issues when considering important distinctions between Imane Khelif and transfem athletes, such as the complete absence of any transfem athletes competing at the 2024 Olympics.

Khelif, in essence, had access to an easy defense that a hypothetical trans woman athlete would not have been able to utilize: she could simply point out that the statements made about her sex were not true. Popular defenses of her place at the Olympics did not, ultimately, rest upon affirmations of trans women’s place in women’s sports, but merely pointed out that she was being lied about and had as much a right to participate as any female athlete. It was simply the case that Khelif was cast in the role of “woman to degender and vilify” because the extant global transmisogynistic panic had entirely succeeded in keeping trans women out of the Olympics.

Further, women of color are no more ‘treated as men’ than trans women are when we are maliciously degendered. Here is yet another case of inflammatory rhetoric and reactionary invective being taken entirely at face value rather than understood for its rhetorical purpose. Though third-sexing and degendering are mechanisms that patriarchal reactionaries understand and deploy intuitively, their schema of sex as dichotomous only allows them to call their targets “men” when attempting to exclude someone from the category “woman”. (Even as misogynists fully understand the purpose of gender as a social disciplining tool, they must safeguard the fiction of ‘immutable’, ‘binary’ sex, leaving a not-woman or a failed-woman to be called a perverse, violent man.) As noted, this is not ‘masculinization’, the elevation to the social role of ‘man’, but rather dehumanization, bestialization, brutification—the construction of a target as a brutish, primitive, animalistic threat to ‘real women’ that can and indeed must be put down. While the patriarchy’s ‘protectionism’ over women-as-a-resource is largely a fiction—reproductive assets are claimed, jealously guarded, and exploited, not ‘protected’—the purpose of racialized degendering is to exclude women of color from even that flimsy heterosexual contract and leave them only fit for brutalization and/or violent consumption.

Transmisogynistic rhetoric is only the latest tool in the racist reactionary’s belt, one that is used to promulgate a long history of racialized degendering. Women of color, lesbians, and women of various other identities have long been opportunistically degendered and expelled from the ‘upper echelon’ of womanhood down to its third-sexed wastes, even when people know full well their target is not a man. One of the first women to fail a chromosomal “sex test” was Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967, a Polish Olympic athlete whose records were stripped from her following this failure, and yet not restored when she gave birth to a child in 1968. In a similar vein, when non-white women are publicly degendered and libeled falsely as violent brutes, the truth of their sex is hardly ever the point. The point is humiliation, to put them in their place for having overreached, for daring to be present amidst ‘their betters’ at all.

Khelif’s case in particular is incomplete without accounting for her race, and for the role organized sports (and their organizing bodies) have played in upholding the ideology of essentialized sexed differences and regimes of racial and national superiority. It is thus not at all a coincidence that the non-transfem athletes whose reputations and records have been consistently harmed by transmisogynistic policies are largely racialized and intersex.

Interpersonally, racialized degendering functions as a means of designating a target for both racialized and sexed violence. A racialized woman is degendered not due to an authentic confusion about her gender, but to eject her from the category ‘woman’—patriarchally understood as lacking in agency, desire, or autonomous capacity—and regard her as a brutified, bestialized threat. Contrasted against hegemonic womanhood, assailants are provided a ready casus belli, their violence against her authorized and justified as the necessary defense of patriarchal property against the external Other. Her body, so marked, becomes an acceptable site of violence, for any who oppose her are acting in self-preservation, while any attempt she makes to preserve herself are interpreted as clear and overt signs of aggressive intent.

That, ultimately, was the sin Imane Khelif was made to pay for. No one who participated in her public humiliation had any concrete reason to doubt her sex. They did have a reason to want to punish her for trouncing a white opponent, though, and relished the opportunity to remind her of her station.

Concurrent regimes of violence, after all, tend to build upon each other, to intensify mutually reinforcing structures that most acutely harm those who exist at their intersections. Yet, despite the intersection of race and sex being one of the most-studied, the ways in which racialization deploys gendering is rather neglected. (Trans)misogyny is a tried-and-true method of degradation and dehumanization, and the racialized regimes we labor under are also patriarchal ones. To say that racialized women experience transmisogyny rather than degendering is to discount how racialization already destabilizes gendering in service of the National project.

Of course, we must also state the obvious and particularly galling conclusion of asserting that racialized cis women “experience transmisogyny”: it erases trans women of color from the conversation entirely by collapsing the specificities of our linked but distinct oppressions together. It is not true that trans women of color and cis women of color are treated identically in multiracial, locally white-hegemonic societies, and when we consider societies that are not locally white-hegemonic, such as those in the third world, the claim that cis and trans women are treated identically therein is revealed to be utterly absurd, as is the usual result of ignoring an important and relevant intersection.

Part IV: Natalism

In conflating transmisogyny with racialized degendering, we do not simply elide the intersection of the two, but also rob ourselves of the insight that comes from examining the underlying impetus animating both. The reason the treatment of racialized women often mirrors that of trans women writ large is that both classes of women are devalued similarly, as inadequate or outright detrimental to the Nation’s reproductive ambitions. The function of patriarchy is to instantiate heterosexuality, to manage the sexual chattel and reproductive stock through which its segregated labor pools are both organized and maintained. Additional ideological investments such as the USian settler-colonial order, the Indian varna system, or state religions the world over further bifurcate citizen from underclass, providing the masses with anti-materialist incentives to “buy-in” and identify with their rulers over their fellow exploited humans.

Through the naturalization of these caste systems as ‘biological fact’, their social and ideological character is obscured and reduced to a matter of individual identity. Manhood, whiteness, and similar mantles of social dominance become obfuscated as innate qualities, and the mechanisms of regulation and enforcement that define and dictate membership are invisiblized by the prevailing epistemic orthodoxy.

Social dominance, then, is best understood in terms of managing affinity, fealty, affiliation, investment in the prevailing social order. Those who are able to access and leverage any scraps of power will often do so eagerly and unthinkingly, disincentivized as they are to examine the basis of their own privileging. Even those who are not positioned to derive the most benefits still usually find compliance to be more frictionless than questioning authority and cultural wisdom. Many, if not most, accede to the bargains they are provided, choosing to ameliorate their own exploitation and suffering by participating in others’, or even by merely reinforcing the constructed boundary between their identity and the assigned identities of those more abject, more reviled.

Recall, once more, the most common defenses of Imane Khelif. Instead of challenging the transmisogynistic precepts that would declare a trans woman’s participation illegitimate or as a threat to “actual women”, the majority of Khelif’s defenders opted to engage in identitarian distancing, with the appeal that she did not deserve the transmisogynistic invalidation that a hypothetical transfeminine athlete would never be granted exemption from. Yes, it is entirely true that the racist degendering and harassment Khelif experienced could highlight points of solidarity between two similarly oppressed classes of women, but that wasn't what happened. Instead, trans women's vilification was declared as misplaced and tragic when it spilled over to others, resulting in appeals to minimize the collateral damage.

Disentangling these threads is a concerted effort in unravelling imprecise language and the varying degrees of epistemic violence that all marginalized classes are subject to. While it would bring me nothing but joy to see racialized cis women—among whom I count some of my dearest friends and allies—collectively identify more with the trans women who are degendered alongside them and the transmisogyny we face, the disappointments of material reality remain, and racialized cis women are often just as invested in cisness as their white counterparts. If they can reinforce the difference between themselves and trans women, if they can secure their own place within womanhood—however abject or tenuous—by denying us ours, it remains true that many, if not most, will do just that.

Not all the transfems are white, and not all the racialized women are cis, leaving those of us betwixt with no choice but to be brave, given how frequently we are forgotten, abandoned, and alone. Women like me must mind both meanings of ‘passing’, requiring us to make peace with how, no matter how seemingly indistinguishable we are from racialized cis women, our gender is still always subject to challenge under a white hegemony.

Finally, the bitterest pill remains the most evident one. Because for all her experience with degendering, all the experiences that should give her insight into the indignities of racialization, the white trans woman is often unable to resist the temptation of partaking in racialized transmisogyny, lured in by the siren song of being enabled to implement identitarian distance herself, against a woman placed below even her. Despite being given every chance to embrace sameness over difference, the chance to prove her womanhood against the degendering of those easily cast as rapacious, alien, animalistic predators tends to be reward enough.

I must repeat: the similarities between the cis and trans women of a race-class abound, including whom they are allowed to enact violence against, and how they leverage their access to patriarchal protectionism.

Which stands conclusively as the grandest irony of all. Yes, even here, in the unholiest of unholies, I am offal amidst offal, a tranny amidst trannies. We’re all trans, and I’m still brown—this is a lesson I’ve learned all too well. What makes the irony rich is that my place here is so readily reinforced by those who can no more avail of the patriarchal bargain than I can, who will in the final calculus be looked upon no more favorably than a third-sexed, degendered beast from the wrong Nation. Dworkin noted astutely in The Coming Gynocide that a society which apportions women value based on fertility will also euthanize them the moment they prove fallow, that longevity and security are the commodities patriarchy withholds from us most of all. One day, you will be offal too, and serving me up before that day comes will not prevent its arrival, or even meaningfully delay it.

Heed or ignore that warning at your own peril. Under the current regimes, our fates are entwined, and our ignominious end inevitable, unless …

Unless.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks the first entry of my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published before have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!