Degendering and Regendering

There is an asymmetry inherent to transphobia, due to the patriarchal ideology of sex.

If you follow this page, you've probably come across writing on the degendering inherent to transmisogyny by now. As a refresher, Serano's definition is succinct and sufficient: trans women are often treated not as men or women, but as some manner of "third thing", a "third-sexed" and dehumanized creature subject to dismissal, hypersexualization, brutalization, and fetishistic violence. In terms of understanding trans women's place in the patriarchy, degendering is as relevant a concept as epistemic injustice, which is the locking-out of transfems from all the processes of knowledge-production about us, resulting in a culture where we are spoken of frequently, but rarely heard.

Of course, degendering and epistemicide are both broad subjects, mechanisms that are not limited to transmisogyny by any means. Infertile women, racialized women, disabled women, fat women, and many other categories of women are routinely degendered, while epistemic injustice impacts many marginalized populations, including but not limited to lesbians, racialized people as a whole, and transmascs.

Arguably, epistemicide affects transmascs particularly acutely and results in the phenomenon that is commonly referred to as inviziblization. Transmasculinity is rendered invisible both transculturally and transhistorically, a denial of the possibility that manhood is a permeable social category rather than a 'natural', inevitable, biodestined role based on one's anatomical configuration.

This is because many societies are patriarchal and male-supremacist, enshrining not merely the humanity of those designated men above the subjugation of those deemed women (or sufficiently close), but also refusing to entertain the idea that anyone who is at any point deemed unworthy of manhood could ever ascend to this positionality. Transmasculinity cannot be permitted, cannot be named or allowed to be possible under a system that is oriented around the exploitation of reproductive and sexual chattel by those who are their 'natural' superiors, imbued with the signifiers of masculinity and thus autonomy, personhood, agency.

In short, to acknowledge transmasculinity, a society would have to first admit that manhood—just like womanhood—is a social class and not a 'natural' category. Its people would have to acknowledge that the desire for independence and self-actualization exists within all of us and is not, in fact, stored in the balls.

Conversely, the reason that transfemininity has been more visible across both time and cultures is that the veneration of manhood is highly central to patriarchal modes of organization. The idea that manhood can be failed, that an individual can fail to live up to its mantle and be stripped of manhood's privileges and protections is a useful schema to ensure ideological investment in patriarchal society. The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors. The transmasculine, by contrast, are ignored or treated as little more than delusional, as people who reach above their station and are doomed to never succeed.

In that sense, transmasculinity is subject to regendering. Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

These forces are complementary and interrelated, but not identical. Transmisogyny exists on a continuum with anti-effeminacy and the homophobia directed at queer men, while transemasculation is on a continuum with lesbophobia and the vilification of the 'masculine', 'unladylike' woman. This is because of how sexuality is not neatly separable from gender under patriarchy, since the only permissible mode of existence is heterosexuality, and so homosexuality is also, frequently, understood as a form of gendered deviance.

This is also why the most common forms of transemasculative rhetoric beat the drum of the 'mutilated girl', itself an echo of the idea of damaged goods. Being a reproductive asset under patriarchy is not an enviable fate, but patriarchy, in the process of dehumanizing the transmasculine, still accords them--no, not humanity, don't be absurd, but utility. The transmasculine can still be "of use" to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious 'fertility' and render themselves 'undesirable', unfit for reproductive exploitation.

There is, sometimes, a point of no return, past which the transmasculine are no longer as heavily subject to regendering, having committed the cardinal sin of exercising autonomy over their own sex. They are, at this point--welcomed as men?? Don't be absurd. If they are recognized as transmasculine, even if they can navigate the world as men, transmasculine individuals become subject to degendering, vilification, and monsterization. The goods have been damaged, and the heterosexual regime seeks to discard them as it discards all of us who do not fit into its vision of 'natural' reproduction.

A note: An individual's actual inclination toward having children does not impact the perception of gay people or trans people as a class. Heterosexuality, cissexuality, and monogamous straight coupling with the intent of furthering a bloodline are the presumed patriarchal default. Adoption, artificial insemination, or even the participation of trans people in 'natural' reproduction does not detract from the patriarchal perception of us as mules who mutilated ourselves into sterility, to say nothing of the frank reality that the majority of queer people do not, in fact, seek to bear or raise children.

Patriarchy's calculus is cold, impersonal, and infinitely reductive. A person's value to society is measured in terms of their ability to participate in the heterosexual regime, while those of us who deviate from this prescription in any way suffer gender-marginalization. The specificities of our oppression and how the violence against us manifests in policy, cultural perception, and public rhetoric are important, and cannot be collapsed or easily equivocated.

However, even still, I urge us all to keep in mind an important maxim: our oppressions, even if distinct and asymmetrical, even if difficult to map onto each other, are interrelated and share the same root.

We are all dissidents from heterosexuality in the eyes of patriarchal society and are thus all subject to punishment for that desertion.