Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Three: Constructing the Transsexual

Or: Transmisogyny is NOT simply the overlap of 'transphobia' and 'misogyny'.

Content Note: Towards the end of this piece, gendered slurs are used descriptively in a sentence in order to illustrate a point. Reader discretion is advised.

Do boys experience gendered violence?

We left the previous installment talking about gendering as a process, as an action that takes the autonomous human and reduces his autonomy, lessens his status and subjugates him under the gendered regime. The principal mode by which this is done is through sexing, the social process of gendering the body, whereby certain anatomical features in aggregate are granted outsized social meaning and determine one’s social standing, primarily (though not exhaustively) by means of their relation to gestational capacity. Those sorted into the category burdened with reproductive, domestic and sexual labor—women—are dehumanized and denied full personhood. Furthermore, heterosexualist logics can position someone closer to or further away from the abject woman, whereby any violation of patriarchy’s organization around its own reproduction carries a commensurate sentence. Men are thus positioned as the beneficiaries of an extractive labor relation, one that they must enforce and uphold to continue reaping its rewards.

Though of course, this begs the question: how does one become a man? How is one prepared and trained for a lifetime of serving the regime?

Recalling the verticality of the gendered hierarchy, we understand how much easier it is to become more ‘like’ a woman than a man, to have one’s humanity denied than built up, to fall further down the ladder than to ascend its rungs. This manner of conceptualizing patriarchy and its enabling misogyny makes one very important elision, however: it does not quite account for children.

No child is a man or a woman, of course, and for a time, determining what a child’s sex might be is a difficult prospect by sight alone, requiring parents to resort to fairly explicit external gendered markers in order to distinguish which sex-caste their progeny has been sorted into. The realm of gender and sexuality is largely placed out of reach of children, though the boundary is far more porous than it perhaps should be and frequently trickles down to shape and mold their social development. Children are enmeshed in a process of perpetual becoming, much like we all are, only more explicitly so. They are socialized into various roles according to class, race, sex, ability, and more, their existence defined and determined by the authority of others, their world divided into what they are allowed to be and what they must never become. Girls quickly learn just how rigidly-bounded their worlds are, how narrowly their expected selves are defined. Boys in turn quickly pick up how much they can be, intuit how much possibility is afforded them even when it is very little, and implicitly understand that their own worlds are not permitted to overlap with that of the girls.

Except for the boys who don’t.

Rules and edicts only go so far, after all, and for all of history, children have always known better than their betters, no matter how much their parents have insisted that they don’t. Not every punishment stings enough to dissuade, not every rebuke inspires compliance and not every child grows into the adult that their guardians so desperately wanted them to be. We know that there are girls who, despite being told that kisses are for boys, steal them from each other’s lips behind closed doors and whispered glances, who think fondly of the boots and carabiners they’ll sport when they’re older. Similarly, there are boys for whom the reproachments don’t … stick.

Violence is, of course, a gendering process.

Which is to say that violence is also thoroughly gendered, an act that connotes certain delineations in a world where aggression, strength and power are all considered the domain of men, while women are meant to—for various meanings of this phrase—take it. There is thus a terrible anxiety that centers upon the boy, this creature that is destined to grow up and become a man with all the power and vigor and virility that embodies, but is not quite a man yet, is distressingly proximate to the reviled woman by dint of his dependence and relative frailty and subjection to authority. For all the arrogant assertions of the naturalness of gender, most cultures have understood that boys need to be made men, need to be inculcated and indoctrinated into the cult that is manhood, and many have accordingly acknowledged this explicitly via the coming-of-age, the rituals and processes through which a pitiable boy, this child that is a potential-man, can demonstrate his readiness for the mantle and harshly divide his boyhood from manhood, demonstrating definitively that he has successfully left his juvenile weakness behind him.

Though of course, this begs the question: what of those who do not succeed?

If you can succeed in overcoming boyhood to become a man, what happens if you fail?

Paradoxically, boys are often subjected to violence to make them men, are broken down and further abjected in a bid to make them reject that abjection. A boy that is not sufficiently aggressive is made the subject of aggression, a boy that feels too much is angrily taught that the only feeling he can express safely is anger, and a boy that refuses to prey on others is brutally made to understand that that will mark him as prey himself. Boys have to like girls without loving them, without wanting to be like them or among them. Boys have to reserve affection and admiration and camaraderie for other boys, without crossing the threshold that makes that affection too much like the affection only a girl can harbor for a boy. Boys have to prepare to be men, and any insufficiency in that regard must be violently corrected until the boy decides that doling out the beatings is better than being on the receiving end.

Still, some boys never quite learn what’s good for them.

There is another purpose to this omnipresent violent correction, this repeated attempted breaking of the boy to reveal the putative man ensconced within, irrespective of how old the arrested boy actually gets. Simply put, should the constant testing of manhood be too agonizing, the repeated failure to become that which the boy was supposed to become too much to bear, and the torturous excesses of others’ brotherhood too exclusionary and ostracizing, then the failed man, the persevering boy, can finally elect to stop persevering, one way if not another, thereby ridding the world of his malodorous taint.

Proving rituals never quite ceased, after all, even if they have become somewhat more esoteric and less momentous.

So far the experiences described herein could apply to people of quite a few identities, generalized as they are to ‘boy who does not perform masculinity appropriately’. The sources of this inadequacy can even be located outside of a gendered paradigm (such as along racial or religious lines, for example) given how synonymous demeaning a man is with gendering him, how the worst insults that can be levied at a man or type of man involve likening him to a type of woman. Even so, the sharpest disciplining is reserved for those boys who show signs that they are unlikely to ever be man enough, who do not love or fuck or be in the manner a man ought to. For the single worst outcome possible, the result that must be avoided at all costs, is absolutely untenable in a male-supremacist society.

Namely: What if the boy is neither broken nor discouraged by the disciplining, and perseveres without becoming a man?

What if a boy, despite being shown exactly what will be done to him for rejecting his biodetermined destiny, chooses it anyway?

What if a boy actually chooses to be a woman?

No regime can afford to take desertion lightly, but outright treason, actual and legitimate identification with the occupied, the exploited—that it cannot countenance under any circumstance. If one’s entire ideology is built on a myth of essentialized superiority, of a difference between the master and the slave that is innate and natural and impossible to transcend, then legitimizing any porosity between the two contradictory categories, permitting any identification of the humane Self with the dehumanized Other, has to be treated as an existential threat, a possible catastrophe in the making. Traitors to the regime need to be sought out and suppressed with all possible zeal, every last one stamped out and marginalized to the utter fringes.

Which all, ultimately, amounts to this: if society ever erroneously constructs a transsexual, she needs to be immediately, instantly destroyed.

There is a rich irony inherent to this destruction, however, which is that in attempting to destroy the transsexual, patriarchal society actually validates her. For in a society that genders everything, every mechanism, essence and feature, the act of violently negating the transsexual’s potential manhood, of casting her out from the upper echelons of the humanized down to the depths of the untouchables, is an act inseparable from the misogynistic processes by which all besides the patriarchal man are ultimately defined. Creation in destruction, construction by nullification, patriarchy births its own antithesis in hatred, by expelling its worst traitors for the unforgivable sin of seeing worth in all that it did not want them to be.

As it so happens, under patriarchal ideology, womanhood is the worst fate that a person can be consigned to.

We can now truly begin to ascertain the shape that transmisogyny materially takes, finally begin to put the pieces together after reckoning with gender as a socially-constructed regime of dehumanization predicated on specific forms of labor extraction. The failure to take up the mantle of manhood, or the temerity to wilfully reject it carries the penalty of reassignment, of revocation of any and all respectability that existence under patriarchal gender affords. The transsexual woman, having already failed at being a man, is relegated to the simultaneous state of failed women as well, given her inability to serve patriarchy’s reproductive logics, to become a somewhat valued property utilized to perpetuate patrilineality. Her exploitation takes an acutely sexual form, her purpose defined and distilled into the sole function that women are reduced to if (and when) they cannot bear a man’s children.

Despite this reduction of the transsexual’s existence to her sexual availability, she is also peculiarly denied something crucial: recognition. While it may be permissible to treat the transsexual like a woman, to degrade her and objectify her and sexualize her as one, she cannot at any point be named as one, cannot be admitted to have achieved the status that those who violate her implicitly categorize her into even as they commit the violation. No, transsexual has to be something else, has to be the boy who could never grow up, the sissy who couldn’t be manly or the homosexual whose lust for straight men drove her to self-mutilation. In order for her to be the ur-example of dehumanization, the totalized non-person that exists in the harshest contrast against the Natural Man, she must be hurled out of gendered classification so utterly that she becomes Something Else, held up as a degendered freak even as she is subjected to the full force of gendering.

In this sense the transsexual and her body become the site upon which any and every patriarchal excess can be enacted without remorse, the brutalized Other who is not simply a colonized subject of the regime, but a barbarian milling at the gates, at once wretched and pitiable while also representing the crisis that could undo the regime’s very foundations. All regimes sooner or later need an external threat to divert attention to, a foreign enemy for its people to focus on so that the extant tyranny seems preferable, even tame by comparison, and the transsexual is the Gendered Empire’s very own Vandal. She is the menace against whom any violence can be justified, both the failed man who can be beaten senseless and the failed woman who can be raped with impunity, against whom no amount of harm is unjustifiable.

Speaking in plain terms, the tranny is constructed as the union of fag and whore.

What, then, is transmisogyny? It is the process by which those conscripted into the male sex under patriarchy are denaturalized and dehumanized, being demoted from potentially liberated agent to subjugated object. It is the intensification of misogyny in a manner that does not merely enforce sexual difference, but explicitly penalizes the failure to uphold it. It is the degendering of the male subject, enacted to reconstruct her into an un-person who cannot be considered to be wronged, violated or otherwise harmed, upon whom sexual exploitation and feminized labor extraction can be enacted with impunity. More broadly, if misogyny is the force that elevates men at the expense of women, then transmisogyny is the complementary force that makes examples out of those who dare to turn their backs on the resulting gendered rewards. Transmisogyny is the reminder, the warning, the deterrent: “be the man you were meant to be, or else.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this series. I hope that my attempt to synthesize the radical feminist social construction of gender with transfeminist insights into the state and existence of the transsexual woman yielded something that was, if not particularly revealing, at least clarifying in some ways. If you are interested in reading some of the material that has informed my worldview and perception of both transsexuality and radical feminism, I have enumerated a few recommendations below.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere, perhaps the single most accessible elucidation of Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic, and truly the key that can unlock and revolutionize one’s understanding of oppressive social systems.

The Straight Mind by Monique Wittig, the matrix from which all lesbian feminism may as well have been birthed.

Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist text steeped as much in history than in theory and a truly indispensable one for understanding the gender-collaborationist mindset.

Refusing To Be a Man by John Stoltenberg, while intended as a radical feminist framework for men who wish to critically engage with the plight of women and support them in their struggle, turns out to have a great deal that speaks to the transfem perspective, as the title itself might indicate.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix by Susan Stryker is an unconventional essay that nonetheless captures a certain transsexual internality particularly well, conveying the experience of our denaturalization at the hands of a patriarchal society and the resultant rage thereof evocatively well.

Lastly, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich is an excellent, frequently-misunderstood and chronically under-read essay that builds and puts into words a powerful central framework by which one can understand the shared struggles of all women, whether lesbian, heterosexual or, yes, even transsexual.