Genderqueer Genders in Society

Lately, the question has occurred to me whether genderqueer and trans genders (not transgender people, but genders that people who identify with them classify as trans; some trans* people identify their gender as man or woman, obviously) are defined by being culturally unintelligible or culturally prohibited.

And I think the answer is a qualified "yes" to both.

Some of these thoughts stem from the argument that physically transitioning is a reactionary political action in that it renders invisible deviance from the gender binary. Which, of course, is a messed up argument that places politics above people's identities and control over their own bodies, and has inherent in it the assumption that transitioning people will then conform to the gender binary, and, even discounting that, that the very act of transitioning does not in of itself destabilize the gender binary (and even if it didn't, presupposes that those most abjected by a system have the most obligation to destabilize it). More personally, some of these thoughts stem from my inability to have an idea what a "man" or a "woman" is, in attempt to at least know what genderqueer is, even if only in reference to how it fails to conform to social regulations and prohibitions.

I'm not even sure if there is a distinction between a genderqueer gender and a trans gender, as the only distinction I can come up with my head is that genderqueer genders are outside the binary, and trans genders transgress against societal gender strictures in some way. However, a gender being outside the binary is transgressive, and a gender that transgresses against societal gender strictures is by definition outside the binary, which we would be all better served - both in terms of having coherent theory and of focusing activism - if we simply called the heterosexual matrix*. Thus, I think I will merely talk about genderqueer genders, with the caveat that not everyone who is gendered this way identifies as genderqueer (genderqueer being a political label that has been personalized, trans being a personal identity that becomes politicized).

*Butler's terminology, which I find very useful - basically that there are male and female sexes, they are respectively masculine and feminine, respectively men and women, and have as their object choices women and men.

The standard gender determination process, which all occurs without the object of the processes consent, is first the viewer (henceforth the subject) first attempts to determine the sex of the object from among the choices offered by the societal construction of sex, then evaluates the gender performance and signifiers of the object to determine whether they are in accordance with societal regulations for the assumed sex (though gender cues are inextricably linked with perceived sex), and then, based on those judgments, reads an identity either in accord with the heterosexual matrix, or makes a judgment based on the heterosexual matrix. Subjects tend to become confused and or try to more forcefully and openly apply a label when one of these steps fail, which is where unintelligiblity comes in - if a label in one stage cannot be applied, the object needs to be rendered readable, without their consent (or without necessarily any probing of them for information) so that the subject can know how to react to an object.

For instance, if a subject reads the sex as female, the gender cues as feminine, they will generally assume the object is a woman and heterosexual (unless there is extensive context to the contrary). If they read the subject as female, the gender cues as masculine, they will assume the object is a woman and lesbian, or, depending on the degree of masculinity, within the societal mainstream, will read the object as a female person trying to usurp manhood.

This thesis that the reading of gender is nonconsensual labeling is taken from Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, with the important expansion (which is a critical change) that people will read sex (influenced by gender cues) and then assess the gender cues on the basis of that sex to decide whether the object is following social strictures in accordance with their sex-gender (as Foucault, Butler, and many others point out that these in some way, once socially constructed are seen to naturally generate the other).

At this point, this whole description is nothing but a synthesis of ideas that have been floating around quite a while applied to a transfeminist view of gendering. To further along that path, and to get really Foucauldian, we could very well see genderqueer genders as a counter-discourse to the discourse that creates and enforces the gender binary, and thus themselves be created by the gender binary, because, of course, without a gender binary to transgress against, there can be no identities that transgress against it. Also, clearly, the whole process of the subject gendering the object is elephants all the way down, relying on the presumed existence and naturalness of sexuality, gender, gendered cues, and sex.

The newness here is that it doesn't presuppose a set of gendered performances on genderqueer. The simple act of identify as genderqueer - as neither a man nor a woman - means that the object is no longer correctly readable, because, ultimately, the subject reads, "that is a woman, that is a man, I'm confused, the object must really be a wo/man". It's important to note that genderqueer does not exclusively exist in the category of the subject being confused - someone whose gender is femme, for instance, and who is read down the line as being coherent with the heterosexual matrix is just as misread as someone who is visibly outside that matrix. In some ways, identifying as genderqueer is an attempt to gain subjectivity in the objectified process of being gendered, by identifying as always being misread.

One could also, of course, state that anyone who does not totally conform to the heterosexual matrix is genderqueer, which was the original political point of the label - to unify seemingly diverse groups under a common banner. It is also perfectly reasonable to point out that since none of the qualities of the heterosexual matrix are readable separate from each other, that any activism directed at eliminating bias against any particular Other in a duality in isolation from the rest is doomed to failure.

All of this of course ignores race, class, and ableness, which is never absent in the gendering of POC and of poor, working class people, and non-ablebodied/minded people (who do not pass as white, as middle class, or able, respectively and even then passing is a process of erasure). The reading of race and ableness are also generally presumed to be on the body (but also coincides with performative cues) and the reading of class is part of the reading of performance, and both inform the prohibitions and regulations on the presumed gender and heavily affect the subject's reaction to the object's gender and sexuality. So it would be more proper to state that the subject seems to read sex, race, and ableness (informed by gender and class cues), reads gender cues and class cues (mixed with cues for sex, race, and ableness), assigns a gender (which is inseparable from standards based on race, class, ableness), and then reads a sexuality (based on all the above), and determines how to react. Of course, race, class, and ableness have the same sort of existence as everything else in the process. Much transfeminist writing has conveniently ignored race, class, and ableness (most egregiously, Serano's Whipping Girl, especially given the title), and in general much of gender studies has failed to acknowledge how intertwined race, class, and ableness are with gender.

I've quite intentionally included sexuality (and the reading of it) into this process, which is controversial, to say the least, in mainstream gay and lesbian circles. Part of the method by which gays and lesbians have gained a measure of social acceptance is by denying that homosexual acts and identifying with those acts has anything at all to do with gender, despite the fact that the reason that homosexuality is punished in our society is that homosexual acts transgress against societal gender prohibitions and are labeled as such based on how society constructs gender and sex. A side effect of this willful separation that refuses to effectively engage with how punishment and regulation occurs is that trans, genderqueer, and otherwise gender variant people are repeatedly thrown under the bus, as we have seen time and time again.

Finally returning to the qualified "yes" I gave, the subject either notes a transgression (which would be indicative of the identity being prohibited), and then does not know quite how to deal with it (thus the object is unintelligible), or notes no transgression and comes to the wrong conclusion (unintelligibility) which transgresses against the dictate that a clear reading is true (running into a prohibition). Thus, they are functionally the same thing.

Where does all this synthesis of existing theory (with some modest interjections by myself) lead us in terms of activism? How can it inform action under what we currently term feminism, transfeminism, and queer activism, while remaining mindful that we must always consider activism dealing with issues of race and class (and that we inevitably will intersect with those)?

It pretty much states that seeing any of those as separate is a dead end. Many feminisms have presupposed the naturalness of sex, assumed it generates gender through society, and have focused on eliminating the oppression of the presumed to exist class of women by not challenging the existence of sex, but either arguing that genders should be on equal footing, or that gender is a social construction that should be done away with. The one crack in this is in non-transphobic feminisms, the societal generation of gender by sex is only presumed to be mostly true.

Transfeminism has mainly just argued that the class woman should include all self-identified women on equal footing, and that the oppression of transpeople is a valid topic of examination through the lens of feminism, and in ways that respects the validity of trans identities and tries to bring subjectivity to transpeople.

Queer activism has had an important split - mainstream lesbian and gay activism has merely sought to remove the prohibition against homosexual acts, and thus the punishment of people perceived to engage in them, and to put homosexual relationships on equal legal and societal footing with heterosexual relationships. More radical queer activism has also engaged with the devaluing of alternative modes of sexuality (nonmonogamy, BDSM, public sex) and necessarily ends up tying in with transfeminism to some extent when it focuses on the rights of transpeople to be viewed as their identified with genders and sexes.

But really, on their own, they are all simply calls for a redistribution of power along lines that gives power to people who formerly had less. The more radical goal is to attempt to dismantle the whole hierarchical system - not by de-Othering the Othered portion of a binary but by ...and this is where it breaks down from within the binary, because inevitably, the language we use is in the binary. What we can do in the here and now is, in terms of activism, coalition build and recognize the artificialness of boundaries, and in terms of theory, not merely pay lip service to intersections and treat them as special cases, but view it all as one whole that has no true separability.

Returning to the initial prompts, genderqueerness and transness do not depend on being read certain ways (doing such would deny us any subjectivity); we inevitably define ourselves in terms of the heterosexual matrix, and cannot be truly outside of it; and rather than holding identities up to a political litmus test (which is problematic on so many levels), we should focus instead on personal fulfillment and comfort, while returning to our at first coalition based, and ultimately unified activism, attempting to dismantle the system, knowing that we cannot know what the result will look like.