On Jules Gill-Peterson's 'A Short History of Trans Misogyny'

Doc Impossible quotes Jules Gill-Peterson:

Mujerísima… poses a bold new trans feminism for the twenty-first century and critiques the flaccid trans misogyny of the present in both anti-trans feminism and and queer and trans movements. Dissatisfied with the impotence of trans-inclusive feminism, which has proven unable to outmaneuver the trans misogyny of gender-critical and far-right anti-trans political movements, [mujerísima] turns to trans Latin America for a different lesson [A Short History of Trans Misogyny, p. 26].

In this post, which you should read (A Love Letter To The Dolls: The liberatory trans feminism of Jules Gill-Peterson's Mujerísima. Doc Impossible. Stained Glass Woman (Substack). May 6, 2024), Doc Impossible explains:

"The core historical argument of A Short History of Trans Misogyny is that the global trans panic that we all are enduring now was the deliberate, calculated creation of European colonial invaders, who needed a moral excuse, a morality play, that they could sell to their citizenry to justify not only the invasion of the global South, but the ruthless, centuries-long exploitation and extermination of its peoples. The global trans panic has been ongoing for at least the last 250 years, and probably since the very stirrings of white settler colonialism in the early 1600’s. We are all, hopefully, pretty familiar with the unspeakable racism of the so-called white man’s burden, which argued that racist colonial exploitation was the method by which these '“uncivilized' Black and Brown peoples would be remade into 'proper,' white-coded, European-coded versions of themselves and their societies."

Quoting Jules Gill-Peterson again:

"By the early nineteenth century, the global reach of European and American slavery and colonialism had stolen so many bodies, and severed so many people’s relationships to the land, that the urban, lumpenproliterian model of trans womanhood began to replace all others (p.92)."

The problem, as Doc Impossible puts it, is that "the fundamental caste structure that the racialized colonial cisheteropatriarchy we live in has built over the last several hundred years." The important question for your feminism is whether you oppose that. Including trans people in your feminism is not enough. ("This," Doc Impossible adds, "was ultimately the core argument of Whipping Girl: that white feminism is the same old gendercide, just wrapped up in pink ribbons and pantsuits.")

When I hear phrases like "trans women are women, trans men are men," to me as a trans person it sounds like a basic fact, true by the pragmatic definitions I live by. The phrase “trans women are women” should not mean (as Doc Impossible warns) that “trans women are woman enough to be counted amongst our number, if you peel away the things that make then unique." It should not mean "lesser" and barely "acceptable." It should not come from a scarcity mindset in which, if some people are accepted as women, there will be less womanhood for others, so we have to be careful who we let in the club. In the voice of cis white women, it often means that, Doc Impossible thinks. Instead, it should mean something more like "womanhood grows with the inclusion of trans women."

I had not realized this: that when trans people are asked to justify exactly how we are men or women, and why we can't just stay the way we are as whatever the opposite thing is imagined to be — the thing we plainly are not, the thing many of us claim we never were — that this gatekeeping happens under a scarcity mindset. If everyone realized there was plenty masculinity & femininity to go around, they'd get bored of asking whether individual people (trans, cis, nonbinary) measure up. Because why would it matter? There is no yardstick to measure masculinity & femininity because there is no shortage of it. It's immeasurable because it doesn't need to be measured. Empires try to seize and exploit gender as a resource, but there's nothing to be gotten. It can't be extracted from us. Gender is the untouchable quality, and gender keeps growing.

No label is going to solve every conundrum and pin the butterfly into the box because any label tends to be something to which you try to assimilate. Even "trans": if you're trans, there comes a point at which you start to worry if you're doing "trans" correctly. (I suppose anti-trans people worry most of all that they're doing anti-trans correctly.) But gender is about abundance, surplus, never fearing shortage, being "too much," as Doc Impossible says.

Trans panic, Doc Impossible paraphrases, "was the harbinger of and the justification for literal genocide for centuries, and old memories of such massive societal trauma run deep. That’s why many, but not all, cis, heterosexual white men fight to enforce it even today. The continued extermination of trans women is, at heart, the justification for white, masculine power."

To Gill-Peterson, "trans" — as Doc Impossible paraphrases it — is "a white, colonial amalgamation of gender diversity created in the 1960’s and 70’s and which really went global in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, that set out to sever gender diversity from its historical contexts and meanings."

Doc Impossible says:

"The last page comes, then the last word, each more wonderful than the last, and then it's done. I close the book, hold it to my forehead, and howl with tears. I have never felt seen like this before, never been told these things before, and there simply are no words, no reality, that can possibly capture how much they mean to me."