A Short History of Trans Misogyny

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Jules Gill-Peterson teaches history at Johns Hopkins University and is a general editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is also an activist, the author of Histories of the Transgender Child, and a recipient of a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. She is cohost of Outward, Slate’s flagship LGBT podcast.

A Short History

of Trans Misogyny

Jules Gill-Peterson

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2025

First published by Verso 2024

© Jules Gill-Peterson 2024

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ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-160-3

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ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-162-7 (US EBK)

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The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the Hardcover Edition as Follows:

Names: Gill-Peterson, Jules, author.

Title: A short history of trans misogyny / Jules Gill-Peterson.

Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023036325 (print) | LCCN 2023036326 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804291566 (hardback) | ISBN 9781804291627 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Transmisogyny. | Transgender women—Violence against.

Classification: LCC HQ77.96 .G55 2024 (print) | LCC HQ77.96 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/8082—dc23/eng/20230815

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Contents

Preface

Introduction: Femmes against Trans

1. The Global Trans Panic

2. Sex and the Antebellum City

3. Queens of the Gay World

Conclusion: Mujerísima and Scarcity Feminism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

Trans misogyny refers to the targeted devaluation of both trans femininity and people perceived to be trans feminine, regardless of how they understand themselves. While it can manifest as a system of beliefs, trans misogyny also structures the material world through disparate life outcomes and a suite of characteristically punitive regimes. As an exercise of interpersonal or state violence, trans misogyny operates through the logic of the preemptive strike. It trans-feminizes its targets without their assent, usually by sexualizing their presumptive femininity as if it were an expression of male aggression. This process of misrecognition and projection construes its targets as inherently threatening. The threat label, in turn, justifies aggression or punishment rationalized after the fact as a legitimate response to having been victimized—a self-interested playbook if there ever was one. Whoever pursues trans misogyny enjoys the rare privilege of being at once the victim and the judge, jury, and executioner. The transgression prompting this full-court press can be as mundane as walking down the street, or a moral panic as overinflated as the putative end of Western civilization. Regardless, the passive presence of a trans-feminized person is almost always the solipsistic pretense for striking first. Trans misogyny attacks the very existence of trans femininity in attacking real people.

Trans misogyny is both highly discerning, isolating its targets from the rest of the social world, and wildly impersonal, recruiting elements of homophobia and conventional misogyny to its cause. It also tends to manifest through local idioms of racism and class antagonism. This book outlines those characteristics and mechanics in greater detail, tracing some of their key historical points of emergence over the past two hundred years. Throughout, I insist on trans misogyny as the infrastructure of the shared world to release the pressure to sort human worth through identity and social position. While each day seems to bring new taxonomies for assigning value to would-be gender identities, sex classes, or variously privileged and oppressed people, I offer this book as a materialist case for leaving such losing games behind. My first axiom is that trans misogyny is too ubiquitous to make such lofty distinctions. It sticks to and gums up nearly everything concerning sex, gender, sexuality, race, and class. I don’t believe in sorting people’s relative degrees of guilt or victimhood through what kind of person they are because that is precisely what trans misogyny does. Worse, doing so makes for resentful, purity-obsessed solutions to social inequities. In truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny. There is no one who is purely affected by it to the point of living in a state of total victimization, just as there is no one who lives entirely exempt from its machinations. There is no perfect language to be discovered, or invented, to solve the problem of trans misogyny by labeling its proper perpetrator and victim. Nor is anyone’s degree of safety or harm determined or assigned in any final way, whether at birth or through the allegory of socialization. There are, likewise, no biologically static, inherent attributes from which to extrapolate anyone’s deservingness of recognition, freedom, or quality of life, let alone their fantasized inherent criminality or power. Every attempt to legislate how the world ought to be by pretending to innocently describe its normative rules will fail to deliver, as all idealizations do in their overconfidence. This book is critical in its procedures of analysis, but it is also, crucially, empiricist in its reliance on the evidence of the past.

The present era of screeching moral panic, frothing authoritarianism, and endless crisis in the capitalist system has been unkind to us all. Lately I’ve reflected on how brittle I’ve become, at least by some measures. When the stakes are set so permanently high as life or death, catastrophe or salvation, it’s difficult to front the cost of vulnerability, including the vulnerability needed to inhabit uncertainty or tender provisional thoughts. It feels immensely difficult to risk being wrong today, especially in public, and I’m not immune. I’ve found myself saying less outside of the labored prose of my research and scholarship, which builds in a million opportunities to choose my words carefully. (This book is one example of that, to be sure.) The debate club of what remains of the public sphere is a surreal nightmare. For every right-wing pundit or liberal launderer of extremism whose vitriol splatters on the windshield of my public-facing self, there’s the symmetrical rudeness and aggression of people I don’t know, but who seem otherwise to be in the struggle with me. Moral panics are not restricted to anti-trans projects. There are queer moral panics and even trans moral panics directed intramurally—at ourselves, by ourselves. And though they hurt differently because they are seldom backed by the overwhelming force of the state, they do wound in a manner the people explicitly dedicated to the fool’s errand of my eradication cannot. Frustrated and exhausted by pervasive bad faith, lately I’ve found myself saying less that I’m not absolutely sure of. And I’m not talking about practicing boundaries, or being opaque to reserve some interiority as a writer—which we all might want to do. I mean something that mixes self-censorship through silence with the arterial hardening that comes from a lifetime of being let down, by racism as much as by homophobia and trans misogyny.

Trans misogyny is highly compatible with right-wing authoritarian politics because it aims to preserve, or entrench, existing social hierarchies through the production of an imagined threat from those with the least demonstrated power, demanding violence to put them down. However, it would be a mistake to think this means liberal or left politics are immune, or even less amenable, to wielding its power. Trans misogyny is a rare point of consensus across any proverbial spectrum, be it of politics, identity, or desire. I hope that the meticulous approach of this book, which aims to provide overwhelming evidence as a resource in your hands, also moves you in a different way. If you, like me, feel a little brittle, uncertain of how to break the relentless march of the wretched order of things, then perhaps defending your own goodness, even through learning or politicking, is not the most urgent task. Trans misogyny functions less as anyone’s personal failure than something like the weather. Relinquishing the drive to seek political clarity in the goodness, or badness, of your demography might yield far bigger rewards. What awaits is a certain un-learning, a task for which this book might be one humble guide.

Jules Gill-Peterson

September 14, 2022

Introduction

Femmes against Trans

We are living in the global era of trans, a shortened or prefixal version of the word transgender. As an umbrella promoted by the global North, trans is a hyper-inclusive category under which a constellation of gender identities and styles are meant to find their home. As a prefix, trans- is also a kind of boundary-crossing energy, a refusal to be contained by binaries, and attachable to nearly anything: not just people around the world in countless cultures and languages, but also animals, molecules of animate matter, or digital technology.¹ Trans is caught between describing a small minority of people and naming something hyper-modern about how the world works. But trans, as the inheritor of transgender, is also uniquely premised on the distortion and domestication of trans femininity. Prefixal trans politics promise a queer utopia of gender in which everyone else is set free by getting rid of a backward trans womanhood. This is an origin story that is rarely told.

The word transgender rose to popularity in the 1990s in two related but distinct births. The first was a largely white activist world in the San Francisco Bay Area, where people long involved in queer organizing began to rally around transgender as a nonmedical, avowedly political category for trespassing the enforced boundaries of gender. Swaths of people in the United States who had previously traveled under disparate and even incompatible signs were suddenly lumped together under a single umbrella, including transvestites, drag queens, cross-dressers, street queens, hair fairies, butches, studs, bois, faggots, femmes, gender fluid and genderfuck people, and transsexuals. This activist milieu produced radical and intersectional definitions of transgender as a sort of strategic coalition of the gender precariat, like Leslie Feinberg’s influential 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.² But the far bigger shadow cast by transgender came through its second birth in the well-funded NGO industrial complex. There, transgender was institutionalized by social service organizations working in US cities and was swiftly adopted for parallel international development work across the global South. For organizations doing safer-sex outreach work, HIV/AIDS care, and harm reduction, transgender carried the same definition it had for activists, at least on the surface. David Valentine, an anthropologist who studied the process firsthand in New York City, observed that these organizations imagined transgender in the late 1990s as "a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of male- and female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been understood as distinct kinds of person."³

The problem, as Valentine saw most strikingly in his fieldwork with sex workers, was that few of the femmes being recategorized as transgender used the word to describe themselves. As social service organizations, charities, healthcare providers, and local bureaucracies began identifying street girls and sex workers under the transgender umbrella, they actively dismissed these women’s understanding of themselves to include them in philanthropic projects. The biggest sticking point was femmes’ use of the term gay. Valentine noticed that for NGOs, transgender identification was, above all, to be explicitly and fundamentally different in origin and being from homosexual identification.⁴ Calling poor street sex workers transgender was meant to distinguish them from gay people, but the distinction was imposed from the outside. As a result, the femmes on the street became even more illegible than they had been before. Transgender arrived for many girls on the street not as an activist cry but as an institutional word to abstractly separate gender identity from sexual orientation. By refusing to ratify that separation, these largely poor trans women of color were cast as backward, suffering from an outmoded belief system. Since then, the tendency to frame anyone who refuses to separate gender from sexuality as anachronistic has migrated to the global South, further entrenching the white, middle-class, Western model of gender identity as the hallmark of trans modernity. Transgender’s great accomplishment has thus been to disavow the very people it claims to urgently represent: poor women of color.

Around the same time Valentine was doing fieldwork in New York City’s Meatpacking District, a season 3 episode of Sex and the City (2000) followed Samantha (Kim Cattrall) moving into a $7,000-a-month loft in the neighborhood. In now-infamous scenes, Samantha confronts a trio of Black trans women whose sex work is driving her to bourgeois tears. I didn’t pay a fortune to live in a neighborhood that’s trendy by day and tranny by night, she exclaims to her friends during the show’s iconic lunch scene. Samantha first tries to resolve the issue by complimenting the women’s looks and asking if they would kindly move to another block. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) chimes in as narrator to add that Samantha always knew how to get her way with men, even if they were half women. But when the girls return and interrupt an orgasm with her boyfriend, Samantha flings open her bedroom window, screams, Shut up you bitches, I called the cops! and hurls a pot of water onto one of them. I am a tax-paying citizen and a member of the Young Women’s Business Association. I don’t have to put up with this, she rants to herself. A police car then appears on the street and Samantha watches, triumphantly, as the Black trans women move on. At the end of the episode, feeling remorseful, Samantha hosts a rooftop party with the girls, befriending them once and for all—though not without getting in several more cringeworthy barbs.⁵

The episode, fans admit, hasn’t aged well over the past twenty years.⁶ As the documentary Disclosure (2020) might put it, the conventions of representing trans people have since traveled the so-called trans tipping point, in that framing Black trans women and sex workers as the butts of crude jokes colludes with their social death.⁷ But perversely, the scene underlines how plainly Sex and the City offers a characteristically anti-Black form of trans misogyny. Samantha’s dehumanization of the girls working her block is not the organ of a moral campaign against sex work or a philosophical crisis in the category of womanhood. It has to do quite simply with her status as a gentrifier. She wants the Meatpacking District policed and emptied of Black trans women because she pays exorbitant rent for her apartment. And she wants the privacy of her home to facilitate pleasurable straight sex with her boyfriend, which requires that it be separate from the public, transactional economy of sex work. There is nothing deliberately veiled in Samantha’s actions or beliefs; they are explicit defenses of a bourgeois white woman. To purify the Meatpacking District and Samantha’s home, the girls on the street must be evicted. Rewatching it today, viewers might find the episode remains oddly unambiguous about the gentrifying work of the global trans era.

Twenty years later, the world is hardly shy about discussing violence against trans women, though the cosmopolitan pendulum has swung from Samantha making jokes about that violence to raising awareness about it. In fact, violence is like the currency through which trans women circulate. In the public’s mind, Black trans women like those portrayed on Sex and the City are tied to a powerful spectacle of harassment, sexual assault, policing, physical violence, and murder. And there is no shortage of voices demanding that everyone pay even more attention to that violence, as if beholding it is the key to its remedy. But in the constant repetition of scenes of violence, one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: Why does it happen?

Advocacy and domestic violence organizations rarely track violence against trans women as a stand-alone category, preferring to place it under a general transgender or LGBT heading. Yet they also describe the scope of that violence variously as a plague, or an epidemic of staggering or shocking ubiquity.⁸ And they contend that the rate of violence against trans women seems to be going up, especially for Black trans women and trans women of color.⁹ Yet none of these organizations provide an explanation for why trans women are harassed, assaulted, and killed at such alarming or exceptional rates, or what makes the rate change. It’s as if the answer is too self-evident and disturbing to entertain: some trans women are so widely reviled that they are uniquely killable.

Killing trans women is horrifying regardless of its motive. But the absence of causal explanations for such violence is tied to some strange prescriptions from advocacy groups. The National Center for Transgender Equality, for example, advocates the prosecution of violence against trans women of color in the US as hate crimes, even though hate crime statutes are, paradoxically, mostly used to criminalize people of color.¹⁰ Lambda Legal, another civil rights organization, admits that police are rarely helpful in investigating this kind of violence, being themselves a significant source of harm to trans women.¹¹ Although the Human Rights Campaign notes that the causes of violence against trans women are too complicated for a single explanation (they call it a culture of violence), Tori Cooper, HRC’s director of community engagement for its Transgender Justice Initiative, told Time magazine in 2021 that we need to make sure that folks who commit hate crimes are prosecuted accordingly.¹²

The concept of hate crimes grafts a vague notion of transphobic bias onto a prefabricated explanation for violence: it happens because it’s committed by criminals.¹³ This premise has proven to be exceptionally weak in the face of the trans panic defense, which exonerates those who are brought to trial or reduces their sentences