I see a tremendous amount of solidarity every day between trans men, trans women, and those off the binary- within and beyond the queer community generally, but also expanding out into broader struggles, notably Feminism, Decarceration, anti-Racism, Palestine Solidarity, Sustainable Living, Anarchism, Radical Arts and social struggle generally...
Interview
forthcoming from Maximum Rock'n'Roll (2002)
by mimi nguyen
On Saturday, February 2, Dean Spade had to pee. So after six hours of protests in the bitter New York City cold outside the World Economic Forum, Dean and his affinity group entered Grand Central station in search of relief. Dean entered the restroom marked "men's" and was followed by a police officer, who demanded identification. Dean explained that he was in the right restroom, that he is transgender but understood the officer's confusion, and offered to use the premises quickly and leave. Craig Willse entered the bathroom after his friend and attempted to defuse the situation. When Dean attempted to leave the bathroom, however, the police officer pushed him against the wall and called for back-up. Craig tried to intervene in the arrest and shouted for help. Both were arrested, and while leaving the bathroom another member of their group, Ananda LaVita, attempted to un-arrest Dean. All three were then dragged out of the train station.
The three were held for 23 hours and three different precincts. They were released on their own recognizance to a courtroom packed with friends and allies wearing "Living Trans in Not a Crime" stickers. Among the three of them, they were charged with multiple counts of disorderly conduct, trespassing, resisting arrest, and obstruction of government administration. While all charges were dropped at the following court appearance in March, Dean Spade (who is also a lawyer) and a number of other progressive legal organizations are pursuing the case to highlight the everyday violence of gender enforcement, transphobia and its role in the maintenance of the state and capital. A zine was quickly produced about the arrests called Piss and Vinegar and is distributed by the members of the Anti-Capitalist Tranny Brigade. (More details about the arrest are in the zine.) Mimi Nguyen chatted with Dean and Craig about the politics of transgender activism, and about the linkages between gender regulation, the state, and globalization.
MRR: The "commonsense" assumption about gender is that it is innate, a metaphysical substance which is hardwired into our genes or hormones or some more ethereal essence. Of course, a closer look would reveal that what counts as "appropriate" gender has always been negotiated and regulated which would suggest that there is nothing "natural" about gender (or sexuality) after all. In the Western nations in the late 1800s it was suggested that education rotted the uterus, in the 1950s it was "obscene" for women to wear pants. What is your understanding of gender, and by extension transgender?
Dean Spade (DS): I guess I see gender as a regulatory system-a hierarchical set of mandates that require certain people to do certain things at certain times-that orders the lives of everyone in ways that foreclose everyone's possibilities for fully inhabiting and self-determining our bodies and minds. As you point out, what those mandates are, and how they work, varies widely on cultural, racial, economic, and historical bases. In any arrangement, though, resources are distributed according to this regulatory system, and it is harshly enforced with consequences ranging from social stigma to death. Transgender, to me, is about disrupting those regulatory systems, and interacting with gender in a way that is specifically aimed at disruption. This means violating the two basic rules of gender: 1) that you can't change your gender identity and 2) that you have to occupy a single gender category cohesively-meaning fully inhabiting the characteristics associated with "male" or "female." So, to engage transgender politics is to let go of these two rules, and to allow yourself and other to move within gendered meanings as we wish. It means using the pronouns people want to be used, calling people by names they want to be called, not telling them how they have to look or talk or act or move in order to conform to gender norms, and supporting changing the world so that the methods of coercion (social, legal, medical, educational) used to regulate gender are eliminated.
Craig Willse (CW): My understanding of gender is that, yes, it is obscene for women to wear pants!
No really, I think gender is a lie. All gender is policing. All gender is about setting limits on what a body can look like, what a body can do in the world. If you feel bad about your body, about how you look, that's you feeling gender oppression. Though certainly some folks benefit more than others do from dichotomous gender regimes, and in fact some people access gender privilege quite well, for who does gender really work? Whose gender is right? And I'm not only thinking here of people who obviously do gender wrong to great and sexy effects (like butches, fairies, genderqueers, andros, robots, etc.), but what straight guy doesn't spend his time worrying that he's too fat/too skinny, not tall enough, not macho enough? I also think we need to understand gender as variable in terms of race and class. Racism interacts with gender privilege, such that white maleness and Latino maleness bear very different costs and privileges.
I like to think of the "trans" in "transgender" as being an active element, an invitation to dynamically move across a field of gender, and not in only one direction. I hope that doesn't make me sound like a hippie, but I'm trying to point out that everyone's gender is trans. We all understand our bodies in relation to movement, and this is often painful and policing (a vertical movement that places some better gendered bodies above ours, some wrong bodies below ours, with us trying to claw our way to the top). But that movement can also be horizontal, improvised, unplanned and changing. Doesn't the second option sound like more fun?
MRR: And to clarify, what is the relationship between transgender and transsexuality? Where do queer debates about butch/femme, androgyny and drag fit in --or don't?
DS: "Transsexual" is a term that is mostly associated with the medical model of understanding people who's gender identities are contrary to the gender they are assigned at birth, and who seek medical intervention in the form of surgery and/or hormones in order to change their gendered characteristics and live in their new gender identity. Many trans people are adverse to this term, or feel it is too constrictive, because it is used in a medical context in which we are pathologized and considered mentally ill. The term transgender has emerged to indicate a broader variety of experiences. Many people use it as an umbrella term (like 'queer') to indicate a variety of genderfucking people: crossdressers, drag kings and queens, genderqueers, transsexuals, FTMs, MTFs, etc. In this way, the term can be used as an organizing tool-a way of calling out to all people who are facing punitive gender norms and subject to gender policing because our gender presentations make people uncomfortable and angry. The term can be used to affirm the experiences and resistances of people living in violation of gender norms.
CW: As far as how I use them, I think of "transsexual" and "transgender" as roughly parallel with the terms "homosexual" and "queer." So, transsexuality and homosexuality reference a pathologized understanding of sex/gender, and both are closed terms-they serve to mark out a small, aberrant group of people from the "general public" against whose normalcy perverts are defined. In contrast, "transgender" (or simply "trans") and "queer" are more politicized terms that signal an oppositional stance to sex/gender regulation and hierarchy. They are open, not closed, in the sense that a transgender identity is not confined to someone who has surgery, or passes, or feels like they are trapped in the wrong body; and queer is not about fucking someone of the "opposite" gender, but fucking gender and dislocating sex from romanticized, heteronormative constructions. Of course, queer has been used in totally reductive ways as a synonym for "gay" by marketers and mainstream groups, and some trans people call themselves "transsexual" but challenge in their lives and politics medical conceptions of coherent gender. Language is always strategic, so the meaning of these terms shift in different contexts, and any word can take on oppressive weight or liberatory potential.
MRR: What are the politics of "passing" and "legitimacy"? What are their uses and limitations?
DS: One of the debates that goes on within trans communities that mirrors debates in many other communities is about how much we should conform to norms in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a transphobic world. There is a long history of the medical professions corralling us into gender norms in order to justify their role in our transitions. A "successful" trans person is seen by the medical world often to be one who passes as non-trans, and who is taken by most people as a stunning example of normative maleness or femaleness. Some people feel that this is the safest route for trans people to take, and that if we want legal protections and an end to bias, we should try to be as normal as possible in order to convince others that we deserve this inclusion. Others of us feel, however, that the proper response to normalizing legal and medical structure is to fight, to stand out as people who disobey and break down dichotomous understandings of gender, and to make room for all people to break these gender rules as they see fit. The debate sometimes mirrors debates about assimilation in queer communities, where some people feel that being as close to straight culture, through marriage, monogamy, military participation, consumerism, etc., is the best way to access equality. Others feel that part of a queer project is resisting all of those norms, and occupying an oppositional space in terms of gender, sexuality, race relations, and economic systems. Sometimes the 'assimilationist' approach is associated with a desire to trace sexual orientation to some biological source-a kind of "we can't help it" argument. Similar arguments are made in trans communities. Clearly, my view on these questions is that we should be opposing systems of gender policing in as broad and comprehensive a way as possible, rather than carving out new narrow spaces where only the most normative queers and trannies can be accepted.
CW: We get to this a bit later, but I think the most frustrating response to our case has been trans folks who have basically said, "if you pass this wouldn't have happened, and if you won't do what it takes to pass (spend money on surgery and hormones, perform the most ultra-conservative preppie masculinity, banish all queer forms of femininity from your self) then you have yourself to blame." Assholes who say this shit should sign up for the NYPD, because they'd do great work at Grand Central.
Our demand is not for more people to be comfortable in a binary gender system, it's for an end to the real and daily violence of that system. So in terms of bathrooms this means we want all people, all genderfuckers, to be able to use public restrooms safely and with dignity. Everyone deserves to live a full, complete life in this city. To suggest otherwise is to tell genderqueers to disappear-to say, don't leave your home, don't ever eat or drink anything when you're out because you don't deserve access to a bathroom, don't expect not to get your ass kicked on the street. To call yourself trans or a trans-ally and abandon people who transgress normative gender (intentionally or otherwise) is to play right into the right-wing design to remake New York into a suburban shopping mall for the exclusive enjoyment of white straight consumers. And if you don't see that, or you don't care, you're a fucking idiot.
MRR: The assumption is often made that gender or transgender issues are merely "personal" issues with no bearing on larger social forces. Clearly your arrests would suggest otherwise -- that public space is a contested site for those who transgress gender norms. As Craig writes in his contribution to Piss and Vinegar, "What bodies can travel free of harm through our violently policed cities?" What do you think is the state investment in gender regulation? Why is it explicitly illegal to use the "wrong" restroom?
DS: I think this debate about whether one person's gender expression is a "trivial" matter is essential, and actually brings up a lot of old conversations that feminists made public during the 2nd wave. Up to that time, people thought that issues around women being paid less, women being forced to wear restrictive or sexualizing clothing to work, women being systemically harassed in the workplace, and the like were trivial, personal, and individualized. It was only through a lot of organized effort that more and more people came to see that gender hierarchy had deep impacts on all women, and all men as well, restricting everyone's ability to survive, avoid violence, marry or divorce as they wanted, have kids when they wanted, etc. Similarly, when you look at trans issues as being about the narrow issue of whether one person gets to be called by a certain name or use a certain bathroom, it can seem trivial. However, when you look at how all people are subject to extreme regulation on broad scales like the law as well as narrow issues like what we wear and how and who we fuck, you begin to see that a struggle for transliberation and a deregulation of gender is a struggle to end a lot of systemic violence and suffering. I see where a lot of struggles fit into this, like the struggle over low-income women of color being disproportionately tested and then jailed for having drugs in their systems while pregnant, or conversations about compulsory circumcision for male and female babies, or struggles over rights for immigrant domestic workers working independently in wealthy homes for below survival wages. All of these struggles have some part that is about compulsory enforcement of gendered norms onto the bodies of people, to their extreme detriment. They are also intimately connected with racial and economic privilege, and I see that as an essential component of any inquiry into how gender policing occurs, because it does not occur on the same terms for people in different economic, racial or immigration statuses. The state investment in gender, like in hierarchical systems of race, immigration, and income, is that it is a regulating opportunity whereby the regulation itself becomes invisible or assumed to be natural, when in realitiy it is an artificial condition of oppression.
CW: I think one aspect of the state's investment in gender regulation stems from a keen interest (to put it mildly) in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism. Gender regulation is big business. Normative gender regimes create and multiply consumer needs-clothes, make-up, gym memberships, sports cars-that are marketed along gendered lines. Why sell just one kind of deodorant when you could sell two-one strong enough for a man, but made for a woman! People in the u.s. grow up believing their gender presentation will never be good enough, but it can be made better through shopping. Men's and women's magazines, men's and women's watches, men's and women's entertainment-these commodities don't simply meet a consumer need, they create and perpetuate gendered consumer markets. We grow into the shapes that markets trace.
MRR: What does it take to be good trans allies?
DS: Good trans allies do more than use the right terms or come to a drag show. Being a good trans ally, like being a good activist in general, involves thinking personally about ideas and applying them to your own life in an intimate way. It means being as invested in transliberation as you think a trans person is, and working as closely to uncover how you participate in gender regulation as you can. So much of gender policing occurs in ways that seem trivial or personal, and it requires each of us to really take apart our minds and find the locations of these norms in order to create safe spaces for new gender actualizations to thrive.
CW: In my efforts to be a good trans ally, I've tried to start out by being honest about what buttons of mine trans issues push. And I've tried to interrogate those hot spots on my own, without projecting them on to trans people or asking trans people to guide me through my learning process. Don't ask trans people if they've had surgery, what their families say, how they expect to get a job-if a trans person trusts you and thinks they will get something out of that conversation, they will start that dialogue. I've also tried to share some of the burdens that trans people deal with as far as educating and challenging non-trans people. If I invite someone to me and Dean's home, I let them know before they come that we live in a trans and transpositive house, and we expect people's politics to meet those standards. I talk to people who fuck up pronouns. In group settings, I make an extra effort to use lots of gendered terms when referring to trans people present, so new people in the crowd will have an example to follow and won't use "wrong" pronouns because they're making incorrect assumptions about someone's gender. I also don't think I've figured it all out, I expect to make mistakes and though I won't beat myself up for not being perfect, I demand of myself a commitment to doing hard work.
And I think being a good trans ally means simply taking these issues seriously. Think of every moment of every day that someone addresses you by your gender, and think how easy and comfortable that feels. Think about giving that comfort up. If that doesn't seem like a big deal to you, recognize how many lives you are conveniently dismissing.
