We are pleased to present here the first of three excerpts of Rogers Brubaker’s book, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, which forthrightly and with an open mind tackles the “complexities, tensions, and contradictions in the contemporary politics of identity.” Professor Brubaker has generously provided an introduction to the excerpts below.
Rogers Brubaker is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where he holds the UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written widely on social theory, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity. His most recent book is Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents (Polity, 2022). Website: https://brubaker.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/ Twitter: @wrbucla
Introduction, by Rogers Brubaker
Since the editors of World Without Gender have kindly arranged to reprint my discussion of what it might mean to go “beyond gender,” I thought it might be helpful to briefly contextualize this discussion.
The excerpt is taken from my 2016 book Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. The second half of the book starts from the idea that trans is “good to think with.” By this I mean that trans can serve as an illuminating conceptual prism through which to analyze not only gender but also other systems of social classification, notably race and ethnicity, that have been losing the simplicity, self-evidence, and clarity they once had.
I distinguish three forms of trans, which I call the trans of migration, the trans of between, and the trans of beyond. In the domain of gender, the trans of migration involves a unidirectional movement from one binary category to the other, paradigmatically by surgically or hormonally transforming the body, durably altering one’s gender presentation, and formally changing aspects of one’s identity. The trans of between involves defining oneself with reference to the established binary categories, yet without identifying fully or unambiguously with either one, and without moving definitively from one to the other. The trans of beyond involves positioning oneself outside the frame of reference defined by the established binary categories. It involves the claim to transcend existing categorical frameworks or even to transcend gender categorization altogether.
The trans of migration leaves the binary gender framework intact and may even be said to reinforce it. The trans of between defies the either-or logic of the binary framework yet takes the binary coordinates as its frame of reference. The trans of beyond presents the most radical challenge to the binary framework. It seeks to escape from the social and cultural force fields defined by established categories. But what does this mean, concretely? This is the question I seek to answer in the excerpt reprinted here, drawn from Chapter 5, “The Trans of Beyond.”
The excerpt identifies three stances or strategies that exemplify three different forms of the trans of beyond – and three different ways in which one might go beyond gender, or at least beyond the binary gender category system. Neo-categorical stances assert a new category – such as genderqueer or trans – that is not situated within the conceptual space defined by the gender binary. Anti-categorical stances involve personal or political opposition to being categorized at all in gender terms, or to the categorization of others in such terms. Post-categorical stances envision a social world no longer organized – at least no longer organized so deeply – by gender categorization. The excerpt considers each of these in turn.
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Beyond Gender excerpt, Part One
Used with permission of Princeton University Press from Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker, 2016; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
What might it mean to go "beyond gender"—or at least beyond the categorical frameworks that define the gender order and organize our experience of gender? And how does the trans of beyond differ from the trans of between? After all, some forms of enacting and embodying gender betweenness already involve-implicitly or explicitly-the claim to go beyond the either-or, binary logic of gender. What I want to highlight in this chapter are other ways of going beyond gender categories.
As I noted in my discussion of the trans of between, some novel gender categories are constructed from the existing binary pair or positioned along a continuum defined by that pair. This is true for "both-and" identifiers such as "ambigender" or"bigender," for the older combining form "androgynous," and for scalar descriptors such as "masculine-of-center."
Neo-categorical forms of the trans of beyond assert or recognize categories that are not located on this continuum. These include anti-categorical categories such as genderqueer, pangendered, and ungendered, which I discuss below. They also include the categories "trans woman," "trans man,” "trans*," or simply "trans.1
Transgender migration was long self-concealing: transsexuals and other unidirectional gender migrants sought to pass as women or men and to erase all traces of their former lives. For some, this remains the ideal. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, increasing numbers of transsexuals and other transgender migrants have sought recognition as trans women and trans men (even though they have also claimed recognition, inclusion, and equal rights as women and men). Unlike androgynous or masculine-of-center, these categories do not suggest betweenness. And while they do of course suggest a trajectory of migration, out transsexuals or transgender migrants —unlike their "stealth" counterparts—do not move between established gender categories. The out male-to-female trans person migrates not from man to woman but from man to trans woman; and "trans woman" is not located in the same category space as "man" and "'woman."
The categories "trans woman" and "trans man" obviously make reference to the categories "woman" and "man." Yet "trans woman" is not intended or understood as simply equivalent to "woman"; nor is it located between man and woman. It names a new position that transcends not simply the either-or, once-and-forever logic of the gender binary but also the prevailing one-dimensional bipolar framework through which we construct and imagine the space of gender possibilities. That is, the categories "trans woman" and "trans man" —and, even more clearly, the category "trans" itself—transcend not just the gender binary but the gender continuum. They transform the space of gender categorization from a one-dimensional continuum into a two-dimensional space, defined by the cis- trans axis as well as the male-female axis. In this two-dimensional space, the categories male and female (or some mix thereof) no longer suffice to define a gender identity; one needs the categories cis and trans as well.2
This redefinition of the conceptual space of gender suggests why the trans of beyond challenges the gender order in a more fundamental way than the trans of migration or even the trans of between. Self-concealing transsexuals—by seeking to pass as women or men, deploying the most conventional gender signifiers in order to do so, and framing their stories in the essentialist language of gender identity—do not disrupt the gender order; they may even reinforce it. But self-revealing transsexuals— and others expressly claiming recognition as trans women, trans men, trans*, or simply trans—disrupt the cognitive and social foundations of the sex/gender system by positioning themselves not simply between but, in part, outside its foundational categories.3 This disruptive potential of the trans of beyond is attractive to some feminists, a point I return to below.
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Stay tuned for the next excerpt, which will focus on the anti- and post- categorical forms of what Brubaker calls the “trans of beyond.”
As "trans" has come to be associated, in many contexts, with trans man or trans woman, trans* has come to be used in recent years as a device for expressly including those who do not identify in binary terms as well as those who do. The irony is that this replicates the inclusive intent earlier associated with "transgender" and subsequently with "trans." (Bettcher 2014a, 385; Titman 2013)
The complexities go well beyond this two-dimensional space. Vade (2005), for example, argues for conceptualizing the "gender galaxy" as a "three-dimensional non-linear space in which every gender has a location that may or may not be fixed."
Sandy Stone's "posttranssexual manifesto," originally published in 1991, played a key role in enabling as well as conceptualizing this shift. Stone expressly sought to position herself outside the gender continuum, to "speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible" (2006, 230). Reflecting on the significance of this text a quarter century later, Susan Stryker (2008, 128-29) noted that Stone was calling on (post-) transsexuals to "speak out in a 'heteroglossic,' Babel-like profusion of tongues about all the imaginable genres of gender difference there could be, if only the medically dominated discourse of transsexuality were shattered."
References from this excerpt
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014a. "Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance." Signs 39, no. 2: 383-406.
Stone, Sandy. 2006. "The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto." In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle,221-35. (Orig. pub. 1991.) New York: Routledge.
Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
Titman, Nat. 2013. "About That Often Misunderstood Asterisk." Practical Androgyny (blog), October 31. http://practicalandrogyny.com/2013/10/31/about-that-often-misunderstood-asterisk/.
Vade, Dylan. 2005. "Expanding Gender and Expanding the Law: Toward a Social and Legal Conceptualization of Gender That Is More Inclusive of Transgender People." Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 11: 253-316.
Note that guest posts express the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the publishers and founders of A World Without Gender, which is expressly intended as a place where readers can encounter and explore different viewpoints on the topic.