This week, find the second of three excerpts of Rogers Brubaker’s book, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities. The first excerpt, which you can see here, includes and introduction by Prof. Brubaker for this republication. There he explained new ways to think about going beyond gender categories. Part One went into neo-categorical forms; this excerpt will discuss the anti-categorical and post-categorical stances.
Beyond Gender excerpt, Part Two
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.
Anti-categorical forms of the trans of beyond take a stand not just against binary forms of gender categorization but against gender categorization per se. For some, this is a political position; for others it is primarily a personal stance. The line between the personal and the political is of course often blurred, since the lived experience of being personally unclassifiable, of not fitting in any available category, may find expression in political claims for interactional or institutional recognition of hitherto unrecognized identities.
A leading exponent of an anti-categorical position is the longstanding transgender activist Riki Wilchins. Wilchins treats all categories— even transgender itself—as traps. Her critique of category-based identities and identity politics is consistent with her emphasis on the constitutive rather than merely expressive significance of gender performance: "Gender refers not to something we are but to something we do."1
A quite different and even more radical anti-categorical stance is that of Christie Elan-Cane, who has long sought both personal and public recognition for an ungendered self-identity.2 Elan-Cane came to hate being burdened with a female body, rejected the ascribed identity of woman, and eventually had a mastectomy and a hysterectomy, but never identified as a man or considered sex reassignment surgery. Elan-Cane identified for some time as an androgyne and a third-gender person but came to prefer identifying as "ungendered." In keeping with this, Elan-Cane sought recognition through the use of ungendered pronouns and terms of address, preferring the pronoun "per," derived from person, and "Pr." as a term of address. To avoid being perceived in gendered terms, Elan-Cane favors gender-neutral clothes and a shaved head.
Elan-Cane's public campaign for recognition of those with ungendered identities is in one sense neo-categorical. In a world teeming with categories, it is impossible to avoid categories altogether. Elan-Cane therefore proposes "ungendered" as a social category, while registering ambivalence about doing so: "The non-gendered identity will become a recognised social identity or category (although I dislike using the C word) alongside the existing gendered identities of male and female."3 But Elan-Cane's fundamental stance is anti-categorical. Sex/gender categorization may be needed in some official contexts; hence Elan-Cane has taken a leading role in the campaign for the "X" passport in Britain, following the model of Australia and New Zealand. But Elan-Cane is consistently opposed to gender categorization in other contexts. "Facebook's multiple ‘gender options' is a gimmick and nothing more --they have trivialised the issue.... It is inappropriate to ask whether one is male or female [in] the commercial sector but there should always be a third non gender-specific option when the question is asked-- even if that option says 'none of your damned business.'”4
In a less radical way, the assertion that one does not fit in any of the available categories may be informed by a conviction of the uniqueness of one's own lived experience of gender. In describing and endorsing a "paradigm shift" in understandings of transgender, Holly Boswell criticized the restrictive focus on transsexuals and cross-dressers, concepts that are too simple– and too dependent on the existing binary categories–to capture the actual "experience of transgender" for many people. Referring to her own experience, Boswell wrote that "I seem to be neither [man nor woman], or maybe both, yet ultimately only myself." Transgender "has to do with reinventing and realizing oneself outside of the current systems of gender.... There are probably as many genders as there are people. Gender may be nothing more than a personal matrix of personality traits."5 Boswell's claim to a unique gender identity—in effect, a claim to constitute a category of one— resonates with the cultural valorization of individualism in the American context. It is reminiscent of the distinctive personal faith called Sheilaism (after her own name) by an informant in the sociologist Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, which "suggests the logical possibility of over 220 million American religions, one for each of us."6
The personal anti-categorical stance may also be informed by a celebration of gender multiplicity and fluidity, as epitomized by Kate Bornstein's 1994 book Gender Outlaw, with its emphasis on play, performance, and transgression, or by Boswell's claim that "my transition will never be over."7 This liberationist, explore-all-gender-possibilities stance has strong affinities with a genderqueer stance. And while genderqueer is itself a category—and thus might be subsumed under the notion of a neo-categorical stance—it is expressly understood (like ungendered) as what might be called an anti-categorical category: a category to end all categories, as it were. This family of stances differs sharply from Elan-Cane's ascetic efforts to escape the force-field of gender altogether: from the perspective of Elan-Cane, gender multiplicity, play, performance, and even transgression can be seen as "hyper-gendered" rather than ungendered.8
Post-categorical forms of the trans of beyond are more difficult to characterize.Here, expressly transgender stances and visions shade over into feminist stances and visions that are not ordinarily considered part of the same universe of phenomena. Indeed, normative visions of a post-gender society—and empirical diagnoses of incipient and partial moves toward such a society—have been much more fully articulated in the feminist than in the transgender literature. For my purposes, however, feminist visions of a society "beyond gender" are not simply compatible with and supportive of certain transgender projects and discourses; they are part of the transgender phenomenon, broadly understood, even if they are not presented in this way.9 If "new paradigm" understandings of transgender refer, as Boswell suggests, to "the transgressing of gender norms, or being freely gendered, or transcending gender altogether in order to become more fully human," then this ought to include feminist visions of forms of social life "beyond gender."10
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Wilchins 2002, 24. In her emphasis on gender performance, Wilchins follows Judith Butler and post-structuralist theory.
My discussion of Elan-Cane follows Ekins and King 2006, 158ff.
Elan-Cane 2000.
Elan-Cane is quoted in Kyriacou 2014
Boswell 1997, 54.
Bellah et al. 1985, 221.
Boswell is quoted by Ekins and King (2006, 199)…Multiplicity and play are also suggested by such terms as "polygendered," which echoes in the domain of gender Freud's notion of "polymorphous perversity" in the domain of sexuality.
Ekins and King 2006, 159-60.
It is important to distinguish transgender as a term of self-identification from transgender as an analytically defined field of phenomena. As a field of investigation, transgender studies regroups phenomena previously studied under other headings. Transgender studies would not be the productive field it has become if it were limited to persons and practices that expressly define themselves as transgender. None of the participants in the support group for transgender-identified people with HIV in New York studied by David Valentine, for example, referred to themselves as transgender: "They talk about themselves as girls, sometimes as fem queens, every now and then as women, but also very often as gay" (2007, 3). Yet they fell within the purview of his study because they were "identified by others as being transgender" (p. 26). Similarly, forms of gender-blending and androgyny that are not expressly framed as transgender fall within the domain of the field as instances of the trans of between. By the same logic, if the trans of beyond comprises efforts to escape from the social and cultural force fields defined by existing categorical frameworks, then feminist visions of forms of social life "beyond gender" can fruitfully be studied as instances of the trans of beyond. For sophisticated accounts of the emergence of the field of transgender studies, see Stryker 2006 and Valentine 2007, chap. 4.
Boswell 1997, 54.
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References from this excerpt
Bellah, Robert N., Ann Swidler, Richard Madsen, Steven M. Tipton, and William M. Sullivan. 1985. Habits of the Heart:Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge.
Boswell, Holly. 1997. "The Transgender Paradigm Shift towards Free Expression." In Gender Blending, edited by Bonnie Bullough, Vern L. Bullough, and James Elias, 53-57. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.
Ekins, Richard, and Dave King. 2006. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: SAGE.
Elan-Cane, Christie. 2000. "The Fallacy of the Myth of Gender." Paper presented at the Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester, England http://www.gender.org.uk/conf/2000/elan.
Kyriacou, Anastasia. "Meet Someone Who Isn't Male or Female and Wants a New Type of Passport." PinkNews, October 24. http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/10/24/interview-christie-elan-cane-on-x-passports-and-the-campaign-for-non-gendered-legitimacy/.
Stryker, Susan. 2006. "(De)SubjugatedKnowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies." In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1-17. New York: Routledge.
Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wilchins, Riki Anne. 2002. "It's Your Gender, Stupid." In Gender Queer: Voices from beyond the Sexual Binary, edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Anne Wilchins, 23-32. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
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.