Trans people in 2019 are more represented in mainstream culture than ever — but that hasn’t necessarily improved our everyday lives. So what should we be fighting for instead?

youtu.be Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Instagram / jacobtobia, YouTube / ContraPoints, Time Inc., Getty Images / Via instagram.com

Our existence, the saying goes, is resistance. But is our existence really resistance on its own?

Five years have passed since Laverne Cox’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine heralded the era of the so-called “transgender tipping point.” The politics of trans identity and visibility has since led to more #genderfluid ad campaigns and individual gains for a select few now-famous trans people — efforts that have sometimes helped everyday trans people feel less alone while also encouraging everyday cis people to better understand trans identity and humanity. But even though trans representation in the media is at an all-time high, most trans people are still living under precarious and profoundly unequal conditions. Most urgently, Black and brown trans women are dying in record numbers, and many more are suffering on the streets. The year is almost over; in 2020, it’s worth asking ourselves what ought to come next. If recognition couldn’t bring us revolution, what should we be fighting for instead?

YouTube / ContraPoints / Via youtu.be

“Transsexuality,” wrote feminist scholar Viviane Namaste in 2001, “is about the banality of buying some bread, of making photocopies, of getting your shoe fixed. It is not about challenging the binary sex/gender system, it is not about making a critical intervention every waking second of the day, it is not about starting the Gender Revolution. Queer theorists, as well as transgender theorists like [Leslie] Feinberg and [Jack] Halberstam, just don’t get it.” For Namaste, who devoted her professional life to improving the Canadian prison and health care systems for trans people, there was nothing exceptional or even terribly interesting about being trans. We didn’t want to be visible, political, radical, or revolutionary — we simply had to be those things, though only as a result of being discriminated against. I don’t know how I feel about Namaste’s full argument; surely Leslie Feinberg, a revolutionary communist whose historical and political writing and activism demanded that readers recognize trans personhood and endorse working-class solidarity, “got it.” Still, Namaste’s point is an interesting one to consider, at the very least because her framing sounds eerily familiar to Wynn’s dichotomy between the “vanguard zoomer tran” and the “old-school transsexual.” For as long as trans identity has existed in the mainstream, there have been tensions between those who simply strive to live normal lives and those who have imagined the transsexual experience as a political project — something that will succeed or fail in the quest for queer liberation and gender revolution.

There have always been tensions between trans people who simply strive to live normal lives and those who have imagined the transsexual experience as a political project.

I began identifying as trans in 2015, the same year that the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality nationally — a time when increased “trans visibility” was beginning to be celebrated in the mainstream for its apparent ability to improve the everyday lives of trans people. After the “transgender tipping point” in 2014, sensational trans people and aesthetics were all the rage, earning write-ups and video spots from the likes of Mic, NowThis, Bustle, and other LGBTQ-friendly online publications and their pivot-to-video enterprises (prefiguring the 2017 launches of Into and Them). By 2016, it was not at all uncommon to hear people talk about “abolishing gender” or “breaking the binary,” even if all they really did was put on lipstick. But these were the later Obama years, when it was easy to sell the idea of representation as a cure-all for social ills. Being different was exciting; alongside my fellow privileged baby gays, I gobbled it all up. Then, in 2016, on the same campus I had just graduated from, Jordan Peterson, a right-wing intellectual and psychology professor, declared his culture war on nonbinary identity, claiming that “gender identity ideology” was going to bring down Western civilization. That same year, Milo Yiannopoulos went on his Dangerous Faggot Tour, harassing trans women at various campuses across the US. Cultural conservatives started conflating trans identity with a Stalinist assault on “free speech” and “traditional values.” It was a strange ontological bind: We didn’t exist, yet somehow we posed an existential threat. Many trans people and our allies responded to right-wing propaganda by doubling down on the radical potential of trans visibility, using it as the basis of a general politics of resistance. To be trans meant to stand in violation of the rules society created around men, women, sex, and embodiment. We were evidence that the system was broken, so why not smash it entirely and build something new? Others, however, were more concerned with proving our availability to be good citizens and governable subjects: Yes, trans people exist, but we mean you no harm. A viral hashtag, #WeJustNeedToPee, suggested we’re not trying to rewrite the rules of society. We’re just trying to go to the bathroom, or school, or work, or the grocery store — what Namaste calls the “banality” of everyday life. These campaigns often featured normatively masculine or feminine trans people, viral photos of burly trans men sarcastically asking if they belonged in women’s rooms. But in the end, anti-trans people don’t really care if the trans women they attack and criminalize can perform womanhood better than cis women do. In fact, many transmisogynists claim that trans women are anti-woman precisely for attempting to conform to the sexist expectations imposed on them. There was no way we were going to win against patriarchy and cissexism — the normative perspective that perceives trans people as abnormal and aberrant — by attempting to play by its own fucked-up rules. We were having the wrong conversation.

It’s understandable that some trans people would want to uplift the promise of visibility, all in the hopes that it will translate to greater freedom for all trans people. When yet another hateful trans-exclusionary radical feminist (or “TERF”) is spreading fearmongering nonsense about trans people daring to play sports, or when “gender-critical” opinions show up as cover stories or in the paper of record, it’s tempting to respond with photos of innocent-looking trans kids or personal pleas for recognition. The hope is that by normalizing ourselves — and by being visible in our normalcy — we can offset the barriers that keep trans people at the margins of society. The kinds of pronoun circles that make Natalie Wynn uncomfortable, as well as subtler actions like pronouns in Twitter bios or email signatures, are all earnest attempts at making trans people more visible and thus, hopefully, more accepted. But I worry that we’ve overemphasized the importance and political value of visibility to the extent that some of us assume it’s the only tool we have to work with — or the only goal worth seeking. Among the extremely logged-on and relatively well-off — like white trans entertainers with academic credentials, online activists with rich families, and the cisgender allies celebrated at nonprofit galas — the language and platform of visibility is mistakenly invoked as a solution to the violence faced by everyone under the trans umbrella. My friend Edgar Nuñez, 26, is a nonbinary artist based in San Diego. She told me during a recent conversation that public discussions about trans “visibility” and recognition are often a shorthand for passing — the ability to be perceived as one’s gender, which is often predicated upon one’s levels of racial and socioeconomic privilege. In her view, comments like Wynn’s about hypervisible trans Gen Z’ers take for granted the whiteness of their subjects. By implying that nonbinary people’s desire for their genders to be recognized and affirmed is antagonistic to the goals of binary trans people who want to pass, Wynn inadvertently demonstrated the main problem with so much of “visibility” discourse. While she and other self-identified “old-school transsexuals” (Wynn is only 31) yearn to pass as the genders they are, the very possibility of that “passing” is bound up in matters of race and class. In many ways, transphobia is a by-product of societal racism: Gender is racialized and consequently policed; racial logics make certain trans people more visible — and dangerously so — than others. Thus, for Black and brown trans people, visibility isn’t always a goal. More often, as artist Martine Syms noted, “Representation is a form of surveillance”: Visibility doesn’t translate to acceptance, but greater attention, scrutiny, and restriction. “For Black and brown people, the state is already generally out to get us,” said Nuñez. “We have a lot of attention on us already. No one is trying to be visible, at least not in the way [Wynn] imagines. Class has everything to do with it. To conflate being nonbinary with a specific, hypervisible presentation is very limited.” Nuñez tells me that, when out in public, she’s more likely to receive unwanted attention from strangers than, for example, a white trans woman who’s able to pass as cisgender most of the time. Her visibility is thoroughly unwelcome; whether that stranger is a cop, a landlord, or a particularly aggressive white person, they are all more likely to see Nuñez as (in her words) “a dangerous, criminal, brown thing” rather than a paragon of radical transgender personhood.

“For Black and brown people, the state is already generally out to get us ... We have a lot of attention on us already. No one is trying to be visible.”

The contradictions between these two very different kinds of visibility made themselves apparent the same week that trans people online rose up in reaction to Wynn’s initial tweets. While everyone was arguing about ContraPoints, a 17-year-old Black trans girl named Bailey Reeves had just been shot and killed in Baltimore, the same city where Wynn lives. Despite the gravity of this event — its publicity, its violence, and its painful similarity to the devastatingly high number of other killings of Black trans women and girls this year — Reeves’ death seemed to make far fewer waves on the trans internet than the argument over ContraPoints. And that, itself, is telling. Whereas one event continued long-standing debates over the best ways to present trans identity online, the other marked yet another instance in a long pattern of Black deaths and the way those deaths are so often overshadowed by concerns over white people’s comfort. All trans people suffer due to cissexism. All incidents of misgendering and harassment are scarring. Still, when we look at the conditions of poverty, precarity, and over-policing in which most transgender people live and die, different kinds of patterns begin to emerge. Reeves was a young Black girl in one of the most wealth-segregated cities in America, where the police shot and killed at least four Black people this year alone. Trans visibility and recognition has skyrocketed, but Black and brown trans women are still dying. It doesn’t seem like a politics of visibility can really save the most vulnerable among us. Ending this epidemic might require something different than a trans-positive Instagram ad from yet another brand seeking points, a book deal from yet another overexposed trans social media microcelebrity, or a workplace inclusivity session in the wake of a misgendering incident in the office — or, for that matter, #canceling someone like Natalie Wynn for her inelegant comments about nonbinary people. It seems as though all the visibility in the world won’t change how some bodies are valued over others. So what might that something different look like?

“At the time of the ‘trans tipping point,’ there was excitement around the idea of identity itself being a rupture,” Alyson Escalante, 27, recently told me over the phone. Escalante is a Chicana trans woman and cohost of the podcast Red Menace. In 2016, her essay Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto was among the more widely read and cited online texts about the contradictions of this golden age of representation politics. “My thinking at the time was that identity cannot be radical, and so it must be destroyed,” said Escalante. “Since then, my organizing has been more interested in addressing the issue of class — the real conditions in which proletarian trans people live.”

What’s the use of gender-neutral clothing without the money to buy it? Why worry about a landlord respecting your pronouns if you can’t afford rent?

“We as a community are familiar with a set of transsexual narratives that are now considered to be either total canards or strategic narratives created for the benefit of cis people — the ‘born this way’ or ‘wrong body’ would be one of them,” Andrea Long Chu told me. “But the fact is, nonbinary identity is also privy to similarly leaky narratives. And that’s because nonbinary people, being full and entire human beings, may, like the rest of us, believe a lot of dumb shit.” A girl after my own heart, Chu has a penchant for punchy writing that challenges its audience and inverts their expectations, which has made her a prominent and somewhat controversial figure over the past year. At the end of 2018, she wrote about her impending vaginoplasty in the New York Times, advocating for a change in thinking about trans surgeries: Rather than framing the operations as a way to mitigate “risk,” we should recognize them as opportunities for bodily autonomy, the fulfilment of a desire that ought to stand for itself. “Surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want,” Chu wrote. “Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.” There was much to enjoy about Chu’s essay. But some trans women were deeply uncomfortable with how she described her body (referring to her vagina as a “wound”), and, by extension, the bodies of other trans women. Kai Cheng Thom argued in an essay for Slate that Chu’s writing “grazes some unfortunate stereotypes of how people talk and write about trans people” and “generalizes transition in a way that’s hurtful to post-op trans people and potentially damaging to those considering transition.” Essentially, Thom argued, even as Chu aimed to subvert the narrative of transition as an emergency medical intervention, her article reinforced other, equally insidious narratives. Rereading Chu’s piece, and Thom’s response to it, reminded me of an argument raised by trans poet and activist Gwen Benaway in her essay “Pussy”: “Being a trans girl,” she wrote, “often means that much of the world actively hates you and will try to dehumanize you at every encounter. You are forced, quite literally, to give perfect accounts of yourself to access institutions and participate in public life.” When we’re faced with such an environment, it’s no wonder that many of us rely on certain tried-and-true narratives to account for something as flimsy and unfixed as gender. But narratives about trans people, and trans women in particular, have a power of their own. The fallout from Chu’s essay demonstrates how our ability as trans people to speak to and about our own bodies and experiences involves navigating prejudices and preexisting cultural ideas; when you think you’ve evaded one, another one sneaks up in its place. Some trans people have found a kind of power in defining themselves in opposition to these ideas. But that opposition is often one without teeth. To paraphrase journalist Harron Walker, most trans identity discourse promises a rebellion “without ever trying to pick up the first brick.” And so the troubling narratives about trans people produced by cisgender medical gatekeepers, politicians, pundits, and marketers remain undisturbed. The ContraPoints incident can’t really provide us with some grand theory of transsexuality today. Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about Benaway’s point, and how narratives can often take on a much bigger life than the events they describe. The actual problem of cissexism is absent both from Wynn’s complaints about her own hypervisibility and her critics’ characterization of trans women as antagonistic to nonbinary people. It is cissexism that makes us visible whether we want to be or not, punishes us for our gendered transgressions, and insists that we can never really be real enough. Yet in the ContraPoints controversy, cissexism and cisgender people remained unobserved, unchallenged, worked around — accounted for without ever having to provide an account of themselves. The fact that the ContraPoints incident erupted into such a significant debate, arguably at the expense of further coverage and discussion of Bailey Reeves’ death and the many social, economic, and cultural factors that produced it, should tell us something about the priorities of a trans discourse concerned primarily with visibility and recognition. It also speaks to the limits of playing to a cisgender audience — a feature of ContraPoints’s videos and of visibility discourse in general — which always occurs within the defined bounds of whichever cis person has the money and goodwill to entertain it. “As in all performances,” wrote Benaway, “the audience and their expectations are the real story.” And so I’d argue that trans people are not the ultimate benefactors of this discourse; we’re simply its rhetorical tools.

It is cissexism that makes us visible whether we want to be or not, punishes us for our gendered transgressions, and insists that we can never really be real enough.