On Class(“ism”) and Gender Self-Determination

Anonymous asked: Do you think it’s classist to advocate for gender-neutral pronouns or words like “cisgender” ?

…and we’re back to classism, my favorite term. There is not a whole world of context behind this question, and it smells a little bit bait-like to me, as though it were asking me to presume a certain antagonism between the critical principles and practices of gender self-determination and principles and practices of class struggle. Let me take the bait and spit it back:

No, I don’t think it’s classist to advocate for the transformation of the institution of language to not effectively expel trans and gender non-conforming people from the category of the human. No, I don’t think there’s anything classist in the demand that we transform language in order to mark just how much society has been shaped to privilege, normalize, protect, and categorize as natural the experience of conforming to the gender that its most powerful ideological institutions assign to (and enforce upon) its subjects. And no, I don’t think that it’s classist to stand for shifts in the ways that we speak, address and relate to each other that enable trans folks to recognize themselves, individually and collectively, as agents with the capacity to alter the conditions in which they live by not accepting as inevitable the gender that dominant social institutions—whether the medical industrial complex, educational institutions, or the family—have assigned them.

Yes, I do think that, if extracted from larger agendas for social transformation, the push for trans recognition by dominant institutions can assume a certain petit bourgeois and white character that will not only have little positive impact and little potential to transform the material conditions in which most trans and gender non-conforming people live, but may vey well have the opposite effect. This is something that Dean Spade has written about extensively. The state can “recognize” trans folks in the same gesture as it develops new ways to incarcerate them en masse—the “beneficiaries” of such violent recognition, and let’s contain our surprise here, will just so happen to be disproportionately poor trans folks of color. (On the matter of trans folks as an insurgent presence in relation to the prison-industrial complex, two of my most brilliant comrades recently co-edited a book on the matter, so please pardon my shilling on its behalf.)

Let me be frank: I think working toward gender self-determination is necessary for any class struggle worth speaking of. And let me be frank: I think class struggle is necessary for gender self-determination to become realizable in ways that do not concentrate its practice into the most materially privileged strata of society. Without an agenda for gender self-determination, anti-capitalist practice and theory risk perpetuating a cisnormativity that is nothing short of lethal for the very trans and gender non-conforming folks that should be considered the agents of class struggle. Moreover, it risks losing sight of the ways in which creating different genders and different relationships to gender can be an empowering way of learning to resist and corrode the institutions that reproduce the ideology and social relations of capitalism. Without a commitment to class struggle, trans and gender non-conforming politics risk becoming conscripted to a narrow, individualizing concept of gender self-determination that provides an alibi for the very structures of state violence that rob trans and other people of the very resources (and livelihoods) they need to fully realize any self-determination worthy of the name.

I don’t know if that answers the question you asked, Anon, but I hope at least it provides one schema for thinking about what there is to lose if one assumes from the jump that the shifts in language and terminology that are associated with critical trans politics exist in opposition to class struggle. Such an assumption may seem to be authorized by some segments of mainstream trans politics as they’re playing out at present, or in certain segments of the internet that are at home in the assumption that to make slight shifts in language is to radically transform social relations, but it’s certainly not the only story worth telling. And don’t get me started on the paleomarxism that is so ensconced in its own theoretical arrogance and practical transphobia that it cannot begin to acknowledge that trans politics is a place where class struggle is already playing out. One needs to consult the life and work of Sylvia Rivera (and some of the contemporary projects that are taking place under her name) in order to challenge the idea that gender self-determination and anti-capitalism are irrevocably, or fundamentally at odds.