Talia Bettcher, “Trapped in the Wrong Theory”
Posted: Thu, Nov 7, 2024
Theorizing Trans People vs. Trans Theory
Medical establishment: “gender identity disorder”
- Trans people are confused: conflating sex and gender.
- “Manipulative”: Agnes’s case (Harold Garfinkel, UCLA Gender Clinic, 1967).
- Pathologization: “mismatch” between body and identity is a “correctable problem.”
- Goal is maintenance (creation? cf. Christine Jorgensen) of dominant gender/sexuality system: racialized attractiveness/ability to pass, perfect heterosexuality, perfect performance of gender (“role appropriateness”), plausible backstory, invisibility.
- Gatekeeping: access to medical care is used as carrot and stick.
- Weird, masculinized “playing God”: the surgeon’s power to create manhood/womanhood itself.
- Trans people’s response:
- Playing into doctors’ expectations in order to access medical care.
- Playing into a medicalized “trapped in the wrong body” narrative for public sympathy.
Anti-trans radical feminism: cultural appropriation, fetishization, “rape,” (Robin Morgan, 1974), “sappho by surgery” (Janice Raymond, 1979).
Sandy Stone (1991): “The people who have no voice in this theorizing are the transsexuals themselves.”
- Stone’s call: be visible & authentic (~coming out).
- Problems:
- Conflating authenticity and coming out? (Is hiding one’s non-trans past the same as lying?)
- For trans women, the problem is not so much invisibility as too much visibility? (the wrong kind of visibility? visibility without agency?)
- The Transgender/Beyond-the-Binary Paradigm (Susan Stryker, Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, and later Julia Serano):
- “Transgender” as umbrella term for gender variance: transsexuals, cross-dressers, transvestites, drag queens/kings, gender outlaws, etc.
- Focus on transgender people as problematically positioned in relation to a binary gender system.
- Binary: construes transgender people as a third gender.
- Gender: focus on gender expression and identification.
- Transgender studies vs. study of transgender people: subjectivity and objectification.
- Visibility politics: anti-assimilation/anti-erasure.
Bettcher’s Critique
The “trapped in the wrong body” theory: being trans = a conflict between mind and body.
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Weak version: innate gender identity; fixing a problem with the mind by matching body to mind; medical transition literally turns (“reassigns”) a trans person into a woman/man.
- Can’t secure the validity of trans claims to lived sex.
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Strong version: innate sex identity; fixing a problem with the body by matching body to a deeper true sex; medical transition “confirms” a trans person as a woman/man.
- Not compatible with social construction/feminist commitments.
The “beyond the binary” theory: being trans = problematic location in relation to the gender binary.
- Reduces gender to a mere construction, contrary to actual experiences of trans people.
- Invalids or otherwise diminishes the claims of trans people identifying within the binary.
Bettcher’s diagnosis (according to Ding):
- Both theories take for granted what being a man/woman means to cis men/women within the mainstream cisheterosexist culture.
- Within subaltern trans/queer cultures, however, what being a man/woman means to trans men/women may be the paradigm, and a trans man/woman’s body may be unproblematically if not paradigmatically a male/female body.
- Bettcher urges the recognition that manhood/womanhood have, in addition to their “dominant” meaning, multiple “resistant” meanings. But she does not see any deep metaphysical reason to reject the dominant meaning (does this ultimately fall prey to the same problems as the beyond-the-binary theory?).
- Neither theory understands “reality enforcement”—a central mechanism of transphobia.
- The reality/appearance contrast: trans people are caught in between being construed as “the man/woman who is really a woman/man” (the “evil deceiver”) and “the woman/man pretending to be a man/woman” (the “make-believer”).
- Gender presentation euphemistically communicates genital status: its function is to facilitate heterosexual PIVI.
- ~the color you wear at a football match.
- Euphemistic communication: norms about privacy.
- The wrong-body theory caters to this; the beyond-the-binary theory ignores it.
- Reality enforcement: “That’s really a woman, merely dressed as a man.”
- Wrong-body theory: “That’s really a man, disguised by a misleading body.”
- Beyond-the-binary theory: ??
- Is the problem with the reality/appearance contrast itself, or a specific implementation of it which connects gender presentation with genital status?