The Emergence of Trans

Cultures, Politics and Everyday Lives

Ruth Pearce, Igi Moon, Kat Gupta, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Ruth Pearce, Igi Moon, Kat Gupta, Deborah Lynn Steinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351381550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This book represents the vanguard of new work in the rapidly growing arena of Trans Studies. Thematically organised, it brings together studies from an international, cross-disciplinary range of contributors to address a range of questions pertinent to the emergence of trans lives and discourses. Examining the ways in which the emergence of trans challenges, develops and extends understandings of gender and reconfigures everyday lives, it asks how trans lives and discourses articulate and contest with issues of rights, education and popular common-sense. With attention to the question of how trans has shaped and been shaped by new modes of social action and networking, The Emergence of Trans also explores what the proliferation of trans representation across multiple media forms and public discourse suggests about the wider cultural moment, and considers the challenges presented for health care, social policy, gender and sexuality theory, and everyday articulations of identity. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of gender and sexuality studies, as well as activists, professionals and individuals interested in trans lives and discourses.

Part I

Trans genealogies

Foreword

This book explores the consequences, characteristics and contestations of trans emergence from numerous perspectives. No examination of ‘emergence’ would be complete without a look at how contemporary understandings of trans identities and experiences have come to be in the Western context in which we write.

It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a broad history of trans discourse, language or politics.¹ What the contributors to this section of the book offer is a spotlight on several key arenas in which trans has ‘emerged’. They explore the intersections of patient experience and professional practice in trans therapeutics, ‘pathways of care’ surrounding medical interventions and the management of trans bodies, and how changing understandings and experiences of trans becoming reflect (and feed into) wider shifts in the discursive landscape of gendered possibility. Across the first four chapters, we shift from the macro to the micro while remaining attentive to the interplay of individual circumstance and social context: from the broad sweep of eugenic history, to the evolution of specific forms of trans medicine, to personal epiphanies and trans becoming. As we editors have previously argued, ‘[t]o describe a genealogy is to look beyond linear narratives of causation’ (Pearce, Moon and Steinberg, 2019). Similarly, Kadji Amin (2018: 602) observes that the truth of the present cannot be found in a singular historical origin point; he therefore highlights the importance of recognising ‘not one but multiple ramifying but often contradictory origins’ in conducting trans genealogies. Consequently, we sought contributions to this section that look deep into the complexities inherent in the negotiation of meaning over time, which together form a multifaceted account of trans becoming.

We begin with Julian Honkasalo’s genealogy of state-enforced sterilisation requirements for trans people. These have a long history in Europe, and are still a condition of legal gender recognition in many countries. In Chapter 1, Honkasalo links trans sterilisation to the wider history of eugenics in the white Western world, teasing out the threads of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia which have played an inherent part in the biopolitical administration of gender. He concludes by reflecting on contemporary debates over trans reproductive rights, illustrating how these follow from the continued influence of eugenic logics.

In Chapter 2, Eric Plemons draws on ethnographical fieldwork to explore how changing conceptualisations of sex, gender and trans possibility play a role in the increasing popularity of facial feminisation surgeries among trans women. He observes that the initial focus on genital reassignment surgeries in twentieth-century trans medicine reflected widespread contemporaneous understandings of sex as a property of individual bodies that follows from genital anatomy, whereas a stated desire for facial feminisation surgeries seems to have become more common as understandings of sex and gender as intersubjective and performative have proliferated more recently. In making this argument, Plemons highlights the importance of taking trans patient narratives seriously, while observing the instability and multiplicity of categories.

While trans has emerged (and continues to emerge) through the wider interplay of culture, biopolitics and medicine, in Chapter 3 Natacha Kennedy provides us tools with which to examine the genealogy of individual identity emergence. Through an employment of social activity method (SAM), she captures the interplay of internal experience, social interactions and the wider historical context of trans erasure and delegitimisation in trans people’s experiences of personal epiphany. In this way, we might come to understand the multiplicity of trans becoming, recognising that processes of change vary within trans communities while also reflecting wider mechanisms of identity formation.

A more intimate account of individual emergence is provided in Chapter 4 by Elena Rose, who links trans identity and experience back to a far deeper and more troubling history. ‘the seam of skin and scales’ is a genealogy of monsters, an account of promise in the present and the primordial, the mythical and the material, as emergent within the trans body, within trans lives. This poem was originally published on Rose’s blog Taking Steps in 2007. We include it both as an important contribution to thinking, and as an example of how trans theory and trans histories alike owe at least as much to everyday trans cultures and cultural production (the theme of the following section of this book) as they do to the realms of science, medicine and scholarship.

Note

1 Readers seeking to explore these matters are advised to consult important existing histories such as Susan Stryker’s (2008) excellent Transgender History and Christine Burns’ (2018) Trans Britain, as well as more critical works such as C Riley Snorton’s (2017) important book, Black on Both Sides, Henry Rubin’s (2003) Self-made Men and Joanne Meyerowitz’s (2002) How Sex Changed, as well as the 2018 Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue on Trans*historicities.

References

Amin, K. (2018) ‘Glands, Eugenics, and Rejuvenation in Man into Woman: A Biopolitical Genealogy of Transsexuality,’ TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 5(4): 589–605.

Burns, C. (2018) Trans Britain: Our Journey From The Shadows. London: Unbound.

Meyerowitz, J. (2002) How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pearce, R., Moon, I. & Steinberg, D.L. (2019) ‘Introduction: The Emergence of “Trans” ’, Sexualities, 22(1): 3–12.

Rubin, H. (2003) Self-made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among Transsexual Men. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Snorton, C.R. (2017) Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Stryker, S. (2008) Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press.

1 In the shadow of eugenics

Transgender sterilisation legislation and the struggle for self-determination

Julian Honkasalo

Introduction

This chapter draws on the history of eugenics to examine the rationale behind infertility requirements for transgender persons undergoing legal and/or medical gender reassignment. Since state-enforced sterilisation is usually theorised in relation to reproductive heterosexuality, and understood as a past historical practice that targeted the assumed hereditary degeneracy of heterosexual populations, the practice of present-day, state-enforced transgender sterilisation has not caught enough scholarly attention in the tradition of critical research on eugenics or in the fields of queer and transgender studies. Similarly, transgender reproductive justice and health remain marginal issues in mainstream lesbian and gay rights and equality movements. Understanding this history is important for an account of how transgender persons have navigated the complex and intersectional terrain of discrimination in their plight for social justice and the right to self-determination.

The chapter is structured in three parts. I first examine the moral, medical and political legitimation of the nineteenth-century invention of eugenic sterilisation. I then analyze the ways in which the eugenics movement gave rise to ‘male effeminacy’ and ‘femininity’ as legitimate criteria for positioning certain groups of people, such as Jewish and homosexual men, as hereditary degenerates, and furthermore show how the eugenic pathologisation of femininity set forth medical models for governing black women, lesbians and transgender men. Finally, I argue that the rise of ‘sex change’ and ‘sex reassignment’ legislation for ‘transsexuals’ has created a double-bind, decriminalising physical transition and ratifying legal recognition, whilst at the same time continuing the biopolitical administering of transgender lives and bodies. I also discuss contemporary emerging debates concerning trans reproductive justice.¹ My genealogical analysis seeks to answer the following questions: how do certain forms of transgender embodiment and gender expression come to be viewed as legitimately subject to sterilisation by the state? Furthermore, what do various moral, psychiatric, juridical and political techniques approaches to gender nonconformity and transgender reproduction reveal about Western notions of citizenship?

The invention of eugenic sterilisation

Although Francis Galton first made human eugenics famous in his 1883 Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development, the practice of eugenic sterilisation has its origins in the medical experiments of American prison doctors. Whereas castration had previously been used for punitive ends, Indiana doctors Harry C. Sharp and AJ Oschner regarded sterilisation as curative. Sharp’s attempts to stop prisoners from masturbating led him to expand his practice of curative vasectomy to the sterilisation of ‘degenerates’, ‘defects’ and ‘deviants’ in general. During his position as a doctor of the Indiana Reformatory, he performed vasectomies on more than 400 men. Sharp also encouraged the state of Indiana to create the world’s first sterilisation laws in 1907 (Largent, 2011: 29–30). The Chicago-based urologist and criminal anthropologist, G. Frank Lydston, wrote in 1905 that resistance to sterilisation was unjustified since vasectomy or resection of the fallopian tubes was quick and safe, and caused no disfigurement (Ordover, 2003: 74–77). British sexologist Havelock Ellis published a similar argument in a fall 1907 issue of The Eugenics Review.

By 1910, Charles Davenport had established The Eugenic Records Office, which was responsible for collecting hereditary information about the American population. By 1930, more than 30 American states had enacted sterilisation laws, and anti-miscegenation laws were ratified by nearly all states. During this period, eugenics societies and scientific research institutes were established all over the world, such as the British Eugenics Education Society in 1905, the German Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene in 1907, the Brazilian Sociedade Eugênica de São Paolo in 1918 and the Swedish Statens Institut för Rasbiologi in 1922.

Early American and European eugenicists included biologists, penologists, social workers, educators and even first-wave feminists. Since crime and poverty were widely perceived as biological, hereditary problems, rather than socio-economic and political questions, supporters of eugenic sterilisation argued that it was more humane to prevent degenerates such as ‘the poor’ or the ‘feebleminded’ from reproducing, than to have society institutionalise or imprison their supposedly poorly raised offspring (Stern, 2015). Although individual supporters of eugenics differed in their methods and goals, the international eugenics movement shared the moral task of so called racial responsibility, that is, promoting the life and reproduction of desired populations, whilst preventing the reproduction of degenerate populations (Spade and Rofhls, 2016: 7).

Eugenics quickly became a highly respected science that aimed to save civilisation from degeneration. For instance, all Scandinavian welfare states – the Swedish folkhem (people’s home) in particular – were based on this ideal. Sterilisation of the ‘feebleminded’ was the first step towards humane treatment in care homes and mental hospitals. Usually a patient’s genetic background was examined by tracking (or speculating about) signs of degeneration in three generations. Sterilisations were conducted in state-controlled public institutions, such as hospitals, prisons, reform schools and care homes. Official records show that between the years 1935–1975, nearly 63,000 Swedes underwent state- mandated sterilisation, a number higher than any other European country except for Germany, and nearly as high as the total number of recorded sterilisations in all American states throughout the entire twentieth century.

Moreover, ‘positive eugenics’ – that is, increased reproduction by ‘healthy’ and ‘fit’, heterosexual persons – was strongly encouraged through various state-funded programs to ensure the improvement of the nation’s hereditary pool (Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 2005). For example, in 1914, London-based educational pioneer Alice Ravenhill published a booklet entitled, Eugenic Education for Women and Girls, which argued for the significance of women’s domestic care work for a healthy family and hygienic society. The booklet also set forth ideological guidelines for the eugenic responsibility of motherhood.

Theorising the logics of nationalism and ableism inherent in the eugenics movement, Snyder and Mitchell (2005) and Ordover (2003) argue that eugenics functioned by enforcing aesthetic ideals by means of quantitative methods. The isolation, institutionalisation and incarceration of undesirable groups, such as immigrants, disabled persons and poor or working-class people, were based on simple techniques of statistical standardisation through which all human beings could be defined as either ‘normal’ (fit to breed) or ‘defective’ (unfit to breed) (Snyder and Mitchell 2005: 77–79). As Snyder and Mitchell show, eugenics was not simply an ideology inherent to the nation state or the welfare state. American and European governments and eugenics societies collaborated and shared information and population records in their transatlantic task of creating a ‘healthy’ hereditary gene pool. Hence, eugenics was an American-European, transatlantic apparatus of power. The aesthetic ideals of the eugenics movement therefore raise the question of what discourses made it possible for educators, medical practitioners, politicians and social workers to define transgression and resistance towards binary gender norms as a transatlantic marker of psychopathology.

Effeminacy as a sign of degeneracy

Galton’s studies on hereditary fitness, talent and character triggered speculations in Europe about whiteness as a sign of genetic superiority. However, as Sander Gilman argues in The Jew’s Body (1991), in contrast to colonial, imperialist theorisations about skin color and racial fitness, Galton thought that European Jews hid their presumed inner pathologies and were capable of passing as ‘normal’. Based on such presumptions, early European anti-Semitist scientists invented a physiognomy, (a specified range of quantifiable physical and visible markers) that characterised the ‘Jewish type', so that Jews could be recognised. Physiognomic practices included measurements of the pitch of the voice, the posture of the body and the size of body parts, including genitalia (Gilman, 1991: 64–69, 96–97, 178).

A key feature of nineteenth-centu...