A Short History of Trans Misogyny

I don't believe in sorting people's relative degrees of guilt or victimhood through what kind of person they are because that is precisely what trans misogyny does.

Nor is anyone's degree of safety or harm determined or assignedin any way, whether at birth or through the allegory of socialization.

Trans misogyny is highly compatible with right-wing authoritarian politics because it aims to preserve, or entrench, existing social hierarchies through the production of an imagined threat from those with the least demonstrated power, demanding violence to put them down.

Samantha's dehumanization of the girls working on her block is not the organ of a moral campaign against sex work or a philosphical crisis in the category of womanhood. It has to do quite simply with her status as a gentrifier. She wants the Meatpacking District policed and emptied of Black trans women because she pays exorbitant rent for her apartment. And she wants the privacy of her home to facilitate pleasurable straight sex with her boyfriend, which requires that it be separate from the public, transactional economy of sex work.

The concept of hate crimes grafts a vague notion of transphobic "bias" onto a prefabricated explanation for violence: it happens because it's committed by criminals.

Through the hypersexualization of trans femininity, trans women are seen as inviting not just sexual interest but any violence required to reassert straight men's position over them in the social hierarchy. The sexualization of trans women, ironically, threatens men by association, like a boomerang of desire.

By sexualizing, misgendering, and even ungendering some of them as exceptions to the so-called natural history of civilization, the state justified immense violence to consolidate its soverignty, its claims to stolen land, and its function as guarantor of private property.

When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine. And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women's access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women's presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity. It is felt as a fear of proximity. Trans femininity is too sociable, too connected to everyone—too exuberant about stigmatized femininity—and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality getting too close.

The word transgender rose to popularity in the 1990s in two related by distinct births. The first was the largely white activist world in the San Francisco Bay Area, where people long involved in queer organizing began to rally around transgender as a nonmedical, avowedly political category for trespassing the enforced boundaries of gender.

But the far bigger shadow cast by transgender came through its second birth in the well-funded NGO industrial complex. There, transgender was institutionalized by social service organizations working in US cities and was swiftly adopted for parallel international development work across the global South.

Clearly there have been people in nearly every recorded human culture who have lived in the roles of women, or in between specific understandings of manhood and womanhood, despite not having inherited that role at birth or through anatomy. However, to decide that trans women as we know them today have "always existed" would be foolish for several reasons. First, there is no meaningful way to land on a definition of trans femininity that could apply to all places and times, much like there is no way to agree on a single definition of womanhood...More pointedly, a staggering array of non-Western cultures have been irreparably marked by the reductive violence of colonialism, which included the enforcement of a male/female sex binary in which trans life acquired its present association with boundary-crossing. Trans-feminization as a concept responds to this problem, emphasizing that labeling many kinds of people "trans women" is continuous with that colonial project. Even for groups with documented histories spanning hundreds or thousands of years, like hijras in South Asia, the legacy of colonialism has so transformed their social and political standing that they are now caught by LGBT politics on one side and by religious nationalism on the other.

By Euro-American standards, trans womanhood today is construed as an individual identity, a kind of personal property held deep within the self that creates conflict with families of origin, public norms, and social institutions. In many other contemporary cultures, and in many time periods prior to the present, however, a trans-feminine way of life has not necessarily required leaving kinship structures behind or adopting an identity positioned against social norms, or even crossing boundaries at all.

The uncertain line between an effeminate gay man and a trans woman wasn't so ironclad in the 1950s and '60s, when it functioned as a class distinction. Street queens, unlike the glamorous and enviable drag performers of the stage, were considered trashy for trying to live as real women, in plain sight.

Until well into the twentieth century, sexuality was overwhelmingly class and gender based, and the urban world was structured around men's sexual power.

The court sexualized hijra gender transgression by calling it prostitution, making it concrete in an era when a central British alibi for empire was ending the global sex trade.

The CTA outlawed property inheritance in hijra households, impoverishing them by disrupting their lineages. The law also restricted hijras from traveling outside of their local districts, which they often did to attend marriages and births. Combined with the criminalization of dancing in public and wearing women's clothing, their entire way of life was now illegal.

When it came to the division of public and private labor, British society was organized around a strict separate-spheres ideology. Women were ideally consigned to the home, while labor and public life were intended for men—a division that hijras transgressed simply by going about their daily lives.

The blending of state violence with interpersonal violence is a signature outcome of the global trans panic, a deadly merger that persists to this day.

The elite lived in lavish mansions only blocks from working-class row houses, the docks lining the rivers, and the notorious slum Five Points. There was no single segregated neighborhood for the city's sizable free Black population. And vice, for which New York was world renowned, was for sale just about everywhere. Instead of confining themselves to a red-light district, brothels and houses of assignation played neighbor to fancy hotels reputable theaters, and working-class homes. Visitors to the country's largest city often remarked that Broadway, America's answer to the Champs-Elysees was the place to be seen, not just for wealthy white people but for stylish Black dandies and flamboyant sex workers, too. Everyone seemed to rub shoulders in New York. And these intimacies across social hierarchies of race, class, and gender seemed to be causing more tension with each passing year.

But the downward mobility of living as a woman was ironically minimal on top of the economic situation of free Black workers after emancipation...The explosion of the city's sex economy tracks with the surge in its population and the money brought by industrialization. New York had become a city of bankers, businessmen, and proletarians. The last group—by far the largest—was defined by having no property but their bodies, forced to sell their labor. Wages, along with the transient urban population to whom they were paid, fed the development of commercialized leisure on a mass scale for the first time, including sex...Landlords, who were making money hand over fist off a housing shortage, could demand some of the highest rents from sex workers in return for protection. This tidy arrangement between the sexual underground and the city elite characterized the antebellum era.

As cities like New York ballooned into the largest the country had ever seen, insistence on the stark division between private and public space was one way to manage the numeric threat of angry workers suffering under the unprecedented brutality of industrialism. By dint of the gendered line between public and private, women and girls could be confined to the home, not simply chaste but economically subordinate to husbands and fathers. Men, in turn, relied on steady work to support their entire family, making it harder to risk organizing against their bosses. Still, for most women this arrangement was a cheap fiction.

Antebellum theaters reserved the "third tier," the highest balcony, for sex workers, who attended with clients or to pick them up.