wound watching
assimilationist notes on the trans day of visibility
There is something bewitched that happens on the 31st of every March, a day of visibility, a trans one. Pink, white and blue flags everywhere, campaigns, awareness posts, etc. There has been for the longest time a distaste in the trans community for the fact that their identity is a political subject, and yet, year after year we participate in activities that only amplify the politicization of the transgender as a distinct subject. The actual effect of such events is reinforcement and reproduction of certain narratives in a Butlerian sense. These events produce an image of trans women as a coherent, specific and politically marked category of person. Not relating to the wider category of women, no, but a very distinct trans woman specifically. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976) (which paved the way for numerous advancements in queer theory) has argued for something that is still very relevant to this day and we see it all the time. That discourse doesn’t do what it claims to do, it doesn’t describe pre-existing subjects, but rather it, literally, produces them from nowhere. Foucault uses the homosexual as an example of this. Before the nineteenth century, there were people who committed sodomy and this was considered no more than a sin, an act that someone simply does and could repent of. And then came the proliferating machinery of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology which started a certain discourse about these individuals who committed sodomy, an entirely new subject appeared, a type of person or species as Foucault called it whose very existence and social profile was organized, or rather seen through the lens of what was previously seen as a mere act that someone commits.
Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.1
A heterosexual man is a man who happened to be heterosexual while a homosexual one is a homosexual who happened to be a man. Heterosexuality has never been in a discourse that produced it as a distinct subject because it is the invisible norm, not a category but the absence of categorization itself while homosexuality has gained a larger effect over the word “man”, thus, in the composition of “homosexual man”, the homosexual part holds the spotlight. Notably, what changed was not the people or the acts themselves, what changed was the discourse surrounding them. A discourse that called a distinct category into being and made it real. Drawing from Foucauldian analysis of the production of the homosexual as a subject we can smoothly apply it on trans identity. The known incongruence between the image of the body in the mind and the physical reality of the body has existed in every culture and period. The phenomenon itself is not anything new, but the consolidation of “transgender” as a stable identity in the late twentieth century with its associated medical protocols, academic departments, legal classifications, visibility campaigns and community aesthetics. These did exactly what Foucault was describing back in 1976, it produced the transgender subject through that specific discourse and it did more than producing the subject, it gave the categorized individuals a name which they can speak from, organize, demand rights and build pride, but when they do such acts of speaking in the name of the category they necessarily use the same vocabulary by which the category was established in the first place. The Trans Day of Visibility, the trans flags, the trans campaigns, etc. are the most efficient mechanisms for perpetuating this. In modern terms, the compound “trans woman,” the modifier has come to overwhelm the noun. This language now brings up an entire new reality, one that has nothing to do with the trans identity itself. To say “trans woman” in modern discourse is to bring up an entire semantic field: a political position, an aesthetic cluster, a community, a set of debates, a legal category, a medical history.. But what’s most important is the political position that it brings up because it further politicizes the transgender as well as proliferates the discourse that produced it as a distinct subject. The “woman” part in “trans woman” sits there slightly stranded, waiting for the adjective to tell the actual “truth” about the individual at hand. What needs to be done is a normalization of the trans identity rather than further thickening it. A cis woman doesn’t need to announce that she is a cis woman when introducing herself. Being recognized as a trans woman, being visible as one, celebrating that visibility, building communities specifically around it, speaking from the category itself is a performative act that re-enacts and reproduces the boundary between “woman” and “trans woman” and in doing so it makes that boundary more stable, real and harder to dissolve. Something more than mere reflection is happening. Consider an example of the type of individuals you would find at such campaigns: white, leftist, deeply invested in identity politics and has no personal experience for being a transgender and no actual knowledge in what transgender life actually involves. I’m not interested in whether such individual is a good person or not, and these acts may as well be done from a genuine spot. I am rather interested in what their presence does, it cements the association, in the social imaginary, in the mind of anyone who is observing the landscape, between the trans identity and the progressive left. Which may not sound bad on a superficial level but what it’s actually doing is reaffirming the narrative that being trans means holding certain views, using certain vocabulary and belonging to a certain political coalition. Proliferating the politicization of the trans woman as a subjectified identity. A trans woman can no longer be a woman who happens to be trans the same way a cis woman can be a woman who is cis. The trans woman, increasingly, is recognized less as relating to the wider category of “woman” and more as belonging to its own “trans woman” category.
Wendy Brown is a notable figure in the discussion of visibility politics. In her 1993 essay Wounded Attachments she was arguing about how politicized identities in late modernity tend to crystallize around the wound, the history of injury, the injury that is real and the suffering that is real, and this crystallization produces what she calls a “wounded attachment”: the identity becomes hyper focused on and invested in the recognition of its suffering that it can no longer imagine its existence outside said suffering. The political demands in this context shift from transforming the conditions that produce this suffering to recognizing that these conditions exist. The visibility campaign is a demand for recognition made to the dominant culture and on the dominant culture’s terms. The crystallization around the wound makes it so that the identity remains a historical record of what was done to the subject, rather than an expression of what the subject is. Politicized identity becomes a fetishism of the injury, it “can hold out no future that triumphs over this pain” because its very existence depends on that pain being visible and cited. The trans subject presents itself as a subject in need of acknowledgment, as a wound requiring a witness. And year after year the wound is witnessed and it remains, because witnessing is what sustains it. If “trans woman” is a category that was produced from a history of not being recognized as a “woman”, then celebrating that category as a distinct subject keeps this binary alive. The more a marginalized identity is celebrated, the more the marginalization is inscribed permanently.
The pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity.2
Pursuing true political freedom that concerns identity is not about being able to wave the transgender flag freely, or hold trans awareness campaigns, and it’s not even about having your cis friend wishing you a happy visibility day. It, rather, lies in giving up categorization itself, gradually dissolving the slogans, the icons, the flags. The true assimilationist dream is the abolishing of the very word “transgender” with its accumulated context, in which one can be before being named, in which the experience exists before it is organized into a subject. A more open horizon of possibility. Though this isn’t easy by any means, many trans people find themselves in these exact icons, they identify through them, they see themselves in them at a moment when the world offered them nothing else that reflected them back. This is the paradox that Brown describes, to ask to dissolve the category with which recognition was first made possible feels like an attack on the core identity itself rather than the political subject constructed around it. The willingness to risk that in favor of Brown’s open horizon is what true political freedom would require.
But it’s not like this is a conspiracy against the transgender identities, to lock them in a state of eternal marginalization through producing them as distinct subjects, nothing is being done on bad faith from anyone’s part. The people organizing these events sincerely wanted something like what Rachel Crandall-Crocker described when she founded it in 2009: a day for the living, a reason to feel joy. The machinery of these events is what matters. The campaign’s logic, regardless of its harmless intention, reproduces the categories and politicizes them when it claims to transcend said categories. It is like what Foucault described the confessional apparatus, it produced the truth that it claims to merely discover. The thing that makes this so difficult to resolve is that the reproduction is (or will be) no longer only a response to external forces, its machinery has been internalized. The subjects that the discourse produced have now taken up the politicization work themselves, speaking from the category, organizing their self-understanding around its vocabulary, its aesthetics, its political markings.. It has fully crystallized, the flag has ceased to be something to be carried but rather the identity itself. Asking to release it is beyond a political task because it’s far more intimate and difficult for the subject to imagine itself outside the very category through which they first became legible to themselves and to others.
There is no campaign for that, no flag either.
P.S: this was supposed to be written on March 31st but I have a procrastination problem