Queer Theory Reader

Of course, enormous shifts in migration and urban demographics are rarely coincidental or neutral occurrences. Usually people don't want to leave their homes and only do so when forced or highly motivated. The impetus can be political events as well as aggressive policy changes that push one community out while actively attracting another to replace it. 

 After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided great impetus for urban ethnic whites to move to newly developed moderate income suburbs outside of the city. The bill provided low-interest loans for veterans that made home ownership possible for the first time, and racist housing often de facto restricted these benefits to white families. This period, often known as ‘white flight,’ recontextualized many white families into privatized suburban lifestyles, with a much higher rate of gender conformity, class conformity, compulsory heterosexuality, racial segregation, and homogenous cultural experience than they had known in the city. Built into this was an increased ‘fear’ of or alienation from urban culture, from multiculturalism, gender nonconformity, and individuated behavior. Innovative aesthetics, diverse food traditions, new innovations in arts and entertainment, new discoveries in music, ease with mixed-race and mixed religious communities, free sexual expression, and political radicalism were often unknown, separate from or considered antithetical to suburban experience. An emphasis on new consumer products, car culture, and home ownership itself formed the foundation of values cementing many communities’ ethical systems.”

Prior to the 1990s, a middle-class child who expressed a strong and abiding desire to be recognized as ‘the other sex’ might have been described as having a gender identity disorder and perhaps even treated for psychological disturbances. Such a child might also have been understood as gay or lesbian and been a source of confusion and consternation for his or her parents. Presently, however, as Meadow’s work chronicles, the gender-variant child has been the occasion for activism and outreach by parents and family members who seek not to restrain and reorient their gender-queer children but who advocate for them and recognize them in their gender-nonconforming identities. As Meadow’s work also shows, intriguingly, this new generation of gender variant children may experience their gender identity in vastly different ways vis-à-vis people just a decade older than them. Meadow describes this disjunction in transgender histories as follows: ‘Trans adults must cope with the deeply different trajectories and life chances of the smallest gender outlaws. Some of these children may elect to be stealth (maintain total privacy about their gender histories) as adults; some may never identify openly as transgender; many will never go through their natal puberties or retain childhood memory books filled with pictures that do not mirror their gender identities as adults. For these reasons, this new generation may have wider latitude to disidentify with transgender history and with those who came before them.’ 

While Meadow does not follow up on this point in his short essay, it is a mind-blowing statement. Unlike in other social justice contexts where young people might acknowledge and even thank the adults who came before them and made the world a more hospitable place, Meadow proposes that the support that many white middle-class trans children now enjoy from their families and communities affords them a radically different experience of childhood than that of trans people even a decade older. While transgender individuals of my generation, now in their forties and fifties, often could not transition until they were adults, lacked a complex language for their gender variance, and had to live large parts of their lives conforming to gender identities with which they were at odds, today’s gender nonconforming children, with parental support, may grow up trans rather than struggling through long periods of enforced gender normativity. While that is cause for some amount of celebration, it also, Meadow suggests, puts these young people at odds with the history that produced the conditions for their smoother passage from trans childhood to adulthood. 

And indeed, perhaps the disidentification that Meadow describes between a new generation of trans children/young adults and those that came before them is precisely what has given rise to the battles over naming that I summarized in the introduction. While for an older generation a term like ‘tranny’ harkens back to a time when medical terminology dominated the landscape and forced gender-variant people to present in gender- normative bodies for long periods of their lives, for younger trans people the term speaks to a shadowy world where insults had to be rehabilitated and turned into identity claims and where ‘trans’ was a marker of some kind of irresolvable damage and dysphoria. Indeed, ‘dysphoria’ itself, a term that allowed earlier generations to explain their bodily discomfort, has fallen out of favor and stands as a reminder of the bad old days.”

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“... While some strands of transgender activism have committed to the abolition of state regulation of the body (see, e.g., work by Dean Spade on administrative law, for example, or by Eric Stanley on prisons), others have committed to a politics of recognition and participated in local and often futile and counter-productive quarrels over naming, language, and speech norms.

We can find one example of this last set of tensions between naming and being named in a local skirmish in San Francisco in the summer of 2014 when trans activists asked the owner of a queer bar called Trannyshack to change its name. The term ‘tranny,’ as the owner of Trannyshack, San Francisco-based drag queen Hekelina (a.k.a. Stefan Grygelko), tried to explain in posts on Facebook and elsewhere, was not always understood as a hateful slur. The club began in 1996, and at that time ‘tranny’ has the ring of a term of endearment - it was a diminutive, after all, like ‘kitten,’ rather than a degrading pornographic term like ‘she-male.’ Trannyshack was also a space often shared by gay men and trans women and may have provided a meeting place for gay men who had, at some point in their lives, been marked by the term ‘sissy’ and trans women for whom gay club spaces were experimental and flexible. By 2014, two decades later, the term rang a false note and sounded to trans activists in the city like an insult. After heated debates on Facebook and elsewhere that involved public trans entertainers such as Vivian Bond and RuPaul (who defended the use of the term ‘tranny’), Heklina, fearing that she might be on the wrong side of history, changed the club’s name to T-shack... Heklina cites both business and pleasure in her justification for the name change. But she also acknowledges that certain modes of naming gender-transitive bodies might be archaic as we enter a new mode of sex/gender norms.”

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 12-13.

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I’m interested in reading further about this specific instance in San Francisco & the historical use of the term ‘tr*nny.’ In my experience as a trans person and someone existing in queer spaces, I’ve always been told by peers and never questioned that it was a slur. At the same time, I have older (in their 40s and 50s) trans mentors who have lamented that they can no longer use the term to apply to themselves or their friends, but generally consider it a small thing the sacrifice in the greater push for trans rights. Given my discomfort using it myself, I’ve censored the term in my own commentary, but left it as is in the quotation by Halberstam.

Halberstam, Jack, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 6-7.

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Let's be clear: The national gay marriage campaign is NOT a social justice movement. Gay marriage reinforces the for-profit medical industrial complex by tying access to health care to employment and relational status. Gay marriage does not challenge patent laws that keep poor/working class poz folks from accessing life-extending medications. Gay marriage reinforces the nuclear family as the primary support structure for youth even though nuclear families are largely responsible for queer teen homelessness, depression and suicide. Gay marriage does not challenge economic systems set up to champion people over property and profit. Gay marriage reinforces racist immigration laws by only allowing productive, "good", soon-to-be-wed, non-citizens in while ignoring the rights of migrant workers. Gay marriage simply has nothing to do with social justice.”

The Castro disctrict in San Francisco now stands as the most alienating piece of land to anyone that finds himself or herself not a rich, white, gay male. It is a destination for global tourism and one of the city’s biggest moneymakers. Commodities line the windows of almost every store and you’d be lucky to find a flat here that is under 4,000 dollars. A few years back, the residents of the Castro district refused to have a youth center be built in the neighborhood because it would ‘bring down property value,’ in their own words. The Castro is the perfect symbol of the complete bankruptcy and the co-option of the Queer Rights movement. Tourism and profit stand over the lives and safety of youth who desperately need to escape from their abusive families. This is what happens when the Queers desire to become mainstream. It becomes an issue of ‘who can comfortably assimilate and who can’t.’ And you can see what happens to those who can’t.

My problem with the hype and pressure around DADT [Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] is that it distracts from the very things that Queer Liberation was founded on: Anti-imperialism, anti-racism, equal access to housing and health care, and struggles against patriarchy. It seems almost irrelevant to me whether or not gay soldiers can ‘come out’ in the military when the US military is not only carrying out two genocidal campaigns for US imperialism and corporate profit, but also when the war budget is draining the funds needed for almost every other service we so desperately need in this country. When I see the situation as such, not only does it become apparent to me that the Queer Movement must be anti-war, but also the movement, as is, has been hijacked by a few high-powered assimilationists dragging everyone along through corporate propaganda.”

I’m glad the recent excepts I’ve posted from “When Brooklyn Was Queer” has gotten attention from other blogs. It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in New York history or queer history in general.

The unexpected problem I encountered was that one transcription I made about Victorian lesbianism and queer historiography was reblogged by transphobic and anti-sex worker blogs. I have not blocked them yet because I believe the spread of real history is important even when it is spread by ignorant people. Perhaps some of their followers will see and become interested in actual history rather than transphobic, eurocentrist, anti-woman fearmongering?

In any case, I wanted to take this opportunity, in the chance that Queer Theory Reader gains any real readership, to establish myself as firmly anti-TERF and anti-SWERF. I, myself, am a binary transgender man (who also recognizes the validity of nonbinary genders) and former sex worker.

Paradoxically, this openness about their feelings has helped to make them invisible to modern historians, for whom queer love and shame are inseparable. But the very appropriateness of Foote and Gilder’s behavior is what allowed them to profess their love and publicly as they did. Their ability to have an intense, passionate relationship rested in part on their respectability: their whiteness, their class, their education, their commitment to the family and the home, and their eventual heterosexual marriages. Without these underpinning, what was accepted as an intense but healthy relationship might well have been seen as abnormal or even pathological. Indeed, within just a few years, Victorian sexual morality would begin to give way to the emerging science of sexology, which saw these kinds of intense female-female relationships as suspect. In particular, friendships between women who were poor, “mannish,” or vocal advocates for women’s equality would be demonized as unnatural.”

XYY “supermale” theories in the 1960s and 1970s, which asserted that males with an extra Y were bigger, taller, and more aggressive—more male—represent the first episode in the construction of the notion of the Y as the chromosome for maleness. Today scientists regard XYY as an embarrassing episode in the history of genetics. The studies were characterized by notorious empirical and methodological failings.

The arrival of the XYY male initiated the first serious cytogenetic studies of the Y chromosome. Research on the so-called supermale flourished in the United States, Britain, and Denmark during the 1960s and 1970s. The so-called XYY syndrome was a mainstream target of investigation in the most prestigious journals of biology, genetics, and cytogenetics. In 1970, the US National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) published an eighty-page “Report on the XYY Chromosome Abnormality,” a move that conveyed a high-level sense of urgency about XYY males and fortifi ed the impression that XYY was a veritable medical disorder and a serious factor in criminal sociopathy. The link between XYY and aggression was hotly pursued...

As Jeremy Green, a British science studies scholar whose 1985 account of the XYY episode remains the principal secondary historical literature on it, records, “by the early 1970s, there had been at least two ‘thriller’ films in which the main character is a violent criminal driven by a chromosome abnormality, a series of crime novels with an XYY hero (who constantly wrestles with his inner compulsion to commit crimes), and as a spin-off from the novels, a TV series called ‘The XYY Man.”...

It took enormous resources and more than a decade of work by multiple research groups to reverse Jacobs’s initial conjecture. Through large epidemiological studies published in 1976 and 1977, researchers proved that 97 percent of XYY individuals will never commit a crime, that the higher prevalence of XYYs in security institutions than the general population was due, if anything, to slightly lower median intelligence, that their offenses were actually less aggressive and violent than those of their fellow XY inmates, and that the only phenotype reliably associated with XYY was increased height. This profile of the XYY male showed that any behavioral differences in XYYs were due to a generalized developmental effect, consistent with a chromosome imbalance, not a double dosage of Y-chromosomal genes specialized for aggression or violence. XYY vanished almost completely from the scientific literature by 1980.”

*Notation: “Some males do not have a Y, of course. This includes XX individuals with an SRY gene transplanted to one of their X chromosomes; individuals with disorders of sexual development, such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are XX but may develop male gonads and secondary sexual characters; and transgender individuals who have transitioned from female-bodied to male-identified.”

It is a widely shared consensus among social scientists that genomics is transforming social relations. It is remaking categories of identity— concepts such as “blood relations,” racial or geographic ancestry, citizenship, and subjectivity—as well as notions such as what it is to be normal and healthy, what rights we have to privacy and to health care, and what responsibilities we have to others to maintain and pursue information about our health. Research on the emerging genomic concept of race, a topic with which I have also been deeply engaged, provides a helpful analogue for an investigation of gender in the age of the genome. This research shows the revival of old, debunked models of race in the language of genomics, and underscores the way in which trends such as pharmacogenomics, personalized medicine, and health movements for racial and ethnic minorities are supporting an often uncritical turn toward research on race-specific genetics. The same may be said of genetic research on sex and gender.”