Review of A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Eric Maroney

December 23, 2024

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

by Jules Gill-Peterson

Verso

2024

In the wake of a campaign that made targeting queer and trans people a cornerstone, Donald Trump’s reelection has seemingly opened the floodgates to further antitrans hostilities. And yet Spectre readers will know that the present antitrans crusade predates the most recent election cycle.¹ According to the Trans-Legislation Tracker, an independent research organization that monitors and reports on legislation impacting trans and gender-diverse people across the United States, 668 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 2024, and at present, 48 of those bills have been signed into law.² As in previous years, these bills seek to reverse protections for LGBTQ people, trans people in particular, restricting access to public accommodations, gender-affirming healthcare, and governmental forms of identification. This right-wing legislative campaign represents a continued escalation from 2023, which saw the introduction of 615 anti-LGBTQ bills, 84 of which were signed into law, including Tennessee’s infamous drag ban criminalizing public “adult cabaret performance” or cross-gender appearance.³ With MAGA Republicans now in charge of all three legislative branches, the antitrans climate will continue to metastasize. Already, the Republican-controlled congress has barred incoming transgender congresswoman Sarah McBride from access to the chamber’s gender-segregated restrooms and facilities, and South Carolina representative Nancy Mace has filed a broader piece of legislation that would bar trans people from access to any federal gender-segregated facility including those located at national parks, museums, and airports.

Recent legislative restrictions on sexuality and gender are not unique to the United States. In May of 2023, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni signed a bill that carries the death penalty for certain same-sex activities under the charge of “aggravated homosexuality.” Likewise, President Vladimir Putin has expanded an earlier law banning LGBTQ propaganda, and the Russian Supreme Court has designated the “International LGBT Movement” an “extremist organization,” support for which carries a prison sentence of up to twelve years.⁴ From Poland to Brazil, Hungary to the United States, right-wing legislative campaigns against queer and gender-diverse people are on the rise and the consequences of this are dire.

There is a clear correlation between the increase in anti-LGBTQ legislation and a rise in violence against queer and gender-diverse people. In September of this year, transgender model and public figure Kesaria Abramidze was stabbed to death the day after Georgia passed a broad anti-LGBTQ law banning same-sex marriage, child adoption, and gender-affirming care.⁵ In the summer of 2023, amid a swirl of anti-LGBTQ legislation, twenty-eight-year-old Oshae Sibley was fatally stabbed outside a Brooklyn gas station after being targeted for his effeminate dancing.⁶ In February 2024, transmasculine Oklahoma teenager Nex Benedict died of suicide after he was severely assaulted in a school restroom following a tide of bullying. Benedict’s death came on the heels of several state-level, antitrans laws including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. A recent study by the journal Nature Human Behavior has identified substantial increases in suicide attempts by transgender and nonbinary youth, specifically in US states where antitrans legislation has been passed.⁷These instances illustrate the violence that circulates amid legislative hostilities—a violence that, as historian Jules Gill-Peterson documents, is not unique to the present.

Gill-Peterson’s new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso 2024) argues that trans panics are a unique form of gender discipline, “highly compatible with right-wing authoritarian politics,” but that those panics have not always existed. Instead, the book traces the history of trans panics, arguing that gender panic is a disciplinary tool used to shore up colonial power and reinforce class hierarchies through a normative gender and sexual order. Ultimately, Gill-Peterson aims to identify the origins of trans misogyny, while also highlighting the limitations for responding to it of the predominant liberal organizing based on identity and rights. For Gill-Peterson, neither juridical solutions that seek to criminalize perpetrators of antitrans violence nor feminist psychoanalytic understandings that frame violence as inherent to men offer useful antidotes to trans misogyny. In place of these methods, Gill-Peterson offers a brief history of the transfeminization of gender-variant people, the production of trans panic, and the resistant modes of living transfeminized people have fashioned for themselves, often at the margins of political economies. The book offers an invaluable contribution to making sense of the present moment, placing the surveillance of and violence against gender-variant people—and transfeminine people in particular—into a wider historical account.

The book establishes a relationship between misogyny and trans misogyny, making careful note of their distinctive affects. Gill-Peterson explains that misogyny is a disciplinary tool—one that insists on the “continual policing and punishment of some women for their perceived failures to stay subordinate to men” (9). She emphasizes that this misogyny is not “abstract woman-hating”; rather, “it fixes itself to women forced to live at the bottom of social hierarchies,” specifically transfeminized people of color (9). However, the book does not offer a materialist analysis of gender oppression or a detailed discussion of gender’s relationship to profit and value extraction. Women are disciplined for a “failure to stay subordinate to men,” but the necessary function of gender subordination within capitalism is underdeveloped. Here, readers may wish for a longer history of trans misogyny than the book’s title promises—one that engages with questions of primitive accumulation and Marxist-feminist social reproduction. Doing so would highlight both the racialized and gendered hierarchies that are a precondition to processes of accumulation, while also reinforcing Gill-Peterson’s claims about the historical processes of trans feminization. If racialized and gendered hierarchies are refashioned in the colonial period, engaging with questions of accumulation and social reproduction might demystify the production of transfeminized people—a production that necessarily precedes their subordination. Placing misogyny and trans misogyny within the frame of Marxist accumulation and Marxist-feminist social reproduction also emphasizes the continuity between the two forms of domination and underscores the centrality of gender hierarchy in the production of profit.

Her project refuses a “definitive history of trans womanhood” noting that constructing a unifying and “coherent history is [neither] possible [nor] worth attempting”…Gill-Peterson’s formulation is useful in that the action, trans feminization, replaces the falsely stable category of transgender highlighting transness as a set of historically contingent processes. At the same time, readers are left questioning whether Gill-Peterson’s dismissal of the terms transgender and trans overlook the categories’ unifying properties.

The book’s introduction establishes one of Gill-Peterson’s central criticisms, which is a response to the liberal identity-rights-based organizing model. She argues that trans as a unifying structure through which political affinities are born is not a useful analytic. Instead, Gill-Peterson establishes that trans and transgender are both organizing terminologies imposed from the outside on a diverse group of gender-variant people. Drawing on the work of anthropologist David Valentine, Gill-Peterson notes that the umbrella transgender emerged in the 1990s, lumping together “swaths of people in the United States who had previously traveled under disparate and even incompatible signs…including transvestites, drag queens, cross dressers, hair fairies, butches, studs, bois, faggots, femmes, gender fluid and gender fuck people, and transexuals” (2). As an activist collective, this constellation “produced radical and intersectional definitions as a sort of strategic coalition of the ‘gender precariat.’ However, the appearance and development of social service organizations and NGOs deployed the term transgender in such a way that it has flattened the unique and intersectional social locations of that constellation” (2).

According to Gill-Peterson, the danger of the umbrella transgender is that it erases the multiplicity of identities gathered there, dehistoricizing the colonial context in which a modern form of gender discipline, the trans panic, emerged. This is another moment readers may wish for a longer history of trans misogyny. That an arm of the nonprofit industrial complex extinguished the liberationist origins of this strategic trans coalition was not predestined, and a discussion of the economic downturns that characterized the 1990s and the catastrophe wrought by the AIDS epidemic might provide some context for this devolution. As Myrl Beam documents in Gay Inc: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, the LGBT movement of the 1960s and 70s was part of a broader liberation movement that saw its enemies as racism, sexism, heterosexism, and imperialism.⁸ In an interview with the Virginia Commonwealth University News, Beam elaborates, “the [60s and 70s] LGBT movement, at least a significant and significantly mobilized part of it, was explicitly leftist, anti-capitalist, critical of police violence, and was invested in resisting norms around sexuality.”⁹ However, the decline of the social movements and the installation of neoliberalism gave way to a more conservatizing and assimilationist queer politics—one that took root in nonprofit board rooms rather than in the streets. While Beam’s focus is the assimilationist turn in LGBT organizing, which prioritized marriage equality at the expense of other movement demands, his insights can be extended to address Gill-Peterson’s critique. It is not that transgender or even trans as a set of organizing terminologies are inherently reductive. Rather it is the term’s deployment by professionalized advocates that strips the category of its liberationist potential. Highlighting this nuance seems relevant since one of Gill-Peterson’s underlying claims is that trans or transgender as an identity-based organizing principle is not inherently liberatory; indeed it is often limiting. Her project refuses a “definitive history of trans womanhood” noting that constructing a unifying and “coherent history is [neither] possible [nor] worth attempting” (16). In place of this, Gill-Peterson offers the terms trans-feminized and trans femininity to mark the ways a variety of gender-diverse people, including cisgender women, may become implicated by and experience trans misogyny. Gill-Peterson’s formulation is useful in that the action, trans feminization, replaces the falsely stable category of transgender highlighting transness as a set of historically contingent processes. At the same time, readers are left questioning whether Gill-Peterson’s dismissal of the terms transgender and trans overlook the categories’ unifying properties. The question then becomes, can these categories be rehabilitated to emphasize solidarity without condensing the variety of experiences gathered in them?

The first chapter of A Short History of Trans Misogyny examines trans panics as a disciplinary tool of colonial statecraft. Beginning with a discussion of hijras in colonial India, Gill-Peterson explores the relationship between gendered violence and coloniality in what she identifies as an early documentable instance of trans panic. Hijras, whom Gill-Peterson is careful to note are not transgender women, are trans feminized through a series of colonial policies that criminalize their ascetic way of life. To illustrate this development, Gill-Peterson reconstructs the narrative of Bhoorah, a hijra who was murdered by a lover in 1852. Court proceedings—which misidentified Bhoorah as a sex worker, claiming Bhoorah was part of a sex trafficking trade organized around an independent and “internal government”—illustrate the British rulers’ anxiety over control of their colonial subjects (32). Since “a central British alibi for empire was ending the global sex trade” the discovery of hijras justified a series of repressive moves (32). For example, the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), which was intended to reinforce caste and establish categories of criminalization for Britain’s colonized subjects, also impacted the hijra way of life.

The act mandated a police registry, proscribed the transfer of hijra property, and limited hijras’ movement across state lines. “Combined with the criminalization of dancing and wearing women’s clothing, their entire way of life [became] illegal” (33). And although Gill-Peterson notes that the police registry was inconsistently enforced, the threat of criminalization caused devastating “economic disruption of their [hijra] way of life” (35). As with contemporary trans panics, this reactionary legislation correlated with a rise in both state and extralegal violence against the trans-feminized hijras. Policy “empowered men–namely, police officers–to look for and attack hijras in the street” and their “sexualized [trans] femininity thus became a target for violent punishment” (36). According to Gill-Peterson, the disciplining and erasure of hijras from public life was a precondition for strengthening colonial rule; the violence that followed was a logical consequence. Here, Gill-Peterson draws on the work of Maria Lugones, who argues that the project of colonial accumulation is predicated on the construction of whiteness and that whiteness is distinguished, in part, by its proximity to sexual morality and the absoluteness of its binary sexual anatomy.¹⁰ In contrast, nonwhite figures are defined by an imposed sexual immorality in addition to an assumed anatomical ambiguity. In this sense, the hijras are marked not only by their queerness but also by their distance from whiteness, making the criminalization and erasure of these figures integral to the colonial project.

For Gill-Peterson, trans panic illuminates the relationship between the colonial state and the sexual outsider within the colony; the former requires the subjugation of the latter to shore up its governing authority and to maximize its extraction of surplus value from colonized labor. Gill-Peterson certainly gestures at the economic motives that drive colonial trans panics, but this is another area where readers may be left desiring a more detailed materialist assessment. Here, an engagement with Marxist primitive accumulation and Marxist-feminist social reproduction might better illustrate the logics of colonial domination. While it is true that colonial power required both the trans feminization and erasure of the hijras, this move was animated by more than an insincere objection to the global sex trade and extends beyond the colonial coproduction of race and gender. Gill-Peterson does make note of the separate-sphere division of labor that was central to British society. However, she falls short of tying that division of labor to the reproduction of the family, which serves both ideological and economic ends (35). Indeed, waged labor requires the hardening of gendered boundaries to reproduce the laborer. While the book grants that “[c]olonial states used trans panic as a pretense to secure political and economic power,” a longer history of trans misogyny might view trans panic as one method of undermining preexisting and social-reproductive kinship networks, the destruction of which is a precondition of capitalist development (37).

The second chapter provides a compelling materialist history of race, gender, and class in the antebellum city. Gill-Peterson argues that intimacies across “hierarchies of race, class, and gender” were possible in these developing urban spaces, though not without tension (61). To illustrate, the chapter follows Mary Jones, a sex worker in New York City who was prosecuted not for her cross-sex appearance but for her theft of white men’s property. Gill-Peterson argues that Jones’s criminalization and resulting infamy issues from racism rather than trans misogyny. In so doing, Gill-Peterson emphasizes her provocation that trans misogyny is not transhistorical. Surveying penny papers of the time, Gill-Peterson explains that “the cause of her [Jones’s] infamy wasn’t that she was really a man under her woman’s clothing; rather, the satire of her clothes and wig had to do with her being free and black” (65). Here, Jones’s primary transgression is not her crossing of the gender line. Rather, her major offense is her crossing of the color line. Gill-Peterson’s point in exploring Jones’s story is two-fold. First, she demonstrates the economic incentives that may have encouraged Mary Jones to pursue trans-feminized sex work. Sex work emerged as one of the few economic avenues available to Black trans-feminized people during the “incomplete transition from plantation slavery to industrial capitalism”—a pattern, Gill-Peterson suggests, that continues to the present (70–71). That Jones could earn substantially more income from the sex trade than from the work available as a Black man is evidence of inventive modes of living trans-feminized people have fashioned at the margins of political economies. This line of inquiry complicates popular contemporary understandings of transness. Instead of signifying a stable identity category resulting from psychological and biological anomaly, transness becomes socially and economically produced—a point Gill-Peterson also establishes in her earlier work Histories of the Transgender Child.¹¹ Second, Gill-Peterson argues that Jones’s case illustrates the absence of trans panic, that trans panic had to be invented, and that its invention was necessitated by processes of colonial accumulation and capitalist development. Here, Gill-Peterson draws on the work of Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers who described the “‘ungendering’ of enslaved Africans” in her pivotal essay “Mamas Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”¹² Paraphrasing Spillers, Gill-Peterson writes, “through the infliction of extreme brutality that destroyed their prior identities, enslaved Africans were made exchangeable through a common rate as commodities” (83). This process of ungendering denies the Black subject access to the absolute categories of man and woman, a process of queering that both refuses Black humanity and, as trans scholar C. Riley Snorton argues, produces a terrain upon which Black fugitivity can operate.¹³ Gill-Peterson notes Mary Jones’s mobility, both within the northern antebellum city and between the North and the South, are evidence that her trans femininity eases her passage within and between those spaces though not without perilous vulnerability. Gill-Peterson writes, “the same fungibility attached to Black gender that let her [Jones] follow the routes of cotton between New York to New Orleans, or negotiate a relationship with John Lyness [a white man], was what criminalized her life” (91). Mary Jones’s story reveals the processes of trans feminization, the resistant ways trans-feminized people inhabited social and economic spaces within the antebellum city, and the ever present criminalization of their fugitive lives. This contested terrain, characterized by both criminality and mobility, suggests trans misogyny and its weaponized form, the trans panic, are inextricably linked to the production and policing of race. Rather than providing a definitive claim about the emergence of trans misogyny, the chapter gestures towards moments of its seeming absence and thus highlights its uneven appearance within the processes of capitalist development. In addition to providing a rich history of this complicated emergence, the chapter makes the important but densely theoretical work of Snorton (who draws from Spillers) accessible to a popular audience.

Ultimately, A Short History of Trans Misogyny offers a timely and novel historiography. It details the colonial origins of trans misogyny and offers a glimpse of the historical sites from which transfeminized people have fashioned their lives…A longer history of trans misogyny that addresses these questions might point to different conclusions…

The third chapter examines the post-Stonewall rupture between gay men and trans women, arguing that before this rupture the distinction between the two groups was less absolute. The chapter notes that the illegality and stigma of homosexual life during the midcentury McCarthy era created a diverse, but tenuous, gay community. Gays and lesbians of all social strata were excluded from American society and thus gathered in a queer underground where “bankers rubbed elbows with construction workers,” and “businessmen and middle management drank alongside waiters, hairdressers, and actors” (103). However, this body was not immune to the stratifying pressures of post-war US capitalism, and Gill-Peterson argues that professional drag queens came to occupy a privileged position among this constellation of the socially ostracized, closeted, and discarded. Drawing on Ester Newton’s Mother Camp, an ethnographic study of “female impersonators” in 1960s Chicago, Gill-Peterson notes that drag queens’ privileged position stems from the fact that “unlike everyone else, drag queens made a career being gay,” and as a result, they “were revered, performing in defiance of a collectively shared stigma on stage” (104).¹⁴ According to Gill-Peterson, the queens’ professional success and ambition were the cause of their prestige, and their embrace of trans femininity was, at least in part, driven by economic motivations. The chapter contrasts the professional female impersonators with the trans-feminized individuals Gill-Peterson identifies as street queens—those who dressed in women’s clothing offstage and made their living from sex work. Street queens found themselves at the bottom of a gay social hierarchy, embracing effeminacy “in the wrong place and for the wrong reason” (105). While stage queens “carefully managed and monetized” femininity, “turning femininity into a job,” street queens were frequently ostracized for being too trans feminine. As sex workers, they also monetized femininity. However, they turned it into the ‘wrong’ kind of job.

Gill-Peterson notes the economic slippage that existed between the stage queens and street queens of the 1960s United States. The boundary between these figures was not fixed, and a job loss could easily lower a professional female impersonator to the status of a street queen. The chapter suggests that discomfort with this shared precarity, which extended to gays and lesbians of the period, anticipates the post-Stonewall political betrayal of trans femininity by assimilationist gays. This betrayal, which placed an artificial barrier between trans-feminine people and gay men, also provided cover for the increased policing of urban centers. Gill-Peterson argues, “the policing and attack on street queens in US vice districts became the internal counterpart to [a broader and older] colonial project to neutralize the sovereignty of the shadow world” (116). To extend Gill-Peterson’s observations, it is worth noting that this effort of domestic neutralization coincides with the later stages of the Vietnam War, a period during which the Cold War turned hot as US and Soviet powers fought to reassert colonial influence in a postcolonial world. Further, the political abandonment of trans-feminine people by gay assimilationists of the 1970s also coincides with a general decline of the social movements punctuated by economic recession and stagflation. These economic and imperial conditions provide further context for considering the post-Stonewall assimilationist turn—a move that was not predetermined by biases internal to the gay community, but rather one that was likely influenced by an array of overlapping and competing material conditions.

Acknowledging the wave of antitrans reaction and the growing coalition of antigender forces, Gill-Peterson concludes the book with a discussion of the present stakes, writing, “[p]erhaps the point is to stop [trans] girls from growing up to be trans women, or simply to punish them at every turn” (139). The book certainly recognizes the weight of this reactionary moment, yet it remains ambivalent about the solutions. Gill-Peterson is clear in arguing that a liberal identity-based politic of multicultural inclusion, which constructs transness as a stable and transhistorical identity category, cannot defeat political reaction. This kind of project not only flattens a diversity of trans experience, but it also requires an assimilationist wager, which as I have described elsewhere, “asks the trans body to bend into its cisgender correlative in exchange for a limited and precarious promise of safety.”¹⁵ In a rejection of trans assimilationism, Gill-Peterson asserts that collapsing trans women and trans femininity into womanhood generally is misguided and issues from a scarcity mindset: “To make trans-feminist demands smaller in unifying through sameness with non-transwomen, or with all trans or LGBT people, is a mistake” (141).

In place of this, Gill-Peterson offers an antiassimilationist trans politic, one that takes its cue from the travesti communities of Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Travesti is the chosen term of some Latin American trans-feminized people who embrace a trans femininity that stands in contrast to the often medicalized trans womanhood of the global North. In his monograph, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, Don Kulich explains that travesti “adopt female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, [and] linguistic pronouns” they also “ingest…female hormones and inject…silicone…into their bodies to acquire feminine bodily features such as breasts, wide hips, large thighs and expansive buttocks.”¹⁶ However, most travesti “do not consider themselves to be women,” nor do they identify as transexuals.¹⁷ Instead, travesti inhabit a unique identity category altogether. Gill-Peterson describes travesti as a femininity of excess, one that refuses “the American model of state recognition and gender-based human rights,” which requires trans people to present their trans self “to the state for evaluation” (147, 149). Gill-Peterson suggests the travesti refuse the postcolonial gender regime by organizing around material demands rather than demands for recognition. Her caution against a narrow politics of recognition is an important one, and so too is the book’s call to organize on material terrain, prioritizing the barriers to trans life that exist outside state recognition: prisons, police, and economic precarity (129). However, Gill-Peterson goes perhaps too far in suggesting a transfeminine political independence. After all, the book is careful to note the relatedness of misogyny and heterosexism to trans misogyny; it then follows that a genuine solidarity, one that accounts for the unique oppression experienced by trans women, is not only desirable but also possible.

Ultimately, A Short History of Trans Misogyny offers a timely and novel historiography. It details the colonial origins of trans misogyny and offers a glimpse of the historical sites from which transfeminized people have fashioned their lives. Nevertheless, the book does not account for the relationship between colonialism and capitalism, nor does it locate the origins of gender oppression generally. A longer history of trans misogyny that addresses these questions might point to different conclusions—ones that acknowledge the need for a coalition of the gender precariat while also insisting that we listen to “the dolls [who] hold all the receipts” (20).

Review of A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Eric Maroney

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Review of A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Eric Maroney

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Stand Up and Fight for, and Alongside, Your Trans Siblings

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