The Black Sheep: Part 1

The nuclear family is a site of Black death, both physically and ontologically. It also facilitates the death of Black autonomy through embodying the amalgamation of various institutions and structures which give birth to the state and sustains it. The effects of this on Black men and women have been written about extensively, however these analyses have been overwhelmingly cis. Further, where they have touched upon those Black and “queer”, those TMA have—as is the case with Black feminist analysis more broadly—have been delegated to the periphery. With the understanding of transmisogynoir as fulcrum, I will briefly map out how while the effects of the nuclear family, the family unit, whatever one opts to call it (for brevity, it will be referred to as The Family), are felt by all Black people its ramifications are felt most severely by those TMA and further, we are disproportionately utilized as scapegoats for these very ramifications and therefore both they and the resulting targeting by the state and Black TME people are self-justified. This will be a multi-part series, with each part not necessarily carrying an individual summation conceptually; they will begin and end upon what is simply convenient for me, although hopefully they will flow fairly well together.

The Black Family as a pathologized structure is necessarily prefigured as being “chronically ill” —something not only fundamentally outside the boundaries of what’s “normal”, but also presenting a threat to this so-called “normalcy”. The Family demarcates the Human while, crucially, also defining its boundary. This has ramifications for matters of race, gender, and (dis)ability, and therefore the culmination of these intersections embodied within transmisogynoir. In other words, one’s capacity to produce a successful example of The Family is contingent upon these genres of Being, with Black TMA people occupying the position as being not only least capable but an active detriment towards achieving it. Currently, a convergence of transmisogyny/noir on the global scale presents ample opportunity to develop what could be called a spatial analysis of these structural interplays of power. From this, we can delineate an animating apparatus that engenders a shared methodology of nation-state building among countries that on the surface are notably distinct from one another in terms of sociopolitics such as the United States, Britain, Nigeria, and Ghana. The general trend towards reaction and the emboldening of conservatism that has occurred around the world following the cracks in neoliberalism becoming more apparent has more recently been nurtured in particular with a reinvigorated attack against those LGBT+/QTGNC, with trans* people in particular being utilized as leveraged through transmisogynoir-as-fulcrum.

First, a brief background overview of the surge in transphobia taking place within the US and Britain, something I must reiterate came right off the heels of—and in many ways was directly in response to—the 2020 Uprisings that were sparked in the US and spread throughout the world. Because of the existence of social media, it became functionally impossible to escape the social ramifications of and the discourse generated from this heightened antagonism. In spite of this, it was also during this period, specifically in June of 2020, that J.K. Rowling released a series of tweets and an essay within which she made herself known as a TERF and laid the tracks for her eventual role as a major spearhead for the spread of transmisogyny in particular in the name of feminism, “women’s rights” and the protection of “single-sex spaces”. While I possess neither time-travel nor mind reading abilities, I do not think it is a stretch to say that Rowling’s timing is no mere coincidence. The 2020 Uprisings placed antiBlackness firmly center stage and urged a reassessment of the notion that a “post-racial society” had been achieved, and to preserve the legitimacy of the nation necessitated a reactionary backlash which culminated in a concentrated attack upon sexual and gender variance challenging the strict confines of cisheteronormativity.

Rowling’s rapid development into an avowed TERF must be understood as a part of the broader trend of this reactionary backlash. This strategy proved effective because it permitted the unification of two fronts of the neo-fascist movement, TERFism/radical feminism and antiBlack white nationalism, while masking this as merely an alliance of “sanity” for the “protection” of (cis)women’s rights. TERFs, while fashioning themselves as not only feminists but representing the “true” ideals of feminism itself, are able to successfully claim a spot among the Left and through their aforementioned alliance, they are able to present ideas about gender that have long since been a staple aspect of (neo)fascism and conservatism more broadly as being something that is, at worst, moderate. This alliance is, in actuality, not a new one and in fact has been utilized as a tactic towards similar ends as early as the initial Suffragette movement. More recently, the particular expression of this traces itself in no small part to the rise of the alt-right and the internet culture surrounding it which created a feedback loop which spurred the growth of the right more broadly. In spite of this movement having clear origins in misogyny and anti-feminism (see it’s precursor, Gamergate), there were a number of women who found a place within this movement. These women were, of course, overwhelmingly white, and no matter how much the movement levied overt misogyny towards even them, this whiteness overrode said misogyny and these women marched in lockstep with alt-right men in spreading the narrative that “political correctness” had “gone too far”. Concurrently with this development was the growth of the BLM movement and, again, an affirmation that antiBlackness continued to be a fundamental constituting force of the US. While it is more transparent today, even during this period, the alt-right made explicit favorable nods and fostered alliances towards TERFs, essentially knighting them as the “exception to the rule” for their anti-feminism.

The development of the intelligentsia on the African continent is not free from the pernicious influence of Western epistemology, and this is perhaps most obvious in the case of Nigeria with feminists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, something I have commented on extensively in my article For Those Seeking on In Flight. However Ghana also presents us with additional clarification of broader reactionary trends both globally and on the continent. In 2021, a bill was introduced in Ghana extending its pre-existing legislation criminalizing being gay, bisexual, and trans*. The bill’s name itself—”Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values 2021”—reveals the hand of the government rather flagrantly; at its core, a narrative of a threat to The Family serves as the animating principle for discrimination and state violence against those who are not cishet. Furthermore, the opening paragraph of the draft bill reads

“The object of the Bill is to provide for proper human sexual rights and Ghanaian family values; proscribe LGBTQ+ and related activities; proscribe propaganda of, advocacy for or promotion of LGBTTQQIAAP+ and related activities; provide for the protection of and support for children, persons who are victims or accused of LGBTTQQIAAP+ and related activities and other persons; and related matters.”

A familiar sentiment is laced within this description of the bill’s objective that currently animates the equivalent reactionary movements within the US and Britain—the idea of queerness, homosexuality, transness, are predatory in nature and are things that the most vulnerable, i.e. children, must be protected from. Within the calculus of cisheteronormativity, they are traps that ensnare unsuspecting youth who become victims used towards the ends of the deterioration of society and the nation. Of course, the true children who are victimized are those who on some level are cognizant of their gender and/or sexuality transgressing cisheteronormativity and are consequently subjected to violence on that basis through forcing them to subsume integral aspects of who they are and how they relate to others. This violence is reframed as benevolence such as to deny the efficacy of alleviating the trauma and psychological scarring as a result of cisheteropatriarchy through affirmative means. Take for example prominent transphobe Helen Joyce, who declared a genocidal goal of “reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition” and characterizing this as “limit[ing] the harm”. For her, these children are “damaged”, and while one may debate whether this is an accurate assessment within a value-neutral context, Joyce clearly views the fact of being trans itself as being the damage, equating it to dysphoria itself and therefore considering these children as “a huge problem to a sane world”.

Joyce overestimates her ability to conceal the intentions of her and her movement and drops the mask through a tacit admission that her concern is not for the safety of children, but rather to preserve a very specific form of society that aligns with white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy. In her own words, she believes that any trans child, even those who have “happily transitioned[...] is someone who needs special accommodation in a sane world where we re-acknoweldge the truth of sex”. To leave no room for doubt of this channeling of eugenicist thought, she further states that “every one of those people for 50, 60, 70 years is going to need things that the rest of us don't need because the rest of us are just our sex. So the fewer of those people there are the better in the sane world that I hope we will reach.” These things that people such as Joyce do not need are more commonly known, particularly within various disability and Disability Justice communities, as accommodations—things that are embedded structurally and institutionally which recognize and account for the variance in human physical and mental existence rather than treating them as a diverging “Other”. This is not so say that being trans* is a disability, however unlike other typical clarifications of this point, I also stress that merely offering up said clarification does not address the fundamental problem with this equivocation and in some instances merely reaffirms the ableist and saneist logic at play. The shared ground upon which both this ableism/sanism and transphobia are laid is navigated with a disdain for and dehumanization of that which lies outside of the socially constructed “norm” and as such, they cannot be disentangled.

We might also further consider the ways in which the articulation of the “norm” within Africa itself constitutes the imbrication of The Family, ableism/saneism, antiBlackness, and transmisogyny. Indeed, if the “norm” is that which demarcates the human, and the specific form of the nation-state is positioned as a gauge of one’s relative humanity, we are able to better understand transmisogynoir-as-fulcrum. Ghana’s “Family Values” bill navigates a complex hermeneutical forest that troubles certain ontoreductionist “Black-first” narratives which misappropriates Black ungendering for the purpose of obfuscating gendered contradictions. We can thus identify from this a map that we can then utilize for the purpose of demystifying territory. The Bill tethers various expressions of a colonial logic which masquerades itself as concern for the very Indigenous epistemologies that it itself in fact disrupts and undermines. The Bill references the opening of an LGBTTQQIAAP+ advocacy resource center in Accra and presents this as antithetical to Ghana’s cultural landscape on a fundamental level. This is done through referencing the various European Union delegates in attendance as well as referencing the critical reaction of prominent Ghanian figures; from this, a sentiment of an invasion of “Western” cultural values is presented as self-evident fact. Further, direct emphasis is placed upon the statement from the National House of Chiefs, specifically a section which reads,

"The House wants to state without equivocation that throughout history, nowhere does the Ghanaian culture subscribe to LGBTQI which is a taboo, inhuman and alien to our society ...In God's wisdom, man and woman were created to fulfil the procreation of humans on earth to satisfy God's will...The symbolism for sex [and] marriage was between man and woman, as such, the idea of man marrying man and woman marrying woman is an abomination to our tradition and culture as Ghanaians ...".

We are then reminded that this statement is of great significance as the National House of Chiefs—the greatest body in Ghana which unites all of its traditional rulers, chiefs, and kings— is directly recognized and backed by Ghana’s Constitution and therefore this lends credence to the idea that both homosexuality and transness are incompatible with “traditional” Ghanaian values. Such articulation of pseudo-anticolonial posturing is familiar to those acquainted with settler-colonial states employing such reasoning. More specifically, the Bill makes reference to notions of “sovereignty” and “self-determination”, concepts which carry no inherent deconstruction of (settler)colonialism on their own and can easily be co-opted in the interest of colonial states themselves. Indeed, we can witness the examples of the United States and Canada who formally maintain policies of “recognition” with regards to the Native nations imprisoned within their borders which espouse the self-determination of said nations while simultaneously levying state violence against these very nations when they, in practice, exercise sovereignty over land and water that runs counter to the interests of the settler-colonial state and capital. The settler-colonial infrastructure of the United States and Canada cannot be neatly traced onto that of the neo-colonial state of Ghana on a 1-to-1 basis, however the internal colony thesis allows us to draw crucial insight via noticeable parallels. I will not parse in-depth these parallels here, however even without such thorough examination,the insight of the relationship between the colonized state, the metropole and indigenous social relations expounded upon by Fanon offers great clarity.

Fanon’s criticism of Hegelian dialectics as well as his alternative dialectical insight allows us to maneuver the complex points of conflict in (neo)colonial states. The settler-colonizer loves violence yet also fears it and therefore attempts to deploy violence in a manner such that anti-colonial movements pursue recognition above all else. This pursuit is a dead-end and the colonized inevitably turn to violence because it is through violence, which acts as a “cleansing force” that “rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence”; in other words, violence opens the door for self-actualization. This is facilitated in no small part by the way in which violence demarcates ally from enemy through the dialectic of anti-colonial violence whereby the violence of the settler-colonizer reveals to the colonized that violence is the only language they understand, responds with violence themselves and the continuous cycle of response both establishes the perpetrator of colonial violence and consistently reaffirms this identification—summarized by Fanon as “the process of identification is automatic”. Fanon however is simultaneously conscientious in this explication because of his awareness that a Manichean approach to anti-colonial violence is inherently unsustainable as colonial and anti-colonial interests do not necessarily align neatly. Fanon takes us by the hand and leads us to the necessary questions of 1) what happens when there are traditional/cultural leaders who believe in self-actualization, but self-actualization that serves their specific class interests 2) what happens when there is a aspiring national bourgeoisie and an urban proletariat who view said traditional/cultural leaders as competition and 3) what happens when the settler-colonizer desires both of these parties be brought to heel while simultaneously recognizing the utility of intermingling them politically, socially, and economically to develop, as much as possible, a perfect neocolonial nation-state.

That Fanon requires we grapple with these questions to understand both his critique of Hegelian dialectics and the development of his own dialectic is often simplified into a reductionist position which fundamentally opposes nationalism. In truth, Fanon's position is, in simple terms, that of his position on violence—that is to say, Fanon does not fetishize violence or nationalism but recognizes their utility and necessity in the process of self-actualization during the pursuit of decolonization. Consequently, it must be recognized that the interests of "the nation" is not necessarily consolidated into a program that is both agreed upon per consensus by the traditional/cultural leadership and the political/economic leadership as well as serves the interests of the lowest, deepest masses and those who lie at the furthest margins. These masses understand violence as a necessary step towards decolonization whereas the national bourgeoisie and nationalist parties "are not at all convinced that this impatient violence of the masses is the most efficient means of defending their own interests." The common ground of shared political power between these two groups is solidified through this mutually-held aversion to the sort of violence employed by the masses that is a response to colonial violence in a dialectical fashion.

The relationship between traditional/cultural leadership and the urban elite/national bourgeoisie manifests itself as a game of push-and-pull where both parties vie for “control” over the rural masses. It is in this sense, there is an inherent conflict on interest, where the traditional/cultural leadership requires social control over the rural masses to legitimize their power and the urban elite/national bourgeoisie seeks to entice the rural masses into urban towns, proletarianize them, and exploit them to undergo industrialization and expand their own wealth. The peasantry who maintain their Indigenous modes of being and relationships both to each other and to the land present a threat to both, but for differing reasons. The traditional/cultural leadership can only maintain their place with the support of the peasantry, however because their desire to maintain power in a world that would in truth prefer they not exist, their very appeal to “tradition” which sustains that power can itself at seemingly any time present the impetus for their annihilation.

With the intertwined relationship between this traditional/cultural leadership and colonialism uncovered, we can then begin to properly question the degree to which appeals towards tradition even within the context of the African continent are complicated by ontological reductionism. More specifically, if we are to accept that antiBlackness is paradigmatic, it cannot be denied that antiBlackness undergirds various ontological and epistemic presuppositions which sustain nationstates globally, including on the African continent. Therefore, identifying what legitimizes antiBlackness even within the heart of what historically was conceptualized as the birthplace of “the Black” is of paramount importance and upon deeper investigation we see that transmisgoynoir-as-fulcrum becomes indispensable in this venture. What we are currently witnessing is a crisis of the rationale of the nation-state itself—a crisis that is being felt across the world—and there is an attempt by various nation-states to regain their legitimacy through demonization and repression of those at the margins who supposedly threaten “society” and “civilization” itself. I will end this Part here for now, and Part 2 will continue navigating these underlying threads through further clarifying what we can learn from, for example, Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ+ Bill and also demystify certain feminist presumptions which also was much discussed in For Those Seeking Or In Flight.