Ungendering and the Denial of Femininity Part 2: Anti-Theory as Transmisogynoir

“When I asked Mr. Johnson how the union succeeded in winning some of their demands, without the slightest hesitation he reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a dog-eared copy of V. I. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly on the bed next to me, and said, ‘Right thar, theory and practice. That’s how we did it. Theory and practice.’”

—  Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During The Great Depression (2015) by Robin D. G. Kelley

Anti-Theory is a luxury. It is a luxury that cannot reasonably be afforded to Black transmisogynoir-affected (TMA) people. See, we need militancy—this is something many of those who purport to be our greatest alias will agree upon. However, if they are to agree to transmisogynoir as the fulcrum, i.e. the ordering principle of antagonism, it requires that they engage with theory. Here, I will be discussing the sentiment among Black transmisogynoir-exempt (TME) people, specifically those AFAB, that it is necessary to be Anti-Theory in the ostensible defense of the very marginalized Black TMA people that they claim to fight in the interests of.[1]

I feel it necessary to first clarify that none of these people are truly Anti-Theory in the general. Indeed, this term merely describes a specific sentiment being expressed, namely that we should flatten the theory that is produced out of necessity from Black TMA people and the theory that is produced within the academy to serve interests that are divorced from said Black TMA people. This stands in contradiction to the claim (and one that is actually correct) that the academy has a parasitic relationship to those Black who exist at the margins. What becomes more and more clear to me is that those marginalized individuals and their experiences who/that are being cannibalized by the academy are overwhelmingly imagined to be TME and specifically AFAB.

Stated plainly in such a manner, I imagine that this is recognizably an absurd belief to hold, as even representation politics has so blatantly failed to “include” Black TMA people within the ranks of academic production of ostensibly radical/revolutionary theory. Consequently, Black TMA people are, in the first, rendered as pure abstraction—we are talked about and around and rarely, if ever, in conversation with. Worse still, when we find ourselves abstracted and “included” within frameworks, whether they be Black feminist, Black queer theory, etc., we are delegated to the periphery or cynically hidden within the category “male”. Through this, it then becomes possible to argue on the one hand that the precarity and violence Black women face has historically been neglected in the canon of academic Black theory while then sidestepping the question of whether this includes Black trans women.

This is where Anti-Theory from TME AFAB people breaks down; see, they actually agree with this underlying concept of the supposed “overrepresentation” of Black TMA people while ostensibly agreeing with the framework of Ungendering and also proclaiming that it is not their responsibility to study the theory that generates this framework. Consequently, Ungendering not only merely gets incorporated into their already-present transmisogynoir, but also becomes a primary self-justification for it. However, it’s necessary to emphasize that this denial of responsibility therefore indicates that this incorporated Ungendering is merely a skeletal outline—a shoddy attempt at a replication put together through hearsay—and therefore it is necessary to tear it down and reconstruct it properly.

“Those African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally ‘unmade,’ thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that ‘exposed’ their destinies to an unknown course.” (72)

— Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (1987) by Hortense Spillers

I am done with “Black people have no gender”. What was once a convenient slogan for communicating the violence rendered unto Black flesh has become a method of airbrushing transmisogynoir for the sake of “pro-Blackness”. In a cruel irony, this slogan actively minimizes the violence of Ungendering through obfuscating the reality that Black people, as Africans who were enslaved, had gender. Not only did they have gender, the breadth of the variety of gender found in Africa was as expansive as Blackness is today.

Ungendering was initiated in the “Middle Passage'' within the hold of the slave ship. Within the hold, slaves became an undifferentiated mass and were robbed of what made their various cultures distinct, i.e. they were “culturally ‘unmade’”, and their particular social and economic relations were ripped to shreds. “Under these conditions,” Spillers states, “one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities.” In other words, slaves became fungible, they became mere numbers on a ledger. Or, as Zakkiyah Iman Jackson describes, “Slavery’s archival footprint is a ledger system that placed black humans, horses, cattle, and household items all on the same bill of purchase” (Jackson 2020, 45). Those captured Africans had existing modes of living and Being that resided outside of the confines of what would become the onto-epistemic canon of Euromodernity. To once again echo Jackson, slavery “catalyzed the conscription of black people into hegemonically imperialist and racialized conceptions of ‘modernity’ and ‘universal humanity’”.

Ungendering is, therefore, not an ontological embodiment that Black people have always occupied—rather, it is something that is imposed onto us to capture us within anti-Black and colonial frameworks. Ungendering is an exogenous process and this is why it was co-developed with another exogenous process, racialization. However at the same time, gender is an endogenous production and therefore there is a delineation to be made between said endogenous form of gender and what ultimately culminated into the flattening category “Black Woman”. Put together, this particular (i.e. colonial and bourgeois) expression of gender and therefore race are both, as Sylvia Wynter states, a “function of genre[...]the genre of Man”.

This recognition that race is a function of genre is a crucial one, as there seems to have been a misappropriation of this conceptualization. What was initially a materialist framework for understanding the historical development of distinction/categorization/classification centered around the Human has become an insistence that a particular distinction/categorization/classification supersedes and subsumes all others. Specifically, it would appear that Wynter’s interjection into feminist theory has been read as an argument that Blackness disrupts gender to the point that it renders it illegible—in other words, the racialization of Blackness has produced/stemmed from an epistemic shift in which race (i.e. Black) has replaced gender and therefore feminist struggle merely represents one of many struggles within the house of the Human.

There is some truth to this however where the misreading comes in is the claim that race (i.e. Black) has replaced gender. Historical epistemic shifts do not occur through substitution, but rather transformations, or perhaps more accurately, transmogrification. This is how, for example, we find that the epistemic shift during the period of the formation of European humanism through the Enlightenment that took the Christian and made it into Man (or the Human) did not occur through substitution; indeed, the Christian as the signifier representing One who was unbefitting of enslavement and one who was deserving of Freedom was transmogrified into Man and therefore stood in contradistinction to the Black African who lacked a soul and therefore could not be Saved and was unbefitting of self-determination.

This is why Wynter emphasizes that “I am trying to insist that ‘race’ is really a code-word for ‘genre.’  Our issue is not the issue of ‘race.’  Our issue is the issue of the genre of ‘Man’.” This is the facet of Wynter’s theorization that is typically dropped by those who present it as a mere replacement of gender for race. Instead, it is a project to expand a critique of humanism beyond a restrictive scope of gender and study genre more broadly. Reading this development, one can detect a noticeable frustration within Wynter’s writings and interviews that I find common ground with. For example, Wynter continues, “Now when I speak at a feminist gathering and I come up with ‘genre’ and say ‘gender’ is a function of ‘genre,’ they don’t want to hear that.” Currently, I feel like Wynter at these feminist gatherings when they weren't trying to hear that “gender” was a function of “genre”, but instead it's whenever I'm talking to those who claim themselves to be”'pro-Black” and they're not trying to hear that “race” is also a function of “genre”. And the reason for this is fairly simple: it is because they do not want to recognize that, as Nsambu Za Suekama states, the “‘color line’ is threaded at the nexus of gendered labor divisions/institutions/contradictions,” or, to slightly amend another observation by her, the color line is painted with a gendered brush. This is where those TME Anti-Theorists have found themselves in alignment with those who are ostensibly their ideological enemies, i.e. cishet Black hoteps and Black Male Studies acolytes. Even more concerning however, is that there is ideological overlap with those outright reactionary figures such as Dave Chappelle and therefore fascists.

Dave Chappelle is certainly no anomaly, and I feel it necessary to state this plainly because underlying all of the harmful rhetoric he insists on perpetuating is a gender anxiety that provides relative stability to anti-Blackness that is leveraged in particular by transmisogynoir. This gender anxiety is grounded in a shared narrative of dispossession that ultimately aspires proximity to Man through internalization of Man’s science, Man’s religion—Man’s (bio)mythology. Furthermore, there is a shared insistence on the paving over of the violence endemic to sexing. This is because sexing is crucial to the self-justification of genital fixation—or perhaps it would be apt to follow in the path of Christina Sharpe’s employment of the term genital fantasies.

These genital fantasies emerge from the very process that shapes the concept of biological sex and therefore sexual differentiation: semiotic transposition. This term appears unwieldy and complex, but the actual concept itself is straightforward. Defined by Bernice L. Hausman in Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (which, by the way, I do not recommend in any way, shape or form), semiotic transposition is when “a sign becomes a signifier for something else.” For example, we name certain hormones as “male” and “female” despite the fact that it makes no sense to assign sex to anything other than the whole of an organism. Because the whole organism being sexed is taken as a given, this assignment is transposed onto the various individual aspects (e.g. hormones, chromosomes, etc.) which then is used to signify that the sex actually exists. Therefore, the sign (individual aspects) becomes the signifier (the sexed organism).

If that sounds fundamentally circular, it’s because it is, however this circular logic is a significant reason for why “biological sex” has sustained itself despite being in perpetual crisis (such as it being demonstrated unequivocally that “male” hormones and “female” hormones are found in “females” and “males” respectively). Even as early as 1939, for example, scientist Frank Lillie felt it necessary to state that “there is no such biological entity as sex. What exists in nature is a dimorphism within species into male and female individuals[...] Sex is not a force that produces these contrasts; it is merely a name for our total impression of the differences” (Lillie 1939, 3). There are two things most notable about this. First, it communicates the fact that because of the circular nature of the logic of this form of semiotic transposition, sex itself cannot possibly be a causal force for what are deemed differences in sex-based outcomes. Second, there is a tacit attempt to circumvent this very circular nature which extends from taking for granted the concept of sexual dimorphism.

Sexual dimorphism, even moreso than the sex binary, carries with it a strong vaneer of “scientific neutrality” despite coming nowhere close to having earned such a badge of honor. Indeed, from the very initial stages of significant consideration and study from the time of Darwin, sexual dimorphism was inherently racialised. Darwin himself even noted the writings of a contemporary, Carl Vogt, who argued that sexual dimorphism was hierarchical according to race, with it “increas[ing] with the development of the race”.[2] Further, in 1866, Richard von Krafft-Ebing stated in Psychopathia Sexualis, one of the most influential texts in psychiatry and psychopathology, "The secondary sexual characteristics differentiate the two sexes; they present the specific male and female types. The higher the anthropological development of the race, the stronger these contrasts between man and woman."[3] Despite the concept of race largely falling out of favor with anthropologists, sexual dimorphism even to this day has also been used to preserve the concept within forensic anthropology through comparing the dimorphism of skulls of the remains of white versus Black people.

This continuation of the mutually constitutive nature of sex/sexual dimorphism and race is, to say the least, an inconvenience to the sex-as-class framework that has thus far fueled what we now typically refer to as white feminism. Indeed, if sexual dimorphism and sex/gender differentiation is itself racialized and if we do not live in a “post-racial society”—but rather, we live in a society in which liberalism insists upon rendering racism invisible which therefore provides cover for and facilitates the growth of fascism—then it stands to reason that the argument that we live in a “post-transmisogynist” society in which trans woman wield a disproportionate amount of power is an articulation of and forms a feedback loop with the insistence of the existence of a “post-racial society”. However this also means that race and cissexism are inextricably sustaining of one another systematically, institutionally, and interpersonally and that therefore they can mask various methods of preserving and perfecting slavery, with transmisogynoir as the fulcrum.

Thus, when Dave Chappelle states that transmisogyny is of no concern to Black people, nestled under the surface is the idea that therefore transmisogynoir is of no concern to Black people. When he declares, in an attempt to justify his attacks upon trans people, that his problem isn’t with trans people but instead it’s with white people, he is conflating trans with white. The violence of Dave Chappelle's special isn't merely found in that it perpetuates violent and harmful rhetoric about trans women (and trans people broadly), but that he is successfully (i.e. profiting off of and generating profits for others, including Netflix) parroting sentiments that already govern the world itself while perpetuating the idea that the converse is true, and that it is actually trans women who have disproportionate power in this world. This is where the convergence with fascism is established most clearly and concretely.

Indeed, Chappelle’s proclamation that he is “team TERF” in defense of J.K. Rowling quite explicitly betrays his true intentions in allying himself with neo-fascism. The only way for the idea that Rowling — a cishet white woman who has more wealth than most people can only dream of — is a “victim” to gain anything approaching coherence is to presume that poor, Black TMA people somehow wield power within society. Chappelle summarizes his allyship with neo-fascism and Rowling with the simple statement: “gender is a fact”. He then follows by “clarifying” that “I am not saying that to say trans women aren’t women, I am just saying that those pussies that they got… you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not pussy, but it’s Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy. It tastes like pussy, but that’s not quite what it is, is it? That’s not blood, that’s beet juice.”

This convoluted mess of mental gymnastics is quite familiar to trans women. We are met with “trans women are women”, followed by the implicit “but” that then leads into bioessentialism which reduces us to how “real” our pussies are. It does not actually matter whether we have undergone surgery or not, this is besides the point. Genitalia is merely the sign that is being utilized as signifier. Vagina becomes synonymous with “woman” while at the same time “Woman” itself is essentialized to such a degree that trans women are divorced from it on a whim. This interplay between semiotic transposition and genital fantasy mediates the general sentiment from TME people that trans women are merely attempting to “don” womanhood. This therefore leads to the bizarre claim that being a trans woman is equivalent to Blackface. Black TME people therefore navigate interactions with Black TMA people with this framework lodged within their unconscious. After all, Blackface is an act of deception. It is a mockery. Therefore, if being a trans woman is equivalent to Blackface, Black trans women become the embodiment of the “trickster”.

This is propelled forward by those Black and AFAB who navigate the world with the assumption that the source of the violence they face is due to the denial of the innocence, care, etc. that cis white womanhood is afforded. When Black TMA people interject to point out that we are also not afforded this presumption, this is read as an encroachment — i.e. that we are attempting to claim something that is not “rightfully” ours. The implicit justification for this lies within the very genital fantasy that animates Chappelle’s declaration that while trans women can have vaginas, they aren’t “real” vaginas. Therefore, Black TMA people are positioned as having the very characteristics associated with the imago of Black men, i.e. “males”, but heightened to an even greater degree. In other words, if “Black males”, as the bio-mythology is to be believed, have intrinsic sexual rapacity and are predatory in nature, then Black TMA people would not only be folded into this, but we would represent a particularly pernicious expression of these facets, as we are, according to the story internalized by Black TME people, willingly attempting to gain proximity to and occupy a space that is “reserved” by a sex-as-class that we ostensibly oppress.

It should therefore come as no surprise that anti-trans activism at the structural, systemic, and institutional levels are spear-headed by concerns such as trans women in sports, trans women in bathrooms, trans women in feminist spaces, trans women in domestic violence shelters, etc. These are all avenues that can be easily translated into concerns of the “safety” of “real women”. Consequently, this “safety” is by necessity always under threat and therefore translates to trans women, particularly Black trans women/transfems as always being threatening. We are therefore always positioned as aggressors. We are therefore never deserving of the presumption of innocence. We are therefore divorced from the “right” to claim “sanity” while simultaneously occupying the position of “manipulator” at any and all times. We therefore are, so it goes, only and merely deserving of violent transgressions upon our mind, body, and soul.

Black feminism and Black queer theory have thus far tried, and failed, to avoid employing these scripts through crude intergrationism. Violence upon Black flesh has been read through the violation of specifically “female” flesh. Some Black AFAB people who are themselves trans have pointed to academia being predominently cis which therefore justifies being Anti-Theory, but they largely fail to stop themselves from incorporating the resulting transmisogynoir that it brings. This is because, through semiotic transposition and genital fantasies, the hypervisibility of Black “males” within Black academia that has been stated by Black feminists to be responsible for the resulting invisibility of Black “females” is translated onto Black trans women, usually implicitly. This is why we are delegated to the periphery. We are spoken about and around while our actual experience is largely delegated to the realm of the Unthought. There is no reason, so the story goes, to speak of sexual violation of Black TMA people in any significant depth because to do so would only reify the centering of the sexual violation of Black “males”. This results in a cruel irony, where the Black feminist critique that Black cis women’s bodies are both hypervisible and invisible repreoduces this with Black trans women and Black TME Anti-Theorists take up this torch and run with it while declaring “center Black trans women”.

When Black feminism reads the criminalization of the bodies and therefore agency of Black “females” as being representative of the criminationalization of Black Womanhood, we again witness the pernicious semiotic transposition and genital fantasies at work. The criminalization of Black Womanhood in terms of agency is equated with the womb and by proxy the vagina. Black trans women who engaged in sex work and were the subject of genital fantasies not only to end up being criminalized and imprisoned by the State, but also done so specifically on the basis of claiming Womanhood. This was a transgression on the basis of a self-articulation of agency not only on a sexual basis, but at the very level of Being itself.

To be clear, it is important to further understand that this is a matter of class as well. A bifurcated gender labor system is integral to sustaining a racialized carceral system that creates a feedback loop that prevents accumulation of Black wealth and essentializes this failing both biologically and ontologically. Prison, as a institution of the systemic disappearance of people, ensures a perpetual dispossession of Black trans women/transfems and the criminal justice system writ large facilitates this at every step of the way — from increased police scrutiny (often through presuming every Black trans woman is a sex worker), to increased sentencing and heightened cash bail, to, once being imprisoned, forced to engage in “male prison labor”. We are then wrapped into the mold of the endless debate about the “breakdown of the Black family”. We are positioned as “failed men” and therefore “failed providers”. On the one hand, we are presented as being representative of “Black male’s” supposedly predatory and manipulative nature and on the other we are presented as being the embodiment of the “Black male’s” failure to properly fulfill their “role” as men. On another axis, Black trans women/transfems are a reminder of the gender variety European colonizers found within various indigenous African societies that was accompanied with labor relations that was fundamentally incongruent with the labor relations that was necessary for colonial extraction as well as capital accumulation. This gender variety is collapsed and therefore recontextualized as “proof” that Black people, including cis Black women, are always merely approximating, at best, gender as human genre. In other words, Black trans women/transfems are positioned as the embodiment of everything that is “wrong” with Black people.

I find that the insistence by AFAB people that Black TMA people “educate” them has less to do with wanting to understand our analyses and more to do with a desire to be as invasive as possible while circumventing our automatic responses that we have developed against more direct attempts to do so. Despite being complicit in transmisogynoir and being able to pull out transmisogynist tropes at the drop of a hat the moment they are in conflict with Black TMA people, they somehow navigate the world as though transmisogynoir is conceptually “beyond” them. This bizarre contradiction is further seen in, to once again reiterate, the (true) claim that the academy is parasitic upon the margins, and yet they do not seem to be interested in the possibility that the transmisogynoir endemic to the academy is an expression of the sentiments found within those who exist at the margins but who are TME.

From this perspective, the trend from Black TME people to insist on the supposed “inaccessibility” of the theorizing of Black TMA people is nothing short of projection through an attribution of proximity with the academy to us that not only doesn’t exist but in reality applies to them in terms of shared agreement on the matter of transmisogynoir. (In)accessibility is a function of structural power and therefore, as the term indicates, access. Consequently, what Black TME people mistake for (in)accessibility is in reality (un)familiarity — in other words, what they are seeking isn’t accessibility, but ease of consumption. However the expectation that transmisogynoir be easy to consume for them is an absurd one, as even Black TMA people are barred from this despite the fact that we experience it. This is a reality formed through structural and institutional formations also mediated by interpersonal violence which seeks to endlessly cast doubt upon our experience. We turn to theory to make sense of this gaslighting and our condition and positionality in general. This theory does not exist for the sake of Black TME people, and no amount of “we all bleed red” or “we’re all Black” will change that.

[1] I use AFAB not as an identity label, but a method of communicating an assignment that both engenders and is ground in a biomythology that has implications for sociogeny and ontogeny.

[2] An observation by Vogt bears on this subject: he says, it is a "remarkable circumstance, that  the difference between the sexes, as regards the cranial cavity, increases with the development of the race, so that the male European excels much more the female, than the negro the negress. Welcker confirms this statement of Huschke from his measurements of negro and  German skulls."

[3] I would like to emphasize that the influence of this text is to such a degree that it is responsible for popularizing the terms “homosexuality” and “bisexuality” in English lexicon and therefore making them terms referencing sexual orientations.