Ungendering and the "Denial of Femininity"

The limitation of "center Black trans women/fems" from Black TME people maybe wouldn't be so evident if not accompanied by the liberal and defanged frameworks and attempts at showing solidarity with us from them. In practice, "centering" us does not mean a commitment to being accomplices towards our aims of achieving material gains and self-determination, but rather it means "validating" our claim and/or proximity to womanhood.

This is a symbolic gesture and one laced with a number of presumptions of "womanhood", including the legitimacy of the category and the story that describes its supposed creation. The bourgeois hold over Black feminism precisely exists because the project of attempting to "expand" woman to "include" Black trans TMA people is as self-defeating as trying to "normalize" queer culture through sanitizing Pride.

One would assume Black queer feminism would be more sensitive to such attempts to defang Black feminism but even it has fallen prey to what Wynter refers to as "mist[aking] the Map for the Territory." Rather than considering that it is in the interests of Black TMA people that we would like to construct an entirely new terrain altogether, they wonder if perhaps we simply need to explore the terrain just a bit more.

For Black TME non-men, the violence of ungendering lies in the dispossession of something. They may give a number of specific instances of this, but at the end of the day the exclusion from the category woman is violent because it denies them femininity. They are denied innocence, fragility, etc. and therefore are open to gratuitous violence—this is the story that they tell. But the violence of ungendering from this perspective is inherently limiting because it requires us to think of womanhood qua femininity that is undeserving of gratuitous violence.

This reifying of a feminine/masculine dichotomy casts aside not only "masculine" Black TMA people, but also those of us who navigate the interstices of this dichotomy to simultaneously accept and embody "masculinity" but also reject it. If I lack the "femininity" to be dispossessed of, from where exactly does the violence of ungendering stem from when I declare myself "woman" and met back with a resounding "no" by this world? Black (queer) feminism has failed to satisfactorily answer the questions of how the world rejects the girl within me while I claim her/them/him and how I simultaneously reject femininity if it is the case that denial of femininity embodies the violence that marks the experience of Black womanhood—therefore I turn to Black transfeminism.

I turn to Black transfeminism because I cannot help but read a certain idealistic strain within Black (queer) feminism that uncovers the aspects of the story of humanity that has been buried and plastered over by Euromodernity and yet attempts to replace it with an idealized story of their own, one in which pre-colonial gender formations lacked their own class and labor divisions. When Europeans noticed the gender variation among Africans, they reframed this as as lack of sexual differentiation in order to reify a racial hierarchy in which the more "advanced" races were those with the most sexual distinction according to a strict binary. This is misread as Europeans refusing femininity to African women, but how does this account for Mary Jones, who was presented in a lithograph featuring art of her adorned in a wig, beautiful dress, jewelry, a purse, and other "women's accessories" only for her to be referred to as "The Man-Monster" in the title? Or the case of Mary Ann Waters, who was characterized by a pickup notice as being "a Negro Man, who calls himself Mary Ann Waters" but then describes her dress and the time that she had spent "hiring out in the city of Baltimore as a woman for the last three years". Waters had maintained that she was free, however she was repeatedly misgendered and her claim to freedom cast into doubt because she lived as a Black woman.

Waters and Jones were free Black women. They were free Black women who were also gender fugitives who pursued gender maroonage and subjected to captivity on that basis because they were made fungible. They also were caricaturized—their femininity were emphasized in an ironic twist in order to reify gender fungibility of Black flesh. They both committed a specific transgression as defined by the carceral state—self-possession. To reduce this to a mere denial of their femininity betrays the struggle of flight and self-naming that they engaged in, i.e. self-determination.