Trans Girls and the State of Exception

Around a decade ago, the philosopher Brian Massumi wrote Ontopower, an attempt to make sense of the politics of 21st century America. It is a… thickly written work of political philosophy, in the Geertzian sense, which means it has a lot of complicated arguments with inaccessible language. I think it does something very interesting, underneath the opaque language, in that it tries to explain why America was so insistent on normalizing a state of preemption after 9/11. There are useful ideas in it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend reading it. I’m still wrestling with it. It is thickly written.

Anyway, Massumi develops a really interesting idea in this book: ontopower, a self-consciously Foucaldian term to explain the post-9/11 effort at implementing “full-spectrum dominance” of the War on Terror, from imagined threats (nuclear weapons in Iraq) to civil threats (seeking privacy from pervasive surveillance), to ideological threats (anyone opposed to the invasion of Iraq). In this discussion, he deploys a fascinating term, “the logic of future threat,” which is worth thinking about for a minute. In brief: Massumi (correctly) identifies what he calls “the affective logic of potential,” or the US government’s tendency to focus on what may emerge from a threat matrix, regardless of likelihood or immediacy, as a means of applying the war on terror’s preemptive logic to unrelated issues driven by the feelings of officials. Put a bit more simply: the war on terror’s preemptive logic has been expanded to a universal tendency, not just a temporary state to prevent follow up attacks. 9/11 was 25 years ago.

There is an interesting thing about the logic of future threat: it doesn’t have to be real. Officials can worry about, say, someone mixing chemical precursors in a plane bathroom in order to explode an airplane, even if doing so is so impractical as to be functionally impossible while actual would-be plane bombers are so cartoonishly inept they get stopped by their seat mates. The threat might not be viable, but the feeling of that threat, the sense of insecurity and fear, persists, which then becomes permanentized into law. Crucially, Massumi argues, this fearmongering approach to security also filters into other areas of daily life. It’s a powerful argument with real explanatory power.

There is a logic of future threat in the anti-trans movement (notice how much anti-trans policymaking is aimed solely at women, never men?). So-called “gender critical” bigots routinely invoke a fear of trans women infiltrating toilets and locker rooms to assault “real” women, even if that simply doesn’t happen. Trans women are far more likely to be victims of cis women (and cis men, enforcing a bathroom rule) than they are perpetrators. Even supposed examples of this phenomenon are mostly exaggerated or outright lies. Rapists don’t need to dress up like a trans girl in order to assault women; they do that anyway, usually to women they already know, without bothering with a gender pretense. It is a fake fear, driven by bigotry not anything real. But that fear gender criticals say they feel of being assaulted in the bathroom, though, that sense of threat from a man who deceived everyone in society, taking hormones, changing his name, and dressing differently, just to assault a stranger in a restaurant toilet, becomes self-reinforcing. You can’t argue with it (how dare you dismiss my fear?), and you certainly can’t disprove it. That’s what makes the logic of future threat so appealing to fascists. By invoking it, it becomes permanent.

Policing gender in the bathroom is an ancient problem for trans people. In his 1998 book Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam argues that policing not-femme-enough people in the toilet is ultimately an act of misogyny. It tells women that they aren’t women enough, which one might think self-described feminists would find troubling.

“However, having one’s gender challenged in the women’s restroom is a frequent occurrence in the lives of androgynous or masculine women; indeed, it is so frequent that one wonders whether the category ‘woman,’ when used to designate public functions, is completely outmoded… In these bathroom confrontations, the gender-ambiguous person first appears as not-women (“You are in the wrong bathroom!”), but then the person appears as something even more scary, not-man (“No, I am not,” spoken in a voice recognized as not-male). Not-man and not-woman, the gender-ambiguous bathroom user is also not androgynous or in-between; this person is gender deviant.”1

It doesn’t really seem to matter that anti-trans bathroom laws have disastrous effects on trans girls, or maybe it is more accurate to say the entire purpose of bathroom laws is to harm trans girls. It is a rhetorical move designed to silence debate while reframing bigotry as self-defense, little different from a white nationalist claiming “great replacement” to justify throwing children into disease-riddled prison camps. It looks a lot like a thought-terminating cliché, though I think it does slightly different work.

Trans girls playing sports is another area where the logic of future threat exerts itself. Right now, there is capital-D discourse about Sophie Cunningham, a WNBA player who has begun saying a bunch of nasty things about the possibility of a trans girl playing ball against her. To be clear, there are no openly trans women in the WNBA, nor is there widespread awareness of a trans superstar in high school or college basketball who might be drafted. It is a “fear” that comes from nowhere: a threat felt once, expanded into ideology, enforced through dominance. So, when Riley Gaines, still upset at tying for fifth place with a trans girl that she made it into her entire personality, shows up to WNBA games to do photoshoots with people wearing anti-trans shirts, it’s worth acknowledging that she is protesting something that doesn’t exist. It’s fake.

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Just as Halberstam warned, these beliefs end up all harming women, straight, queer, cis, and trans, and that’s the most visible in sports. Semenya Caster and Imani Khelif are women who are arbitrarily excluded from competition out of a fear of “biological men” distorting the sport (men of extraordinary biology, like Michael Phelps’s abnormally long arms or Jonas Vingegaard‘s extreme VO2 max, are allowed to benefit from their bodies). To repeat: cis men are not taking hormones, surgically altering their bodies, changing their names, and dressing differently just to win at women’s sports. It’s fake. It’s a fear used to justify anti-trans policies, not anything “real.”

I am very pointedly ignoring that the athletes being used in this crusade are all pretty blonde girls — the politics of protecting women as if they are rare sportscars is a bit beyond scope here — but it’s not immaterial. It’s also not immaterial that deploying these future threats to justify a fascist spread of laws is very lavishly financed by bigoted billionaires, who are not shy about censorship, financial ruination, and deploying the police against anyone not deemed girly enough to pee in a stall. Again, an old, shitty story.

I’m not arguing that transphobia is the fault of the war on terror era — it was around long before and will be around long after we decide that era is over (is it over?). But I am arguing that the success of George W. Bush’s rhetorical maneuvers, using the past fear of a threat to drive current policy even if that threat never materialized, is relevant here. To repeat: there is no evidence that the things gender critical and trans-exclusionary feminists deploy to justify harsh laws targeting trans women actually happen. They just don’t. There is no trans “problem” in our society or anyone else’s society. It is fake. Imagined. That feeling of threat, though, endures, however fake it may be, and in this case has become a way of enforcing violent bigotry. I think it’s important to focus on that point: the end point of this rhetoric is bigotry and domination, not safety. No one is protected by gender critical policies; they only harm.

Slowly, the US has begun to move past the threat politics of the Bush era: people are less trusting of the military, less accepting of the government’s justifications for violence, and most certainly don’t believe the lies that the Trump administration pumps into the public sphere with eager media amplification. After a certain point, the human toll of such politics become impossible to ignore. But that human toll of the war on terror has been extreme, measured in megadeaths between Bush, Obama, and Trump. I hope we don’t force trans people to endure similar horrors before reconsidering the way fake threats are used to impose hateful ideologies on them. But I also worry: queer rights generally are losing public support under the onslaught of anti-trans bigotry.

I wish I had answers here, but apart from solidarity I’m not sure yet where to begin. What I do think should happen first is for more trans people to be centered in this discourse: not everyone has trans or queer friends, which makes personal connection hard to scale. Trans voices are absent from the WNBA controversy, they were absent from any locker room argument, and they are intentionally excluded from media discussions. We can fight instead is highlighting what trans people are thinking and feeling, and importantly what they are telling us they need. I don’t think those needs are unreasonable (jobs, money, housing, safety, respect, dignity), so maybe we can start there.

Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1998, pg. 20-21