Contours: the mediation of transgression

In June Rachel Dolezal, a professor and the Chairperson of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP was thrust into the center of a national conversation on the nature of identity. Caitlin Jenner’s transition was leading a debate on the way America relates to those who break out of their assigned roles, so when a local newspaper discovered that Dolezal, who had been presenting as mixed-race for several decades, was, in fact, solely of european descent, the story caught like wildfire and was incorporated into the already heated discussion on trans* people. Reactionaries, expectedly tried to use Dolezal as a method by which to discredit transgender people. “See,” they said, “transracialism is a ridiculous concept, thus, trans* people don’t exist at all and those who claim to be don’t deserve our respect. QED!”

Of course, those who care about civil rights found this argument unconvincing. “Of course transgender people exist and deserve our respect,” was the near universal response of progressive thinkers. Unfortunately, response to Dolezal herself was nowhere near as unified or as kind. ‘Bizarre.’ ‘Privileged.’ ‘Modern blackface’ and ‘Racist white bitch.’ were all titles applied to Dolezal by the left. This did nothing to quell the reactionary right, who began pointing their fingers and screaming ‘HYPOCRITES’ at the social justice community. Unfortunately, at least at first glance, they appear correct. If the we, as people who fundamentally care about respect and equality for all people, why should we not respect those who wish to perform a race or culture other than those which they were born with? If we want to resolve this seeming conflict, we either need to construct a rock solid logical argument for our our disrespect of people like Dolezal (whom, for the sake of brevity, I will refer to as transethnic) and why that same reasoning does not apply to transgender people. The alternative is to change the practice. In order to do this, we can start by modifying the axioms upon which the current praxis is based until we arrive at a conceptualization that is logically consistent with progressive first principles.

Starting off, let’s document the most common belief and practice in progressive circles. This theory centers on two axioms. First, it holds that, generally speaking, transgression is a privileged action that reinforces extant social hierarchy, and second that race and gender are two fundamentally different types of category, in that race and ethnicity are purely social constructs, while gender, though it may have constructed aspects to it, is not. The reasoning follows that we owe respect to transgender people not because their supposed transgression is irrelevant to their personhood, but because they are not transgressing. If gender is inherent, it is not aberrant to bring one’s performance in line with one’s ‘brainsex.’

From these axioms, it also holds that those in progressive spaces should not respect, and should in fact shun transethnic people, because, as race is not inherent, these people are transgressing, and are thus using their privilege to reinforce systemic disenfranchisement.

The axioms from which this conclusion flows are problematic for several reasons. First, it assumes a purely vertical hierarchy, and thus reinforces the centering of masculinity and whiteness, but, perhaps most glaringly, it denies and central tenant of post-structural feminism: that gender is a social construct.

In her well known and controversial work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler uses the tools of post-structuralism to argue that gender is a normalized symbolic performance that has little basis in reality. In essence, to quote Simone De Beauvoir, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” As the west tends to be more willing to shun discrimination based on inherent qualities, LGBT advocates have pushed to have gender and sexuality recognized as fundamental qualities. In the short term, this is an effective method, but in the long term, it ends up reinforcing structural inequalities.

Clearly, the central postulates of the prevailing hypothesis aren’t consistent with our present understanding of mediated reality. Let’s begin by reconsidering the second axiom. What if we hold both gender and race as solely social constructs. This is the philosophical underpinning of TERF (trans* exclusionary [radical/reactionary] feminists) ideology. TERFS believe the same thing of transgender people as the leftist majority believes of transethnic people: that they’re simply those who have socially assigned privilege trying to gain access to spaces carved by and for those who don’t. TERFS have become predictably toxic in most progressive circles. Their rage and willingness to align with the radical christian right to prevent nondiscrimination ordinances from passing mean that they are part of a fringe that nobody on the left wants to admit exists.

When we look at TERF ideology, the flaw becomes quickly apparent.* There is no proof that those who transgress categories are inherently damaging to the cause of social justice. This leads us to the final possible new progressive social praxis: given that social categories are constructed and then performed, and the goal of the left is to encourage respect and equality for all people, then progressives should defend transgressive people, and fight stereotyping of them just as we would fight stereotyping in any other categories or groups.

This seems to me to be the most rational approach. So far, nobody has been able to articulate a rational, logically consistent, respectful approach for denying Rachel Dolezal and other transethnic people their humanity, and if there is no good reason to attack a transgression, then we should not. If we do, we risk becoming the social conservatives whom we fight against.
Rachel Dolezal, a transethnic individual, was subjected to a series of vicious attacks by the social left. Fundamentally, the philosophical underpinnings of this attack were flimsy, and not backed up by evidence. Using this event as an example, we can identify and deconstruct the symbols that toxify leftist philosophy, and reconstruct more solid philosophical roots.