BY SARAH CAVAR ’20
On Oct. 21, 2018, the New York Times reported that, under the Trump administration, the word “transgender” may be “defined out of existence.” It took me a long time to find the capacity to read any related coverage; even then, it was only in preparation for a class discussion one week after the news emerged that I grudgingly opened several articles on the topic. There are no words for the fatigue I feel at this continual need to beg eloquently for my own humanity –– now, even my own existence. That said, I was less surprised than others at this push for a redefinition of “sex” to conform to binary logics. After all, to fully acknowledge the existence of people who defy the binary bounds of sex and gender would be to expose a fatal weakness within the existing status quo: the sex binary that is a key component of sexist values is fake. Why would the Trump administration –– an administration publicly concerned with the maintenance of a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy –– allow any space for it to be challenged?
It is true that for the duration of the Obama administration, LGBTQ+ people received ever-greater acknowledgement from medical and educational institutions, as well as the popular media and the government itself. That being said, the growing “pro-LGBT” sentiment extended only to those who are otherwise white, attractive, able and gender-conforming.
There have also been gains, however limited, in the area of transgender rights and awareness. The visibility and success of celebrities such as Janet Mock and Laverne Cox and emerging legislation to support nonbinary gender markers on legal documentation in California and other states have allowed for increased recognition of trans people as, well, people. But this surface-level recognition of gender variance has done nothing to trouble the notion of binary sex that underpins this white supremacist patriarchy. Furthermore, the way surface-level reforms that fail to acknowledge the fallacies of the sex binary leaves reactionary administrations like this one ample space to roll back what few protections we might be granted.
The Department of Health and Human Services aims to define sex in a way that is, as the New York Times reports, “‘biological; […] objective and administrable’” for the purposes of Title IX protections. If anyone wishes to “challenge” their assigned sex, they must undergo genetic testing. This caveat tells me a great deal about the weaknesses both in this proposal and in the idea of “sex” in general. Consider the simplistic way that medical professionals assign sex (and thus, gender) to most infants. When I was coercively assigned “female” at birth, I underwent no genetic testing to ensure that I had XX chromosomes. While most defenders of a biologized “sex” cite hormones, chromosomes and genitalia as all contributing to a sex of either male or female, an infant will usually be assigned a sex at birth based solely on their external genitalia.
The supposed clarity of sex assignment also leaves out intersex people, a group frequently ignored by non-intersex trans activists, too. For intersex people, sex/gender assignment is sometimes accompanied by physical violence, including infant and child genital mutilation. Consider, for example, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), medically marked as an intersex condition. According to the Intersex Society of North America, infants with AIS are almost universally assigned female at birth, having been born with the lower part of their vaginas, but missing the upper part and cervix. This can result in young people with AIS being non-consensually given vaginoplasties, solely to allow vaginally penetrative sex to occur.
Not all intersex bodies are so easily defined as such. There is great variation in the percentage of Americans who are deemed intersex in the first place, because its definition shifts depending on who is measuring. Because the category of sex is an invention rather than an objective truth, there is not even a simple way to determine who exactly its dissidents are.
The “transgender ally” fact sheets I first began reading as a preteen (when I still only saw myself as an ally) took great pains to distinguish “gender” from “sex.” There is a legitimate distinction there: namely, that sex is legally and medically produced, while gender constitutes one’s position under patriarchy in regard to labor, roles and social norms. This was not the way that those fact sheets explained the difference. Instead, the “social construction of gender” was understood to mean that gender is sex’s “made up” counterpart; that sex is an undeniable fact and binary gender is an icky, transphobic add-on. However seemingly progressive, this rhetoric aligns completely with the Trump administration’s statement: that males and females can “pretend” to be whichever gender they like, but in the end, the supposed objectivity of sex will prove us deviants still.
Gender norms established by the sex binary exist in direct service of heterosexuality, and are foundational for (literally) reproducing the status quo. Make no mistake, cisgender lesbian, gay, bisexual and pansexual people: an attack on sex/ gender diversity is an attack on you, too. Without the sex binary, heterosexuality (attraction to “the opposite sex”) wouldn’t exist as such, and the notion that attraction to the “same sex” was unnatural would cease to make sense. The specter of the trans deviant always has and always will loom large above each cis gay person, too. History that conceived of gay people as gender “inverts” has not simply disappeared from the homophobic mind.
Ultimately, any rights given to us that continue to rely on this bizarre system of sex/gender predestination will always be at risk of rollbacks by an increasingly right-wing government, which aims to consolidate its power by destroying dissidents. An effective erasure of transgender and/or intersex existence is near-inevitable unless we radically rethink the way we have medicalized bodies out of their own personhood.