Joey L./ACLU
Chase Strangio (r) met with ACLU client Chelsea Manning after Manning's release from prison in 2017.
One day, while waiting for a friend at Penn Station in New York City, I was approached by an older man. I was leaning against the wall outside of TGI Fridays when he grabbed my crotch and asked, “How much?”
The fact of my gender transgression signaled to this person that I was waiting to engage in an exchange of sex for goods. That, in turn, suggested to him that my body was available to him to touch without my consent.
I was leaning against the wall outside of TGI Fridays when he grabbed my crotch and asked, “How much?”
The exchange was upsetting and yet, I was not surprised. It was not the first time I had been assumed to be a sex worker while out in public, nor was it even close to the first time I had been touched without consent. Each intrusion has had its own permanence. Sometimes they coordinate to diminish my sense of self, other times they fade into the distance and I reclaim the movement of my body in the world.
My trans body, by existing as it does, destabilizes conventional assumptions about binary sexual difference. The illegibility of a body with a petite frame, pubescent facial hair, flat chest, tight pants, and higher pitched voice invites stares. I become something to be figured out and then, once people’s gazes are fixed, to be sexualized, controlled, surveilled, consumed, dominated.
I am The Other in a society that needs binaries, that deploys notions of gender difference to sustain patriarchal norms. I am transgender and transgressive, and I am part of a community that is dying because of our threat to the “order of things” as they are. I have experienced deep anguish, discrimination, trauma, discomfort, and violence connected to this transgression of convention. I have watched my friends and community members die by suicide, preventable illness, and violence because transgression is punished with corrective assaults on the opportunities we need to survive.
To be trans in 2019 is to wonder whether the government will announce on any given day its intention to excise you from federal law; to endure the consistent and tired suggestion that your existence is up for debate; to experience internal and external alienation from your physical body; and, at the same time to thrive in ways unimagined ten years ago because of the relentless fight of our transcestors, mostly of color, who died so many of us could live.
None of these various struggles as I experience them, however, change the fact that I am white and trans. And the attacks on my body—individual and systemic—have not taken and could not take away the many ways that I am aligned with power. I exist in public, at Penn Station and elsewhere, without the sense that the world “intended that [I] should perish,” as James Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1962. That is the power of my whiteness. It cloaks my body in protection and serves to channel my voice and my existence into the realm of the legible. And my legibility has always allowed me to imagine a future for myself and to believe that I have a right to self-determination in that future.
The power of my whiteness cloaks my body in protection and serves to channel my voice and my existence into the realm of the legible.
That future is not only one that I hold but one that my parents and their parents held as well. For all the pain I carry, I do not carry the inherited trauma of generations whose labor was uncompensated, whose existence criminalized, whose reproductive capacities were surveilled, controlled, and in some cases, eliminated for eugenic imperatives. My relatives did not survive chattel slavery, they were not separated from their families by borders and conquests imposed by white outsiders, they did not wonder each day whether they and their children would be killed for existing. And that means I was born without that pain in my bones. I have accumulated my own pain, but that is different.
The white Other still benefits from white supremacy. We face discrimination, trauma, pain, violence, exclusion, but it is not the goal of our societal structures. It is more often a product of it.
In “A Letter to My Nephew,” Baldwin wrote to his nephew and namesake, “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being.” This absence of worth that we prescribe for people of color is part of the dialectic of sustaining the inherent worth of our whiteness. That is the organizing principle of our society, founded on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery. What Baldwin consistently named is that whiteness and white people’s perception of our whiteness must be discussed, understood, and contended with if we are to ever celebrate freedom and embrace racial justice.
The danger of white Otherness, whether it be experienced by poor white people, LGBTQ white people, disabled white people, or white women (cis and trans), is that we equate our real pain and trauma with the systemic, deliberate, and foundational exclusion of people of color, particularly black people, from the very notion of humanity conceived in the American conscience. Even our Otherness is leveraged in the service of white supremacy. Whether intentional or not, our unearned centrality in public discourse and sites of power serves to diminish the spaces that can be and are held by people of color who do and do not share the identity characteristics that mark us as The Other.
So, for me and other white trans people, this means that our experience is centered in conversations both about trans-ness and about discrimination and violence generally, to the exclusion of non-trans people of color and to the exclusion and erasure of trans people of color. And of course, within the trans community, it is trans people of color who experience the highest rates of violence and discrimination.
For the last several years, the number of reported murders of trans people has been growing, and the overwhelming majority of those murdered were trans women of color, mostly black trans women. In the context of employment, education, housing, and the criminal legal system, trans people of color experience higher rates of discrimination than their white counterparts. And yet, it is often white trans people who are given a platform to talk about discrimination generally, and particularly about discrimination targeting the trans community.
This centrality of the white “victim” explains why, for one recent example, in the immediate aftermath of the leaked new sets of disgraced comedian Louis C.K., almost all of the headlines focused on his mocking of the Parkland shooting survivors and nonbinary pronouns. Far fewer people reported on his mocking the bodies of Asian and black men.
This is no doubt because the majority of the Parkland survivors in the media are white, and speaking about trans-ness in the abstract can be filtered or imagined through the lens of whiteness. By contrast, mocking the penis sizes of men of color is a familiar and comfortable part of the American discourse and serves whiteness. The outrage becomes fixed first on the commentary that is viewed as an attack on innocent white people.
None of these various struggles as I experience them, however, change the fact that I am white and trans. And the attacks on my body—individual and systemic—have not taken and could not take away the many ways that I am aligned with power.
Our duty as white people who are Othered in society is to name the ways in which our discrimination, our hurt, our alienation, does not erase the power we simultaneously hold, and to watch for the ways it also serves white supremacy. This means recognizing when we are positioned as the desirable white victim of discrimination in contrast to communities of color—who are either erased or deemed unruly or undeserving of being named and recognized.
The need to unpack our power and privilege in moments of pain and hurt is counterintuitive to most of us. We rightly want to sit in the pain of being targeted. But holding our own pain cannot come at the expense of obscuring the machinations of power that keep us safe even as we are Othered. And when we inevitably turn to the legal system for redress for our pain, we must there too recognize how we are serving a system that is designed to benefit us as white people.
In the mainstream legal nonprofit space in which I operate, there has been a long overdue push to deepen our equity, diversity, and inclusion work. For years, the work has focused on legal reform to the exclusion of work committed to power building and organizing in communities experiencing the most violence from our legal systems. Yet, within the largely white-dominated liberal nonprofit structure, these efforts have done little to destabilize existing power dynamics.
We speak often of “directly impacted communities” when referring to people of color, trans people, disabled people, incarcerated people, immigrants, and other historically marginalized groups, usually in the context of these belated and often symbolic efforts to identify groups whose voices have historically been excluded from our work. This discourse betrays our deep limitations.
The reality, of course, is that every one of us is “directly impacted” by the systems we work to change. The language is intended to suggest that some people working to make change are not impacted by the law and must call in those who, by virtue of being “directly impacted,” have a unique (and important) perspective on what changes are needed. But that expertise is situated as nonimpacted and white (as well as cisgender, nondisabled, male, heterosexual) and “impact” becomes synonymous with exclusion. The result is that we make invisible the impact of the law that deliberately elevates some to positions of power and relegates others to the ever-outsider role of nonexpert impacted person.
The structures of power remain invisible and we merely rearrange the mechanisms of violence rather than dismantle them.
I have watched myself flirt with the intoxication of power that comes with being positioned as an expert (a white, masculine lawyer) who carries the “directly impacted” credibility of having experienced pain and discrimination. But my experiences in Penn Station or at the doctor’s office or at work are legible because I am white, masculine, and a lawyer. I become an appropriate voice for a story of discrimination but then suddenly there is room for only one voice. I speak in and traverse various spaces, and easily forget that my voice is not the most valid, but rather the most trusted. And it is trusted because whiteness is trusted by whiteness and power is cloaked in whiteness.
We cannot be freedom fighters until we are honest with ourselves. We did not liberate ourselves from the structures of white supremacy at the end of the Civil War. We have been building those structures every day since 1865 and every day before that.
I am transgender and transgressive. I trespass the ideology of binary gender difference that has been a tool of white supremacy and patriarchy. But I am also a tool of white supremacy and patriarchy, and my Otherness does not change that. I can and must hold both those truths.