SE02 E03: Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers
[intro music plays]
Ding:
I think about how gender works by starting from how trans people do gender instead of trying to retrofit trans people back into existing conceptual frameworks and social institutions. I think of this as a kind of a difference between, transfeminism versus transinclusive feminism in the sense that you have, like, a transinclusion problem only insofar as you didn't include trans people in the first place.
[music continues]
Anna
There we go. Super.
Anna
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast. I'm Anna Mudde.
Kristin
And I'm Kristin Rodier. On thinking bodies, we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. We collage with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
Anna
And maybe even a DIT experiment… “doing it together.”
Kristin
Right. We do it together on this podcast and we share the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Alex:
Hi, I'm Dr. Alex Adamson, and I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at Babson College.
Ding:
And Hi, this is Ding. I teach philosophy at Barnard College in New York City, where I'm also affiliated with the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
[intro music fades out; pensive music fades in]
Kristin:
How do we communicate gender? What are we communicating about ourselves when we communicate gender? How do stereotypes and dominant structures frustrate and limit this communication, even going so far as to justify violence as a means of doing so?
And how do we forge communities of meaning that resist this violence and uphold the validity of trans identities, maybe even undermining the idea that we must communicate our genders in legible ways?
[music fades out]
This is our third and penultimate episode from our Trans Thinking // Thinking Trans conference. Today's episode is on “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” by Talia Mae Bettcher from 2007. I'm going to play Anna some clips from two philosophers that I talked to at the Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking conference we attended. Are you ready, Anna?
Anna
I am!
Talia Mae Bettcher's a professor of philosophy, and she remarkably produced what can be regarded as one of, if not the, first piece of squarely trans feminist philosophy by a philosopher. She's drawing on a diverse number of sources like Angela Davis, Vivian Namaste, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others.
Bettcher identifies herself as trans and draws on her experiences as a trans person embedded in a trans community, and so is speaking to practices from trans communities she's part of.
Kristin 3:20
Yes, uh, and I just say, I've said this before, I just love footnotes and acknowledgements. I always want to read them.
Anna 3:27
Yeah! Yeah.
Kristin 3:27
And I see here in the article that Bettcher is thanking María Lugones and crediting her for discussions that influenced her thinking. So while I'm reading, I'm looking for that Lugonesian influence and maybe we can think about that through the rest of our episode.
Anna 3:43
Yesss. And I'm reading her brand new book called Beyond Personhood with great enthusiasm and there, too, she's really thinking about María Lugones.
Kristin 3:52
Yes, and we've all waited for this book for quite some time and so, we want to encourage our listeners to check out the article that we're talking about today, but then also go beyond that and see what's, what's developed, uh, in the author's thinking. And this title, Beyond Personhood…
Anna
Yes. It's… it's so intriguing. And, um, and you really do see Lugones's deep influence on her work there, which is an influence I share with her. Bettcher's, um, uh, Bettcher notes that she continued to work on these topics and refine and clarify her view, um, thinking about personhood and beyond personhood, thinking about that over, over time. And so as with any author, one, one article is just a snapshot in time. Um, and that thinking's always developing. So it's been a really nice, uh, reminder of that to read the book at the same time as we've been reading this, rereading this piece together.
Kristin:
Rereading and rereading. Yeah, there's so much here. So, so we don't normally do this, uh, but I'm just going to ask Anna to read from the abstract, which is sort of the author's summary, right, of the article. I'm going to get you to read the abstract. It's really brief and clear, and it tells you just what we're in for.
Anna 5:09
It says, "This essay examines the stereotype that transgender people are, quote, 'deceivers,' unquote, and the stereotype's role in promoting and excusing transphobic violence. The stereotype derives from a contrast between gender presentation (appearance) and sexed body ([conceived as] concealed reality). Because gender presentation represents genital status, Bettcher argues, people who “misalign” the two are viewed as deceivers. The author shows how this system of gender presentation as genital representation is part of a larger sexist and racist system of violence and oppression,” end quote.
Kristin
Awesome. Okay so a number of points just to frame this article. Terminologies have changed, we use some of Bettcher’s but we have adopted some more contemporary terms like trans as an umbrella, drawing on language from our contributors but also from current language use.
Anna
Yeah. And because Bettcher's often outlining the ideas or concepts that are incorrect but presumed in dominant narratives about trans people, I feel like you and I are going to be using a lot of very heavy scare quotes in this episode, which the listener isn't going to see, but I think we'll try to remember to indicate so that you can hear them.
There are air quotes.
Kristin
Right. There are airquotes that are invisible.
Anna
Yes. Right. We'll also just note that, like, there's no line of thought that is more important than your well-being, and this article deals with really difficult topics, including violence against trans people, specifically sexual violence and murder, and specifically as part of strategies to oppress and reinforce the oppression of trans people.
And I mean, we do philosophy because the world is hard and our experiences matter. And so, while we're going to work towards some liberatory and transformational concepts in this episode, please keep in mind that there will be some discussion of sexual assault and murder and transphobia front and center in this article. So, if listening isn't a good idea for you today, please take good care and we'll just catch you next time.
Kristin
Yeah, and something else I was thinking about is… other ways that people can interact with the podcast is with our transcripts online. A person can sort of scroll past and sort of see where they, they might want to or…
Anna
Absolutely. Yeah. That's a really good idea.
Kristin
Yeah. So, so Bettcher is bringing in a lot of things in this article. Media depictions of trans and cis people, a court case, legal defenses, activist speech, assumptions and stereotypes, as well as philosophical concepts. Um, she puts a lot of work into clearly identifying which arguments are from whom in the paper. [Anna agrees] So there's quite a collision course of meaning that she's wading into, um, which makes the article so, so useful. Um, and yeah, so sometimes she's talking to legal advocates to show the limitations of their arguments, trying to push that forward. Sometimes she's talking to trans advocates to extrapolate strategies that might be less than useful could, [or] could be modified. Uh, and sometimes she's talking to and within trans communities, bringing all these complex engagements together for feminist philosophers and maybe even philosophers more broadly.
Anna 8:37
Yeah.
Kristin 8:37
I think we could all benefit from this article.
Anna 8:40
Absolutely.
Kristin 8:40
Um, among so many things, this article demonstrates, you know, just this kind of complex knitting of sources that feminist philosophers often have to do.
Anna 8:51
That's so true. And while I was reading this piece again, I noticed that it reads so clearly across these audiences. and so, well, I think one of the ways that Bettcher does this is through the use of case study.
That's something that feminist philosophers often do because it allows for, um, real, right, lived, uh, complexity, but also the complexity of angles and perspectives and, um, sort of real-world application, if you want to put it that way. And so here, the case study is about a murder and the ensuing legal defense, um, coming from that murder.
Kristin 9:22
So, Bettcher frames the article with the story of a trans woman, a child really. She was 17.
Anna 9:28
Yes.
Kristin 9:28
Uh, Gwen Araujo who was just brutally killed by four men in their early twenties and, in front of others at a party in 2002. In the course of events of her murder, she was, she was subjected to forced genital exposure, during which the killers announced that, quote, she was really a man.
There's a longer description of the events and responses in the article, but Bettcher draws out the conditions that make it possible to “excuse” this racialized transphobic violence against Gwen. That is, you know, to “excuse” the inexcusable.
Anna 10:09
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. So, essentially, um, the defendants in this case put forward what is called a trans panic defense, which can take a number of forms, but essentially blames trans people for their own assaults and murders. murders. And so, specifically, in this case, the defendants claim that they were violated by Gwen's quote-unquote “deception.” And this is why the stereotype of deceiver is so important for this article, because the killers in their defense claimed that Gwen was not who she purported to be and that this justified her killing.
Kristin 10:44
Right, right. And their defense, as if this could excuse, is that upon finding out her, quote unquote, “true sex”, they were “provoked” into a heat of passion.
Anna 10:54
Which is, like, odd on the face of it, because, in general, being deceived is taken to be grounds for, like, anger or hurt. It is not generally taken to be grounds for mortal violence.
Kristin 11:06
No, yeah, not only that, the killers claim a sort of second kind of violation from the victim, which Bettcher talks about sort of both of these levels in the paper, but the second kind of violation, which was that because some of them had previously had sex with her, that she violated them.
Anna 11:26
Right.
Kristin 11:26
To quote, from the defense team here, the killer experienced, quote, “a sexual violation so deep, it's almost primal,” unquote [Bettcher, 44]. [Anna responds] And Bettcher writes that this is how the deception becomes a “provocation” [Bettcher, 44, 45]. Bettcher also links this to racial oppressions, where systemic rape of black women by white men of power works hand in hand with rape accusations against black men as tools of racist, you know, formation. [Anna: Yeah. Yeah.] So she writes, “one may not simply argue that transphobic violence is embedded within a system without appreciating the obvious racial aspect of sexual violence and accusations of sexual violence within this country,” end quote [Bettcher 57].
Anna 12:13
Yeah. Um, I'm going to quote from her some more.
Bettcher writes again, uh, “a framework has been deployed where transphobic violence may be excused or justified on the grounds that deception has been involved,” end quote [Bettcher, 51]. So, that framework, the framework of the killers and those who, quote-unquote, “understand” them, or understand them, without scare quotes, produces the sense of deception. And what is that framework?
Kristin 12:41
Mm.
Anna 12:43
Bettcher shows the ways, and she shows this beautifully, the ways that taking things like clothing and other apparel jewelry or hairstyles, for example, are taken as a sign of sexed bodies, an external sign of covered sex bodies, in a really interesting way, yeah.
Kristin 13:00
Right. Like, as a cis woman, my presentation is not taken as a deception.
Anna 13:06
right right yeah
Kristin 13:08
So to sort of be super basic here, you're wearing a skirt, or you have long hair, you're telling us you have a vagina… which the skirt is covering.
Anna 13:19
Right. Yeah! Which your skirt is covering. Right.
Kristin 13:20
Thus, our, thus, our appearance is announcing a certain genital status.
Anna 13:27
Yeah. And so Bettcher notices how certain cultural assumptions take certain clothing to be for men or masculine and other clothing to be for women or feminine. And so it takes people with penises to wear man or masculine clothing and people with vaginas to wear woman or feminine clothing so that our clothing, that is our gender marking, communicates our sex.
Kristin 13:51
Right.
Anna 13:51
Something like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Kristin 13:54
And, it's like, it's communicating a sexed body, but that's of talking about sexual availability and desire…
Anna 14:02
Right.
Kristin 14:02
… as, as much as gender and, and sex. So there's this presumed alignment, let's say, between clothing or hairstyles with genitals, men's clothing, know, just like you were saying.
Anna 14:18
[laughs] Yeah! It’s just so odd! [laughs]
Kristin 14:17
The idea that someone, the idea that someone can quote-unquote “deceive” us about their sex using clothing assumes this kind of a framework, right?
Anna 14:28
yeah. Yeah. And I'm, I mean, I'm laughing, but it is just, like, when we put it that way, it is kind of startling, actually.
Kristin 14:36
Mm.
Anna 14:36
Men's clothing: penises; women's clothing: vaginas… [laughing] It’s a bit, like, it's just a bit… it's laughable in a weird way. Yeah.
Kristin 14:47
And this is sort of the system that Bettcher's trying to unpack, sort of like, how do we, how do we construct deception, but also how do we construct truth?
Anna 14:56
Right. Just so.
[pensive music fades in]
Alex Adamson 15:04
I'm really excited to be invited here to talk about this article, because it's, you know, it's a canonical article in trans philosophy. For me, it was definitely one of the first articles I ever read by a trans philosopher about trans issues. [music fading out] And I feel like coming back to it as I prepared for this, interview, I was reflecting on how this essay lands in different time periods, and, you know, when it came out 2007, versus when I first read it in 2013, versus when I actually first taught it in 2022, and then, now reading it, you know, on, on the way here in 2025.
And I guess so many of the questions in it, I feel, are still so relevant. You know, she talks about what does it mean to be real, the quandaries of what it means to be trans and, and to claim realness in our genders. Um, she also talks about, like, what does it mean to heal ourselves to be real together? And, I mean, I think those questions are, you know, they're as relevant today as they were in 2007.
I guess I feel like when I first read this, I was reading it during the “trans tipping points.” [laughs] And I was reading it in this moment of just feeling like, wow, like, yeah, we had the trans tipping points. We have trans philosophy, we're doing this stuff, we're doing this stuff, things maybe are getting better. And then they shockingly did not get better.
And so when I taught it for the first time in 2022, I'd never taught it before, I’d just read it. And I was really taken aback by how my students unfortunately responded to it, not in the way I guess that I would have wanted them to. But, you know, the article is about the murder of Gwen Araujo. And it opens with a, with a description of how that went down and the legal arguments around it.
And I guess I was hoping that the students would come away, you know, horrified and very excited to talk about reality enforcement, and these questions of communication, of how we understand embodiment, and femininity, masculinity, and I was hoping they were going to link it to feminist issues. Because, of course, in feminist cases with students, they're pretty good. And they're like, “yes, what you wear does not, you know, invite violence or not.” But when it came to trans things, I suddenly found, wow, we've thrown everything out! And I actually had students who, they really went around the room, and they were like, “you know, actually, I wouldn't date a trans person.” And like, “I see trans people on the apps, and I don't swipe right on them.” And it just became everyone agreeing that that's how we were going to do things.
And it was actually the first class I've ever ended early. And I was so angry, and I was so confused. And I just felt like “you were performing the horrible thing that's in the article. And that's why I gave you the article. And you can't even see your ignorance about your ignorance.” And so it made me completely have to rethink how I was going to teach in the class. And I changed my syllabus. And actually, the next day, I had us watch Disclosure. And that was kind of starting to break in. And then we were able to come back to some of these questions about reality enforcement.
But it really took them watching like two hours of the horrible trope over and over and over, to like crack through this hard crust of their completely unreflective, just biases and just their inability to make the connections to feminism, which I feel like is such a backbone of this essay, and a backbone of so many important like trans feminist thinkers that are just like, “look, the issues, it's it's about violence against women. It's about, it's… gender based violence is not radically separated from those conversations.” But it took a really long time for me to get my students there.
[pensive music fades in]
Anna 19:07
[emotional sigh] Ooooowh. Okay. [taking a breath] Yes. That's, um… you end class early. That's what you do. [Kristin agrees] And then you, and then you breathe, and maybe you call someone in your network of university teachers who understands, and you debrief, and maybe you tear up a little bit, as I'm doing right now. Or a lot. [laughs a bit]
Kristin 19:30
Yeah, yeah, these, these teach, tough teaching moments have been a real theme for us, [Anna agrees] and it's, it's sort of interesting planning a podcast on an, on an article with, with these kinds of topics, understanding sort of the different spaces of risks that risk that we take on depending on how we're bringing these ideas out in the world and how that meets our own bodies and how that meets the bodies of others and, uhm, just to have brought in such a thoughtful article and have it slip into this gross discussion of dating rejection. I, I can't, I, I would just feel so washed with bad feelings if that, you know, it happened. I've, I've had experiences in the, in the philosophy classroom where, you know, things, things go in that kind of way, right to your sort of stigmas and stereotypes and, and, uhm, it's really tough. Uhm, you would think, you would think, like Alex was explaining, that in a, in a feminist class, you know, this is already a self-selecting group that would, you know, have an idea about sexism and gender-based violence but, yeah.
Anna 20:39
yeah. Yeah, and that ties back to what Alex mentions, which is the concept of reality enforcement, right, this is one of Bettcher's novel points, that reality enforcement happens in so many overt and subtle ways, where our dominant understanding of that is, understanding pushes this idea that the trans person is, “really a so-and-so,” but, again, this is only possible if we assume that it's, that it is possible to correctly align, um, our appearance with our genitals,
Kristin 21:11
Which, which of course, yeah, which, which contrasts with this idea of self-identification…
Anna 21:16
right,
Kristin 21:16
… which she develops later in the work, the notion of trans, you know, first person authority, the idea that trans people have or should have, you would think, special authority over their gender.
Anna
Right! Yes!
Kristin
You know, that a third person, uh, personal authority can't undermine. You know, this isn't infallible or absolute, but takes steps towards, you know, undermining a “deception” framework, right? Like, whose truth…?
Anna 21:39
Right. Because there's no deception…
Kristin 21:42
Yeah.
Anna 21:42
… yeah, sorry! There's, there's no deception without the yucky, reality enforcement stuff, right? You have to have the reality enforcement stuff in order to think that there could be deception. But it's also true, and she does this really excellent job of raising this, that, um, as she puts it, “we do not always have authority over how our bodies are understood, or or over what our words mean,” [Bettcher, 54] that, that's also true.
Kristin 22:09
Right, so, so that, so self-identification has limits and I think that's exactly where Bettcher's trying to intervene,
Anna 22:19
Yes. yes.
Kristin 22:19
Is, how does my self-identification get undermined by these dominant structures that subject me to violence when, you know, I can, I can be true to myself, I can be who I am and, but if the world not going to receive it, you know, we don't have authority over, sort of those complex meaning networks. So, um…
Anna 22:41
And identifying, identifying those, actually, is, really, um, a really helpful part of the work she's doing here, because that often gives, uh, us collectively places to intervene, and to do things differently, right, that, those, those places show for us where we need to pay attention.
Kristin 23:01
Yeah. And reality enforcement is all around us.
Anna 23:03
Yes.
Kristin 23:03
You know, it's a mood.
Anna 23:05
Yes! Yeah!
Kristin 23:05
It's a bias. It's also structures institutions. You know, it shows up in the ways our bodies are understood and what our words mean. You know, Alex points out how these forms of sexual rejection playing out in class were absolutely excusing violence and blame shifting. Basically being like, yeah, no, I don't… you know, kind of expressing this rejection over and over again. And it plays into those same sort of meanings that the killers were using in their defense.
Anna 23:40
yes.
Kristin 23:41
I can only imagine how hard it was to get to the philosophy in the article.
Anna 23:45
yeah, yeah, and navigating those sticking points with challenging work, especially when we're calling up and, and evoking the things that we're criticizing, having to raise those things in order to critique them, can sometimes, right, make space for people to, um, to lean in to those things.
Kristin 24:06
Yeah. Yeah. And bringing in the Disclosure documentary is just such a brilliant move because it's like, if you don't believe me about how harmful this is, if you don't believe me about how pervasive this is, listen to all of these other people with expert and lived experience.
Anna 24:24
yes. Yeah, and, I mean, if, if people haven't seen, uh, the documentary, it, it shows and challenges the tropes and stereotypes in film and television, that paint trans people as jokes and spectacles and threats, and it discusses these scenes that are sort of often designed to be impactful because they are purported, you know, quote-unquote, “reveal” scenes that show purported truth. And one of the things that is so successful, I think, about the documentary is that, um, it shows, right, just sort of a litany of these scenes.
Kristin 25:03
Yeah.
Anna 25:04
And I was wondering, as Alex was speaking, about what happens if you have classes where you get them to watch Disclosure first…
Kristin 25:14
Yeah. Yeah.
Anna 25:15
… and then read Bettcher, right? Like, what happens then?
Kristin 25:18
Yeah.
Anna 25:18
Maybe, maybe it, maybe it's the same, but I, I wonder.
Kristin 25:21
Maybe we should put it in our show notes: watch Disclosure!
Anna 25:24
We'll put it in our show notes, everyone! It will be in the show notes! Yes, that's right.
Kristin 25:29
Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing too is watching these stereotypes sort of play, over and over in Disclosure and seeing some of the impact on trans people in the film, but also about how it just sort of normalizes and at the same time intensifies… and maybe this is what's going on with the dating app stuff in Alex's class – it just sort of intensifies this sort of permission to scrutinize trans people. “Be on the lookout.” And not just look for signs, but also the narrative is always about deception and trickery.
Anna 26:10
Right.
Kristin 26:10
So just sort of like criminalizing them in advance, you know, which, which is again making violence seem appropriate.
Anna 26:17
Yeah, which, I mean, partly it just makes me wonder so many times going over this work, like, where, where's the deception?
Kristin 26:27
Where's the deception?
Anna 26:28
Like, [pleading] point me to the deception!
Kristin 26:31
Yeah. It's, it's produced.
Anna 26:33
It's it's produced. Exactly.
This is one of the things that, um, Bettcher sort of moves us through in the article. It's produced, in part, and Bettcher sort of draws on an earlier, uh, thinker who describes what they call, the “natural attitude” about gender. This is from Harold Garfinkel, who's an American sociologist who documented and theorized how everyday practices construct our social systems. And so here, the “natural attitude” about gender is constructed through practice, right? It's a sort of common sense or becomes a common sense. Sort of, um… I like the term “second nature.”
Kristin 27:19
yeah, Yeah.
Anna 27:20
So it's acquired, but we then, um, take it for granted. But it's also a system of sort of perceivable, knowable, stable binaries that, we're, we end up sort of having to navigate or move through in the world.
Kristin 27:40
Yeah. Um, and, uh, also makes me think about, uh, my, when my baby was little, um, we would get him to blow kisses “bye,”
Anna 27:48
Hmm. [Anna loves thinking about babies!]
Kristin 27:48
… You know, instead of like… you know, whatever. And there was always some people who would say, “oh, little boys don't blow kisses, they wave.”
Anna 27:58
Ya, they can fuck right off with that!
[laughs] It’s like… sorry. [contrite] Sorry! That's… it’s all the time.
Kristin 28:04
Yeah, I know, but it's daily.
Anna 28:06
Yeah. It’s [incessant].
Kristin 28:08
People are really, really vocal about how babies, anyway…
Anna 28:13
So interesting.
Kristin 28:13
Yeah. Okay, so to go back to the “natural attitude,” the natural attitude, uh, makes me think about compulsory heterosexuality,
Anna 28:22
Oh, yeah.
Kristin 28:22
.. which is this concept from Adrienne Rich. Rich is thinking about sort of big system that coerces desire, social formations, coerces us into these heterosexual social arrangements.
Anna 28:34
yeah, and Rich is, like, famous here for pointing out how “compulsory heterosexuality” does many things, one of which is to erase or suppress lesbian existence. And, like, even still, we can sort of get into what she was thinking about by noticing that, like, women having sex with women often doesn't quote-unquote "really count" as having sex proper, right? There's, like, “there's no penis! How could it be sex?!”
Kristin 28:58
No! [mimics agreement]
Anna 28:59
Like, “it's impossible!” So, it kind of gets read as not having sex, and women not having sex is unacceptable. So, sex is often violently enforced, so rape and sexual assault can be forms of "I will make you make sense to me."
Kristin 29:17
Hmm.
Anna 29:17
And, um, the only way to protect oneself from that possibility seems to be to have sex with men, more specifically, one man, at the exclusion of all other men, so that you will, quote-unquote, "make sense."
Kristin 29:30
Yeah.
Anna 29:30
Which is an extremely good way of getting women to do what some men want, what some women want, to be frank. What the patriarchy wants.
Kristin 29:39
Yeah.
Anna 29:39
Because if you don't, right, “if you don't do x, I just can't understand you! And so, I will enforce what I think is reality ["reality"] onto you.”
Kristin 29:50
And building on this, you know, Judith Butler in Gender Trouble [Anna is enthusiastic] develops one of my favorite conceptual tools, which is the heterosexual matrix, which they, they sort of talk about as a “grid of cultural intelligibility.”
Anna 30:05
Oh, Judith. [wistfully] When are we gonna do a Butler episode? We need a Butler episode!
Kristin 30:09
I know. How do we choose?
Anna
How do we choose?
Both
Who do we ask?
Anna
Oh, gosh!
Kristin 30:15
Call me! [laughs]
Anna 30:16
[laughs] Yeah! Okay! And Adrienne Rich! I mean, we need, we need an episode on Adrienne Rich! Um, Butler and Rich and other feminist philosophers, including Bettcher, describe parts of that matrix that comprises that grid of intelligibility. Um, and they sort of describe it as, right, a way of making ourselves something that other people can make sense of.
Kristin 30:44
Yeah.
Anna 30:44
And so, like, patriarchy, but also presumed or enforced heterosexuality, ensure that men are what we're paying attention to, uh, in most interactions, um, in most decision-making, in most personal and general social functioning.
Kristin 31:02
Yes!
Anna 31:02
So this is sort of what the matrix of intelligibility is sort of oriented toward: that sort of centering of men's needs and wants.
Kristin 31:14
Yes. Patriarchy: where men are both positive and neutral, and it brings us all the way back to Simone de Beauvoir, you know, women as “the second sex.”
Anna 31:27
Riiiight. Yep.
Kristin 31:28
It's not just that there's two. It's the second, you know. And we can complicate that, and she complicates that in The Second Sex. But just the idea that men are sort of both positive and neutral and women are the other, I guess…
Anna 31:42
Yes. Men is the neutral human being. Yeah. This… the sort of, the idea that the patriarchal system requires that sex can only happen if there's at least one man and or a penis is part of that system of intelligibility. And it sanctions, then, particular uses of our bodies and their parts, right? In very particular ways.
Kristin 32:06
Right.
Anna 32:06
Um, but, but it also means that we end up having systems of nonverbal communication, like using clothing and jewelry and hairstyles and those sorts of things, so that we can always know which of the presumed only two genders we're dealing with. I never have to ask questions about other people.
Kristin 32:29
Mm. Right. Bettcher calls the system of communication part of a, quote, “sexually manipulative heterosexuality” and that it's fundamentally tied to sexual violence.
Anna
Yeah. And that goes back to what we were talking about before. So like, for example, clothing, we can notice is supposed to let all of us know, but especially men, um, uh, who has a vagina without having to ask. And thus who is supposed to be paying attention to or centering them and making them, you know, feel comfortable, welcoming their advances, right? Also, who is rapable and who they're supposed to protect, uh, from whom? From other men. Right?
Kristin 33:16
You know, this stuff kind of, it always makes me think about all my years in the service industry.
Anna 33:20
Oh, yes.
Kristin 33:21
You know, just how sexualized it is? You know, I usually worked in the back of the house. But, you know, there was a lot of difficulty around a few things. One is having to properly be sort of deferential and kind and taking care of the customer. And that just kind of made me think of that with centering the man, which often meant allowing that man to flirt with you in a particular way.
Anna 33:57
Right! Yes.
Kristin 33:57
And allowing them to not feel hurt and to let them be centered. It made me think about how, um, sometimes the only way to get out of those situations is to say, “I have a boyfriend.”
Anna 34:10
Mm-hmm! Yes. Yep. That’s right.
Kristin 34:12
You know, and how you learned that so young about what kinds of speech are respected in terms of like actually, okay, so no, there's another man that's answerable here. So, so now you have to listen to me [chuckles], servers would be coming back, uh, you know, crying or upset. Usually men would be very rude to them if they didn't, you know, properly laugh at jokes or
smile enough or welcome comments on their appearance, intrusive comments about dating life. You know, this tracks everything that we've talked about. Like, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Like, “Why not?”
Anna
Yeah. And very likely, I'm imagining, very likely none of their dinner companions or other customers would say anything, right?
Kristin 34:59
No, no…
Anna 34:59
They would laugh along, there wouldn't… there wouldn't be someone saying, like, “dude, come on, like, get it together”...
Kristin 35:06
This is your tip on the line or your, you know, your job, you have, you're kind of coerced, right?
Anna 35:10
yeah,
Kristin 35:11
Um, yeah. Anyway, so Bettcher is clear throughout the paper that white female gender presentation, even if it is subject to sexism, simultaneously is dominant in standards of attractiveness.
Anna 35:28
Right. Yep. And so, to circle back communicating, um, about genitals through clothing and centering men, we notice then, um, with, with Bettcher – Bettcher makes this point – we can notice how quickly, then, penises get aligned with rape, to the extent that, under this framework, men's penises are taken to be for, and are often used as a means of violent ways of “making other people make sense.” And I often, when I, when I think about that, I often think, like, how are men with penises not outraged by that at every moment of the day? Like, like, that is outraging!
Kristin 36:11
Yeah. [chuckles] So, the idea being that there are sort of straight and determined lines from the sex your body is to the gender you express and the desire you enact. That's kind of the, the heterosexual matrix. So, female sex determines you as a woman, which determines desire for men, but also sexual availability for men. And the same goes for male: men desire women. So, key points for Bettcher: genitals play a key role in determining sex. That is the quote-unquote “natural attitude.” So, within the “natural attitude”, uh, sex is also “invariant,” meaning that it's, it's sort of like a closed set of meaning, um, whatever one might say or do to their body, based genital status at birth, one “really is a so-and-so.”
Anna 37:01
Right.
Kristin 37:02
You know, genitally, essentially, that's the natural attitude. And she makes the claim, I think, because trans people, you know, who have gender affirming surgeries, unfortunately, are still subject to claims that they're “really a so-and-so.” So, you know, that's the kind of genital essentialism that, that constructs this, this whole system.
Anna 37:23
Yes. And so, Bettcher notices that if clothing is quote-unquote “supposed” to communicate who has a vagina and who has a penis without having to ask, that gets linked to the charge that trans people are quote-unquote “deceivers,” but also to the charge that, right, trans women are quote “predators dressed as prey,” end quote, so that women's clothing is “supposed” to be in the absence of a penis. And when it doesn't, that seems like trickery or deception or a violation of some kind.
Kristin 37:58
I had quite a conversation with Alex. One piece was, I asked what they thought about the strategy of trying to kind of fight reality with reality. You know, saying like, well, there's a lot of variability in sex bodies. Maybe this is a way to undermine transphobia…
Alex 38:15
I think that's a bad strategy.
Kristin
Okay, tell me more about that! Tell me more about that.
Alex
Yeah, I actually, yeah, I have, I have an article that I wrote about Lugones and, sort of, critiquing her instrumentalization of intersex. And so, I, yeah, so I, I don't think the response to understanding a truth about anyone about the construction of their genitalia will be undermined by the variability question. I feel like that cedes ground, actually, to “there is some truth to be found in someone's embodiment.” And I guess, yeah, I, I actually, I don't think that Bettcher's argument is pointing us to that.
In my understanding, she was pointing at the way in which we see present… a gendered presentation communicating something. And so, she gives the counterexample of trans communities, and how we don't look at somebody's gendered presentation, and think of it as communicating a description of how they see themselves, or how they want us to see them. Which, at least that was my understanding of the article, and so she's, she's kind of showing that, look, there are these communities where we have undermined these processes that are linked to the violent destruction of women and trans people.
But they're, they're sort of pockets, right? And so then the job of the philosopher is to, like, what is the things that we figured out in this pocket where we're actually radically undermining these ways of understanding our relations to each other, and what we understand as communication? And then how do we bring that to bear on these public discussions? Because, obviously, she's working with public articles. She's looking at the journalists interviewing people. “What did you think about this?” She's looking at the court documents. So, her role as a philosopher is sort of looking at these trans communities. How are we interacting with each other? And then looking back at these sort of mainstream non-trans discourses and sort of undermining the, the problematic philosophical underpinnings of people's initial responses, I think, to that.
[music fades in]
Kristin 40:28
[Quoting Alex] “... cedes too much ground to the idea that there is a truth to be found in someone's embodiment.”
Anna 40:35
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kristin 40:36
A truth to my embodiment.
Anna 40:38
Yeah.
Kristin 40:39
That's really interesting. So like my, my body is always changing for me. It, it, I don't experience my body as a truth relation.
Anna 40:47
No! [agreeing] No! That's a good way to put that!
Kristin 40:50
You know, maybe there are, there are facts about my body, but for me as I live it, it's not a bundle of facts, right?
Anna 40:56
Right.
Kristin 40:56
It's the, the idea of a “truth” here is an assumption that feeds into reality enforcement. And that reality enforcement is a kind of violence, it reinforces violence.
Anna 41:14
Yeah. Yeah. And to make this connection, Bettcher draws on another central concept in feminist philosophy, and this is found in a widely taught piece by Marilyn Frye, from her chapter called “Oppression.” It's from 1983. And now that I think about it, the book is called The Politics of Reality.
Kristin 41:36
Wow.
Anna 41:36
So, yeah! The idea is that, like, our givens are not neutral, right? There's a politics infusing what we take to be real. And we can then ask, like, who is getting to define what is real or what counts as reality?
Kristin 41:52
Well, people who aren't subjected to double binds, I think. That's who!
[both laugh]
[sound effect of page turning in a book]
Kristin 42:00
It is time for one of Anna's famous primers!
Anna 42:02
Oh, gosh. Okay. Yes! So, Marilyn Frye notices that the origin of the term “oppression” involves pressing, molding, squeezing, reducing, forcing against immovable objects or restraints, and deflating. And it's true that, she notices, as a feature of human life, we are forced and molded and squeezed into doing things to some degree. We're all expected to do at least some things that we might not otherwise do if we were left up to our own devices, if we can imagine what those things are. Something like that.
Kristin 42:39
Yeah. I feel forced and squeezed a lot.
Anna 42:42
Yeah. Yes.
Kristin 42:43
Like, like, like a time crunch.
Anna 42:45
Like a time crunch. Just so! Yes. And so, that shaping that we experience is probably why even non-feminist political philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau and Rawls, all those folks, spend a lot of time thinking about the coercive institutions that guide human behavior, right?
Kristin 43:03
Right. Like, I need to stop at the stop sign.
Anna 43:06
Yes!
Kristin 43:07
Like, “please coerce others to also do so.”
Anna 43:10
Yes, that would be good!
Kristin 43:11
But this is not oppressive to me.
Anna 43:14
Right. Right. You obey, but it's not oppressive.
Kristin 43:18
Yeah.
Anna 43:18
Yes. Yeah. And so, some things we're forced to do because we live in particular circumstances, right? I'm not... Free to, like, wear what I like because I live in a place, uh, where my flesh will, uh, you know, burn and die because it's very cold or incredibly sunny. So, right, I'm, I am forced in that way, but, again, just like the stop sign, not oppressed.
Kristin 43:43
The weather, the weather disappoints me by constraining my freedom. On the regular.
Anna 43:47
Yes. [laughs] Exactly. And so, Marilyn Frye notices that one of the classic responses to any talk about, for example, women's oppression is to say that, um, if women are oppressed, then men are equally oppressed because they have expectations placed upon them too, right? They cannot cry in public, for example, without being policed or laughed at. And in many cases, like that, that's still true, right? Masculinity is, um, deeply policed. I don't think anyone is harder on men than Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson.
Kristin 44:19
Yeah. But doesn't, doesn't Jordan Peterson cry a lot? Like, isn't that one of his big things?
Anna 44:24
Oh, well, yeah…
Kristin 44:26
I, I love Marilyn Fry's article. She has no sympathy for this response.
Anna 44:35
None at all.
Kristin 44:35
Right.
Anna 44:35
No, none.
Kristin 44:36
She says something like, men absolutely can cry just in the company of women who do their emotional labour.
Anna 44:44
Yes.
Kristin 44:45
Right. I was also thinking about, like, they can also cry like patriotic tears.
Anna 44:50
Sure.
Kristin 44:50
There are certain things, you know, but they can't really cry around each other or not usually, or, you know, at least not normatively so.
Anna 44:59
And yeah, like just, we'll just take a moment. Like that is truly sad. [Kristin agrees] That's truly sad. But Frye's point is that when men don't cry, there's no oppression, which means there's no double bind. They have an option that doesn't, you know, have bad social consequences.
Kristin 45:22
Hmm. Right.
Anna 45:23
So there are a lot of false equivalences here, right? Um, “if disabled people are oppressed,” uh, there's that thinking that says like, “well, if disabled people are oppressed, then I'm oppressed too, when I break my leg,” right? “If black and brown and Indigenous folks are oppressed, then white people are too, because white people can't wear, um, whatever they want or use whatever language they want or get certain hairstyles or wear certain Hallowe’en costumes or whatever.” Right.
Kristin 45:50
Right.
Anna 45:50
“We're all oppressed,” is sort of the line of thinking there.
Kristin 45:53
Right. Right. So, [laughs] yeah. But like, just because you're part of a social group doesn't mean you are oppressed on the basis of that membership. Even though it's true that there are constraints on men expressing their emotions in public, and those are harmful, as we've said, they don't constitute oppression in any meaningful sense of the term.
Anna 46:12
Right.
Kristin 46:12
Right. And breaking your leg gives you some insight into what it's like to try to move around in the world without a normative body, and it can be truly difficult, but it's not oppression. Oppression is systemic.
Anna 46:23
Yes. Yes, exactly. When men are oppressed, they're oppressed by virtue of something else being disabled or queer or not white or economically oppressed or some combination of marginalized locations. So I, uh, actually it's a nice point to quote her here. Um, she says, uh, oppression is “the experience of being pressed into a situation where the situation characterized by a double-bind,” um, that is to live a life that is “confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between one and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.” [Frye, 4] That's the most important point there: “restrict or penalize motion in any direction.”
Kristin 47:14
Right. Uh, the classic example here is about women's sexual choices. You know, you choose not to have sex, you're a “prude” who needs to loosen up. And if you do have sex, you're a “slut.” But both sides aren't just crappy. They justify and excuse violence.
Anna 47:28
Yeah! And so you're… it's like being caged in, hemmed in on all sides, right? If women are not in a committed relationship again with one person, um, and you like sex or have sex, you're a “whore” or “loose” or “easy.” Um, and if you don't, you're a “prude,” as you said, or in old language, quote-unquote “frigid” or “weird about sex” or whatever, which often limits who will have relationships with you and marks you, um, for sexual violence as well. And notice that there's not really a third option. And it does a really, um, effective job of guiding women back into, institutional heterosexuality, right?, and “compulsory heterosexuality.”
Kristin 48:13
Mm-hmm. Yeah. As an exercise, I used to get students to try to come up with double binds, other than the ones that Frye uses in the article. And they often got it wrong, which I thought was quite interesting and maybe revealing of their positions of privilege. Uh, the one I got a lot of was about appearance. You know, um, if you do a lot with your appearance, then you're vain and you're full of yourself, or you do nothing and you look sloppy and no one respects you. But like, so don't get me wrong. There are huge issues with like personal fashion and what you do with yourself, but I do think it's possible to align with the norm, right?
Anna 48:48
Yes.
Kristin 48:49
I don't think there's punishment everywhere. You can get it an oppressive situation would be that whatever you wear, you're punished. And that's not everyone, right? So…
Anna 49:00
Yeah. No, that's right. Yeah. And clothing is an interesting one because... It is quite important in the, sort of, normative system, um, it's an important feature of, like, making gender presentation, and also things like shaving legs or faces, um, so for a trans person just living in the world that's dominated by the, right, “natural attitude” about gender, you're caught up in an oppressive double-blind.
[sound effect of page turning in a book]
Kristin 49:32
Bettcher writes, the options seem to be “disclose “who one is” and come out as a pretender or masquerader, or refuse to disclose (be a deceiver)” where you “run the risk of forced disclosure, the effect of which is exposure as a liar.” [Bettcher, 50] This is the double-bind.
Anna 49:58
Yeah. Bettcher notices, yeah, that the transphobic stereotypes are so determinative of our everyday reality that trans people are literally constructed as “make-believing,” quote-unquote, or, quote-unquote, “hiding reality,” and thus engaged in deception.
Kristin 50:18
Hmm.
Anna 50:18
And in both cases, they're subject to violence and punishment and moral suspicion.
Kristin 50:22
Yeah. And to go back to the Disclosure movie, these representations are training and retraining viewers to do this reality enforcement, supporting the double bind.
Anna 50:32
Yep. The double-bind applies because, like we were saying before, if we think gender communicates sex, and we think that sex equals genitals, then it's possible to have a, quote-unquote, “misalignment” between what is communicated and what is, quote-unquote, “real.”
Something I really value about Bettcher's work in this piece is her philosophical practice of thinking about what someone or some group of people have to assume in order for certain understandings to be intelligible.
Kristin 51:05
Hmm.
Anna 51:05
Like, what do we have to assume is true in order for it to make sense as a possibility, even, that trans people could, quote-unquote, “deceive” cis people?
Kristin 51:16
Hmm.
Anna 51:16
Right, like, what have we made natural or, in quotation marks, “natural” or into, using that term, second nature?
But I also love the part of this piece where she notices that when people hold views about us as members of groups, we often end up involuntarily animating those stereotypes. And even when we're aware of those assumptions or thinking about those assumptions, we can also end up involuntarily animating those. We don't have full control, as we were saying before, over how other people understand us or what we mean.
Kristin 51:55
Yeah. And that's a hard reality to face.
Anna 51:59
It really, it is, yeah, especially given the cultural stories that we have about our rights to self-determination and, right, the sort of ways that some people's self-understandings are taken unquestionably and unproblematically as what they are.
Kristin 52:20
I yeah, I don't want any of the meaning of who Kristin is to be determined by anyone but me.
Anna 52:27
Right. And some of us have the right, some of us seem to have the right to maintain that, right? Some of us do.
Kristin 52:34
Right.
Yes. And that's very unequally distributed, of course, right?
Anna 52:39
Yes.
Kristin 52:39
Some of us have, um, like, we all sort of, maybe there's something basic around wanting to be understood the way that you understand yourself that we can think about, right?
Anna 52:50
Yeah.
Kristin 52:51
And that, that, that helping each other with that know, relational, you know, form of care even, really.
Anna 52:57
Yes. Yeah.
Kristin 52:58
Um, but we can't just, we don't do that outside of the social systems that create meaning…
[pensive music fades in and out]
Kristin
If trans people are constructed as “really a so-and-so,” then they experience, a kind of refusal by others to understand themselves to understand themselves as they are.
Anna 53:18
Yes.
Kristin 53:18
But this particular construction re-inscribes and forces trans people to involuntarily animate the assumption, really, that genitals determine sex.
Anna 53:29
Yeah! Yep.
Kristin 53:29
Nothing they can say about who they are can matter under these conditions. And they are made by others into “make-believers” or “deceivers” against their will, against their actions. They aren't allowed by this sort of existing framework to make sense in any other way. And that's the double- bind.
Anna 53:47
Right. That is the double-bind. Yeah.
Kristin 53:51
Bettcher thinks about ways to push back on this double bind. And you know me, I'm obsessed with finding methods of resistance [Anna giggles] that don't reinforce what we're trying to resist. So, you know, I think this is where the article really shines.
Anna 54:06
Yes.
Kristin 54:06
Digging for assumptions, Bettcher quotes and responds to, in particular, uh, Dylan Vade, who's the co-founder of the San Francisco Transgender Law Center, who writes,
Anna 54:19
“Why do some folks feel that transgender people need to disclose their history and their genitalia and non-transgender people do not? When you first meet someone and they are clothed, you never know exactly what that person looks like. And when you first meet someone, you never know that person's full history. Why do only some people have to describe themselves in detail – and others do not? Why are some non-disclosures seen as actions and others utterly invisible? Actions. Gwen Araujo was being herself, openly and honestly. No, she did not wear a sign on her forehead that said, “I am transgender, and this is what my genitalia looked like.” But her killers didn't wear a sign on foreheads saying, “We might look like nice high school boys, but really, we're transphobic and are planning to kill you.” That would have been a helpful disclosure. Transgender people do not deceive. We are who we are.” [cited in Bettcher, 53]
Kristin 55:18
Right. Bettcher is, of course, sympathetic to this response, right?
Anna 55:22
Yes.
Kristin 55:22
It isn't fair or moral, that trans people are required to reveal their bodily history, and cis people aren't. But she thinks there are problems, all of which kind of fall under the domain of the double-bind and the gender-genital representational system. So first, Bettcher thinks Vade doesn't appreciate how we just don't live in a world where pointing out this hypocrisy or saying “you aren't deceiving” gets you out of the double-bind.
Anna 55:53
Right.
Kristin 55:54
Trans people are vulnerable to the deceiver-pretender construction at the outset.
[sound effect of page turning in a book]
Anna 56:00
“There's an important difference between coming out as a “transgender woman” and as, quote, “really a man disguised as a woman,” yet it is often the latter that does much of the work in transphobic violence, accounts which justify or defend such violence and accounts which blame the victim.” [Bettcher, 54] And actually this takes me back to Alex's teaching experiences. This, the absolute dominance of the deceiver/pretender, double-bind frustrates any attempt to live openly and honestly.
Kristin 56:30
Precisely.
Anna 56:31
And that shows up, right, in students' responses to, um, even thinking about, right, what goes on on dating apps.
Kristin 56:40
And this is why we just can't equate cis people's self-identifications with trans people’s. Because theirs are not subject to hostile invalidation.
Anna 56:46
Right. So it's not helping to ask why cis people don't have to declare genital status.
Kristin 56:54
And Bettcher also thinks this is weird because most people, meaning cis people, do in fact regularly declare their genital status all the time. Every day we're participating in this gender-genital representational system. We just don't think about it because it doesn't construct us as deceivers.
Anna 57:09
Right! So maybe Vade's response is, um, stuck in this to disclose or not to disclose binary when actually these all happen in a different context depending on how you fit the norm.
Kristin 57:23
Right, and trans people don't so, in a way, this response keeps the focus on genitals as the truth of gender, which is precisely the system that they opt out of in Bettcher's words.
Anna 57:33
Right.
Kristin 57:34
But it is the system which in fact constructs them as “deceivers,” so it doesn't make sense to say cis people don't announce their genital status. I think Bettcher also thinks Vade treats the deceiver/pretender double-bind as merely, like, a baseless stereotype, right? So like when we treat these things as baseless stereotypes, then we go, “well, let's debunk it, right?”
Anna 57:54
Right. Right.
Kristin 57:55
“It’s a misrepresentation, let's debunk it.” But it's so much more than that!
[sound effect of page turning in a book]
Anna 58:02
“[The deceiver/pretender double-bind is] “a fundamental communicative relation that obtains between presentation and [a] body [...] For insofar as gender presentation means [a] sexed body, we do engage in “false representation” [...] whether we like it or not” [Bettcher 54-55]
Whooaa.
Kristin 58:18
Yeah, yep. So this is the punch of the double-bind. There's no good place to go. There's no easy off-ramp.
Anna 58:27
Right.
Kristin 58:28
The deception is constructed from the outset. So this is the effect of the whole representational system we've been talking about. It aims to, and is often successful at, preventing trans people from existing at all. So as sympathetic as Bettcher might be to the claim that trans people don't deceive, it overlooks the power of the communicative relation between sex and gender. And this is bit of a difficult place to go in the article, right? It's a difficult topic. One way to think about whether there are off-ramps to the double bind as Bettcher outlines, and I have hope that there are, but it's not going to be easy, right? Or maybe another way to put this is we need the whole book, right?
[pensive music fades in]
Anna 59:15
Right. [laughs] Yes, yes! we need the whole book!
Ding 59:23
I feel more and more uncomfortable, trying to think about transphobic violence through the charge of deception. I know I look like I'm 27, and I am 27, so it feels weird for me to say – I feel like such, like, an old-school feminist, in the sense that I'm really into some of the stuff that is no longer popular, I think.
Catherine McKinnon wants us to think about sexual assault and sexual harassment from the point of view of the people getting harassed, instead of the point of view of people doing the harassing. And I feel like there is an interesting analogy here, which is: here we're trying to understand transphobic violence from the point of view of the transphobes, instead of from the point of view of the trans people. And I think this has consequences. Bettcher wants to tell us, is something like there is a kind of cognitive dissonance at first, right? So you think, say this is a case with a trans woman, as it usually is. You think, “uh, that's a woman,” but then, um, you see her body, and then you, your brain is like, “I can’t compute. So what do I do?”
After you have the kind of cognitive dissonance, you get an interpretation of this as deception, right? So “I was tricked. She's not a woman. What's going on?” And then this is interpreted as in some way, kind of rape, a kind of sexual assault. And in some way this motivates transphobic violence. And I keep saying “in some way,” because it's actually not entirely clear to me how the underlying mechanism is supposed to work. Like it describes a series of cognitive things that happen in your brain. But like, what's the underlying connection? It's not entirely clear to me.
And I think part of this is a reflection [of the fact] that we're trying to work through this from the point of view of the transphobe. So this is the transphobic violence seen through the perspective of the transphobe. I wonder if there is some more helpful way of thinking about this, which is, what if you really try to think about the series of events from the point of view of the, say, in this case, the trans woman being assaulted. Right? It's a case, again, you start with the kind of cognitive dissonance. So, uh, the transphobes thinks, “well, I thought she's a woman, but she has this body. What's going on?” This is interpreted as deception, so: you're tricked.
But maybe what's going on is actually the transphobe like, in some way, never stops believing that this is a woman in front of you. And so, in some way the trans woman’s gender is taken as empirical reality. And then this gets really, really troubling because you really, really can't wrap your head around this. “This is a woman. And I continue to believe that this is a woman, but I can't reconcile this with her body. So the world is a lie! Everything is messed up! I don’t know what’s going on! Maybe we live in The Matrix! And now we have to destroy the evidence.”
Kristin 1:03:03
So Ding's hypothetical stays with the dissonance of what happens if the transphobe takes the lived gender as reality, but the body doesn't, quote, “match up.” We need a deeper story about how this then becomes a kind of assault on the transphobe. Like, there are a great many different reactions a person could have other than translating that into a deception that they then conflate with rape. But they are, they often are, especially in cases like, you know, what happened to Gwen Araujo, because as Bettcher points out, accusations of rape are often and historically instruments of racial subordination. So maybe that's part of the mechanism that Ding is kind of asking about. What's operating in the background here?
Anna 1:03:49
So maybe another way of putting this is that in addition to explanations never being the same as excuses because they are not, the deception charge doesn't do enough to explain the violence and maybe the reason it doesn't is because it starts from the perspective of the transphobe who retreats to this “deception” as a defense.
Kristin 1:04:13
Yes. Ding also talks about how, you know, maybe some of this difficulty, uh, in general, comes from framing the article around a particular legal case.
[pensive music fades in]
Ding 1:04:32
I focus on, like, US law, because that's what I know. My understanding is this is kind of like a common feature of discrimination law kind of everywhere, but the idea is, um, you want to understand, for example, whether discrimination occurred from the point of view of the discriminator. People make a distinction, for example, between, um, kind of intentional versus non-intentional discrimination, or direct versus indirect discrimination, or in US law, disparate treatment versus disparate impact discrimination.
The first category, the direct, intentional treatment category, is the paradigmatic case of discrimination. So there is a discriminatory intent, and that's what's, in some way, bad about the discrimination. One problem is you run into cases where, (1) it's not clear that there is the kind of clear discriminatory intent, and (2) obviously, you want to account for at least some cases of structural discrimination. That's why people then appeal to a second category of discrimination, disparate impact, so disproportionate consequences, for example, that doesn't require discrimination.
One problem with, like, this approach, uh, is, the, in some way, burden is on you to introduce the second category of discrimination. In US law, it's been, like, relatively successful in terms of, like, statutory prohibitions. But the US Supreme Court has said, very explicitly, that under constitutional law there is no disparate impact discrimination, so, only discriminatory intent.
I think we're, like, in a similar situation, so, we're trying to figure out the logic of transphobic violence from the point of view of the person perpetrating such violence. It's analogous to trying to figure out what discrimination is, not by looking at how discrimination actually impacts real people on the ground, but from the point of view of the person doing the discriminating. And then you get into the question of justification, right, so, what's, like, the rationalization process that led to the discrimination or led to the violence? And, then you get into this kind of, like, weird literature of people trying to sort out, you know, the “justified discrimination” versus the “unjustified discrimination.”
So, some discrimination people think is wrongful, others not so. And I think we're, like, uh, and I think we're, like, we're, like, trying to give a rational story for why transphobes do transphobic violence. It's pretty individualistic. It’s pretty moralistic. It assumes that there is such a rationalization, and the trans person really doesn't have a say in this, which I think is kind of curious for a theory of transphobic violence.
The issue I feel like I'm having is, what's the starting point, right? Do we focus on individual actors or do we really focus on this broader system? You bring up the point of, legal cases, uh, which is also interesting, right? Because, the trans panic defense that Bettcher talks a lot about, is a legal defense. And in some way, we're, like, taking the transphobes at their word, right? It's a defense that they bring up to justify what they did. And if you've, you know, seen, you know, criminal proceedings, people bring out lots of defenses, right? [laughs] It's a decision point of sorts, right? Is the defense a genuine account of what happens? And it could be a genuine account that you come to, after the fact. That's also possible. Or should we think of this as, you know, more pretextual?
Kristin 1:08:37
So, so many things. So, this legal idea of discrimination as being, like, “in the head” of the discriminator, like, so discrimination, like, as an intention, sort of invites this kind of navel-gazing about oneself, right? And then this kind of comfort in airing your biases so openly, right? Which brings me back to Alex's class, where it's like, oh, I get to look inside myself to find out if I’m justified for being discriminatory. Like, “we can't all be bad, right!?”
Anna 1:09:12
We… we could all be bad. We could use our actions or intentions to realize that the ways that deeply bad systems are operating through us in ways that we could notice and take some responsibility for. But we can all be pretty bad, right?, and so now what? But the focus on rationalization from the perspective of a perpetrator hooks us back into that system of patriarchy… no doubt that says that “this is the way things should have been communicated” and thus excusing and justifying and all that stuff.
Kristin 1:09:50
Yeah. Yeah. and I think this is by no means a defense, like, of that view, just that Bettcher's focus on this viewpoint is to show how powerful these forms of understanding are, uh, and, and that there are systems set up to enforce it and to try, you know, and that, that, that try and often succeed at this work of reality enforcement.
Anna 1:10:16
Right. [thinking] … It seems like the fundamental problem is still the social… something about the social communication of genital status, which is violent and makes all of our lives smaller and less rich. This is one of the most beautiful things about, um, trans thinking and trans philosophy. It really shows how much poorer all of our lives are, um, because of these systems. And so maybe the question is the one that you started with, like, how can we forge communities of meaning that resist that violence and uphold the validity of trans identities? Maybe even undermining the idea that we “must” communicate our genders in legible ways.
Kristin 1:11:03
It makes me think back to our episode with Simon Ruchti, you know, um, and how we had a discussion about trans kids and just not just the enforcement of the gender we think they should become but the people that we think that they should become, right? And to look at this fundamental move as the ways in which we claim one another's minds and bodies. And sort of making them be who you think they should be, who we think they should be,
Anna 1:11:36
yeah. And… and what do adults have to reckon with, in themselves and in the world, to make frameworks that allow for openness and possibilities so that kids can emerge into the world as they are? And so that adults can emerge into the world as they are? How do adults rework the existing, “natural attitude” framework so that we have openness to ourselves, let alone to other people?
[music starts]
Kristin 1:12:07
And I'll say thank you to Ding and Alex Adamson, and also to Talia Mae Bettcher [chuckles, as though we could thank Bettcher enough!]. All of the references for what was mentioned on the pod today, uh, along with detailed transcripts of our episodes are on our website, um, thinkingbodiespod.com. Please like and subscribe. Please rate and review!
[both laugh]
Okay, we have more thanks.
Anna 1:12:35
Our theme music is by Seth Makes Sounds and Joseph Press. Thank you so much to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created. Thanks to Amy Marvin, Isabel Best, and the Skillman Library, everyone who works at the Skillman Library at Lafayette College, for conference organizing and hosting of Thinking Trans//Trans Thinking Conference.
I'm Anna Mudde. I'm on the lands of the [mispeaks]... oop!
[both laugh]
Anna
I’m Anna Mudde. I'm on the lands of the Michif/Métis Nation and the lands of the Nehiyawak, the Anishinaabek, Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples, which is also called “Pile of Bones.”
Kristin 1:13:14
And I'm Kristin Rodier, recording today from Amis-Kwahiski-Kan, homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, the Beaver Cree, the Ojibwe, and the Métis, also called Beaver Hills House.
[music ends]
Kristin 1:13:26
I, I love stuff that is sort of critical of the return to, like, the, we'll buy some land and we'll have a co-op and a commune, and things will be hunky-dory.
Alex
Yeah, words do mean things, and “the commune” comes from, we have overthrown the capitalist state and we're redistributing lands, it's not, I as an individual gonna just buy private property like any other private property. You know what I mean? So I just, I think words mean things, as a philosopher. And I think it's perfectly fine if people want to, like, live communally, I think that's great, I think you should do the co-op. But I guess, to me, like, words mean things, and, like, the origin of that word “commune” is forging a new world and a new distribution of land and property, and so it's just, like, to me, like, “you're not doing that!” So, I think, ya, I mean, it does tie into the critique of, that laws, by naming things, are changing reality.
But there is something about, I think, people obviously… speech act theory: we have it…
[Kristin laughs]
gender performativity…
But there is, but, like, you know, I am a trans Marxist, specifically, and so the way that I understand gender is it's the product of social labour. Because in my experience, I think the frustration that cis people have is when they find out that labour did go into them creating their gender, because they never have to think about it. And when they're forced to be like, “what do you mean I have to think about why I feel that I'm a man or a woman, and I have to articulate that to you, and I have to tell you how to treat me?” They're like, “wow, I've never had to do the work of thinking about that because of how the world is constructed.”
And it's, yeah, to undermine actually the category of cisness, I think, is to reveal the fact that gender is a product of social labour. And so that there is something constructed about cisness where they always want to say transness is what's artificial, deceptive, pretending. And it's like, “actually, let's look at the category of cisness and see where that comes from!”