On Queer Self-Anthropology

if you have tell people you're not saying something transphobic...

I didn’t start this substack to become a content producer. What I like about this format is that I can write something for my friends/their friends/their friends and so on, depending on how much each link in that chain likes what I write. That means I can’t really shrug off low-effort posts as the occasional outcome of “producing” “content.” That said and with zero chagrin, today I’m again writing another substack post about a substack post I didn’t enjoy:

My Neoliberal Gender: The Rise of Political Transgenderism

It would be an understatement to say that I love criticism. I partake of the practice as often as I can, in fact. It is a habit I picked up as a bullied kid in grade school, and it is one that I have refined over the course of my queer adulthood. Generally, I don’t do it in writing. The above illustrates why.

Criticism as an emotional impulse is perhaps near universal. You may observe that people will happily criticize in bad faith any number of people, statements, and phenomena that make them uncomfortable or which threaten their self-esteem or worldview. Indeed, the more impotent a person feels in the face of the forces that constrain their lives, the more vocal, vicious, and urgent their criticisms can become. The truth in criticism can be less important for an individual than the way it puts the subject of critique into the correct emotional/ethical/intellectual position relative to the speaker.¹ Naturally, all criticism should be evaluated on its merits, but I’m particularly interested in the ways that motivated criticism can gather to itself a pastiche of emotionally self-serving apparent facts that essentially elaborate on the tropes of a given community’s groupthink in order to further an emotional agenda under the guise of intellectual rigor.

With that perfectly explicable paragraph out of the way, lets proceed to our subject. I would be remiss not to suggest you read the above post itself, but if you’ve only got time to read mine, you can guess which I’d prefer that you focus on.

Lithium’s main argument is essentially as follows: Political lesbianism never died. Instead, it morphed into something called “political transgenderism,” in which wo-, excuse me, AFAB non-binary people identify as trans in order to “[deny] womanhood to the patriarchy, and [frame] gender in relationship to that denial.” For Lithium, “political transgenderism isn’t about the rights and safety of trans people, it’s about arbitrary and impossible goals like ‘abolishing the binary.’” And what’s more, these people are taking up trans spaces, using gender essentialst ideas and language, and pushing neoliberal (whatever that means) ideas onto poor, unsuspecting transsexuals, pulling the whole transgender community to the political right.

Truthfully, I find this all a dreadfully silly string of increasingly tenuous leaps of logic. Furthermore, I think it’s insulting, poisonous, and staggeringly simplistic. Lets do a rapid fire round of incorrect, disgusting, or misleading things from this post.

people who would have been considered cis women just 15 years ago are today being encouraged to embrace diversity and abandon cisheteronormativity in favor of political transgenderism

By whom? I mean what is this shit. Talk about regurgitating propaganda. Oh there’s a shady movement with no clear leadership encouraging young cis women to be trans, huh? Where have I heard that before.

The people who hold these views are an amorphous bunch. They are not strictly “non-binary people” and they are not strictly “AFAB they/them users” (despite many fitting into that category). Get out into the world and you’ll find that you can’t make rules for who fits into this category and who doesn’t, all you can do is know them when you see them.

How convenient for this theory that the people hold no clear views, have no distinct identity, and must be identified by vibes alone.

Regardless of who these people are, they are understandably less confused about gender than a young, dysphoric, trans woman. They have a framework and an ideology within which to operate when considering their gender. Transsexuals, on the other hand, do not have this. We must navigate our burgeoning gender as if making our way through the tall grass, unclear where we’re going or what we’re even looking for.

Reader, I shit you not, this quote is in the same paragraph as the previous quote. These inaccurate generalizations are almost too silly to respond to, but I simply cannot, as a transsexual woman, allow this shit to stand. Do you think transsexuals don’t or can’t have a framework or ideology in which to understand our gender? Do you think political relationships to gender are therefore not personal, not embodied, not inscribed via violence and joy on the psyche of every human being? Do you think you can speak to the broad transsexual experience this specifically? We are the expression of a primordial urge that has expressed itself variously across the whole of human history. Fuck off. Have some humility. Speak less.

In a way, young transsexuals are being politically radicalized by people they consider their peers, when in reality they are in a wholly different class of trans: people with entirely separate motivations for their gender deviancy. These people do not have similar experiences of gender to what transsexuals have

This is where the divination skills of the writer are really straining under the weight of far-flung assumptions about other people. I mean, how can you stomach this kind of lazy “we all know who I’m talking about” shit alongside such drastic, bioessentialist claims about what’s happening for “these people.” If this is ringing your truscum alarms, you’re right on the money. Despite the author’s nominal opposition to gender essentialism, transsexuals of course experience gender in a different, more real way than “the politically transgender” who of course are just cis women playing a weird game with men.

One of the highest rules is to appear morally righteous, so it’s important to be vocal about your support of trans women. Go ahead and spell it “womxn” if you’re seeking extra points, I’m sure they won’t mind. But since we all know you don’t believe that garbage, what do you actually believe? You believe that as an AFAB person you are by default marginalized. Now that you can add “trans” to the list of your identities you’re even more marginalized than before! What’s important to remember about trans women is that they are AMAB, and that the privileges that they’ve gained by being that way make them not only less marginalized than you, but also dangerous (their privilege is unchecked).

Look, I just… this is ridiculous. Stop hate-reading Discord groupchats populated by 15 year olds.

The article ends with a paragraph about how our communities are being attacked from within by these people and their “neoliberalism,” about which the author (in an edit responding to criticism of their vague uses of the term) says the following:

I see neoliberalism as essentially another form of conservatism. One of the hallmarks of neoliberalism, however, is that they are masquerading as leftists.

Somebody better tell Margaret Thatcher. You can’t make this shit up.

In the end, the post completely fails to substantiate it’s most important claims. If you skim, with the right kind of grievances and the right mix of online-inflected political science vocabulary, the post can seem like it gestures at something real. This effect is wholly accounted for by the fact that her core subject, the “political transgender,” is just an amalgamated figure composed of queer capitalists, transgender conservatives, and young people who have experienced gender as the violent heirarchy it actually is but who have not yet come to understand the breadth and depth of freedom that lies beyond what narrow queer ideas American liberal capitalism has managed to recuperate.

This formulation of hers may feel good if you’ve been victimized by a trans person who didn’t understand what it was like to be a transsexual woman. Who doesn’t yet see how thoroughly our collective freedom is tied the abolition of racialized capitalism. Whose understanding of gender remains tied up in essentialism. But none of what she says is correct, and none of it is helpful. It’s a comforting intellectual posture. It simplifies a complex world. It even feels historically grounded. In essence, it’s a conspiracy theory.

1. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, on its own. There are any number of positive reasons why someone would engage in not-quite-substantiated criticism that nevertheless approaches an emotional “correctness” that aligns with what is actually true. Lithium’s post is perhaps a good example. It wants to express its disaffection with a certain strain of reactionary thought among trans-misogynistic trans people, and in doing so mounts a misguided idological critique of idological forms very much in need of anti-capitalist, pro-sosical correctives that address transmisogyny.