From Women and the Arts:

Locating, Opposing and Casting Out At Home

For my second event, I attended the Transgender Commission Open House, where I met Kate Bornstein and watched her perform a series of short pieces questioning the system behind gender. I also picked up Kate’s My Gender Workbook and a transgender friend at the event, which has taught me a lot about how to look at gender and the people marginalized by gender. At the same time as I was investigating that, I was reading Derek Gregory’s The Colonial Present in a global studies class. Interacting with transgender people made me think about how our society positions transpeople as Others within our borders, in much the same way that Gregory claims America has positioned terrorists, Middle Easterners, Muslims, and other groups as exterior Others. In his book, he delineates three tactics for constructing others, calling them ‘locating,’ ‘opposing,’ and ‘casting out. He then demonstrates how this process sanctions violence against foreign others, which bears incredible similarity to the way violence against transpeople in the United States is made more acceptable than violence against men and women.

Locating, according to Gregory’s definition, uses technical wording to reduce opponents to objects. He cites the use of terms like Palestinian targets (instead of Palestinian men, women and children) and the Iraqi Military Machine (as opposed to Iraqi soldiers and civilians) to illustrate this point. The dehumanization of transpeople also begins with locating them outside of the category of people by using the binary gender system in the same way warfare wields technical words. Gender, as most people understand it, means either Man or Woman. Most people also believe that everyone falls into one of these categories- you are a boy or a girl, a male or a female, a man or a woman, or any number of other one-or-the-other groups. If, like Kate, you decides to position yourself as “gender-neither,” people suddenly don’t know what you are. Imagine:
“Male or Female?”
“Nope!”
“I’m sorry, did you say male or female?”
“I didn’t. I’m neither. I prefer to operate without a gender.”
“Well, if you’re not male or female- what are you?”
Without gender (the immediate binary category assigned to people at or before birth based on what they look like between their legs) people don’t know how to view someone. Less obvious ways of failing to perform Male or Female, from wearing a dress and a mustache to not sewing as well as the other girls, generally lead to the same type of denigrating relocation outside of an expected gender, where one becomes nothing. In the same way that technical words transform human opponents into targets and other objects, a binary understanding of human gender removes people who don’t fit well from the general group of “human”.

The next step Gregory discusses, opposing, relies on cultural attacks to reduce problems to a confrontation between Civilization and barbarism. This division calls good American citizens to fight against ignorance, darkness, and Evil itself. In terms of 9/11 and the war on terror, opposing was achieved by asking the American public “Why do they hate us?” Similarly, in the context of differently gendered people, opposing often originates from the construction of a perceived attack on what are seen as traditional family values. One example of this type of opposition would be presenting integrity or being oneself as an American virtue and then faulting transpeople for ‘lying’ about who they are. This feeling of being deceived could come any number of reasons ranging from a conflict between their inner and exterior images of self to having an unexpected history in a different body. According to Kate, “that seems to be universally the least forgivable crime: we’re not who we seem to be” (Bornstein 22). A major fallacy of opposing is that it relies on the erasure of historical and societal factors that explain these apparently shocking realizations. In the case of the war, the question “Why do they hate us?” can be answered any number of ways if one considers the effects of US intervention in the Middle East or the ideological differences between our cultures (keeping in mind that other cultures also have ideologies, and they are not necessarily any more or less valid that our own). Similarly, one cannot credibly impugn transpeople for not being open in a society where honesty about having a non-normative gender identity has often led to that person’s death. Opposing is, of course, accomplished through many different forms of reductions to us vs. them binaries, but they follow the same general pattern illustrated by the integrity vs. dishonesty example. This oversimplification relies on locating (the first step) to objectify the other and separating them from history and society, in order that they may be re-imagined as having an irreconcilably different nature from the self.

Casting out, or insisting that the life of the different or divergent person is worthless, constitutes the final move in sanctioning violence against them. This occurs after a person has been transformed into an object or other un-person through localization and characterized as inherently different and threatening by opposing. At this point, they are said to have a life without value, eradicating them is no longer ethically wrong but prudent. Gregory demonstrates the success of this attitude when he points out that many believe “ten dead Israelis are a massacre; 50 Palestinians not enough to count” (Gregory 116). Casting out the Palestinians has led to the conclusion that their deaths are inconsequential and need not be recognized. The attitude that some people do not deserve to live has been equally dangerous for transpeople. Many transmen and women have lost their lives because they were cast out from normal society and attacked by people who believed they were subhuman. This denigration is enabled by a binary understanding of gender and the prejudices that stem from that understanding and is a very real and very dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that transgender people are murdered at a significantly higher rate than other Americans. Overseas and at home, expelling people from the basic category of humanity enables high incidences of violence and in many cases the loss of life.

The three moves outlined in Derek Gregory’s The Colonial Present, as characterizing the construction of an other abroad, can also be understood as the process by which transgender people become others at home. The localization of transpeople outside traditional gender categories, fear inspired by this displacement and through opposing, and depreciation of their lives all combine to cast transpeople as others and to some extent, permit violence against them because of their non-traditional identity.