Transmedicalism's seduction: Normative gender, affectual productions, and white trans legitimacy

Abstract

This article uses feminist autoethnographic techniques to reflect on a set of interactions between a trans theorist and interlocuter I interviewed for my research, who I call Beth, and myself. In this work, I analyze how medical discourses of transgender transition, particularly that of transmedicalism, functions as an outgrowth of white supremacy. In this ethnographic vignette, binary [white] trans transition promises a coherent gender identity via recourse to anti-Blackness, rather than to cisheteronormativity. I argue that the binary assumptions built within transmedicalist approaches to trans life introduce gender not as an identity or even social phenomenon, but rather as a kind of successful or unsuccessful discursive and visual claim-making. These claims are reliant on whiteness and the ways in which white bodies can become invisibly normatively gendered because Black people are gendered as nonnormative. Contesting the boundedness of gender present within popular American conceptions, this series of interactions illustrates a fluid field of conceptual gender which relies on affective connections that mobilize through and across bodies in order to produce certain kinds of normativity.