Decompiling Oppression #57
Sam McVeety
Of the many things that feel important to talk about right now, I'd like to focus today on the movement against transgender people in Texas, and how this figures into more broadly felt vulnerability. For those who aren't familiar, alongside its recent actions against abortion, the State of Texas has passed a bill providing for legal action against parents who seek out gender affirming care for their children. Beyond the superficial hypocrisy of "parental autonomy for me but not for thee", this ties into a much deeper discussion around gender affirming care, and surgery in particular. Many of the resources this week come from Dean Spade's Normal Life, which is a great (if dense) resource for learning more.
Fundamentally, the Texas law has much in common with an earlier case, Grimm v. Gloucester, with rampant harm stemming from adults projecting their biases and fears onto transgender youth. Grimm involved a school bathroom as the site of "controversy", where court documents make it abundantly clear that none of his fellow students took vocal issue with Gavin Grimm using the bathroom of his choice. Instead, the subsequent frenzy of outrage came entirely from parents and their imagined scenarios (often drawing on harmful stereotypes).
While the Texas lawsuit and media narrative centers on trans children, it's important to also realize how access to care and surgery (if desired -- more on this later) is inaccessible to many trans adults. One obvious barrier is cost, felt where gender identity intersects with economic class, as these surgeries are often prohibitively expensive. Many government aid programs produce an additional layer of gatekeeping around access to surgery, by restricting coverage to procedures deemed "medically necessary", from which gender affirming care is frequently excluded.
Even when fiscal means are present, many medical insitutions deny (or gatekeep with onerous documentation and approval requirements) procedures for transgender people that would otherwise be trivially allowed as cosmetic surgery for cisgender people. For example, when a cisgender person seeks reconstructive surgery after an accident, no questions are asked around the necessity of the procedure. In fact, such procedures are often seen as important precisely because it would be traumatic to the cisgender person not to properly present as their felt gender identity. It's worth dwelling on this point for a minute, as a crucial admission: not presenting as one's felt gender identity is traumatic. And yet: it does not mean that trans people have access to the same care (as in, literally the same procedures).
There's a further layer here that I think is worth mentioning, which is that we also need to avoid perpetuating the trope that surgery is the central facet of the trans experience. Some individuals undergo surgeries (of different kinds), and others don't. Whether an individual has undergone surgery (or wants to) shouldn't and doesn't affect their felt identity. While the aforementioned access issues are certainly relevant, focusing on surgery as an essential, identity-validating step erases the many life experiences that diverge from this pattern. Centering surgery also causes harm by furthering the erasure of non-binary individuals and gender non-conforming people. By portraying a narrative that surgery (and with it, strict adherence to male or female norms) is the way to be a "real" trans person, it reinforces a rigid gender binary.
Irrespective of our discussion here, many laws and structures nonetheless center surgery as central to validating the existence of transgender individuals. For example, many government entities require surgery to change gender markers on official documents. When combined with the financial and other barriers to access, this means that many individuals cannot legally change their gender marker. This then creates a double-bind, where people are forced to have inaccurate documents or seek extralegal means to access surgery and gender-affirming care. (As you might imagine, the contestation of documentation as a space of protest creates common cause with immigrant communities, and I hope I'll be able to write more about those intersections soon.)
That's a lot, and what I'd like to leave you with is the complexity of these overlapping issues. Yes, the Texas law is awful, and overturning it is only one step toward providing greater protection and access, particularly for people who are the most vulnerable -- whether they are children or adults.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What internal and external aspects of your felt self are important for you to feel secure in your identity? How have others seen or not seen these aspects in you?
Communal: What medical needs can you easily access in your community, and when are there barriers? Do the barriers depend on who is trying to access services?
Solidarity: Support TENT and their work to further gender diverse equality in Texas, and/or allgo and their work to nurture and celebrate queer people of color.
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