“Trans women are women” is, by now, a boring and inefficient slogan, but even this is perhaps too far for many academics, even trans academics, studying trans people.
Take, for example, Andrea Long Chu and Emmet Harsin Drager’s influential essay ‘After Trans Studies’, in which they argue that trans studies as it currently exists depends upon a disavowal of the transsexual in order to make the transgender a resource for academic theorisation. In this essay, Chu comments on Sandy Stone’s ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, almost a founding text for contemporary trans studies:
I note the connection between Stone and [Donna] Haraway just to say that posttranssexual is not just an attempt to disavow transsexuality; it’s also an attempt, like cyborg before it, to be post-woman. (p. 109)
(Chu here references the explicit influence of Stone’s teacher, Donna Haraway, on ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. This relationship is not my primary concern here.)
To back up this claim, Chu quotes this sentence from Stone;
In the transsexual as a text we may find the potential to map the refigured body onto conventional gender discourse and thereby disrupt it, to take advantage of the dissonances created by such a juxtaposition to fragment and reconstitute the elements of gender in new and unexpected geometries. (Stone, p. 165)
Chu’s use of this sentence is quite strange. For one thing, Stone is explicitly referring to the transsexual, not the transgender, to make her case, so it barely seems to qualify as a disavowal of transsexuality. As for ‘post-woman’, there is nothing in this extract to support the argument; that, for Stone, the transsexual breaks open gender as it currently exists and reassembles it into some new ‘geometry’ neither states nor implies nothing about womanhood. Let’s remember that Sandy Stone is herself a post-op transsexual woman. Is Stone disavowing herself?
A more sophisticated, but similarly flawed reading of Stone’s manifesto can be found in Cameron Awkward-Rich’s ‘Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual’. In this paper, Awkward-Rich argues that trans community and feminism seem to relate to one another through a desire constituted by a wound; that is, they are both heavily invested in one another yet this investment expresses itself via antagonism. (I do not think that the argument Awkward-Rich makes in this paper implies that this antagonism is equal or has identical consequences across either side of this division). Awkward-Rich reads Stone’s essay as representing a departure or a rupture from feminism. See these extracts;
For Stone, affirming and representing the messy reality of trans lives necessitated a split from feminism that would, in the future, eventually be healed. (p. 829)
Likewise, this threat of annihilation drives the split of trans from feminist thinking when Stone urges transsexuals to write themselves into existence in the face of medicolegal and feminist discourse that evacuates trans of its lived experience, a split that is continuously repeated in the story trans studies tells about its formation. (p. 832)
I like Awkward-Rich’s paper as a negotiation of the relationship between trans politics and feminism - but I consider such a negotiation necessary insofar as the presence and role of trans men and masculinity in trans politics prevents a total identification with a ‘feminist’ politics. As applied to Stone, however, this reading seems to miss the mark. While it is clear that Stone seeks to offer a counterdiscourse to feminisms like those of Janice Raymond, the route by which she arrives at this project is distinctly feminist in outline. See, for example, this quote;
Besides the obvious complicity of these accounts in a Western white male definition of performative gender, the authors also reinforce a binary, oppositional mode of gender identification. (p. 156)
If it is the sense of gender as performative and oppositional that has been latched onto by much academic theorising, it is clear that Stone positions this within a structure of power determined by ‘Western white male’ definition. The process of medicolegal ‘inscription’ described so influentially by Stone is an inscription of women as subjects by patriarchal power. Indeed, Stone’s analysis even seems to draw on the dreaded Second Wave lesbian feminism in her account of this inscription, asking
How is one to maintain the divide between the “male” self, whose proper object of desire is Woman, and the “female” self, whose proper object of desire is Man? (p. 158)
There is an obvious appeal to this reading - that trans theorising has already absorbed, assimilated, and indeed, advanced beyond, the Radical Feminist critique of gender. If locating Stone within a tradition of second wave lesbian feminism seems strange, it is only because the fact that she was already well integrated in lesbian feminist circles before the controversy around Olivia Records arose is largely forgotten. Ironically, isolating trans theorising and practices from the communities in which they are situated is another function of the medicolegal gaze Stone critiques so elegantly. Similarly, whilst a straightforwardly transphobic second-wave feminism is a convenient foil for later generations of feminist writers attempting to legitimate themselves, it is often forgotten that many lesbian feminists of the 70s and 80s were already invested in the abolition of gender way before the advent of queer theory. These gender abolitionisms were messy, often implicated in the same racism and transphobia the Second Wave is so notorious for - but so are the present iterations of gender abolitionism.[1] Stone’s essay is also implicated in these questions - as one might guess from the flippant self-identification with empire. But it also indicates the role of Radical Feminist critique, via the displacement of heterosexuality from its approaches to gender and to kinship, in the formation of the contemporary trans/gender moment. An attempt to see Stone’s work, and by extension, the trans theorising she has influenced, as outside of or unrelated to feminism, seems to replicate the same disavowal of feminism or of womanhood Stone’s critics claim to oppose. So are trans women women or aren’t they?
Which I guess returns us to the question, Is Stone disavowing herself? And if she were, would that not be a case for the continued usefulness of her arguments in interrogating the contradictions of existing trans/feminist movements? If so, perhaps my continued fascination with ‘Second Wave Feminism’ might be justified as more than just an individual fixation or a wounded desire.
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A version of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is available on Sandy’s charmingly 90s website, here; https://sandystone.com/projects.shtml
You can read ‘Trans, Feminism; or Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual’ here; https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1086/690914 . It’s sci-hub though so this link may not work forever.
I would link you to a copy of ‘After Trans Studies’ but to be honest, it’s not worth reading.
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[1] I do not consider myself a ‘gender abolitionist’.