Retheorising Gender and Sexuality: The Emergence of ‘Trans”
Prof. Deborah Lynn Steinberg//Dr Lyndsey Moon//Ruth Pearce
ESRC Seminar Series 2012-14
Seminar 2
Trans and Everyday Culture
social networks, social movements, everyday lives and everyday repertoires
May 23 2013
Rapporteur’s Report
Table 3
Rapporteur: Prof. Deborah Lynn Steinberg
1. Morning Discussion
Discussion arising the Freya’s paper clustered into two interlinking themes:


What is ‘trans culture’?
What distinguishes ‘trans theory’ as distinct, for example, from queer theory?
Trans as multiple cultures
With respect to the question of ‘trans culture’, we suggested that trans is in fact constituted of
multiple cultures defined by
 (more or less) distinctive constituencies/communities
 multiple modalities of trans as lived materiality (rights, movements, institutionalities,
personal lives)
 (more or less) distinctive ‘narratives of self’ (i.e. ‘master narratives’, self histories, tropes
and repertoires of expressed or unexpressed trans selfhood)
 distinctive frameworks of understanding/political analysis/definitions of trans
Distinctions/contestatory framing of Trans
Trans and Distinctions of Relationship to gender: the distinction between transition into gender
and rupture of a gender order
 Transitioning: to inhabit gender in ways that resolve the embodied feeling of gendered
‘wrongness’
 Gender queer: questioning gender // moving away from gender and the sense cultural
‘wrongness’ arising from ‘cisgendered culture’ (as Natacha defined it in her later paper).
Defining Trans
Who is ‘trans’ or rightly regarded as part of a ‘trans community’?
 Are trans identity/communit defined by those who self define as ‘trans’ and/or inject
themselves into a trans communal context?
 Does someone who has transitioned necessarily belong to a ‘trans’ community?
 Shouldn’t we understand ‘trans’ as a distinct identity – ‘trans’ may be an ‘end-up’ point
for some, but will be a starting point and an intentionally transient identity and process,
for others.
This is in part a question of who claims or assumes the standing to define and attribute
identities – one of the points of critique suggested by Natacha of cisgenderism
Trans theory vs queer theory (gender/queer theory)
Retheorising Gender and Sexuality: The Emergence of ‘Trans”
Prof. Deborah Lynn Steinberg//Dr Lyndsey Moon//Ruth Pearce
ESRC Seminar Series 2012-14
Seminar 2
Trans theory and queer theory have distinctive genealogies:
Queer theory arose from a foundational ‘troubling’ of epistemic/affective/lived field of sexuality
- challenging the developmental model of sexuality (and the theory of its singular
‘fixity’ resolved in childhood – though possibly repressed or misrecognised until
adult ‘revelation’ and ‘coming out’)
- challenging the linearity of Kinseys re-framing – Kinsey allowed for the possibility of
polymorphous desire, but retained the notion of a resolved identity in a ‘fixed’ place
somewhere on that continuum
- the ‘troubling’ of heteronormative as well as homonormative ‘fixities’ provided the
framework for ‘troubling’ gender
- in other words, queer retheorising of gender arose out of the queer challenge to
LGB (and lesbian/feminist) politics/frameworks/focus on sexuality.
- Though of course this was not linear and gay, lesbian and feminist theory
themselves have distinct (though intersectional) and nuanced political, epistemic
histories
Trans theory arose from a focus on gender ‘troubles’ in part as embodied/affective dissonance
(the wrong body and/or the wrong gender attribution) and in part from the dissonances of
gender queer (the wrongnesses of gender (or cisgenderism)).
- These have been both distinctive and also intersectional tendencies in the
genealogy of trans theory
Identity: arising questions (both of external attribution and ‘inner’ sense of self)
- ‘visibly trans’ as distinct from ‘visibly gendered’
- trans as distinct from intersex, gender queer, queer
- LGB as defining modalities gender identity (as distinct from or not only defining
object-desire or modalities of desire/attraction)
Intelligibility/legibility
The intersubjective aspects of gender/sexuality arising in the example of ‘trans’
Distinctions of Gender performance/gender role/gender self-feeling/gender attribution
Do the issues arising from and accruing to ‘trans’ only affect people who are or feel gender
variant?
Distinctions between passing, ‘living in stealth’, ‘legibility’
Trans and everyday issues
- Legalities and recognitions and how they shape the parameters of trans lives
- Languages and terminologies: how they authenticate; what they make speakable
- Medical legitimation and the initimate impact on trans lives (a core question on
Manslow’s hierarchy of needs for example)
- Internet spaces and the possibilities of self-authorship, community inclusive of the
multiple constuencies of ‘trans’ (those for whom trans is a transient identity and
those for whom it is a community of arrival)
2. Discussions arising from Surya’s paper
Discussion points on ‘queer’
Retheorising Gender and Sexuality: The Emergence of ‘Trans”
Prof. Deborah Lynn Steinberg//Dr Lyndsey Moon//Ruth Pearce
ESRC Seminar Series 2012-14
Seminar 2
1. Problems of using ‘queer’ as an inclusive or universal category:
- A term that is alienating or offensive for many: generational, a gendered term
(associations with gay men); cross cultural (anglophone recuperation of ‘queer’ does
not always translate)
- Queer is only claimable by particular constituencies; its connotations and ‘fit’
depend on a range political/social/cultural/historical/intersubjective localities
- Queer theory and the problem of accessibility: problems of academic language and
exclusivity
- Used as a universal – can have the effect of territorialising (creating new
normativities/exclusions) even as the intent is to terraform and open spaces)
2. ‘queer’ as a political project might forclose on certain questions: what about people who
want to live in the mainstream of gender? What about this modality of ‘trans’?
3. queer also as a helpful ‘non-label label’ (one that invites conversation)
Discussion points on ‘What does consideration of gender diversity in Southern contexts mean
for UK based thinking and practice?’
1. against universalism: an impetus that anglophone debates or political contexts should not be
prescriptive or regarded as universals
2. trans-definitions: an impetus to consider the context, internecine nuances and situatedness of
Anglophone thinking and practice
e.g. the Americanised dominance in the context of trans arising from DSM – which arises from a
medico-commercial context (USA healthcare is a unique, if extremely large, exception in crosscultural health care political economies); DSM’s diagnostic taxonomies serve as indexical criteria
for private insurance coverage for health care.
3. trans activism: the internet may attract international constituencies, but be idiomatically
Anglophone (i.e. its discourses/languages/assumptions are not international, but rather
Anglophone).
3. Afternoon Table Discussion
What are the thresholds that distinguish the spectrum of gender questioning and
attributions/categories of gender variance
- What makes a child ‘trans’ as distinct from ‘gay’?
- The dangers of a diagnostic or prognostic impetus to categorise gender nonconformity can lay the foundations for pathologisation or at least pigeonholing
children (easy slippage between categorise/name and ‘diagnose’ in the case of
children presents a particular spectre of this problem.
- Establishment of alternative or more pluralistic normativities can, despite the
intention to open up and extend recognitions and possibilities, have the effect of
forclosing on or failing to recognised actual lived pluralities. In other words, there is
Retheorising Gender and Sexuality: The Emergence of ‘Trans”
Prof. Deborah Lynn Steinberg//Dr Lyndsey Moon//Ruth Pearce
ESRC Seminar Series 2012-14
Seminar 2
a danger of establishing a more plural array of what are nonetheless, prescriptive
norms.
To what degree is there a reliable correlation between gender and bodies?
- Why don’t the diversely and widely experienced array of gender dysphorias
translate into more people being ‘trans’?
- How do we adequately explain the power of gendered feeling and the ways in which
gendered feeling locates in and through bodies?
- What is gender?
The ‘spectra’ of gender:
- Gender identity
- Gender role
- Gender performance
- Gender attachment (our attachment to ourselves as gendered)
- Gender and Desire (may or may not suture to the latter)
Rethinking gender and sexuality (nuanced by the range of differences that make a difference)
- Not as a binary; not as a linear continuum, but as a constellation - a constellation of
pluralities, fluidities, confluences and dissonances
- Two children who are comparably ‘gender variant’ may be on entirely different
gender trajectories – there is no reliable indicator of where ‘gender variance’ (and
not only in childhood) will lead
- Trans is not a singularity of orientation, experience, life story, theoretical framework
Temporality
- Developmental models of gender and desire are framed as a temporal progression
to a fixed position
- The transition narrative is also a temporal framing – and a master narrative that
may give some voice and intelligibility and may alienate or negate others
How do we ‘know’?
How did we ‘know’ ourselves with or against the grain of gendered culture?