Billy’s Banter: Reflections from GSC Director (November)
Reflections for my white peers on International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR)
Reflections for my white peers on International Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR)
Founded November 20, 1999, International Transgender Day of Remembrance exists to memorialize those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia and to bring attention to the continued violence that trans people face. In a political climate that is increasingly hostile to trans people all over the world, TDOR serves as an important reminder that transphobia is killing people.
We know that it is trans women, and particularly trans women of color, who are most likely to be met with transmisogynistic violence and death. C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn have published poignant critiques of the ways that “the deaths of trans women or trans-feminine people of color act as a resource for the development and dissemination of many different agendas.”[1] More pointedly, they demonstrate that “Immobilized in life, and barred from spaces designated as white (the good life, the Global North, the gentrifying inner city, the university, the trans community), it is in their death that poor and sex working trans people of color are invited back in; it is in death that they suddenly come to matter.”[2] Similarly, Sarah Lamble critiques TDOR in its reduction of violence against trans folks to transphobia alone. She warns that “deracialized accounts of violence produce seemingly innocent White witnesses who can consume these spectacles of domination without confronting their own complicity in such acts.”[3] In the last decade, I have attended a number of TDOR memorial programs on college campuses and in the communities in which I lived. These events have been populated largely by other white folks, including me.
I have been reflecting a lot lately about my closeness to and complicity in white supremacist logics, especially given the work that I do. These reflections are especially urgent in the wake of the racist and misogynistic results of the latest election. I will not say that I have any answers, however, in this reflection I have decided to share the conclusion to one of my recent publications. Perhaps instead of continuing to extract value from Black trans death, we should interrogate whiteness and complicity on this International TDOR.
I invite my white peers to join in this important dialogue so that we might find better ways to confront racist and transmisogynistic violence in the challenging days ahead.
The following is excerpted from:
Huff, Billy. "Thinking Trans/Sex: Erotic Justice and the Trans-Subject." QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 10, no. 1 (2023): 123-143.
The publication process most often makes the practices of revision opaque. As I conclude, however, I find it necessary to make the revision of this article transparent for a couple reasons. First, the very idea of erotic justice with which I began this project was wholly transformed through engagement with the thoughtful critiques of one reviewer. Second, this article fails to adequately answer the primary critique of the reviewer, namely a failure to account for gender and sexuality as coming into being through racist settler colonial processes and especially my own complicity as a white trans- masculine subject therein. It is precisely this failure that is central to my renewed understanding of erotic justice. For this reason, I decided to leave the first part of this conclusion unrevised—my failure laid bare. I now believe that the failure of the article might well be the most significant contribution it makes—my renewed sense of justice coming in to focus through its negative—what erotic justice is not.
My reaction upon receiving my initial reviews was shame. I thought the account I submitted was adequately “intersectional.” I was ashamed of my blind spots and failures. Why do I always have to be told the same things, and why do I not seem to get better? I admit that I want to present my work as that of a “good white person” who is fully committed to the struggle for a more socially just world. I mistakenly thought my argument was generally liberatory. I was wrong. Following the suggestions offered by my reviewer, I first attended to the whiteness and Western focus of my citational practices. I came to realize that the critique of intelligibility I was offering was not indeed uniquely original. Indigenous folks and people of color have been offering quite similar critiques for centuries. What I experience as a fairly new exclusion in the grand scheme of things is, in fact, not new at all for those whose survival and pleasures have always been limited by imposed categories of knowing and being. The reviewer pointed out that my work “resonates with trans of color scholarship in that [I am] troubling ‘trans’ intelligibility.” The reviewer recommended that I situate my critique within the context of those who came before and those who continue to argue against the confines of intelligibility now.
Next, I attempted to mark whiteness in all the places that it existed as unmarked and supposedly universal throughout my original draft. I added footnotes to account for my own privileges and the many ways in which I benefit from recognition as a white person who is always already more intelligible to white supremacy. I enhanced my descriptions of gender and sexuality through engagement with the settler colonial and white supremacist foundations of their becoming.
After all these revisions, my article oddly seemed even more disappointing. My revisions felt performative. I did not come even close to answering the reviewer’s most pressing critique—“Now, your work centers a white body so the question for me is this: How can you develop this work in ways that both implicate whiteness while centering sexuality as a means of facilitating a felt sense of gender?” I sat with this article and this critique for weeks until I realized that the answer to the reviewer’s question is that I cannot. It is not possible to mitigate my complicity with structures of white supremacy as long as my argument continues to center my own striving for pleasure. Said differently, although citational practices, noting structural privileges, and marking whiteness are vitally important, no amount of doing these things comes close to touching my own complicity. This is not justice.
My complicity, in fact, stares me in the face every time I visit the fag bars where I attempt to realize my desires. It explains why I find almost exclusively other masculine white people there. In fact, all the instances of sexualized gender I cited in the previous section in support of my argument were made by presumably white folks. My complicity haunts the immense pleasure I feel whenever a man refers to my adult body as his “boy”—a term that has historically been used to dehumanize and infantilize Black men. What does it mean that this recognition is all I’ve ever wanted? My complicity evidences itself in the fact that a reviewer had to point out to me that my list of the dire consequences of the foreclosure of sexuality from understandings of trans- did not include trans- women who do sex work. Where is my rage when they are criminalizing, incarcerating, and murdering trans- women of color who are trying to thrive, to find pleasure, and to survive? My complicity fully reveals itself in the previous section where I applaud myself for avoiding the necropolitical use of Black trans- death to advance my argument by using Black joy and pleasure to do much the same thing—or as it is stated in the introduction to “The Issue of Blackness” in Transgender Studies Quarterly, I use the “Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.” This is not justice.
At first, I considered abandoning the project altogether. I do not wish to do harm, and perhaps it does. I also weighed the consequences of removing “erotic justice” from the title, but my avoidance would do nothing to alter the complicity for which I was asked to account. I decided to continue. My insistence that separating gender and sexuality is not necessary or sufficient still stands. Furthermore, my striving for pleasure is without a doubt my only reason for living. That does not mean, however, that my striving doesn’t harm others. Trans- fag bottom boy—the very language I speak myself into being has always and continues to foreclose so many. Could it be that lurking behind my avowed desire to be recognized as a “trans- fag bottom boy” was also an unacknowledged desire for whiteness? It was there all along.
This article critiques those other trans- subjects who I argue have harmed me, but that critique was always misplaced. As Robyn Weigman tells us about the pursuit of gender, “On every occasion in which it is used, it is invested with powerful transformative hopes, first that it can adequately name the experience to which it refers; and second that in being what it names it can provide resolution to the problem that its naming calls forth.” There does not exist an invocation of “transgender” that does not foreclose someone, so when trans- folks respond negatively to my articulations of gender, doing justice would be to listen and to hold space for that harm. Doing justice means that I am white, and I must recognize that who I fight for will assuredly not be my own face in the mirror. That recognition was fully absent from the original draft. Justice means maintaining an awareness of what barriers my passions erect before others. What are the racist and imperialist tropes that animate my desires? Justice, as Vivienne Namaste argues, means realizing that no amount of subtle theorizing (my original aim for this article), can ever ameliorate our complicity. It is, instead, only through attention to the experiences of those who have the most to lose (not me) that the imposition of colonial, racist, and ableist violence becomes clear, so that we might fight against it.
In “Refusing Mastery, Mastering Refusal: Critical Communication Pedagogy and Gender,” B. LeMaster and Deanna L. Fassett articulate a blueprint for thinking about gender toward liberation. Their framing resembles my renewed understanding of erotic justice. They describe the dual operations of epistemologically refusing mastery while also ontologically mastering refusal. Refusing mastery means to “engage and critique the structural means by which one is rendered a ‘failure’ as a result of their embodied difference across intersections of identity.” In this article, I illuminated the ways that sexualized trans- subjectivity is rendered unintelligible within normative and hegemonic epistemological understandings of being trans-. I discussed the consequences of this unintelligibility, and I argued that this foreclosure is not necessary or sufficient.
The failure of this article to address the reviewer’s primary critique stands as evidence that refusing mastery alone does not lead us to justice, erotic or otherwise. Instead, we must also master refusal, which “engages and preempts the affective registers that seek to refuse transformation.” Mastering refusal requires that we acknowledge our complicity in the perpetuation of oppression. My article invoked trans- women and men of color as a means to forward my argument to clear a space for the pursuit of my pleasure, and I claimed this would somehow lead to justice for all. I critiqued colonial logics of gender only insofar as they erased me. I failed to account for the harms that wider acceptance of my sexualized gender might do to others, and I refused to listen when they tried to articulate that harm to me.
I could have “fixed” my article. I could have written around my failure and performed as a “good white person.” I could have pretended that I understood what erotic justice meant all along. Instead, I find it more productive to point to my failure to do justice. I know that there are others out there like me and still more who will not be coaxed into being as long as our categories call into question the legitimacy of our desires, so I will continue to argue for discursive space for our existence. This alone, however, does not comprise erotic justice—as if categories born through violence can ever do emancipatory work no matter their arrangement. I hope that this argument can exist as one among many complex and unstable accounts about gender and sexuality that enables and disables, harms and heals, compels and also always ultimately fails. To truly do justice, we all must learn to fail better.
[1] C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, "Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife," in The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (New York: Routledge, 2022), 66.
[2] Snorton and Haritaworn, 74.
[3] Sarah Lamble, "Retelling Racialized Violence, Remaking White Innocence: The Politics of Interlocking Oppressions in Transgender Day of Remembrance," Sexuality Research & Social Policy 5 (2008): 24.