A New Model of Transness: From Validity & Misery Politics to Queer Joy
What threatens reactionaries is not validity or authenticity discourse based on suffering, but the possibility that trans people could love their existence
It is a common strategy to emphasize suffering, powerlessness and misery in order to change the minds of transphobes and foster compassion among them. Intuitively, this seems like an effective approach: If you really show them how much you suffer under the existing conditions that they reinforce and stress your powerlessness, surely they will start to feel bad for you and have a change of heart.
Some take this even further and also emphasize how they are “one of the real, valid and good trans people” that “deserve compassion” because they are “just trying to be normal”. A lot of the times, these people will also explicitly put emphasis on their struggles and suffering as evidence for how authentic they are.
But here is the sad truth: Many transphobes actively embrace the suffering of trans people and use it as a justification for their transphobic politics.
From crude jokes about the high suicide rates of trans people to memes about how mentally ill trans people are: Transphobes are very much aware about the suffering of trans people — and they enjoy it.
1. Validity Discourse and The Politics of Misery
I want to make one thing clear before continuing: There is no denying that a lot of trans people experience great suffering. How could they not? We live in a world that is structured around a bioessentialist, heterosexist and cisnormative gender binary; a world that actively devalues trans people and makes it difficult for them to change their looks and bodies in a way that brings them joy.
It is important to talk about these matters and point at the norms, social relations and institutions that produce and reproduce this suffering.
What becomes a problem, however, is when transness itself is equated with suffering, and when misery becomes a key criteria to determine how “valid” and “authentically trans” a trans person really is.
Such a reductive attitude denies transness its potential beauty, joy and liberatory power and both a personal and a social/political level. It does not allow transness to be anything more than a condition of struggle and misery, which portrays transness as undesirable and thereby reinforces and rationalizes its subordinate position in our gender system.
Appealing to validity is also ultimately speaking the language of the oppressor. Who gets to decide which bodies, life experiences and struggles are valid and thus worthy of recognition and which ones aren’t? This is the same logic that cisnormative biopolitical institutions use in order to devalue trans people and deny them access to the resources that they need the moment they do not fit some standardized criteria of what counts as valid and deserving of help.
Validity discourse and misery politics trap us in neoliberal individualistic attitudes centered around a focus on how “valid” and “authentically miserable” individual trans people are, which prevents a communal consciousness with all its social and political dimensions.
It is important to remember that the way we make sense of our bodies, feelings and experiences on a gendered level currently largely happens based on terms and concepts created by cis people and the heterosexist binary gender system. Trans people (and queer people of all kinds) are in urgent need for politically conscious communities that are able to build up their own language that allows them to restructure the way they make sense of themselves.
2. Gender Dysphoria and the Pathologization of Transness
The greatest example of how much transness is equated with misery and suffering on even an institutional level is the equating of transness with Gender Dysphoria; a medical diagnosis that describes strong feelings of despair, stress and worry because of one’s body (and identity more generally) on a gendered level.
The problem here is not the recognition that a lot of trans people do experience the symptoms that the concept of Gender Dysphoria describes at some point in their lives, but rather that transness itself is reduced to a mere pathology that denotes illness, misery and suffering.
Gender Dysphoria is often framed as an inherent, trans-exclusive pathology that is the determining feature whether or not a person is trans or cis. In many places of the world, an official Gender Dysphoria diagnosis is required to legally change your gender and/or transition in a medical way.
The equating of transness with Gender Dysphoria, and the way we understand feelings of Gender Dysphoria as a pathology innate only to trans individuals, has many harmful implications & consequences:
If Gender Dysphoria is simply “The Trans Illness” then we are stuck in a bioessentialist framework that completely erases all social and cultural contexts that shape our existence as a gendered being and, by extension, our experiences of Gender Dysphoria.
It implies Gender Dysphoria is something that only trans people experience. This not only frames cis people as “healthy”, “normal” and unaffected by the gendered nature of our society, but also implies trans people are somehow a fundamentally different type of human, almost like a subspecies (reactionaries love to use such dehumanizing language).
It severely limits our political ability to meaningfully challenge the gender binary and cisnormativity by naturalizing them through the pathologization of transness. This also prevents us from holding social systems and institutions truly accountable for the suffering that they cause.
It creates a false dichotomy between “authentic trans people” and “inauthentic trans people” where only those who have an official dysphoria diagnosis and are the most miserable are seen as valid and therefore worthy of consideration. This also feeds resentment in trans people towards other trans people whose paths and experiences differ from theirs, and who might not visibly struggle as much as they do.
(Something relevant to this point: I recently saw an increase in people arguing that “nondysphorics” who medically transition are somehow “stealing resources” from dysphoric trans people. This really has the same energy as people arguing immigrants are somehow “stealing their jobs”)
It rationalizes harmful and arbitrary standards that medical institutions set up with the effect of making transitioning incredibly difficult, exhausting and demanding. Only if trans people have suffered enough in both intensity and duration (according to standardized criteria decided by cis people) are they allowed to finally change their bodies in a way that actually allows them to be happy.
It denies the joyful, liberating and life-affirming aspects that come with the act of rejecting the gender category you got unconsensually assigned at birth and the enactment of autonomy over your body.
An individualistic attitude towards transness centered around Gender Dysphoria also puts all responsibility on trans people. It suggests that it’s simply their responsibility to make sure that they “pass” in the eyes of cisnormative society in order to not be dysphoric. This conveniently absolves our society of any responsibility to transform its social systems and the way the majority perceives and genders bodies and expressions (which said majority currently does based on binary, bioessentialist and heterosexist frameworks).
3. The Power of Queer Joy
So: What does “Queer Joy” mean exactly and how is it a different model of transness compared to a more pathological model centered around illness and misery? And why is Queer Joy a better model?
3.1 The Significance of Queerness and Joyfulness
Queerness is not simply just an identity that you either have or don’t have, it’s a way of living. Queer is an active personal, social and political rejection of the heteronormative binary gender system. To be queer means to be strange, which means to not make sense according to the rigid, repressive and bioessentialist frameworks of gender and sexuality that the current gender system forces onto us ever since we were born.
“The modern gender system has no place for trans people, so we’re subversive to it. As such, trans people are not transhistorical, but a historically contingent feature of the post-colonial gender system which has been imposed upon the world.” - Flores & Storm, The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto
The only reason why trans people are seen as something pathological in the first place is because of the colonial bioessentialist binary that got imposed by european colonizers on many parts of the world. Plenty of cultures such as the Bugi and Yuma had gender systems that were not binary and allowed for movement between these categories. The modern western gender binary does not allow for such things inside its own logic, which is why transness is an existential threat to it.
So what does the “Joy” part in Queer Joy mean in the context of transness?
It means an active affirmation of transness. It means loving to be trans despite all the hardship. It means emphasizing the bodily autonomy and agency that comes with the rejection of an all-defining gender category that we got unconsensually assigned at birth by a binary gender system that attempts to restrict our bodies, expressions and movements on all conceiveable levels in our interpersonal existence.
Reactionaries love to see trans people suffer. As previously stated, they actively embrace the misery of trans people as justification for their queerphobic attitudes. They want queer people of all kinds to see themselves as miserable, powerless and ill because that deprives us of social power and makes us passively submit to their status quo. Nothing threatens them more than trans people who actively embrace and affirm their transness.
The harm that Validity & Misery Politics has done for trans people (and queer people of all kinds) on a personal, social and political level can not be overstated. It has fed alienation, despair and powerlessness, it caused trans people to antagonize and police each other, and it deprived transness of all political power in favor of passivity and assimilationism.
“It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are log-cabin-Republicans and ‘stonewall’ refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a ‘queer’ television station that wages war on the minds, bodies, and esteem of impressionable youth. The ‘LGBT’ political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital, and state power. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination.” - Queer Ultra Violence, Bash Back! Anthology
3.2 Queer Joy and Community
Community is of incredible significance for marginalized people who are already struggling more with alienation, lack of support, and who often find themselves in worse socio-economic conditions because of their more vulnerable position in society.
A proper social and political consciousness is of immense importance for community. The model of Queer Joy provides exactly this by putting emphasis on the socio-political dimensions of trans existence. While a model of Validity & Misery Politics traps us into individualistic mindsets concerned with being “properly trans” according to the very standards that marginalize trans people, the model of Queer Joy stresses the importance of unified action against structures of oppression and fosters compassion and care for other trans people.
Defining transness based on illness, undesirability and negativity not only feeds resentment towards oneself, but towards other trans people as well. That is the tragedy of internalized queerphobia: It makes you not only despise the queerness in yourself, but also in other queer people.
Such an attitude not only limits unity, care and organizational power, it also quickly leads to blaming other queer people (who are more joyfully and openly queer) for your own suffering and struggles. This ends up protecting those people and things that are actually oppressing you (reactionaries, cisnormativity, the gender binary etc.) by portraying other queer people as responsible for their and your struggles. Classic victim blaming.
Queer Joy, by contrast, makes you love and appreciate your own queerness, which also leads you to love and appreciate the queerness in other people. This is fundamental for strong communities with solid support systems.
4. Final Thoughts
In order to meaninfully improve the situations of trans people and queer people of all kinds, we need a radical transformation of the existing social, economic and political systems. Such systems are currently organized around a colonial, capitalist, heteronormative and binary gender system that restricts the potential of our bodies and expressions in accordance to gendered scripts since our birth.
Validity & Misery Politics completely deprives us of our ability to do these things. The most that it allows us to do is to assimilate and minimalize our queerness in order to be seen as acceptable and valid. Such an approach is purely individualistic and just further legitimizes the status quo that inflicts suffering on trans people on an institutional, personal and social level alike. It does not allow transness to be anything more than pathological deviation from the supposedly natural binary gender system.
May I translate this article to Bulgarian?
I recommend reading "Joy of Militancy" as a companion piece to this. Same area of conversation, different accent and both are done well. :)