Shon Faye Quotes

One crucial reason why LGBT people have cause to organize together politically is that, even though we see ourselves as distinct tribes, the rest of society has tended to conflate us. Or as one trans person succinctly put it: we are all beaten up by the same people. This shared oppression, both historic and current, drives – indeed, necessitates – solidarity between lesbians, gay men, bi people and trans people. In an era of growing right-wing populism in the United States and the UK alike, accompanied by an alarming rise in visible street fascism, there is more need than ever for unity across the four different letters (as well as queer, asexual, intersex and other groups). It is in the interests of those who hate us all for us to be at war with one another.

It may seem paradoxical that in a period where civil rights for LGBT people seem to be at unique risk – a time in which Boris Johnson, a man who once called gay men ‘tank-topped bum boys’ and equated gay marriage with bestiality, can be prime minister – there has never been more media representation for LGBT people or more companies happy to insist they support us. This is not out of the sheer kindness of corporate hearts. Brands have recognized that the rainbow flag lends them the goodwill of people who care about social justice. Corporations can purport to be part of a movement with countercultural and liberationist roots, package that movement as ‘aspirational’ for marketing purposes, and in doing so denude it of all the politics that threaten the capitalist status quo and sell it back to those who can afford it. The idea that conspicuous consumption is a route to sexual and gender freedom has been effective in allowing the LGBT movement’s muscles to atrophy. In a godless age, there are new ways to give the masses their opium.

To be trans is an experience bound up with economic struggle. There cannot be one without the other.

In a society that is both patriarchal and capitalist, men’s misogyny towards women sits comfortably alongside their desire to extract women’s sexual labour. This does not change because the woman is trans. In fact, given the political invisibility of most trans women, it may be intensified. To put it plainly, many of the men who purchase the services of trans sex workers will be the same men who argue for the oppression of all trans people and all sex workers. They will be the same men who preach hate and incite violence against them and the same men who, in some cases, personally use physical violence against them. It is no coincidence that trans sex workers are often at the forefront of LGBTQ+ community organizing and activism across the globe, particularly in countries where LGBTQ+ rights are opposed by the state. At times, the two collide.

Dysphoria, it should be said, is not a precondition of being trans. According to some research, as many as 10 per cent of those who positively identify as trans men, trans women, non-binary people and various other terms do so without any feelings of dysphoria. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that trans men and women experience dysphoria and non-binary people do not, when in fact some non-binary people feel themselves to be in great need of medical assistance, and some trans men and women seek none at all. Nevertheless, most trans people experience dysphoria to some degree.

Being trans, of course, is not a consciously adopted political position, just as claiming a trans identity is not, usually, an expression of a consciously held ideology. A trans person is just a person. We see our daily lives through the same everyday lens as most human beings; after all, we are simply trying to live. However, as with all stigmatized social identities, the very ability to articulate being trans, or to work, seek healthcare, or participate in civic life while trans, is political.

Naturally, cisgender women’s feminism starts with the general principle that patriarchy is a system that benefits men to the detriment of women, and empowers men specifically by disempowering women. In some form or other, most cis feminist thought argues for a crucial distinction to be made between sex – one’s biology – and gender, a social structure that dictates appropriate male and female behaviour. Trans feminists also believe that, while the difference between bodies and the cultural narratives we use to interpret those bodies does exist, such difference is not always easily recognized or mapped. Our sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings: consequently, how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex. The gender critical feminist idea – that there exists an objective biological reality which is real and observable to everyone in the same way and, distinct from that, a constructed set of subjective gender stereotypes that can be easily abolished – is an oversimplification. The way we perceive and understand sex differences and emphasize their significance is so deeply gendered that it can be impossible to completely divorce the two.

Despite the extreme ways in which their bodies are mythologized, fetishized and denigrated by our culture, trans sex workers, compared to other kinds of trans worker, enjoy the least solidarity and have the least political attention paid to the reality of their lives. This disparity only increases when the trans sex worker is also a migrant and a person of colour.

Hope is part of the human condition and trans people’s hope is our proof that we are fully human. We are not an ‘issue’ to be debated and derided. We are symbols of hope for many non-trans people, too, who see in our lives the possibility of living more fully and freely. That is why some people hate us: they are frightened by the gleaming opulence of our freedom. Our existence enriches this world.

There can be no trans liberation under capitalism. This is a fact. Yet it’s not a popular view among liberal and centrist LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, who – as we’ve seen in the course of this book – talk about ‘trans rights’ in isolation as a range of personal freedoms and protections; and who cling to corporations and brands as potential ‘allies’ in the fight for social acceptance.

The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society. I say 'liberation' because I believe that the humbler goals of 'trans rights' or 'trans equality' are insufficient. Trans people should not aspire to be equals in a world that remains both capitalist and patriarchal and which exploits and degrades those who live in it. Rather, we ought to seek justice – for ourselves and others alike. Trans people have endured over a century of injustice. We have been discriminated against, pathologized and victimized. Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live.

In general, trans people are more likely to have lower incomes and to experience poverty than the wider population. [...] Prejudice persists. It is not just a personal affront, but an economic reality that shapes and limits trans lives.

Given the British media’s recent pained wrangling with the very idea of gender affirmation as a potential ‘slippery slope’, the fact that more straightforward access to medical transition and legal gender recognition was available during the Second World War than is often the case today is astonishing. The mainstream media’s presumption that strict ‘controls’ on transition are and have always been necessary relies on the suppression, and ignorance, of trans medical and legal history.

Feminism must concern itself with radical possibilities for our future, a future in which gender-based violence and harm is abolished, freeing us all to lead more joyful lives. That cannot begin with barring the freedom to find other ways to look at, understand or do gender.

The existence of trans people ought to make everyone take a long hard look at their own dearly held ideas about gender, and wonder whether these ideas are quite as stable and certain as they once thought. This would be healthy. The distinction between men and women is often arbitrary. The distinction between ‘binary’ trans men and women and non-binary trans people is equally arbitrary and, in reality, the precise distinction between people we call cis and people we call trans isn’t rigid either. The fact that definitions can be so unstable is clearly deeply troubling to many – which is why it is easier to belittle challenges to binaries than to take on their contradictions, complications and exceptions. ‘We are all non-binary’ is potentially a radical new analysis for how we might reorder society, but conventionally it is used by gender critical feminists to mock those people making political demands to dismantle the binary’s imprint on our culture. Yet those critics provide no alternative for how we would otherwise emancipate society from binary gender stereotypes and roles. Once more, feminist hostility to non-binary people reasserts the notion of an inescapable biological sex that should be given more social and legal credence than a variant gender identity, a notion that merely replicates patriarchy’s own logic.