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REVIEW ESSAY

Trish Salah

Undoing Trans Studies

A Review of
Judith Butler. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Viviane Namaste. 2005. Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity,
Institutions and Imperialism. Toronto: Women’s Press.

In her 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, Janice
Raymond voiced the radical feminist claim, “All transsexuals rape women’s
bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body
for themselves” and suggested that “the problem of transsexualism would be best
served by morally mandating it out of existence” (Raymond 1979: 104, 178). As
Sandy Stone noted in “The Empire Writes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,”
until at least the early 1990s, Raymond’s book stood as “the definitive statement on
transsexualism by a genetic female academic” (Stone 1991: 283). Stone’s own work
was perhaps the first academic critique of transphobia within feminism, though
it was legitimated in part by distancing Stone’s postmodern posttranssexualism
from the essentialism of earlier transsexual narratives, which she characterized
as either naive or instrumentally duplicitous. Stone, though critical of Raymond,
seemed to meet her halfway on the question of the “authenticity” of transsexual
self-definition.
Stone’s own groundbreaking, if double-edged, contribution not-withstanding, the
early nineties saw a host of claims made on feminism and within feminism on the
political status of transsexuality, by both trans and non-trans writers. Significant
among those, one cited by Stone is Judith Butler’s early book, Gender Trouble. In the
wave of trans-themed publishing that took off in the early nineties, Butler’s work,
which rightly and wrongly was read to redescribe gender as a kind of melancholy
drag, seemed to stand as a touchstone for the thinking of transgender as exemplary
of gender writ large, both in queer theory and in an emerging, overlapping body
of work that by the end of nineties would come to comprise “Trans Studies.” Like
Stone’s early contribution, much of the queer literature on trans, and much of the
queerly-inflected trans literature, seemed at pains to simultaneously denounce
transphobia in society (usually second wave feminism, the medical establishment,
the state), and to demonstrate its legitimacy in then “contemporary feminist”
and queer theoretical terms by condemning those transsexuals who were seen
as conservative (i.e., essentialist in their gender identifications). Kate Bornstein,
Judith Halberstam and Riki Wilchins are three authors who are exemplary in
the latter regard. An important exception to this trend was “Tragic Misreadings:
Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity,” a 1996 article by Viviane
Namaste which made an early and important critique of queer theory’s, and
specifically Butler’s, reliance upon the transgender figure to anchor the queer
diagnosis of heteronormative sex/gender arrangements. Though some scholars in
trans studies engaged and built upon this critique, it largely went unremarked
upon in queer writing on transgender.
Fast forward to 2005 when both Butler and Namaste published collections which
seemed, from a certain vantage—a particularly transsexual vantage, perhaps—
to significantly take stock of, intervene in and reconfigure contemporary trans

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discourse (or queer discourse on trans), if from opposite ends of the field. Judith
Butler’s Undoing Gender purported to rethink Gender Trouble in relation to
questions around the boundaries of the human, social transformation and social 151

violence. Viviane Namaste’s Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Insti-
tutions, and Imperialism argued the continued relevance of Namaste’s critique of
queer theory and elaborated its implications for an evolving constellation of trans,
queer and feminist discourses and politics. It perhaps goes without saying that
there is something of an argument to be had between these books.
Butler’s essays are equally concerned with “what it might mean to undo restrictively
normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life [and] the experience of
becoming undone in both good and bad ways” (Butler 2005: 1). She discusses the
ways in which the self is always “done” by gendered (and other) norms which it is
called upon to approximate in its coming to be, and argues the importance of this
doing in determining whether one’s gender, and by extension one’s self, is socially
recognizable, or intelligible. As in earlier writings, in Undoing Gender Butler leans
heavily upon transgender figures to anchor and illustrate her concerns with the
intertwining of the categories of gender, identity and the human.
But it would be a mistake to imply that Butler’s primary concern in Undoing
Gender is to intervene in transgender discourse; ranging beyond transsexual,
transgender, intersex, genderqueer and transfeminist organizing, what Butler calls
the “new gender politics,” this book both dialogues with and defends Butler’s
earlier work against critical challenges from “formalist Lacanians,” feminist
 fellow travellers, and French philosopher and opponent of gay marriage, Sylvaine
Agacinski. For example, in order to undo the homophobic logic of Agacinski’s
opposition to the PACS (“pacts of civil solidarity”), Butler challenges her reliance
upon a theory of sexual difference rooted in Lacan’s account of the Symbolic and
Levi-Strauss’ account of kinship. Butler argues the historical status of symbolic
structures of sexual difference and the political stakes of preferring the sociological
and transformable category of gender in articulating a liberatory program for
social transformation. In other words, Butler opposes a reconstructed ontology
of sexual difference that straddles and confounds the social, the biological and
the symbolic registers by maintaining gender-as-concept both descriptively and
politically preferable from a feminist standpoint.
The new gender politics provide “transgender” examples of the heretofore unrecog-
nizably human: the medical mutilation of intersex infants, the medicalization
of transsexual identity, anti-trans hate crimes, all evidence the cost of investing
in a structuralism that she characterizes as intellectually outmoded, politically
regressive and powerfully tenacious. For example, to situate her discussion of
“Longing for Recognition,” a dialogue with feminist psychoanalyst Jessica
Benjamin, in the realm of the social, Butler takes up murdered transgender teen,
Brandon Teena, as an example of the violence our society visits upon the gender
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variant, the unrecognized. Deploring the transphobia that led to Brandon’s death,
Butler also critiques the representational violence of the film, Boy’s Don’t Cry’s
152
concluding depiction of Brandon as a lesbian. And yet, though Butler argues that
it would be unjust and inaccurate to call Brandon a lesbian, his sex appears in her
text as a question, a query she rehearses polemically, diacritically playing with his
name, gendered attributes and pronominal gender, in ways that exploit and inflate
his “ambiguous” status in a queerly emblematic way.
This is not a simple “denial” of anatomy, but the erotic deployment of the
body, its covering, its prosthetic extension for the purposes of a reciprocal
erotic fantasy. There are lips and hands and eyes, the strength of Brandon’s
body on and in Lana, his/her girlfriend, arms and weight and thrust....
When s/he desires his/her girlfriend’s desire, what is it that s/he wants.
(Butler 2005: 143)
Butler’s concluding comments are less than unequivocal, “Brandon is not only or
easily a lesbian” (Butler 2005: 144).
From a certain vantage then, Butler’s book effects an intervention in the constitu-
tion of “the new gender politics,” at times quite ambivalently, as well as almost
incidentally, in the course of what are for her larger philosophical arguments
with non-trans theorists of sexual difference, both on the right and on the left,
who remain unconvinced, or even troubled, by her earlier interventions in the
direction of reconstituting sexual difference as a historical and cultural effect and
mystification of gender.
Curiously though, Butler writes at length about the New Gender Politics, pre-
pared to dwell upon the more talked about gender variant dead, she seems
curiously ignorant of, or indifferent to, academic work by transsexual and
transgender authors, at least those who do not directly support her own political
view. Strikingly, and quite problematically, in a book that both ethically reflects
upon, and repeatedly enacts, the dialogic encounter with a wide range of thinkers,
Butler fails to engage or acknowledge the existence of those transsexuals who
have authored significant academic criticism of her work on transsexual and
transgender people. The closest Butler comes to allowing dissenting positions is a
vague acknowledgement that there are “some transsexuals” who are not eager to
have gender identity disorder removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (of the American Psychiatric Association) and in concessions
that transsexual communities are not unified. In a book declaredly concerned
with questions of ethical recognition and broadening the parameters of social
intelligibility, Butler’s decision to engage transsexuals as objects rather than
subjects of discourse is as conspicuous as it is indefensible.
In contrast to Butler’s quite wide-ranging but strangely exclusive text, Namaste’s
book appears both more narrow and more engaged: her book fleshes out an often
neglected perspective on debates among trans communities and activists towards

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which Butler only gestures. Citing the increased visibility of a public, feminist
debate on the status of transsexual and transgendered people and upon our
potential inclusion or exclusion in women’s communities, spaces, sex, Namaste’s 153
Sex Change, Social Change makes the argument that trans people and feminists
need to move past debates around inclusion and identity, to interrogate the
social and institutional contexts which condition and constrain transsexual and
transgender lives and, crucially, to change them.
For Namaste this means recognizing that in queer and feminist discourses on
“transgender” a history is being written of and for trans people, one that privileges
an abstracted rubric of identity and with it the experiences and concerns of
middle-class and largely white, university-based and queer-identified trans
people. Namaste draws our attention to the failure of much transgender activism
and theory to attend to the situation of transsexuals in prison, transsexual and
transgender sex workers, intravenous drug users, social service access, employment,
legal papers, etc. It is important to note that Namaste’s recurring theme is not so
much the need for trans inclusion in queer or feminist contexts as the coercive
and violent character of an appropriative inclusiveness that does not recognize the
difference or autonomy of those it takes up, and those it negates in that process.
Namaste nominates her text as a feminist intervention against an unthinking
practice of imperialism:
The writing of our history forms our consciousness, and determines
the forms of political action in which we engage. In this regard, this
book insists upon the importance of discussing the lives of transsexual
 prostitutes, prisoners, and drug users. The history of transsexual activism in
Canada is a history of prostitutes organizing themselves to get their peers
the services they need. It is a history of transsexuals negotiating with police
and prisons.... Yet these issues are rarely discussed within feminist debates
around transsexuality. This absence tells us something about the class-based
interests of many feminists. (Namaste 2005: x)
Namaste thus combines her methodological and anti-imperialist critiques:
We cannot take an appeal to “personhood” or “citizenship” at face value
when these concepts become institutional mechanisms through which
imperialism is achieved, denying rights to some humans, according them
to others … current appeals to transgender rights are actually bound within
much broader social and economic relations of imperialism. (xi)
This critique is exemplified in her refusal of the Anglo-American term “transgend-
er” as well as of organizing strategies and political priorities that she sees as
derived from queer-paradigmed American and Anglo-Canadian trans activist
communities, in the specific context of Quebec. Namaste frames their imposition
as a form of linguistic imperialism, one that is either ignorant of, or indifferent
to, histories of transsexual communities and activism in Quebec, and the legal
and governmental framework of Quebec’s Civil Code. Here, her critique of
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linguistic imperialism confounds and conflates both Americanization and lesbian

154 and gay appropriations or misprisions of transsexual and transgender politics,
representations and identities:
The call for papers for this conference reiterates this cultural context
through its list of names: butch, femme, grrrlz, boyz, etcetera. Yet how
would we translate any of these terms into French, which is—need I
remind you—an official language of this country? The impossibility of
translating these terms speaks to the cultural bias of the framework: if
you live, work or think outside the terms of English-speaking lesbian/gay
politics, you cannot make sense of transgender theory and politics…. Since
everyone is preoccupied with gender identities, we don’t ask any questions
about the legal change of sex, or about how health care is organized,
or what it means to immigrate to Canada as a transsexual. Indeed, a
transgendered discourse that is fundamentally invested in disrupting the
sex/gender binary actually evacuates the possibility of an institutional
analysis. (21, 22)
Namaste provides a necessary foregrounding of the routinely elided relations
of power and complicity that install and naturalize hierarchies of social access
and positive representation within queerly oriented trans activism. However,
her critique of linguistic imperialism also writes trans rights discourses (and the
civil rights discourses they emulate and extend) as virtually coextensive with the
hegemonic state discourses they contest. If Namaste is correct to argue these
counterdiscourses reproduce and participate in some of the privilege and prob-
lematic presumptions of the U.S. public sphere, nonetheless her occlusion of
their complex and contradictory rootedness in minoritarian struggles for intelli-
gibility and access to public life has its own reductive violence. Alongside this
consideration, we might pose a perhaps related question: if Namaste is correct
in her assessment that the queer figure for transgender achieves its rhetorical
inflation while making transsexuality literally unthinkable, what might induce
transsexuals and transgenders to signify in the register? Is there a more complex
account of multiple and conflicting hierarchies of access, exclusion and authority
to be found in further unpacking which cohorts of trans people signify variously
in queer, transsexual and other registers?
Though Namaste rightly identifies the weakness of much identity-based work
on transgender, notably Butler’s, her refusal of questions of identity also seems to
foreclose reflexive attention towards the possible erasures enacted by her own text.
Ironically, Butler’s attempts at working through an ethics of gendered recognition
could be of some use here. Despite caveats allowing the good intentions of the
majority of those engaged in trans rights work, there is a reductive, somewhat
painful Manicheanism to Namaste’s account, seemingly consigning queerly-
identified transsexuals and transgenders to either collusion with the enemy or

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false consciousness. Perhaps what should give us pause is less to do with Namaste
being mistaken, than with the affective, affiliative and performative consequences
of her being punishingly correct. 155

References
Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York:
Vintage.
Boys Don’t Cry. 1999. Dir. Kimberly Pierce. Twentieth Century Fox.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York
and London: Routledge.
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Mas-
culine Continuum. GLQ 42: 287-310.
Namaste, Ki. 1996. Tragic Misreadings: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Sub-
jectivity. In Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, edited by
Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, 183-203. New York: New York University Press.
Raymond, Janice. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Stone, Sandy. 1991. The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. In Body
Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina
Straub, 280-304. New York and London: Routledge.
Wilchins, Riki Anne. 1997. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender.
Ithaca: Firebrand.