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A G A I N S T the D A Y

Unrecognizable:
On Trans Recognition in 2017
Aren Aizura, Editor
A G A I N S T the D A Y

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Aren Aizura

Introduction

If the state, capitalism, and surveillance want us to be visible somebodies,

it might be a good time to be undercover nobodies.
—Reina Gossett, Commencement Address at Hampshire College, May 2016

T
​ he essays in this section confront urgent questions regarding trans­
gender recognition in the current political moment, scheming against
what we understand as the empty promises of visibility and legibility. Even
as far-right conservative and authoritarian political forces are on the rise
throughout the world, United States President Donald Trump has promised
to roll back the “liberalism” of Barack Obama by repealing health care laws,
building a wall along the Mexican border, and, as a postscript, rolling back
LGBT recognition, including transgender health coverage and antidiscrim­
ination laws. Since Trump was elected, the trans communities I inhabit in
the United States have expressed fear and outrage at the possibility that the
“transgender tipping point” might be about to tip back. Diana Tourjee
(2016) wrote in November that “transgender Americans have experienced
unprecedented support from the Obama administration.” In the same arti­
cle, Mara Keisling, from the National Center for Trans Equality, is quoted
citing one hundred fifty policy changes that helped transgender people
during the Obama administration, from including gender identity in work­
place and on-campus discrimination laws to outlawing exclusions of trans­
gender-related health care. These are all set to be rolled back during the
Trump presidency.
Assuming that a Republican congress will repeal the Affordable Care
Act (ACA), the federal directives recognizing gender identity in equal oppor­

The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:3, July 2017

doi 10.1215/00382876-3961721 © 2017 Duke University Press
 Aizura • Introduction 607

tunity legislation, and likely coverage of trans-related health care, will disap­
pear along with coverage of preexisting conditions and Medicaid. In trans­

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gender identity, evangelicals sense an effective wedge issue that helps them
further criminalize abortion and attempt to restore the primacy of priva­
tized, heteronormative social relations. Since 2012, Republicans have
attempted to pass laws denying gender-nonconforming people access to rest­
rooms and public accommodations, invoking the specter of gender-noncon­
forming people, particularly trans women, as sexual predators in an effort to
restore heteronormativity to public space. Some of these bills have been suc­
cessful: North Carolina’s “House Bill 2” requires one to use the restroom
corresponding to the gender on one’s birth certificate. Some of the laws pro­
pose fines or jail terms for what under these requirements would be illicit
use of public restrooms (Ford 2015). Others legislate bounty payments for
students who “discover” transgender people in campus bathrooms, effec­
tively rewarding transphobic surveillance of public facilities (Eveld 2016).
Trans activists have joked that perhaps they can support themselves finan­
cially by informing authorities about their own restroom use.
These concerns are not insignificant. But some within trans politics
and theory have always questioned the tipping-point analogy and, with it, the
logic of transgender recognition itself. To accept the recent historical moment
under President Obama, or under Tony Blair at the time the UK Gender Rec­
ognition Act was passed, as one of “recognition” means to accept the neolib­
eral imperialist project within which those laws were passed. As the writers
in this section make clear, recognition may have arrived, but justice for
transgender people has not yet begun. More accessible health care under the
ACA did mean that hormones were covered under Medicaid, eventually; but
the ACA itself never promised free health care for all. Special new jails to
house transgender prisoners do not end incarceration. Transgender inclu­
sion in the military literally deploys trans and gender-nonconforming people
in the service of “counterterrorist” colonial wars in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, and a variety of other locations. Meanwhile
in the realm of representation, imperialist liberals entrench Islamophobia by
arguing that because “Islam” is homophobic and transphobic, protecting
queer and trans populations means expanding the militarized imperial proj­
ect of spreading neoliberal economic policies, democracy, and freedom to
the “rest of the world” (Puar 2007; Haritaworn, Tauqir, and Erdem 2008:
10). In some instances, trans visibility also means becoming scapegoated for
the ascendance of the Right. In an article lambasting the “identity dramas”
of calls for racial and gender justice during the 2016 election campaign,
608 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • July 2017

Mark Lilla (2016) called out the new visibility of choosing gender pronouns
as part of a “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity” that Dem­

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ocrats pandered to, along with campaigning targeted at blacks, Latinx, and
women. For Lilla, the visibility of transness as an election issue alienated
white working-class and religious voters who considered gender diversity
ridiculous; this, rather than white supremacy, provoked the surprise “white­
lash” that elected Trump.
To question recognition does not only mean interrogating its broader
political context. It also means considering how the affective invocation of vis­
ibility plays into neoliberal scarcity politics. In a speech on trans justice in
2016, Reina Gossett likened life under capitalism to the distinction between
being “somebody” and being “nobody.” Quoting Denise Ferreira da Silva
(2016), Gossett asks “Do we want to be somebody under the state or nobody
against it?” (a quotation that also appears as an epigraph to Eric Stanley’s essay
in this section). In the printed version of this speech, Gossett, along with
Grace Dunham and Constantina Zavitzanos (2016), writes about the affective
state of being seen, being “hot shit”—being somebody: “[A]s somebody I am
enough of a body, respected enough or known enough, to be worthy of giving
this speech to you all. Maybe that’s about fame, maybe that’s about clout,
maybe that’s about respect. Whatever it is, I’ve spent enough of my life feeling
like a nobody to feel how different it is to be called upon as a somebody.”
While Gossett refers to her own experience here, her description
encapsulates something like what the tipping point felt like: suddenly trans­
gender people were there. We were everywhere. We were hot shit. But pre­
cisely because capitalism loves differentiation, Gossett Dunham, and Zavitz­
anos (2016) warn against investing too much in being somebodies. Individual
fame, she writes, is bound up in the “commodification and extraction of . . .
life and affect and aesthetics and other labor.” Value extraction occurs at this
juncture. For example, trans women-of-color activists get invited to give talks
at fancy private colleges and nonprofits but cannot find permanent jobs to
pay the rent. Transgender YouTube stars engage in commodity activism by
appearing in videos sponsored by major skin care brands (Reinke 2016: 89)
but remain financially dependent on haphazard contributions to crowdfund­
ing sites like Kickstarter and Patreon. Capital also thrives on the differentia­
tion resulting from transgender’s status as a “new” civil rights movement
competing with other marginalized populations for a seat at the table and
thus separate from them by definition. Meanwhile, the transitivity and mobil­
ity of trans itself becomes a popular way to illustrate neoliberal social mobil­
ity and flexibility (Aizura 2011; Puar 2015).
 Aizura • Introduction 609

So much for being somebodies.

The title of this section, “Unrecognizable,” is intended to highlight a

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conviction shared by these essays that even if recognition is inevitable, we
may not always want to be identified. In addition, the prefigural forms that
trans politics takes here may not be recognizable as politics to liberalism, cap­
italism, feminism, or queer movements—not even, at times, to us. These
essays invent new terms to describe the impossibility and violence of rec­
ognition and speculatively suggest an entirely different relation to visibility.
In relation to the backlash, too, they ask: What are the stakes of familiarity
when familiarity breeds contempt?
These essays elaborate in different ways on a familiar theme: “transgen­
der politics” may be unrecognizable when it invests not in an identity category
but in disrupting the litany of injustices that comprise twenty-first-century
capitalism. If race, gender, and sexuality determine the norms of intimate and
public social relations, those of democracy, nation, prison, property, labor, and
(settler) colonialism, a trans politics aimed at disrupting those institutions
may not read as politics at all. But as subjects within all of these institutions,
gender-nonconforming people, and especially gender-­nonconforming people
of color, are nobodies. Being a somebody means visibility: becoming a popula­
tion, becoming a demographic, becoming (part of) a class, becoming clock­
able. In all of these contexts, it means having to arm yourself with your bro­
kenness. Even as revolutionary subjects of labor in the most Marxian contexts,
which are more often than not absurdly heteronormative, gender-noncon­
forming subjects are still pretty useless somebodies. Aspiring to nobodiness,
on the other hand, means being with others who are marked as nobody too,
finding communality and maybe care: “There is pleasure in nobodiness.
There is love, care, and laughter there. There is art, and study. There is life”
(Gossett, Dunham, and Zavitzanos 2016). Rather than looking to the celebrity
or micro-celebrity culture of trans politics, theory, or art, we look to the people
who we have not yet met and whose liberation is implicated in our own: “I
can’t wait to shake the hand of the person whose name I don’t know who’s in
solitary in the prison 50 miles from my house” (Lazare 2017). Through this
logic, we will know each other in our unrecognizability.
Being unrecognizable takes multiple forms and goes by many names.
It means being nobodies for Gossett, imperceptibility for Deleuzians (Craw­
ford 2008: 140), and opacity for Stanley. It means radical transfeminism for
Raha; the coalitional counter-praxis forged by a resistance to the birth certifi­
cate’s signification in feminist, queer, and trans communities, and commu­
nities of color for Armstrong; and fugitivity for those drawing from a black
610 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • July 2017

feminist or black radical tradition (Gumbs 2016; Bey 2016). This critique of
recognition holds resonance for the moment of trans liberalism, for an analy­

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sis of the tipping point. But it also resonates as the moment of liberalism in
power wanes—especially as an “LGBT-friendly” centrism just slightly to the
left of Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Theresa May becomes the standard by
which mainstream politics frames its rejoinders to authoritarian populism
(Lazare 2017). More than anything, this teaches us that we cannot do trans
politics without an analysis of political economy, without an analysis of the
history of racialization and the violence of liberalism, as well as of hetero-
and gender normativity. Trans politics in its most trenchant form wants abo­
lition, an end to wealth, full communism, free water, food, air, and health
care, reparations, and decolonization (literally, not figuratively). We cannot
achieve any of these things without reimagining the forms of collectivity,
feeling, and being-with that animate our revolt. We will not always be able to
predict when we will need to be marked or when we will feel the pleasure of
unmarking. But we can try to attune to the pulse of our collective need, keep
the beat, and find the flow.

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