Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

"Two things have been happening at once in the US—greater attention to trans issues and heightened levels of anti-black violence. Since the Black Lives Matters Movement erupted a few years ago, there’s been a huge upsurge of attention in the US to anti-black violence, particularly anti-black police violence. Which of course had been happening while some not-insignificant fraction of the population was freaking out over the fact that a black man is president of the United States, their heads exploding over that. This was happening at the same moment when trans people were gaining greater civil rights in the late Obama years. Trans people were being presented as the new ‘model minority,’ about to gain a seat at the table of social inclusion. I totally welcomed that. Anything that makes trans lives more liveable, I’m fine with. But it was very much linked to ideas about respectability and acceptability, which has its downside, because that translates into greater livability for only some trans lives. And as a consequence of all this, trans-women of colour, particularly black trans-women, are really caught in the crosshairs. Heightened trans visibility and heightened anti-black violence produced a sharp upsurge in murders of black trans-women. It’s doubled in recent years. Riley Snorton’s book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Transgender Identity is the first book-length work to think in a deeper way about the relationship between blackness and trans-ness. He is quite interested in thinking about the relationship between fugitivity—the way that black people have survived in a society predicated on their enslavement by running away, both physically and geographically, as well as in more internal, psychical, and affective ways—and the kind of movement, both physical and emotional, that is characterised as ‘trans.’ How is what I’ve called the movement away from an unchosen starting place across the social barriers that work to keep you in the gender linked to your assigned sex at birth, like —that is, similar but non-identical to—the survival strategy of fugitivity? How does one become free within oneself, and to the extent possible, free in the world? Thinking about blackness and transness together, one can begin to see that assigning some bodies to a subordinated socio-economic position based on certain physical characteristics that we call ‘race’ in certain respects resembles the process of assigning some bodies to a subordinated socio-economic position based on certain physical characteristics that we call ‘sex.’ Sex and race are not the same thing, but seeing how they are both used to sort and classify and rank allows us to grasp a more fundamental operation of power, one rooted in our cultural beliefs about what the body, and bodily difference, means. So how might we begin to connect the dots between race-ing and sex-ing, and between trans-ing and fugitivity as strategies for becoming free? “Sex and race are not the same thing, but seeing how they are both used to sort and classify and rank allows us to grasp a more fundamental operation of power” Snorton gives us a very compelling theoretical framing of the questions of trans-ness and blackness, that is once again absolutely rooted in the present but turns towards history like Rosenberg or in some ways turning towards the future like Sybil Lamb, to begin to imagine a different kind of futurity: how can we link what we know of the past to an envisioning of a more just social order? All three of these books address at some level the question of the relationship between the present, the past, and the future. How do we harness knowledge of the past to a present action in a way that shatters and transforms it to produce a different kind of future for people who needs something different in the present? That’s the deep question for me. The default-setting for transness in popular consciousness is white, and Snorton’s book is very good at calling our attention to trans stories from the past that have been marginalised or ignored due to race, which makes what counts as trans bigger, and different—whether that’s pointing out the many slave narratives in which people escape by presenting in a cross-gender manner as a mode of disguise, or in looking at the role enslaved black women played in the history of gynaecological surgeries that later become options for trans people looking to change the shape of their genitals. One of the most horrific stories in medical history is of J Marion Sims, the so-called ‘father of gynaecology,’ experimenting in the 1830s and 40s, in the slaveholding part of the US, on the bodies of enslaved women from nearby plantations, to develop new surgical techniques. He did so without anaesthesia because he believed black people didn’t feel pain the same way white people do. The surgeries Sims developed were designed to repair fistulas—openings between the vagina, rectum, or urinary tract—produced during traumatic births—but they are also foundational for surgeries that now get used for the so-called normalisation and correction of intersex genitals, and the surgical creation of a neovagina for male to female transgender people. Part of what Snorton shows in writing about the history of gynaecology is that the very techniques that inform the medicalisation of transgender are literally built on the bodies of enslaved black women. Race and trans go together in ways that are not just coincidental. The very constitution of what counts as trans and black have these deeply intimately shared histories. Snorton also writes about the marginalisation of black trans lives in the moment of Christine Jorgensen’s massive global celebrity in 1952 and 1953, when what was then called ‘transsexuality’ first came to mass media attention. Christine Jorgensen was a US trans woman, who went to Denmark to have surgery, and it became an international media sensation. It was a Caitlyn Jenner-like moment in the early 1950s. Jorgensen was pretty. She was blonde. She looked like a Hollywood movie starlet. Her story is part of how trans got marked as white in the popular imagination. Snorton writes about people he calls Jorgensen’s ‘shadows’: all of these trans people of colour you can see on the periphery of the white trans mass media spectacle. This in turns helps us ask questions about why some trans lives are more visible than others, and about the different consequences of visibility for different kinds of trans people—the very questions that become crucial for understanding the current moment of heightened anti-black transmisogynist violence. Snorton’s last chapter is a reading of the film Boys Don’t Cry by Kimberly Peirce, for which Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for playing Brandon Teena, a murdered trans-masculine person in the early 1990s in rural Nebraska. In real life, what happened was that these two homophobic, violent, racist guys befriended Brandon, and when they discover he had a female anatomy—had been assigned a girl at birth—they raped him. Then, a few days later, they came back to murder him. “All of the people at farmhouse were shot in cold blood—but the way that the story is narrativised completely erases the others who were present” When Brandon was murdered, he wasn’t alone. He was staying in a farmhouse with a white girlfriend and a male African-American friend. Actually, a disabled male African-American friend, Phillip Devine, who was involved in an interracial relationship with somebody in his social circle; all of the people at farmhouse were shot in cold blood. Snorton looks at how, in the public retelling and memorialisation of this horrific crime in which more than one person dies, it becomes reduced to a transgender story that focuses on the white transgender person. The way that the story is narrativised in mass media completely erases the other people who are present there. The tragic story of violence against a trans person is also a story of deadly violence against a biologically female cisgender woman, and against a disabled black man. It’s racist violence and sexist violence, and homophobic violence, and transphobic violence. Why are some of those stories pushed into the background, and some elevated and centred? Snorton’s book offers a vital corrective to some of the ways that we think about trans issues now. It critiques the implicit whiteness of the ways that trans is framed both in mass media and popular culture, as well as in academic writing. If Jordy Rosenberg went back to recover the possibility of a trans history in the past in an imaginative way, Snorton looks at that past in a more empirical way. Snorton is particularly good at raising the theoretical, methodological, interpretive issues that encourage us not to see something that’s actually been there all along. That’s a very powerful gift to bestow on a reader."