PEA Soup is pleased to introduce the July Ethics article discussion on “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body” by Katie Zhou (MIT). The précis is from Cressida Heyes (University of Alberta).
Commentary on Katie Zhou, “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body”
Cressida J. Heyes
I was surprised by the speed with which the practice of stating one’s pronouns entered cis-anglophone contexts. One year it would have seemed like the most outré and incomprehensible thing to include in a group introduction, and by the next it was happening in my community choir. As Katie Zhou points out in her excellent, philosophically ambitious article “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body” the practice was appropriated from trans communities for political reasons that have not quite survived its transplant. Like all instances of the belief that gender is something an individual determines solely via speech acts, the pronoun circle has an ambiguous status as an exercise in authoritatively expressing one’s gender in a way imagined to increase our individual freedom. Despite this important goal, however, such avowals land uncomfortably (in mainstream cis, non-queer worlds) when they don’t appear to line up with someone’s body or bodily expression of gender. We cleave to what Zhou later calls “anatomical” or “behavioral” ideologies about gender. On the former account, some collection of sexed characteristics determines what gender a person can authentically express (10-11); on the latter, that anatomical identity can only be correctly expressed through normatively masculine or feminine behaviors (11).
These ideologies have long histories and continue to structure both conventional sexism and hostility to trans identities. In addition, Zhou points out that they also have a history in “transmedicalism”—defined as a longstanding interpretation of trans identity as an experience of being “trapped in the wrong body” and requiring medical intervention to “change sex” as a condition of successfully enacting the conventionally gendered behaviors of the category one wishes to transition toward (15-16). This model of what trans is (which for a long time determined access to trans medicine) continues to make it even harder for anyone whose gender is even slightly non-conforming to identify as trans. Indeed, as Zhou suggests (16-17), this ideological bundle makes it impossible for anyone to sustain a completely consistent gendered appearance and comportment, given the body’s tendency to betray us.
This is the backdrop against which the “ideology of avowal” (IA) emerges. If the intersubjective spaces in which sex and gender have shared meaning are so relentlessly disciplinary, then taking matters into our own, radical hands, and saying that one’s gender is just what one says it is—no matter what body subtends that expression—is politically appealing.
While unpacking this appeal in some detail, Zhou ultimately defends a critique of IA internal to trans worlds, in which taking linguistic avowals of gender as definitive has negative consequences for “a more satisfying expressive life with gender” (2). Hence we either accept IA and reject the body as a source of communication about gender, or we reject IA and open ourselves to judgment about our success or failure as normatively embodied gendered persons.
There is a lot to cover in this complex essay, which makes two contributions. The first is what I have just summarized: a philosophical history of IA as an assertion of gender freedom and a critique of its erasure of embodied meaning. In between, second, Zhou articulates what she calls “the expressive argument” (EA), intended to replace IA, which concludes that trans people’s avowed genders are real (make them members of a gender kind), without committing to saying that avowal is the sole criterion of that realness.
I’ll say a little bit more about EA because it is probably the most controversial part of the essay. A view in the literature is that while I might be able to avow my own experience of my own gender without external epistemological constraint (to say, “I am a woman,” even if I was “assigned male at birth” [AMAB] for example), it does not follow that I can unilaterally articulate my membership in an ontological “gender kind” (such as “women”). Against this position, Zhou argues that there is no gap between gender identity and gender kind membership (21), because gender is an “expressive kind.” In general, expressive kinds are states of individuals that obtain (or not) and can be normatively expressed (or not) in the same way that happiness, love, faith and other emotions and beliefs are. Being an expressive kind is revealed through my actions, and those actions are both attributable to my agency and have an underlying reality. That there are certain norms of expression for being a kind is their condition of possibility: expression is necessarily intersubjective and has shared practices and modes of communication (8-10). I can be very happy or not at all happy, and I can feign happiness or model it, and it would be hard to understand if I claimed to be happy but never exhibited any signs of it (like smiling, saying “Great!” when people ask, “how are you?” and so on). Indeed, if everyone did that, there would be no sense in expressions of happiness at all (9). Likewise, I can say that I am a man (and that can be false), and I can do some gendered things to fit that role in my context without conforming perfectly consistently to some norm of masculinity. That said, it would be strange if I declared myself a man but did nothing at all to convey this to others. My gender has both an inner reality, and it is true that the purpose of my sincere avowal “I am a man” is to engage in a language-game that includes gender norms as the condition of my being able to say it. Hence my expression of my gender is factive.
Zhou’s position targets both the view that avowing one’s gender is best understood as a social request for a certain kind of relating from others (a trans-sympathetic view), and the trans-critical view that IA is so implausible that all defences of avowals are equally implausible. If the expressive argument is compelling, then I think Zhou is right that a lot of debate about the relationship between gender identity and gender kind membership would evaporate. I worry, however, that there is some philosophical sleight of hand in this argument.
At one point Zhou herself suggests that “there is something trivial about the expressive argument, since all the heavy lifting is done by the premise that trans people genuinely express their genders” (19). Indeed, I suspect that dogmatic claims about the deceptiveness of trans people are always a risk in this debate. At a certain point such claims are not worth our time, but more is needed here to avoid begging the question of whether gender is factively expressive in the same way as (Zhou says) happiness or pain. The waters are further muddied by her analogy between denying that trans women can express true womanhood, and denying that dogs can experience pain (20). If these expressive kinds are dependent on complex social systems of meaning, including natural language, then animal experience seems to belong to a different world. Perhaps Zhou’s argument enables us to say that this attribution of inauthenticity to a certain class of people is antithetical to the linguistic function of expressive kinds for everyone. There are many people who experience (let’s call it) gender dysphoria who nonetheless insincerely claim to be entirely unproblematic members of a gender kind for all sorts of psychological and social reasons. Indeed, given the gaps between gender norms and anyone’s lived experience under the oppressive anatomical and behavioral ideologies, probably a lot more “cis” people are insincere about their degree of gender fit than trans people. So, perhaps, either Zhou is wrong about the factivity of gender kind expression, or no one can sustain truth-claims about their gender?
My second engagement with the essay is more speculative than critical. I think that the second horn of the dilemma Zhou identifies—the fear that acknowledging gender is, in part, an embodied expression makes us vulnerable to oppression—is just the way gender functions for us now (although it need not). At the end of the paper Zhou offers a personal anecdote about her advice to younger trans people:
Sometimes, I’m asked how I knew that I was a woman, as opposed to being nonbinary, or a man with a ‘feminine’ side. In these moments I often find myself unable to offer up anything useful to them. For if I say that what convinced me of my womanhood was that I felt more at home in the kinds of friendships that women stereotypically have with one another, or because I wished to have a different relation to my body, I worry that I will inadvertently license exactly the kind of normative expectations that IA is meant to free us from. But then, all I can say to them is that they must decide their identity for themselves, on their own terms. And this seems a deeply unhelpful and isolating thing to say to someone who is desperately looking for advice. (28-9)
After reading this deeply thoughtful essay, I imagine that Zhou is a terrific mentor, and I suggest that the very best advice would be the un(self)edited quote. One can say, “this is my experience,” while also saying, “and how I interpret my experience troubles me.” Or, “this is how I make the best of a double bind.” Indeed, one step on the path to exceeding the dilemma Zhou outlines in this paper is, in my view, for people of all genders to engage her argument.
Hi everyone! I want to begin by thanking the editors of the PEA Soup Blog for organizing this discussion, as well as Cressida for her thoughtful engagement with the paper. It’s a privilege and an honor to have the paper read by a philosopher’s whose work I’ve admired for a long time.
I’ll begin by trying to say a bit more about the Expressive Argument. I completely agree that the argument is likely to seem, at first glance, utterly question-begging. After all, a gender critical theorist will probably think that they simply have no reason to accept P1, which is the claim that trans people express their genders when they sincerely avow their genders. (I’ll set aside, for the purposes of this comment, whether they might also reject P2, which is the claim that expression is factive.)
But I do think that shifting the focus of contention from the claim that trans people are the genders they avow to the claim that trans people express their genders helps us make important dialectical progress. This is because the various ways of denying P1 are, in my view, quite costly.
Here are some potential ways of denying P1, and why I think they are difficult positions to maintain.
Strategy 1. ***Argue that trans people’s avowals are never sincere, and so P1 doesn’t find application***
This is the option that Cressida worries about, and I don’t address it in the actual paper. Doubtless, some trans-exclusionary theorists do talk this way sometime (I’m reminded of Talia Bettcher’s evil deceiver/make-believer vocabulary, both of which imply that trans people aren’t sincere in their avowals.) On this view, trans people’s avowals are actually mere *pretend* avowals, in the same way that someone who is unhappy might *pretend* to be happy by pretending to avow that they are happy.
While this theory has its adherents, it’s worth saying that it’s at odds with quite a few things that trans-exclusionary folks say. Most trans-exclusionary theorists also want to claim that trans people are confused, or mistaken about their genders. But if our avowals weren’t sincere, then we wouldn’t be confused or mistaken, any more than the unhappy person pretending to be happy is confused or mistaken about whether they’re happy.
Perhaps the claim is that trans people are *self*-deceived, but that we must know deep down that our avowals are false, because we must realize deep down that gender is biological. This, of course, is a description of the situation that I reject. But even if we grant it for the sake of argument, it wouldn’t show that trans avowals aren’t sincere. The maintaining of inconsistent, but (sincere) beliefs across multiple mental fragments is well-documented.
As such, I don’t think it’s viable to reject P1 on the grounds that trans people’s avowals are insincere.
Strategy 2. ***Argue that trans people do express something about their gender when they make their sincere avowals, but they merely express that they are a deviant member of the gender they were assigned at birth***
(To make things simpler, I’ll just talk about the trans woman case going forward.)
This response would have it that trans women express a sincere belief that they are women, but that the avowal doesn’t express actual womanhood. Rather, it expresses that they’re inadequate men. This is roughly the view that trans women are effeminate men who sincerely believe that they are women..
At this point, we can ask *why* it should be the case that trans women couldn’t possibly express womanhood, but only a defective manhood.
The response, I imagine, will be that trans women lack the requisite biology. But this is to incur some rather controversial commitments. In particular, it would seem to require that expressive kinds aren’t multiply realizable. However, most philosophers are willing to accept that other things we express (beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.) *are* multiply realizable. We are thus owed an explanation of why gender isn’t multiply realizable in the way that other things that we can give expression to are. And this, I think, puts the gender-critical theorist in a difficult dialectical position.
In her response, Cressida points out that on my account, expressive kinds have a kind of normative, social nature inherent to them. If so, then it might seem that by my lights, they couldn’t be as widely multiply realizable as I suggest, since animals don’t appear to exist in such social contexts. (This is her worry about the analogy with the canine-exclusionary theory of pain.)
My response here is twofold. The first is to point out that even if it’s granted that my account makes it difficult to see how non-human animals could express things, this doesn’t have straightforward application to the case at hand. After all, trans people *are* embedded in normative social systems, and so there’s no analogous obstacle to gender being multiply realizable across human biologies.
The second is to argue that animal communication is more normative and social than one might think. Here, I’m inspired by Dorit Bar-On’s work on expression (https://www.doritbar-on.com/uploads/1/3/6/9/13698997/bar-on_-_expressive_communication_and_continuity_skepticism_%5Bpreprint%5D.pdf). Bar-On argues in particular that expression as a category straddles the line between natural and non-natural meaning, and that animal expression does put the animal into the space of reasons, insofar as other animals can understand the animal’s expression as representing the animal’s take on the world. As such, I don’t think the normative, socially-loaded character I give to expressive kinds threatens their ability to be widely multiply realizable.
Strategy 3. ***Deny that gender can be expressed***
The final strategy for rejecting P1 would be to argue that while avowals express trans people’s beliefs about their genders, they don’t express gender, since gender can’t be expressed. A biological theorist of gender might argue, for example, that one can’t express one’s gender, any more than one can give expression to one’s toenail. A hardline social-position theorist of gender might also argue that since gender is a social position, one can’t express it, any more than one can give expression to one’s being someone’s cousin-in-law.
But this requires us to attribute enormous error to ordinary speakers, and as such, is a dialectically unsavory position. Indeed, while the phrase “gender expression” is itself somewhat actually recent, talk of how one can “be a real man” or a “proper lady” is ubiquitous, and cross-linguistically robust. To my mind, these norms about how to (say) be a real man just are norms about how one ought to express manhood, in the sense defined in the paper.
The gender-critical theorist who adopts this response therefore owes us a rather extensive error theory. In particular, they owe us an explanation of what people are talking about when they say things like “that’s not how a real man acts,” and why such language makes sense even to those who have no sympathies with trans people, when on their account, it should be as nonsensical as saying “that’s not how a real person with a toenail acts.”
All in all, I don’t pretend to think that the Expressive Argument will move many entrenched gender-critical theorists. But I do think that it allows us to shift the dialectical ground in a way that is advantageous to trans folks.
Thanks to Katie for writing such a thought-provoking article and Cressinda for the wonderful precis!
I’m curious what Katie or Cressinda think about one way we might try to diffuse the Dilemma of the Body – i.e. “(i) reject the body’s expressive capacities, as IA does, and risk losing what we found most meaningful about our lives with gender in the first place, or (ii) admit the body’s expressive capacities and leave us vulnerable again to the manifold oppressions that can be visited upon us insofar as we are embodied, social creatures.” (p. 665)
I guess I’m wondering whether we can accept the first conjunct of (ii) while resisting the second. So, we can accept the body’s expressive capacities, but resist the idea that these capacities leave us vulnerable to manifold oppressions. This is because we can allow that some expressions of gender do the normative work fans of IA might want it to while others do not.
I take it that some of the normative work that gender expressions are meant to sometimes do according to fans of IA is to change or sustain what (morally acceptable) gender norms apply to the person making the avowal. In this sense, gender expressions are a kind of normative power that allows the avower to shape the gender-normative landscape. If that’s right, I was thinking that we might draw on lessons from other normative powers, like consent Expressions of “I consent” sometimes, but not always count as an exercise of the normative power of consent. When the power isn’t actually exercised or validly exercised, saying “I consent” doesn’t morally transform what others owe the person who consented. One common view is that the consenter must intend to change how (moral) norms apply to them in order for consent to be morally transformative.
If this Intention Condition is a necessary condition on morally transformative consent, I wonder if we might think there’s a similar Intention Condition on how gender expressions shape the gender-normative landscape. If we suppose there is, then the practice of people sharing their preferred pronouns shapes the gender-normative landscape much like valid consent shapes the sexual-normative landscape. And bodily expressions can sometimes do this as well so long as the intention condition is met. When the Intention Condition is not met in the case of bodily expressions, however, that expression is not transformative of the gender-normative landscape.
If this is all correct (big if!), I’m less sure whether admitting that the body can express gender leaves us vulnerable to manifold oppressions. After all, only some expressions will turn out to be normatively transformative. Of course, implicit in this suggestion is a shift in focus from an emphasis on the relevance of factivity of expressions to the normative implications of expressions. (This may just be version of Talia Mae Bettcher’s idea of ‘moral authority’ in “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority.”) So at root, I’m wondering/hoping that divorcing the activity of an expression from its normative implications might help us diffuse the Dilemma of the Body. Of course, the body may still express gender in non-transformative ways – perhaps this is enough to cause the problem? (That my body expresses a gender other than my gender may be sufficient to sometimes rationalize my dysphoria, but I wasn’t sure that this was sufficient for the manifold oppressions Katie has in mind.)
Thanks again to both for this conversation!
Hi Jimmy,
Thanks so much for your comment! The comparison with normative powers is super interesting, as is the comparison with consent.
Earlier drafts of the paper actually featured a comparison between IA and recent colloquial ways of understanding consent, which I’ll mention here, as I think it’s relevant.
One thing you’ll often hear in college sexual consent trainings and the like is that consent must be verbal or (written), and must always be asked for explicitly. The view is roughly that we ought not to rely on people’s body language when determining whether consent has been given—there’s just too much room for misinterpretation there. (The concern is both with nefarious claims like “he said no but his eyes said yes”, but also more innocent misunderstandings.) In fact, consent doesn’t count as having been given until it has been linguistically expressed.
In other words, on this folk view of consent, the Intention Condition is necessary, but *not* sufficient for the moral landscape to be altered. *Verbalization* of that intention is also required in order for the normative landscape to be altered.
My thought is that something similar holds of IA. It may very well be that in (say) wearing a dress, or in walking a certain way, I express an intention to alter the gender-normative landscape, such that others see me as a woman. But on IA, that intention must be verbalized in order for the normative landscape to count as having been altered.
The worry again is that there is too much room for miscommunication unless things get verbalized. Thus, in the Carl case from §6, we don’t want people to mistake Carl’s wearing a dress as an expressing a desire to be seen as a woman.
I should note at this point that there’s a salient difference between normative powers and expression as I’m thinking of it, that makes the gender case even more fraught than the consent one. In particular, one can express things and thereby alter the normative landscape, regardless of whether or not one wants to. (Plausibly, this isn’t the case with consent) Thus, if I start crying, despite my best efforts to hold my tears back, I do count as expressing sadness, despite my intention to not express sadness. And others will naturally react to the sadness that I’ve just expressed, say by comforting me, even though I had no desire to express it. Similarly, if I can’t help but chuckle at a bad joke, I do count as expressing amusement, even if I don’t intend to. And again, others can react to my expression of amusement (perhaps with derision), even though I didn’t intend to express it. For this reason, I’m not sure that the Intention Condition is even a necessary condition on expression in regular cases. (That said, I do think it’s right that IA tries to make something like the Intention Condition necessary for expressing gender. But this is already, in some ways, to hamper the body’s ability to speak for us, since in the above cases of expression, our bodies speak for us despite our actual intentions.)
I also wanted to address Cressida’s thought that there are some cis-identified individuals, who avow as much, but who are actually mistaken about their genders. Doubtless this does happen—indeed, it happened to me!
One goal of IA, I think, is precisely to raise questions about gender where there seeming previously weren’t. Thus, in being asked to give one’s pronouns, one might, for the very first time, find oneself reflecting on what one’s gender is. This is intentional.
However, Cressida worries that if people are widely mistaken about their genders (perhaps because they just automatically assume they’re cis), then perhaps expressions of gender aren’t factive. This would be a problem for the Expressive Argument.
My response, which might be a bit unsatisfying, is that in such cases, we simply don’t have genuine expressions of gender. Thus, when I believed myself to be a man, I certainly went around saying as much, and acting in ways that made it look like I was expressing my manhood. But in my view, none of that was a genuine expression of manhood, because, well, I’m not a man.
To take an analogous case, suppose I think that I’m in love with someone, and do various things that seem like expressions of that love—for example, maybe I publicly profess my love, buy them flowers, etc. However, suppose that I then later realize that I wasn’t actually in love with them at all, but was just coming down from a drug-induced high. This, I think, should lead us to conclude that my earlier expressions weren’t genuine expression of love. That’s not to say that they were insincere, or that I was out to trick anyone. But since I wasn’t in love in the first place, then none of those behaviors could count as manifestations of that non-existent love.
Importantly, none of this should threaten the thesis that once we have an genuine expression of gender, that person’s gender follows.
Of course, there’s a difficult question of how to separate out genuine from non-genuine expression of gender (just as is there is a difficult question of how to separate out genuine expressions of love from non-genuine ones.) But I do think that we have reason to trust someone’s considered, thoughtful avowal, in the same way that we have reason to trust an avowal of love that is made after careful consideration and thought.
Thanks, Katie! Super helpful and generative reply. I really appreciate you taking the time.
To take your points in reverse: I guess I wasn’t thinking that the intention condition was a necessary condition on gender expression. I was thinking that it’s only necessary for a given gender expression to be normatively transformative. So, we can and do sometimes express gender without transforming what norms apply to us, etc. This would rob the expressive capacities of both our bodies and our words from being normatively transformative on their own. But they’d still be actual gender expressions (and necessary for transformation) even when they’re not normatively transformative. So, the case of Carl may involve a gender expression even if it’s not a normatively transformative one.
I totally agree that the sadness/amusement cases make my suggestion a little thorny. I think we can accept that involuntary expressions of sadness/amusement are genuine expressions. But you make the plausible observation that the mere expression of sadness or amusement is sufficient to make certain responses by others fitting/appropriate. There’s no mediation by a normative power going on in that sort of case. So I suppose I need to provide some reason for thinking gender avowal works more like consent than these sorts of cases. (And I admit it would be surprising, even if gender avowal are normative powers, that they work exactly like consent… so the analogy surely will break down somewhere…)
I also agree that “It may very well be that in (say) wearing a dress, or in walking a certain way, I express an intention to alter the gender-normative landscape, such that others see me as a woman. But on IA, that intention must be verbalized in order for the normative landscape to count as having been altered.” This seems to suggest that the Intention Condition is insufficient for transformation. That seems right to me.
I guess I find it suggestive there’s much disagreement about what sort of condition needs to be added for consent to be morally transformative to intentions as well. Some have proposed that one may also need to attempt to communicate, successfully communicate one’s intention (which includes an uptake condition), or there may need to be sufficient evidence available to others of one’s intention for consent to be transformative. To make the under-motivated analogy again, perhaps one of these other controversial conditions is necessary in addition to the Intention Condition for a given gender expression to be normatively transformative.
But I guess I’m wondering why settling the debate over which conditions are needed to turn a mere expression into a transformative gender avowal isn’t the right strategy for diffusing the Dilemma of the Body? We take horn (ii) and say that the body can and does involuntarily express. But in addition to expressing, other conditions must be met – perhaps an intention and communication condition – for that expression to shape the gender-normative landscape/make various responses fitting. I was thinking this might make horn (ii) look less unpalatable than it did before. But I admit it also leaves a lot to be desired… I wouldn’t be surprised if accepting that there are non-transformative expressions of the body still made us vulnerable to oppression. I was just less sure what shape that takes beyond the oppression that trans people face independently of the Dilemma of the Body.
Thanks again!
Thanks, Jimmy! The suggestion that we can make progress on the question by separating out what aspects of gender oppression belong to the mere expression side of things, and what aspects belong to the normative power side of things is helpful, and one I’ll need to think more about.
There is indeed an extant interpretation of gender avowals on which they do function like normative powers (see Dembroff and St. Croix 2019 or Kukla and Lance 2023), wherein to avow one’s gender is to restructure the normative landscape around you (e.g., to make using certain pronouns for you required, etc.) And doubtless, much of the gender oppression that IA is worried about does arise from the way in which the anatomical ideologies straightforwardly deny this normative power of ours.
However, I do think that many of the oppressive effects that IA is worried about don’t involve the outright denial of this normative power, and that expression helps us see this. So for example, someone might grant that someone is non-binary, accept that they should be referred to with they/them pronouns, allowed into non-binary only spaces, etc. solely on the basis of their avowal, while *still* thinking that they ought to start dressing more androgynously, because that’s how one ought to express one’s non-binaryness. This seems to be a case where the normative power is respected, but something is still amiss.
Perhaps, though, there’s an epicycle of the normative power view that tried to make it so that it was part of the normative power that one could forbid others from having expectations about how I express my gender. On this account, then I suppose the Dilemma of the Body would reduce to the question of under what conditions we should think normative powers have been exercised.
I’m not entirely sure how plausible this epicycle of the normative power view is, since it seems to imply that we can make certain attitudes on the parts of others impermissible, and not merely certain actions. But it’s an interesting suggestion, and something that I’ll think about more!
I want to start by thanking Katie and Cressida for inviting me to participate in this discussion, and especially Katie for writing such an illuminating essay.
One quick thing I’d like to note before a more substantive engagement is that Zhou has framed and analyzed an element of contemporary trans communal existence that has long troubled me: the somewhat overly zealous adherence within trans communities to ideologies of avowal at the expense of gendered embodiment. Zhou’s presentation of the historical development of this discursive shift out of bodily ideologies and transmedicalism and into a radically trans-affirming space of avowals provided important context given that it explains for the reader, trans and cis alike, what exactly is at stake with IA and its particularly strong and exclusive emphasis on avowals of gender.
1) Of Puppies And Penises
Zhou’s development of the Expressive Argument, especially her analogy to canine-exclusive pain, was also powerful for me, and it comes down to the concluding observation Zhou makes about the harm of transphobia: “In both, the denial of the reality of trans people’s genders and the denial of the reality of the pain of animals is a callous denial of our most basic status as feeling and experiencing subjects who have an inner reality – a status that we share with all sentient life” (680).
One personal anecdote to help me articulate why exactly this line hit me so hard – I have spent much of my summer reading political analyses of the war on trans rights, existential analyses of trans becoming and trans intimacy, and Kate Abramson’s On Gaslighting. The hardest, emotionally, for me to get through right now is On Gaslighting. There is a loose connection here to this brief paragraph on transphobia in Zhou’s essay. Freedom and autonomy for trans people are what are at stake in the first two topics. My reality and therefore my sanity are what are at stake in the final topic, and that is where I have suffered the most lasting damage as a trans woman. I have had my reality denied in a ruthlessly persistent fashion that has made me question my sanity in the process. This is a part of what Alex Iantaffi refers to as gender trauma, and it is taking me years to work through it in a professional therapeutic setting.
So coming back to Zhou’s point about canine-exclusionary theories of pain and trans-exclusionary theories of gender, she offers us an insight from trans experience here and frames it in a powerfully evocative analogy. For me, it immediately called to mind all of the “common sense” challenges to the callous theories of pain that deny canine reality in academic conversations. And it lands with the general public as well! I could hear Sinead O’Connor singing on repeat as images of suffering canines are paraded before my mind’s eye.
What I did not experience was a rush of all of the “common sense” defenses of trans gender realities. There are none. And to my knowledge, basic cable does not subject viewers to the full O’Connor track while flashing pictures of sad trans folks on the screen. Personally, I’d prefer our fundraising advertisements to focus on trans joy, so maybe it should be a trust for transition funds advertised to the tune of Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!”
For this trans reader, Zhou makes clear that transphobia is about a denial of reality that runs deeper in our culture and our profession than the denial that dogs feel pain. And I think this is reflected in our contemporary politics outside of the academy. A politician brags about shooting her own dog for misbehaving and people judge her morals. The same politician advocating policies that will result in the deaths of thousands of trans folks and the suffering of hundreds of thousands more is just a “difference in values.” While this is a brief and structurally minor point in Zhou’s essay, it is the point I most hope readers take away from it.
2) Is There A Dilemma?
Returning to Zhou’s larger project, her reintroduction of gender expression into the discourse is incredibly important for keeping our theories of trans experience ground bound. In my own transition, declaring out loud for the first time that I am a woman was a powerful experience. Even so, it pales in comparison to the feeling I had this afternoon after 2 years of GAHT as I walked to my car in a cami and skirt with some cute strappy sandals, dangly earrings, and my curly hair up in a cheap Amazon Basics clip.
And this comparison of my own experiences with avowals and expressions perhaps illuminates a path through, around, or beyond Zhou’s stated dilemma of the body. There is a temporal dimension to transition and to gender in general. It takes an incredible amount of labor (physical, psychological, emotional, etcetera) to transition, and whatever gender expression one finds comfortable is an expression that will come only after considerable labor has been expended. An avowal, however, can be made earlier, before any attempts to work through expression are made. In fact, the avowal may be necessary to create the space for a recently cracked egg to begin experimenting and exploring different gender expressions. And perhaps avowals always take precedence over bodily expressions as a result. But that is not to say that one does not honestly attend to one’s bodily expression and reasonably expect a certain social experience as a result. There is, perhaps, an existential ambiguity to our gendered existence that explains what appears to be a dilemma here.
I know a cisgender woman who lives in an area with virtually no openly LGBTQ+ representation and where legislation now targets transgender people using public restrooms. She now uses men’s restrooms because they are the safer option for her given how masculine her gender expression is. She did not do this prior to the anti-trans legislation. While we could discuss how wildly dystopian this situation is, I share it because it points to how gender is a matter of existential ambiguity. This person is a woman, a cisgender woman at that, who uses she/her pronouns exclusively. In my interactions with her, I first thought she was a baby-faced male trucker, then realized she might be a trans man, then her avowal informed me she was a woman. In spending time with her over the years, her existence has broadened the category of woman for me (similar to the existential claim that being authentically human is a matter of becoming as fully your unique self as possible and thus broadening the category of human).
With trans men, trans women, and nonbinary folks, a similar kind of existence could play out. They express gender however they can or want to, but their avowals always take precedent with others. In continuing this ambiguous existence, they broaden gender possibilities for everyone they engage with. They do so at a cost, however, since the further they deviate from the contemporaneous normative gender expressions of their avowed gender the more often they will have to perform the labor of corrective avowals.
Also, I suspect that this approach to Zhou’s dilemma of the body might take us down a particular path that forecloses topics she wishes to engage in the work that follows from this paper, in which case the production of this dilemma is perhaps useful.
Returning to the question I raised earlier about whether there is a dilemma of the body, I think the answer is yes and no. I think the methodological approach in this paper (which is for the record the dominant tradition in professional Philosophy) certainly produces a dilemma. How could it not in trying to theorize a deeply ambiguous existence into the kind of clean analytic distinctions necessary to the project?
But in the lived experience of transness, is there a dilemma of the body? I would say only insofar as all of human existence is shot through with this sort of ambiguity. And if the dilemma is actually a site of existential ambiguity, then maybe grabbing both horns of the dilemma will be the project that generates the most radical impacts on gender.
***
I’d like to thank Katie again for her essay. I know I will be returning to it several times in the coming months. It was a joy to read and so illuminating. I hope my comments, written in the 100F heat of summer break, contribute to this discussion in a way that does justice to her work here.
Thanks, Katie! Yeah, I suppose I was thinking that having certain attitudes/expectations may constitute a form of disrespect. And such disrespect might, in turn, constitute a wronging or be sufficient grounds for criticism whether or not we think attitudes themselves can be impermissible.
I’ll certainly keep thinking more about your article and responses! Thanks again for writing such a stimulating article and answering my questions! Looking forward to seeing where others take the discussion from here.
Hi Imogen! Thanks so much for this thoughtful and moving set of comments. I’m really glad that the analogy with the denial of animal pain spoke to you. I think your summation of the analogy is exactly right, and clearer than I’ve managed to put it thus far. Indeed, it’s not merely that our wills are thwarted, but rather also that our very sense of reality is denied. Accordingly, it’s not just our autonomy, but also our sanity that is under threat.
The connection you draw with existential ambiguity is also super interesting! I must admit that I am not as familiar with either existentialism or Beauvoir’s work on ambiguity as I would like to be.
But it’s interesting to note that there’s a way of cashing out IA on which it’s really quite existentialist in spirit. In particular, one could read IA as telling us that there is no expressive essence to womanhood (aside from avowal), and so that every woman must choose for herself (and for herself alone) what womanhood means to her. (One might compare Bex-Priestley’s account of “gender as name”, where each individual has to decide the particular idiosyncratic significance that their gender will have for them.)
This, of course, makes gender into a rather lonesome enterprise. For if IA requires us to decide for ourselves what our gender means, and if reliance on communal norms/teachings about gender expression constitutes a kind of bad faith/rejection of our freedom, then it’s difficult to see why I (if I buy into IA) should allow how someone else understands their womanhood to have any effect on how I understand mine.
Now, I take it that in your example of the masculine cis woman, her understanding of her own womanhood *does* affect how you understand your own womanhood. And that definitely seems like how things often go in real life. But I think that such instances of interpersonal shaping wrt gender is precisely what IA makes difficult.
Perhaps the existential ambiguity you see at work in your relationship with this cis woman can be read as an alternative to IA, insofar as it does allow for other’s self-understandings to affect my own self-understanding. But this does re-raise the specter of oppression. After all, the motivating worry that leads to IA is precisely that how others understand their gender has undue influence on how we understand our genders. And this is precisely the other horn of the dilemma (i.e., readmit bodily expression and open ourselves again to the manifold oppressions that can be visited upon us insofar as we are embodied, social creatures. )
I hope that was at least a little responsive to your thoughts! I’d love to hear more about how the existential ambiguity you’re interested in compares to the existentialist gloss one might give for IA.
Hi Katie – thanks so much for such a fascinating article!
While reading (and teaching!) the paper I had a couple of questions, basically of clarification, that I wonder if you could help me with:
You propose in the paper that gender is an *expressive kind,* and that gender is a *state* that can be expressed. To help with explaining the latter, you make an analogy to happiness: it’s a mental state that, when one has/is in it, can be expressed through verbal and active forms of expression.
1) Since it’s fairly intuitively obvious that, and in what sense, happiness is a state, but less obvious that and in what sense gender is a state, I wondered how tight you take the analogy to be. Do you think gender is something like a mental state? Or, I wondered, is it more like the state of (say) being free? (Freedom is a state I can be in or not be in; I can also express my freedom by, e.g., I yelling, “Finally! I’m free!”) This seems potentially important since something like happiness is (arguably) primarily an internal state, whereas something like freedom is (arguably) non-internal.
2) I also wondered how substantial you take the claim that gender is an expressive kind to be. I can celebrate my birthday, and in that way maybe we could say my birthday is a *celebratory kind* — it’s the right kind of thing to be celebrated. But in that case, we’re not saying anything particularly deep about birthdays by noting that they’re celebratory kinds — it doesn’t follow that this is the “primary” kind they instantiate, nor that it’s the only kind they instantiate, for instance. Should we read the claim that genders are expressive kinds similarly thinly, as basically just another way of saying that genders are the right kinds of things to be expressed? (If we can properly celebrate our genders, are they also celebratory kinds?) Or did you have in mind a more substantial commitment?
Thanks again 🙂
Hi Tweedy! Thanks so much for reading (and teaching!) the paper, and for your questions. They’re super on point, and address things that I’ve been trying to clearer on myself.
1) I’ll start with the question about whether, on my view, gender is a mental state. Now, I *do* think that expression is the mark of the mental, and that things that don’t have minds don’t express anything.
That said, I don’t think expressive kinds are restricted to the classic, occurrent mental states. For example, we can say that someone expressed great self-control at an event, or that an employee expressed great courage in standing up to the company boss.
Notably, self-control and courage are both standing (i.e., not occurrent) states that have a deeply embodied dimension to them. I think of gender in the same way. (In general, I tend to think of mindedness as an embodied phenomenon.) Gender, of course, usually sticks around longer than occurrent states like emotions and desires, but it’s a state in the same sense that being courageous, or being virtuous is a state.
The freedom case is interesting. I’m tempted to say that what’s being manifested there is one’s excitement or elation at being free, rather than one’s freedom itself. But I wouldn’t want to claim that in general, only states which get individuated in terms of narrow, internal criteria can be expressed. So for example, I think that someone can express their knowledge by performing well on a test, even though whether some mental state is a state of knowing depends on external factors. Thus, like knowledge, gender could have a mental dimension to it without being a purely internal state.
2) Turning to the question of how significant calling something an expressive kind is, I suppose I do think it’s a substantive claim with significant metaphysical import. However, I certainly don’t mean to claim that because something is an expressive kind, it can’t instantiate other kinds. For example, I think courage is both an expressive kind and also a virtue.
But I do think that we learn much about the metaphysics of a thing by learning that it’s an expressive kind. And that’s because not everything is apt to be expressed. Indeed, while expression is a kind of showing/manifestation, it is not mere manifestation. Thus, I can make my eye color manifest by taking off my sunglasses, but it’s not grammatical to say that I express my eye color by taking off my sunglasses.
In general, I don’t think that physical properties and traits can be expressed. (Indeed, a very short argument against the biological view of gender would just be: i) we can express gender, ii) but we can’t express our biologies; therefore, gender isn’t biological.)
Rather, I think that something can be expressed only insofar as it has a mental, normative dimension to it. And insofar as categories like mental and normative are quite metaphysically joint-carving, I guess I also think that expressive kind is a fairly joint-carving property.
I hope that was responsive. Thanks again for your questions!
I am grateful to the editors of PEASoup for inviting me to comment on Katie’s terrific paper, from which I learned a lot. And the discussion is excellent!
I’ll just say two things:
1. When I concluded with the suggestion that Zhou embrace the dilemma, what I had in mind was exactly what Imogen Sullivan suggests above when she says, “But in the lived experience of transness, is there a dilemma of the body? I would say only insofar as all of human existence is shot through with this sort of ambiguity. And if the dilemma is actually a site of existential ambiguity, then maybe grabbing both horns of the dilemma will be the project that generates the most radical impacts on gender.” In Megan Burke’s wonderful recent book, Becoming a Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Trans Existence, they make exactly this case. We are our bodies but we are not only our bodies, and what our bodies mean is not given or fixed, and hence is in turn fluid and open to change, even if only in small ways. We cannot deny this (says Burke via Beauvoir) because it’s our “situation” (in the existential sense). The moral responsibility here is to create less oppression and more freedom (easier said than done!). The last line of my precis captures the idea that it’s just the kind of critical work that Zhou has done for us–as well as her praxis as a mentor or activist–that opens up possibilities of freedom.
2. My own view is that trans philosophy has really done feminist philosophy a huge favour by cracking open a number of deeply sedimented ideas about gender, and by showing so-called “cis” philosophers that they have deep investments in maintaining essentialist understandings of gender identity and expression. No one can really live up to the norms associated with being a man or being a woman. They are too disciplinary and abstracted, as well as plural and changeable. So my suggestion was that if trans-hostile critics want to undercut the validity of trans people’s gender expressions, they take a hard look at the validity of their own! If Zhou is right, we all get to have expression, but if her imagined critics are right, then it’s not clear why *cis* people’s gender expressions are both authentic and factive. This strikes me as a usefully radical conclusion that might be pressed.
Hi Katie –
I just wanted to drop in to say how much I enjoyed your paper! I have two related questions – ones that, admittedly, I have not thought through particularly deeply at this point. But my first question concerns the role of avowals of gender and how seriously we want to take the notion of a gender kind (and the metaphysics thereof). You say that avowals like “I am a woman” are expressive of one’s belonging to the gender kind woman. Well, I would imagine the same is true for the gender kind trans woman. So when somebody avows that they are a trans woman, this is expressive of their belonging to the gender kind trans woman. Suppose two trans women both avow this latter. However, one disavows being a woman simpliciter, while the other avows it. The former, instead, avows that she is nonbinary. Is this going to lead us to problems with our metaphysics of kinds? Suppose the latter adds (avows) that, for her, to be a trans woman is to be a woman. Are there problems now?
Second question. I wonder if we might say the following: Gender avowals, at least within trans communities, are more than expressions of gender and more than reports about one’s gender. They are also interpretations of one’s gender and the various ways one expresses it. If we recognize avowals as interpretations of one’s various ways of gender-expressing oneself, then does this not suggest that while such interpretative avowals are (typically) authoritative, they do not require the denial that there are other forms of gender expression as well? It requires only that all other forms of gender expression occur under some particular interpretation or other provided by the individual who so expresses.
Hi Katie,
Thank you so much for your paper. There is obviously so much to talk about, but your discussion of the risks and values of gendered embodiment really resonated with me. This in particular:
“For it is consistent to admit that the body is endlessly vulnerable to harm and coercion while at the same time maintaining that the body is also an irreplaceable source of meaning and knowledge” (687).
That tension that you’ve captured! It seems so inescapable. The risk of embodied (as opposed to verbal) gender expression, if I understand correctly, is that bodies can only express gender via the mediation of “expressive generics” (670) that themselves place limits on intelligible gender expression. With that risk in mind, I’m curious to hear more about the joy of gender embodiment that you mention (686, 688), which seems to play an important role in your critique of the ideology of avowal.
On your view, is the joyful experience of the gendered body, specifically — in contrast with other positive affects, such as pride — especially valuable? To put the point a bit differently, do all positive affects associated with the experience of the body as gendered carry the aforementioned risk? Or is there something distinctly powerful about joy in this context?
Hi Talia! Thanks so much for reading the paper, and for your questions!
1) I’ll start with the question about whether *trans woman* is also a gender that one can express, and if conflicting beliefs amongst trans people about whether all trans women are women poses a problem for our metaphysics of gender.
I want to first point out that being an expressive kind is not always a downward-ly heritable property. So for example, the set of all courageous individuals who have two-syllable names is necessarily a subset of the set of all courageous individuals. But while the property of being *courageous* is an expressive kind, the property of being *courageous and having a two-syllable name* is not an expressive kind.
Now, the default trans-inclusive view is one where *trans woman* picks out a subset of the gender kind *woman*. And it’s entirely compatible with this view that one thinks that *trans woman* is not actually an expressive kind, and accordingly also not a gender kind, any more than *woman with red hair* is a gender kind, since being an expressive kind is not always downwardly heritable. (To be clear, downward heredity does happen sometimes. The set of forlorn individuals is a subset of the sad individuals, but I think that both *forlorn* and *sad* are expressive kinds.)
However, you could have a view where *trans woman* really is a gender in its own right. And then you could raise a further question of whether *trans woman* is necessarily a subset of *woman*. Moreover, we might imagine a case in which different trans women come to have different beliefs about this question, and express their differing beliefs to one another.
I take it that your worry then is that since I claim that expression is factive, then it turns out in this case that trans women both are and aren’t all women. This would indeed be a bad result.
But the key thing is that what is expressed when one says that “trans women are women” is a belief with a certain content, and not the content itself. Thus, while one can express one’s belief that trans women are women, one doesn’t express trans women are women. (Indeed, it isn’t even grammatical to say as much). Accordingly, it doesn’t follow from my sincere utterance that trans women are women, although it does follow (by the factivity of expression) that I believe that trans women are women. Thus, when one person avows that all trans women are women and the other avows the opposite, it follows that they have conflicting beliefs, but it doesn’t follow that trans women both are and aren’t all women. The latter entailment would indeed be a problem, but the former entailment is perfectly fine.
In general, what we express are states of ourselves. Thus, it’s grammatical to say that I expressed my belief that Pluto is the ninth planet, or that I expressed my happiness. But the sentence “I expressed Pluto is the ninth planet” is ungrammatical. And that’s because the proposition *Pluto is the ninth planet* is not a state of an individual.
This might seem confusing, since I do claim that one can express one’s happiness by saying “I’m happy!”. But crucially, what’s expressed in such a case is one’s happiness (which is a state of oneself). What is not expressed is the proposition that I am happy, since that proposition is not a state of myself.
A final thing to say here is that my account doesn’t rule out that people could have multiple genders. Thus, my account allows for the possibility that someone is both non-binary and a woman (in the same way that someone could be both angry and bored.) Of course, it’s a substantive, further question whether this is in fact a possibility. But I’m happy in general to defer on such questions to what people avow about their own lived realities.
I apologize for the convoluted nature of my response here. But I’m more than happy to clarify as needed!
2) The idea that avowals of gender are interpretations of gender is super interesting. And I do think it’s right that often, in trans spaces, you’ll hear people say something like “for me, being a woman is about being X”. The thought behind this utterance, I take it, is that X is my way of expressing womanhood, but that others might have their own ways of expressing womanhood.
This thought has a more general analogue. Thus, we say things like “everyone grieves differently”, where this means something like: different people express their grief in different ways.
However, it’s worth pointing out that claims like “everyone grieves in their own way” are intelligible only against a shared understanding of how grief normally gets expressed. Thus, I can understand how celebration might be someone’s unique way of grieving by noticing the continuities between it and our more paradigm instances of grieving behavior. But if there is no shared grasp of how things paradigmatically go, then it becomes difficult to see what makes this instance of celebration an instance of grief, as opposed to an instance of pure joy.
I think the same thing applies to gender. While everyone might have their own way of expressing their womanhood, we get a grip on those idiosyncratic ways of expressing womanhood as expressions of womanhood (as opposed to something else), only via reference to a shared grasp of certain generics about what the “normal” expression of womanhood looks like.
IA, however, wants to reject that there is any such thing as the “normal” expression of womanhood. And I worry that this undermines our ability to develop our own interpretations of how we live our genders.
I hope this is at least somewhat responsive. Thanks again for your questions, and happy to continue chatting (either here or via another mechanism)!
Hi Matt! Thanks so much for reading the paper, and for your question.
To answer your question, I don’t think that gender joy carries a risk of oppression that other affects (positive or negative) about gendered embodiment don’t carry. Thus, things like gender pride and gender disgust (i.e., gender dysphoria) also carry this risk. For example, while two trans women might bond over how much they hated their facial hair, this might at the same time alienate and invalidate a trans woman who chooses to not remove her facial hair.
I do, however, think that the loss of gender joy under IA has a normative significance to it in the way that the loss of (say) gender disgust might not. This is because I think that often times, the whole point of gender transition is to find new embodied ways of relating to others that feel true and joyful. As such, removing the body from the picture might seem like it defeats the purpose of transition.
Now, I want to acknowledge that I am here invoking a very particular understanding of transition. I think that for some folks, euphoria is a much less integral part of being trans. And more generally, I want to acknowledge that joy around gender isn’t a universal experience. I take it that for many cis feminists, womanhood is a source of frustration and anger, not joy.
But I do think gender joy is valuable for *many* trans folks, and that such joy has long been integral to our practices and our communities. As such, we can point out that IA’s depriving us of it is a significant cost, even if it turns out that, all-things-considered, other thing (say, the complete abolition of gender) ought to be prioritized over trans experiences of euphoria. After all, IA was, at least originally, a practice by and for trans people.
Thanks again, everyone, for such a lovely and generative discussion! Before I log off for the day, I just wanted to briefly reflect again on Cressida and Imogen’s thought that living out the messiness is the best way forward.
I am also tempted to think that the living out the messiness of our status as embodied beings who can harm one another is the only realistic way forward. But on my reading, this is to embrace the second, anti-IA horn of the dilemma.
This is because I think of IA as being, in many ways, an understandable, and even valiant attempt to avoid the messiness of our embodied existence. There is, indeed, something almost Platonic/Christian in IA’s thought that our bodies merely obscure who we really are, and that what we are really after is the gendered soul, which we can gain unadulterated access to through speech. Disavow the body, IA tells us, and then we’ll finally be able to see one another for who we really are.
In general, I think IA recapitulates an old problematic of the body that has long dogged the human experience. This is the situation in which we find our embodied natures both offensive to, and yet also constitutive of our dignity as human beings. Now, it may very well be that rejecting the body is not a real option, and that we can only live out the painful messiness of our embodied existences. Nevertheless, I think there is something distinctly human (and perhaps even admirable or beautiful) in the impulse towards non-messy things like IA, even if we judge that such impulses are ultimately misguided.
I am late to this conversation, but I wanted to stop by and say how much I appreciated the paper and the discussion, and add a few thoughts for Katie which I hope are helpful despite being late.
I found your analogy between gender and emotion very helpful, and I wonder if it would be helpful to compare atypical expressions of both, perhaps bringing in a disability perspective. While expressing gender or emotion requires some shared norms and expectations, those norms can be more or less flexible in allowing for individual variation, and a set of norms can legitimately be criticized for excessive rigidity and suppression of individuality.
I’ve been spending time with a close person who is pretty paradigmatically autistic—diagnosed in childhood, grew up stigmatized as having a developmental disability—and we recently talked about the value of unmasking. Their lack of eye contact and flapping are not paradigm expressions of comfort and joy, but are nonetheless genuine expressions. When they are in a setting where these expressions are misrecognized, or where they suppress these expressions for fear of being misrecognized, something is loss. I suspect that a this point generalizes to other people who express feelings in atypical ways, including but not limited to other disabled people.
The way I express my gender is not typical either, and I think having room to be atypical is valuable for me, and valuable for those around me. I wonder if turning more of a critical lens on social norms that force everyone’s body into the same narrow normative expectations could be a way of taking on the second horn of your dilemma. (Obviously I need to think more about how to have norms that are at once intelligible and pluralistic, but I think this is a project worth doing!)
Thank you again for a very thought-provoking paper and discussion.
Hi Ray! Thanks so much for reading the paper, and for your comment. I think it would definitely be super cool and useful to bring in a disability perspective, and explore the analogies between various forms for neuroatypicality and trans gender expression. Indeed, there’s a lot of extant discourse in trans communities about how trans people with autism experience their autism and gender as unified whole. I’ve been meaning to thinking more deeply about this connection for some time, and I agree that it has strong resonances with the topic of this paper!
With respect to norms, I definitely agree that we should have a critical eye when it comes to many of our social expectations of one another, whether it has to do with emotion or gender. There is an interesting question, however, of what norms we should embrace, and what role norms should have in a just and inclusive society. I worry that there is a strand of queer/trans theory (a strand exemplified by IA) on which any sort of normativity whatsoever winds up being viewed as a potentially oppressive construct that needs to be deconstructed and destroyed.
One theme of the paper, however, is that while norms do often oppress us, they’re also how we build a meaningful, shared life together. The task for us, then, if we embrace the second anti-IA horn of the dilemma, is to find ways of critiquing and reforming our norms, without completely throwing normativity out the window.
I’m not well equipped to join the discussion at an academic philosophical level, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate Katie’s work towards a humane and free view of gender and what resonates with me from my own tangled perspective as a trans artist (and friend).
I believe that many trans and queer people experience IA as a stumbling block. At times we may be enticed by its simplicity and its promise, but our behavior reveals the underlying expressive reality. Katie’s work makes that reality more explicit. When I look carefully around my trans and queer community, I find an abundance of expressive relationships to gender that may to appear to an outside eye as contradictory, implausible, or irresponsible. As I understand them these games of expression are not meant to neatly avow a singular internal experience, they are not meant to prescribe an appropriate method of interaction. Instead they probe, they tease out a common experience of gender. In these games we place ourselves as collective witnesses not individual captives of gender. With these games we grieve and heal the violence caused by patriarchal systems. We’re not trying to explain ourselves, we are trying to explain gender.
But it can’t always be fun and games. IA emerges as a solution to a scathing outside eye. In a moment where all creativity is stifled, you can catch a trans person dig their heels in and merely avow their existence. If you do not allow me to play and express, I can only be as I am before you, I can only constrict around what I live and know. From here I have seen trans people get stuck. We rally around a more militant logic, we may forget that underlying the distress of what one might call gender dysphoria is a roaring sense of responsibility to come out and to express.
Katie finds that IA does not ultimately serve gender liberation or a rigorous investigation of gender, and I agree. And yet she also finds a compassionate way to dispel the problematic ideological trappings and uncover within acts of avowal a deeper expressive truth about gender.
The transphobic critique attacks trans people as the origin of the very contradictions of gender which the drag queen or the trans artist seeks to illuminate within their audience. Katie’s work appropriately situates the troublesome contradictions and complexity within the greater realm of gender, reminds a queer reader to open their expressive channels as often as possible (because it was always about coming out), and hopefully invites the transphobic accuser to begin to count themselves as yet another witness to gender.