Pauline Park
Vassar College
18 April 2012

I feel honored to be speaking here at Vassar College again only a year after my last appearance here.

I’d like to begin by thanking the Vassar College Feminist Alliance and TransMission for inviting me to speak today.  I’d especially like to thank Faren Tang and Rachel Ritter, the co-presidents of the Feminist Alliance, and Tristan Feldman, president of TransMission, for arranging my appearance here.

Given that it was the Feminist Alliance and TransMission, I would like to engage in a feminist analysis of the politics of identity from my perspective as a transgendered woman of color who was born in Korea and raised here in the United States. I would like to focus on the claim made in a speech in 2000 that the transgender community needs to move beyond identity politics to a ‘post-identity’ politics model of organizing.

Introduction: GenderPAC’s Organizational History and Background

Riki Anne Wilchins was the executive director of GenderPAC for the entire 14 years of its organizational life, from 1995 until 2009; in that capacity, she called for the creation of “a post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans.” By way of a critique of that call, I will argue here that the discourse of a post-identity politics movement – far from providing a unifying philosophy and political strategy – is intellectually incoherent and politically counterproductive. It is my aim here to articulate what I see as the racial politics implicit in the discourse and to offer an alternative conception of identity formation and transgender movement politics based on notions of community.

GenderPAC was founded in November 1996 to be the national voice of the transgender community. A number of different individuals and organizations came together to establish the organization in order to educate society on transgender issues and to advance a legislative agenda in Congress. Wilchins, a white post-operative male-to-female transsexual woman, took the organization in a very different direction. By the end of 1999, Wilchins shifted GenderPAC from the original vision of its founders to a very different organization with a very different mission. With Gina Reiss as managing director, Wilchins then went public with her intention to reject the original conception of a transgender advocacy organization in favor of a vague, rather inchoate concept of a ‘gender rights’ organization.

Wilchins’ rejection of GenderPAC’s original mission as a national voice for the transgender movement is symptomatic of the inherent problems of attempting to create a movement while denying the existence of a community upon which it is based. I would argue that community is a necessary component of any movement politics. Organizational accountability to the community is not only the analogue, but also the concomitant, to – individual accountability to a board of directors. Any refusal to acknowledge community as the basis of movement politics ultimately represents an attempt to evade responsibility to a larger collective. Wilchins’ decision to reject the notion of transgender community organizing had profound implications for the community and the movement that GenderPAC once claimed to represent. In 2000, Wilchins gave a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving National Donor Conference entitled “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights” in which she asserted that she was:

“…building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place… And so it’s not so much a question of including transgender, as of recognizing that gender has always been a part of a gay agenda and always will be… GenderPAC is a ‘post-identity’ organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us…  In a post-identity movement, who we are is not a pre-condition for working together – our identification as gender activists comes out of the work we do.  And so identity becomes not a cause of our politics, but an effect — not a wall to be defended and debated but something mobile, personal, and flexible that changes and grows with us as our understanding of ourselves changes and grows.  And all these confusing, even threatening new identities are not barbarians at the gate but a doorway out. Their messiness is not the problem, it’s the solution — a tactic, even an essential political goal… We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences… A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender… What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do…”  (Riki Anne Wilchins, “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference).

The Gill speech was perhaps the clearest articulation of the discourse of the ‘post-identity politics’ gender rights movement that Wilchins ever gave, a discourse that I will simply call ‘the post-identity politics paradigm’ (or ‘PPP’ for short). But even the most cursory glance at that speech will reveal a number of significant problems of the ‘new paradigm’ that Wilchins ostensibly articulated in it. First, there is the problem of the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression. Second, there is the problem of the practical application of Wilchins’ notions in the legislative arena. Third, there is the problem raised by Wilchins’ conception of identity formation, as it might be applied to race. Fourth, there is the parallel problem as applied to gender. And fifth, there is the problem of the apparent contradiction of ‘post-modernism’ and liberal rights discourse in Wilchins’ thinking.  I will take each of these in turn.

The Conflation of Homosexuality and Transgender

At its heart, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is based on a misconception about the nature of individual identity and the relationship of sexual orientation to gender identity and expression. Wilchins’ analysis of the sex/gender binary is reductive, attempting to reduce one form of oppression to the other, rather than recognizing them as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression.  One cannot fully understand homophobia or genderphobia unless one maintains the conceptual distinction between homophobia and genderphobia.  Hence, in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins makes it impossible to successfully explain either.  In her Gill speech (quoted above), Wilchins declared,

“And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.  And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.”

In fact, it is not at all self-evident that “the mainspring of homophobia is gender.”  Not all gay people are gender-variant, with the ‘butch’ gay man and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ exemplifying the gender-conventional; the oppression they face could not therefore be attributed to their outward gender expression.  There are many cases of conventionally gendered lesbians and gay men facing discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation alone. Relatively ‘butch’ gay men, for example, have been attacked leaving gay bars despite— and one is almost tempted to hypothesize because of – their gender conventionality.  In fact, the very assertion of a self-conscious masculinity on the part of gay men in the 1970s may have provoked even more intense hostility on the part of some homophobic men who may have perceived those masculine gay men to be all the more threatening because of their relative masculinity; in other words, in the logic of a homophobe, if a relatively manly man can be gay, a manly man like me could be gay.

A more conceptually sophisticated analysis would recognize homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression, one in which neither is fully reducible to the other, though interrelated.  One could draw an analogy with explanations of racism based in class prejudice. Clearly, race cannot be reduced to class, because racial discrimination cannot be fully explained as class discrimination.  Similarly, discrimination and oppression based on sexual orientation cannot be fully reduced to oppression based on gender expression, especially in cases involving conventionally gendered LGBs.   But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins implicitly dismisses the distinct forms of oppression faced by conventionally gendered LGBs.

Clearly, gender variance is relative; but it is equally clear that the kind of oppression faced by relatively more gender-variant LGBs is likely to be more intense than that faced by more conventionally gendered LGBs; they are, in any case, different and distinct.  Collapsing homophobia into genderphobia provides Wilchins with a rationale for jettisoning the concept of ‘transgender,’ which she finds hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.  But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins is left without a conceptual framework for distinguishing between gender-based and non-gender-based homophobia. Hence, Wilchins’ conceptual framework does not allow her to recognize the greater potential for discrimination and violence faced by gender-variant LGBs. Ironically enough, then, Wilchins’ desire to focus on what she sees to be the gender-based roots of homophobia leads her inadvertently to minimize or trivialize the oppression that gender-variant LGBs face specifically because of their gender variance, as opposed to their sexual orientation alone.

While the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity leads to conceptual confusion, it also provides an opportunity for Wilchins to try to bridge what she perceives to be a gap between traditional ‘gay’ politics and the newer politics of transgender.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that GenderPAC’s philosophy and strategy were premised on a conflation of sexual orientation and gender, and that conflation allowed Wilchins to position herself as the leader of a ‘post-transgender’ organization, one which was guided by an ostensibly sophisticated conception of gender that was ‘hip,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘post-identity politics.’

Wilchins thus cast herself as the avatar of a new age in which GenderPAC would lead a gender rights movement that would supercede both the old gay and lesbian rights movement and the newer transgender rights movement.  What this all-inclusive ‘national gender rights movement’ ended up looking like, in practice, was an organization whose primary constituency would appear to be non-transsexual transgendered youth who were uncomfortable with any fixed gender identity and who reject the classic transsexual transition narrative. GenderPAC’s membership was especially heavy with college students, mostly of female birth sex, who were intrigued by Wilchins’ use of Butlerian terms such as ‘gender performativity’ and notions of gender fluidity that seemed to apply so well to their own personal experiences at that stage of their lives.  Since many of these individuals identified as lesbians at some point but seemed dissatisfied with the inability of that term to adequately describe or encompass the gender-transgressive component of their identities, they were especially attracted to the way in which Wilchins seemed to be able to bring the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity together.

Praxis Makes Perfect: Applying the Paradigm in the ‘Real World’

The faults of Wilchins’ approach can be observed by applying it to a current political battle engaged by the movement.  The focus of national efforts for many years has been passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the federal LGBT rights bill still pending in Congress many years after its introduction.

In Wilchins’ view, the gay movement does not understand that gender oppression is at the root of homophobia and therefore seeks to exclude transgendered people in a futile attempt to appropriate heteronormativity; but the transgender movement too narrowly circumscribes the concept of gender because it is rooted in the medical model of transsexuality and therefore excludes non-surgical ‘gender queers.’

The equivalent of Wilchins’ desiradatum – ‘a national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ – would be a ‘national sexual freedom civil rights movement for all Americans’ that would remove ‘identity politics’ labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay.’  It is unlikely that LGBT organizations would remove ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ from their mission statements and their literature and jettison the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ in favor of some broader but vaguer notion of ‘sexual freedom for all,’ and if that scenario seems extremely far-fetched, it is because such a move would represent a rejection of the fundamental principles around which lesbian and gay groups have been organized heretofore.

But Wilchins stakes out a much bigger territory than even a movement that covers both the transgender movement and the lesbian and gay movement. One can probably best understand Wilchins’ call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ as part of a marketing strategy under which GenderPAC was marketed as being ‘more’ than just a transgender organization, because it (ostensibly) had a broader conception of gender; broader than any lesbian and gay rights organization because it included a focus on gender issues; and broader than any women’s organization because it included transgendered and gender-variant people who were not part of the traditional mission of organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW).

But for all that she claimed to be engaged in a critique of binary thinking, Wilchins ironically constructed her own binary opposition, implicitly pitting a ‘transgender’ movement against a broader and more inclusive ‘gender’ movement. This is a false dichotomy.  Wilchins offered no evidence that a self-styled transgender movement cannot include both non-transgendered gender-variant individuals as well as issues faced by such individuals.  Clearly, there is no ‘either/or’ here.  There is no reason to jettison the concept of transgender simply because it is not all-inclusive; nor is there any reason to believe that a transgender movement cannot be based on a conception of gender oppression that recognizes all forms of oppression based on gender identity or gender expression.

Race, Gender, Identity Formation and the Politics of Community

The third difficulty with Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm lies in the way in which Wilchins misconstrues the nature of gender identity formation and political movements rooted in communities organized around such identities. Underlying the discourse of a post-identity politics gender rights movement as Wilchins articulated it in her Gill speech is the assumption that any exclusion is bad – both illegitimate and politically problematic – coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion.

The rationale implicit in this discourse would seem to be something like this: gender-variant people (transgendered people, genderqueers, etc.) have been excluded from the lesbian and gay movement, and that is a bad thing. Transgendered people (including male-to-female transsexuals) have been excluded from the women’s movement, and that is a bad thing.  The underlying assumption would seem to be that any movement that excludes anyone is morally suspect and politically questionable.  But the fundamental error is the failure to take account of the asymmetry of power between privileged and marginalized groups in American society.

A case in point is Wilchins’ reaction to an invitation to attend TransWorld in October 1998. Co-sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the New York City Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center) and the Audre Lorde Project, TransWorld I (which took place at ALP in Brooklyn) was the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color (TGPOCs). The organizing committee for TransWorld I made the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters, though the conference was open to everyone whether white or of color, transgendered or not. As one of the members of the planning committee, I voted for that decision because I felt that it was necessary to ensure that the conference provide an opportunity for TGPOCs to speak for themselves. Previous conferences in the series sponsored by the Center’s GIP (of which TransWorld I was the fourth) had featured largely conventionally gendered white men literally and figuratively talking down to transgendered people from the dais. This conference would be different: it would feature transgendered and gender-variant people of color speaking from personal experience of oppression and marginalization as well as from expertise in health care, social services, and advocacy.

Wilchins’ reaction to the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters was to denounce the conference as ‘racist’ because it ‘excluded’ white people.  Her response to the invitation to attend TransWorld was not merely an expression of her personal pique at not having been invited to speak at the conference.  The rejection of TransWorld I and limited-membership formations – based on the assumption of a symmetry of ‘exclusion’ – demonstrates a failure to understand the difference between the power of a white elite vs. the power of marginalized communities, as well as a failure to understand the nature of institutionalized racism in this society.

The ‘exclusion’ of whites from the dais at TransWorld I cannot be equated with the historic exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in society, because those white service providers – whether physicians (such as surgeons and endocrinologists), psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers, or other ‘gender professionals’ – are in positions of power relative to the transgendered people of color who are their clients (or ‘patients’ or ‘consumers,’ however one may wish to describe them). Such white gender professionals – most of whom are not themselves transgender-identified – exercise power over their clients as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of affording (or denying) access to hormones, sex reassignment surgery, psychological evaluation, legal change of sex, and other crucial aspects of transsexual transition. Those professionals have access to resources – financial, legal, and organizational –that their clients largely lack, and the institutional power that they command therefore belies any ‘moral equivalency’ between their ‘exclusion’ from the dais at this one event and the exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in a white-dominant society brought about by pervasive discrimination based on race and/or gender identity that TGPOCs face.

The decision of the TransWorld I organizing committee to limit panels to people of color only was understood by committee members as an attempt to provide transgendered people of color themselves with a forum in which they could speak unhindered by service providers who had dominated the previous three ‘health empowerment’ conferences sponsored by the GIP.  That decision was informed by a recognition of the multiple oppressions – oppressions based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status (among others) as well as gender identity and expression – faced by transgendered people of color.

It is important to understand, however, that such oppressions are not merely additive in nature; in other words, it is not simply that a transgendered African American faces transgenderphobia in one context and racism in another; rather, these oppressions are interactive and mutually reinforcing.    For example, a transgendered African American woman may find no support as a person of color at a white-dominated center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities; but she may also find no support as a transgendered person at a community center or social service provider in her community of origin.

Related to oppressions based on race and ethnicity are those based on nationality and citizenship status. Many TGPOCs are immigrants and face the same challenges as their non-transgendered compatriots, but without access to social services in their communities, because many immigrant service providers will not serve openly transgendered people. Even in those instances where social service agencies may welcome them, transgendered people may be reluctant to come forward for fear of discrimination. While LGBT community centers are springing up across the country, very few have any means of ensuring linguistic access for those who are not native speakers of English or cultural competency for those who are immigrants and/or people of color.

Those TGPOCs who are not US citizens do not have even the minimal legal rights that transgendered citizens enjoy; if they are undocumented, they are easily deportable; and while they live here in the United States, undocumented transpeople face exploitation because of their lack of legal status.  Hence GenderPAC’s call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans’ begged the question as to just who constitutes an ‘American.’ To define the category of ‘all Americans’ by way of citizenship would leave out the undocumented, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation.  But to include the undocumented would raise the question of whether or not GenderPAC is serious about working on behalf of this population.

While transgendered people of color certainly need legal protections from discrimination and violence, they do not have the luxury to regard legal rights as the sum total of the movement’s goals.  Juridical rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the liberation of transgendered people of color. A movement that limits its focus to legal rights will not be able to satisfy the need for social justice that transgendered people feel deeply.  That movement, in order to serve transgendered people of color, must also address issues of race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status, as well as class, (dis)ability, environment, and every other form of oppression suffered by TGPOCs.  Hence, a broad social justice movement is desperately needed, and an organization that embodies those values is a necessary component of that movement.

The complexity of the transgender community and the variability of gender oppression across different transgender populations and different transgendered and gender-variant people provides the rationale for the use of ‘transgender’ by an organization or a movement.  Deployed strategically and with intellectual and political sophistication, ‘transgender’ becomes a useful organizing principle for a community under construction that is attempting to create a political movement.

As I have already argued, it was GenderPAC’s failure to connect to community that led to its failure as an organization. Indeed, the discourse of a ‘post-identity politics’ movement as articulated by Wilchins in her Gill speech would seem to have no role for communities of any kind. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is all about ‘doing your own thing,’ as the phrase popular in the 1960s and 1970s would have it; and that may account for GenderPAC’s appeal to genderqueer youth, especially female-bodied youth who do not relate to terms such as ‘transsexual or even ‘transgender.’  Wilchins apparently believes that gender is primarily or perhaps even solely a matter of self-expression; what she does not understand is that gender identities are constructed by individuals in the context of larger communities, including the broad national community that we call ‘society.’ Public fora and conferences such as TransWorld that have a circumscribed focus are necessary precisely because transgendered and gender-variant people do not exist solely as atomized individuals; they live in communities – even if some are profoundly alienated from communities, including communities of origin and communities of color.

At root, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is premised on an atomized individualism that does not recognize the social context in which gender identities are formed. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm reduces the problem of gender oppression to a simple society-wide oppression of genderqueers attempting to express their individual gender identities. But the lack of conceptual sophistication regarding the variegation of gender oppression across different cultures and communities is not the only conceptual flaw in the discourse of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’ A reading of American history will show that the very notion of a ‘post-identity politics’ is fundamentally ahistorical, as it fails to acknowledge the identity politics of Jeffersonian liberalism, which was premised on an identity politics that excluded some from power because of their identity.  Identity politics did not begin in the 1960s; rather, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the African American civil rights movement were simply a different form of identity politics. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is rooted in an individual rights discourse of Enlightenment provenance that ironically enough – and fatally for its intellectual coherence – is at odds with Wilchins’ ostensible ‘post-modernism.’

Wilchins’ rather superficial critique of ‘post-identity politics’ really speaks only to the excesses of an exclusionary version of identity politics and does not acknowledge the origin of identity politics, much less address the issues raised by white skin privilege. GenderPAC’s call for a post-identity gender politics is analogous to Ward Connerly’s call for a color-blind society. The discourse of a color-blind society – promoted by conservatives who aim to eliminate affirmative action – fails to recognize the specificity of racial and ethnic oppression and therefore renders impossible any effort to address it. In a certain profound sense, the call for a post-identity gender rights movement represented a ‘whitewashing’ of gender and transgender politics. Implicit in Wilchins’ critique of identity politics was an assumption that identities are somehow fixed and exclusive. In her Gill speech, Wilchins implies that identifying as ‘gay’ somehow precludes identifying as ‘transgendered’ or that identifying as ‘transgendered’ somehow precludes one from identifying as ‘genderqueer.’ But identities need not be mutually exclusive; rather, they are more like Venn diagrams – overlapping and not always strictly definable.

‘Transgender’ is an identity formation that offers the same kind of advantages by bringing together a loose collection of individuals – crossdressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender-variant individuals – who may have many differences but who can achieve greater political agency through coalition-building, which is precisely what the construction of a ‘transgender community’ represents when brought to bear on the creation of a transgender political movement. Transgender offers the additional advantage of moving beyond the pathologizing medical model of transsexuality. The fact that ‘transgender’ does not include everyone who might be identified as gender-variant, much less the total human population does not invalidate it as a construct.

The term ‘transgender’ can be deployed strategically in order to bring legal rights to individuals who face pervasive discrimination, as the example of the successful campaign for the New York City transgender rights law shows (Int. No. 24, introduced in 2000, was enacted by the City Council in 2002). Similarly, terms such as ‘gender-variant’ or (if you prefer) ‘genderqueer’ can be deployed as well.  These are all clearly social constructions, and the one to be used in any given context depends on the particulars of that context.

Because of personal experiences of being excluded, transgendered and gender-variant people have become sensitive to the notion of exclusion of any kind. Perhaps some of this sentiment is behind Wilchins’ insistence that a gender rights movement, to be legitimate, must include everyone.But if the African American rights movement does not include everyone, does that invalidate it in some way? Certainly, white people (including many Jewish Americans) have played an important role in the movement, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal whites in the South and from the North participated in Freedom Summer and other civil rights campaigns. But the focus was clearly on dismantling Jim Crow, which directly affected African Americans in the South, even if it had an indirect impact on whites, especially those who supported the black aspiration for civil rights.  Was the African American civil rights movement ‘exclusionary’ because it did not specifically seek to include Latinos or Native Americans? Or was it rather more effective because it chose to focus on the specificity of oppression faced by African Americans, which was distinct from that of other people of color?

Wilchins simply fails to understand the variegation of gender oppression by race and ethnicity. And to suggest that it is illegitimate to organize around identity formations is to suggest that those identities are illegitimate. Indeed, such a suggestion represents nothing less than an attempt to invalidate efforts to address racial and ethnic oppression itself.

All that being said, we must also acknowledge that an ‘identity politics’ model can be limiting, and nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of electoral politics. There is considerable pressure within the LGBT community — just as there is in communities of color — when the prospect opens up for electing the first openly gay person or the first person of color to an office at the local, state or national level, the most spectacular case in point being the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008. There were also many women — Gloria Steinem most prominent among them — who championed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2008 because she would have been the first woman elected president, had her candidacy succeeded.

David Paterson became New York’s first African American governor upon the abrupt resignation of his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, in 2008. Hiram Monserrate became the first Latino elected to office in Queens County when he was elected to the New York City Council in 2001, and John Liu became the first Asian American elected to office in the state in same year when he was elected to the City Council. Paterson decided not to run for re-election as governor in 2010 after a series of scandals tainted his administration, and Liu — now City Comptroller — is facing possible criminal indictment in a campaign finance scandal. Monserrate was actually convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2009. All of which to say that the crudest model of identity politics — that we have to support ‘one of our own’ just because that person shares our identity category or categories — is just as absurd as rejecting identity politics altogether. When it comes to elected officials, at the very least, there is an obligation to hold members of one’s community or communities accountable even when there are compelling reasons to support them. Identity politics is rather like nationalism in having a more positive face of community empowerment and a negative valence that can at its most extreme even lead to genocide.

From my personal experience working in the legislative arena, the best example that comes to mind of work that moves beyond the limitations of identity politics is the campaign for the Dignity for All Students Act (NYS DASA), an anti-bullying law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2011. This safe schools law protects students in public schools across the state from bias-based harassment based on a comprehensive list of characteristics — including sexual orientation and gender defined to include gender identity and expression — as well as race, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

Importantly, while the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity bill — in which I represented the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) — included a number of LGBT-specific organizations, it also included many non-LGBT organizations. The coalition that advanced enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA) by the New York City Council in 2004 was perhaps an even better example of a legislative coalition based in identifiable communities but able to work in a way that moved that work beyond the limitations of identity politics. Asian American organizations played a particularly important role in the NYC DASA Coalition, including the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Sikh Coalition and the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF).

My experience as an activist leads me to conclude that we need to work within recognizable communities because of the continued oppression that members of those communities experience, while at the same time moving beyond those communities to work together across identity categories to pursue a common goal of social justice and social change; it is not an ‘either/or,’ but rather, a ‘both.’

‘Paradigm-Shattering’ and the Disjuncture of the Liberal and the Post-Modern

Pretensions to the contrary, Wilchins’ argument is not consistently or rigorously ‘post-modern,’ and it is not so much ‘insubordinate’ as simply incoherent. There is in fact a fundamental disjuncture at the heart of Wilchins’ thought, between the rights discourse of a ‘national gender rights movement’ and the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ thinking of post-structuralist theory that is superficially applied to the problem of gender-based oppression. Liberal rights discourse is premised on the very unicity of the unified subject as well as the specific identity of that subject (in demographic and (sub)national terms) that Derridean deconstruction would render impossible. Rights appertain to individuals, and individuals with individual identities, not to gender expression itself – to acts, to gestures, or to performances. And rights presuppose at the very least the possibility of an objective moral order. One need only cite a few passages from her Gill speech to demonstrate how little Wilchins understands the conceptual problems posed by this disjuncture. Post-structuralist thought renders problematic if not impossible the ground of rights discourse that enables the articulation of positive assertions of normative right of the sort that Wilchins would like to make. To many post-structuralist theorists, there is no such thing as objective moral obligation; given the inherently arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, there cannot be. For at root, ‘post-modernism’ represents a challenge to the fixity of meaning. For post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, the relationship between ‘signifier’ (e.g., word) and ‘signified’ (thing or concept) is inherently unstable and arbitrary.  If this is the case, there can be no conceptual ‘fundament’ to liberal rights discourse, because the meaning of the term ‘right’ itself cannot be fixed, any more than ‘individual’ can be:

“If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.  This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions…” (Jacques Derrida, “Writing and Difference,” trans. Alan Bass, 1978, p. 289).

Liberal rights philosophy is precisely the kind of ‘totalizing’ discourse of which Jacques Derrida speaks in this passage. Traditional philosophy – including the normative political philosophy of Locke and the liberal Enlightenment – is undermined by a deconstruction of the relationship between word (logos) and concept. For the post-modernist, a normative project such as the construction of a ‘national gender civil rights movement’ is not only hopelessly old-fashioned, it is an impossibility, because the deconstruction of the unified subject and the relationship between word and concept makes it so. Wilchins does not seem to understand that the central core of post-structuralism is the disjuncture between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ But if one were to take Derrida (by way of Judith Butler) seriously, then there can be no unified subject ‘I’ and therefore no unambiguous collective ‘we’ or ‘us.’ Unfortunately, Wilchins herself has never given any indication of how, from the post-modern ethos she would embrace, she would find a middle ground between the Enlightenment concept of the self and the deconstructive reduction of identity to textual device, or how she would create a conceptual foundation for positive moral statements such as the ones that she makes in her Gill speech.

In short, the notion of a post-modern ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ is inherently contradictory and intellectually incoherent. Poststructuralist theory of the Derridean sort that informs the work of Judith Butler – which Wilchins in turn takes as the conceptual fundament for her own thought – challenges not only identity formations of the sort that Wilchins labels ‘identity politics,’ but also undermines the very possibility of affirmative statements about individual and collective human needs and human rights that were at the heart of the GenderPAC strategy and philosophy that she labeled her ‘post-identity politics paradigm.’ That Wilchins does not recognize this problem, let acknowledge it, demonstrates the superficiality of her use of terms such as ‘post-modern’ and the bankruptcy of her notion of a ‘post-identity politics.’

Conclusion

It is no accident that GenderPAC failed to spearhead a new ‘national gender rights movement’ just as it failed to connect to the transgender community out of which it initially emerged. Wilchins reconfigured GenderPAC as a ‘post-transgender’ organization that would create and lead a ‘post-identity politics’ movement. GenderPAC’s rejection of a clear link with the transgender community left the organization unmoored from its tethering, and it is emblematic of GenderPAC’s failure that hardly anyone even noticed when Wilchins shut down the organization in 2009, by which point GenderPAC had become a bloated irrelevance.

Failing to take account of (let alone effectively address) the multiple oppressions of transgendered and gender-variant people of color, Wilchins’ GenderPAC instead offered slogans such as ‘gender, racial and affectional equality.’ Nor did her call for “a national gender rights movement for all Americans” address issues of race, ethnicity, national origin, or citizenship status in any meaningful way. An organization or a movement that purports to include everyone includes no one, because it does not speak to the specificity of particular forms of oppression, which must be named in order to be addressed.

Wilchins’ discourse is not truly liberational, because it fails to take into account the totality of individual human experience. A crucial part of our humanity is the experience of community – admittedly ambivalent and complex for many transgendered and gender-variant people – but a sine qua non for human existence as well as a necessary element of any successful political movement.

What the ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ does not recognize is how identity formations – such as ‘transgender’ as well as ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘people of color’ – can be strategically deployed to form community, which is the basis of any successful social or political movement.

Finally, Wilchins fails to recognize – let alone address – the inherent contradiction of a rights movement that is ostensibly ‘post-modern.’ Any attempt to try to construct a ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ that is rigorously poststructuralist is bound to failure, because of the fundamental disjuncture between a liberal rights discourse that depends on the unified subject as its fundament and a theoretical framework that denies the very possibility of a unified subject who is the ostensible bearer of those rights. If the hallmark of the ‘post-modern’ is a rejection of ‘logos’ and the very notion of a stable and unambiguous relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ then no truly ‘post-modern’ political movement is possible, because post-modernism rejects the possibility of affirmative normative statements that are the requisite for an objective moral philosophy upon which ‘rights’ movements must of necessity be based.

In the end, for all of Wilchins’ ability to market herself and her organization to funders and members, GenderPAC shut down operations in 2009, with Wilchins continuing some of its work through a new organization, True Child, ostensibly focusing on “programs and policies that address reproductive health, partner violence and gender-based bullying, and educational achievement integrate a strong, specific focus on gender norms.” Wilchins’ role as executive director of True Child suggests that it is a reformulation of the same marketing strategy that she used to build GenderPAC, but with a focus on youth. Why Wilchins closed GenderPAC’s doors remains a bit of a mystery, as she never explained the decision to shutter GenderPAC, despite having built a very impressive financial base for the organization. Allow me to speculate and suggest that Wilchins shut down GenderPAC because it became clear to her that it was not and would never be the vanguard of a ‘new gender movement.’ GenderPAC was a useful platform for Riki Wilchins herself, but because she rejected the very concept of a community, and because other organizations — most prominently, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) — took up the work that GenderPAC was originally created to do, GenderPAC lacked a foundation in any recognizable community. Hence Wilchins’ quixotic attempt to cast herself as the Martin Luther King of her own movement failed because she failed to understand that a movement must have a connection to a recognizable community or communities in order to succeed in advancing a real agenda of social justice and social change.

This speech is based on an essay entitled “GenderPAC, the Transgender Rights Movement and the Perils of a Post-Identity Politics Paradigm” that was published in “Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality?,” a compendium of presentations  given at the 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality (27 February 2002).

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York (www.nyagra.com), which she co-founded in June 1998. She also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF). Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines – adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 – for implementation of the new statute.

Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation introduced in that body. She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Freedom of expression and the debate over identity politics

By Pauline Park

Gay City News
5-11 September 2003
Vol. 2, Issue 36

Ever since engineering a fundamental shift in strategic vision for the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) in late 1999, Riki Wilchins has stirred controversy among trans political activists. At that time, Wilchins declared that GenderPAC, the group she heads, was no longer a ‘transgender’ organization but was instead pursuing a new vision of creating a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’

Wilchins’ most recent column in The Advocate (“Freedom of Expression,” September 2) has re-ignited that controversy, creating a firestorm of protest.

Are there issues here for the larger lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community?

I believe that there are, and that those tempted to view the current controversy as a tempest in a transgender teacup would do well to reconsider those issues.

“More than 55 cities, states, and municipalities have passed laws outlawing gender stereotyping on the job. Yet these heroic changes, which have largely been driven by transsexual activists, focus solely on transsexuality and gender identity. They disregard gender expression,” asserts Wilchins.

To illustrate why those efforts fall short, she cites the example of Darlene Jespersen, “who was fired after two decades at the same job when she refused to wear makeup and high heels as required by her employer’s dress code.”

Here in New York City, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, the Empire State Pride Agenda, and a broad coalition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender organizations as well as non-LGBT groups led the campaign for Intro. 24—commonly referred to as “the transgender rights bill”—a city law enacted in April 2002. Intro. 24 protects not only transsexuals (usually defined as those who seek or have obtained sex reassignment surgery) and transgendered people (those who present themselves in the gender opposite their birth sex, whether part-time or full-time) from discrimination, but also provides full legal redress for anyone who experiences gender-based discrimination.

The statute defines “gender” as “actual or perceived sex and… gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression, whether or not [it]… is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.”

That language would cover someone facing the discrimination confronted by Darlene Jespersen, or, for that matter, any non-transgendered man––gay, straight, or bisexual––denied employment, housing, or public accommodations for being “too effeminate.”

In fact, gender expression is explicitly included in virtually every one of the 55 state and local “transgender” rights laws that Wilchins claims fall short, information certainly available to her when she wrote her piece for The Advocate. One wonders why Wilchins––herself a post-operative transsexual––would be so intent on distancing herself and her organization from transsexuals and even from the transgender rights movement that GenderPAC was founded to represent. A cynical interpretation of Wilchins’ latest move might be to posit some sort of marketing strategy at work to differentiate GenderPAC from transgender organizations.

GenderPAC’s current strategy seems premised on marginalizing transgender organizations as exclusionary bastions of old-fashioned middle-aged transsexuals out of touch with genderqueer youth and others who reject the sex/gender binary premised on the assumption that there are only two sexes and two genders. Those who have attended GenderPAC’s annual conference have noted that it is dominated by white, middle-class, female-born college students––many of whom refuse to identify as either women or as men, some calling themselves “bois”––who appear to be GenderPAC’s market “niche” these days.

But is there more at issue here than an aggressively competitive organizational marketing strategy?

At the heart of the controversy is a real debate about how to define a movement. Wilchins’ stated aim is to move beyond “identity politics,” which she views as limiting and exclusionary.

“It would be easy for us to stay in the LGBT model—to continue to assume that all of our community’s issues can be pegged to one gender identity or sexual orientation,” Wilchins declares. “But maybe it’s time to look outside that model.”

One may rightly ask whether the strategy of a “post-identity politics movement” that Wilchins is touting is a viable alternative; to date, it has produced no concrete results in the legislative arena. Significantly, GenderPAC is an organization without an integral connection to any community, and the mistake that Wilchins makes is in failing to see the creation of community as an important and even necessary part of building a movement.

History shows that great movements are often rooted in community. Forty years ago last week, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the historic march on Washington that helped enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislation clearly aimed at enfranchising the African American community. King saw community as a necessary foundation for the civil rights movement, but neither that legislation nor the movement excluded anyone.

So it seems to me that it is Wilchins who is creating a false dichotomy between “identity politics” and an inclusive civil rights movement, rooted in the notion of a transgender community, supported by the organized lesbian and gay community and their allies.

Our experience with Intro. 24 shows that this binary—this false choice that Wilchins presents—is irrelevant to understanding the significant progress achieved.

It was important that City Council members saw that there was a real constituency behind this legislation, that it meant something to an identifiable community. And supporters were able to rally the transgender community and the larger LGBT community by calling Intro. No. 24 a transgender rights bill and by making clear just who—transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people (both transgendered and non-transgendered)—would benefit most directly by its passage. Our ability to mobilize a wide swath of the LGBT community—especially for the first public hearing at City Hall, in May 2001—played a crucial role in securing passage of the bill. By that fall’s municipal elections, leading candidates for mayor and a large majority of City Council candidates were on board with the bill, which passed the following spring with a 45-5 majority.

Our experience with Intro. 24 also belies Wilchins’ assertion that the transgender rights movement is run by transsexuals who exclude non-transsexuals from participation.

The work group that organized the campaign for Intro. 24 included transexxuals and non-transsexuals alike. The group was coordinated by a non-transsexual transgendered Asian American woman and included a Latina lesbian, gay white men, and gay and straight African American men, all of whom were excited by the task of working for passage of a transgender rights bill. The same was true of the diverse coalition behind Intro. 24, which included organizations of color and civil rights and social justice organizations, labor and women’s organizations, and people of faith.

Our experience with Intro. 24 demonstrates that articulating a transgender rights agenda—firmly rooted in a visible and organized LGBT community—is a crucial element in enlisting the support of non-transgendered people and in building broad coalitions that help enact nondiscrimination legislation beneficial to everyone, regardless of gender identity or expression.

Pauline Park is co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and coordinated the Intro. No. 24 work group.

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As coordinator of a legislative work group that includes city council members, transgender-supportive allies, and other members of  the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, Pauline Park is one of the key players in the initiative to amend New York City’s Human Rights Law to include transgendered and gender variant people. (In February 2000, city council members announced their co-sponsorship of a trans-protective bill; it has not yet passed.) Park’s participation in transgender activism began with GenderPAC’s annual national gender lobby days in Washington, D.C., in May 1997 and 1998.  She and other New York-based trans activists decided to focus their efforts at the state and local levels, and in June, 1998, they  founded the  New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender political organization in New York.

Park, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois, found working on this project in the highly-charged political environment of New York City to be a real education in lobbying.  Her first piece of advice: “While the support of legislative staff is important, it’s crucial to get at least a few of the members themselves actively engaged in the process. We’ve been very fortunate to have the direct and active participation of two legislators of color — Margarita Lopez, an openly lesbian Latina city council member; and Bill Perkins, a GLBT-supportive African American city council member.” The legislative work group meets in person or via a conference call every two or three weeks.

“It’s also vital to have the support of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. We’ve formed a working partnership with Tim Sweeney and Ralph Wilson at the Empire State Pride Agenda, and we’ve been able to build on the credibility with legislators that they already enjoy,” Park said.

Park also emphasizes the importance of forming a broad coalition of allies in support of the bill. “In a city as diverse as New York, it’s important to counter the perception that transgender-based discrimination is only a white queer lower Manhattan issue.”  Park said. “With Pride Agenda staff and the six council members in our legislative work group, we’ve produced what looks to be a winning strategy, forging a broad-based coalition that includes communities of color and people in the outer boroughs.”  Members of the legislative work group have reached out to a range organizations for their support, including the Audre Lorde Project, the National Organization for Women-New York City Chapter, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, District Council 37 (the largest union in the city),  the GLB political clubs, and people of faith.

Park has been involved with organizing in GLBT communities since 1994, when she launched Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago, an organization for gay, bisexual, and transgendered Asian and Pacific Islanders. Since then, she has continued to be involved in Asian and Pacific Islander communities, working with the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York and co-founding Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in February 1997. The initial spark for Iban/QKNY was the Korean LGBT Forum organized by the Korean Gay Organization/ Chingusai and hosted by the Korean American Association of Greater New York on November 2, 1996.  Park was one of the four speakers in that panel discussion, the first forum on GLBT issues ever sponsored by a non-queer Korean American organization. For Park, ensuring that people of color have an equal voice in the transgender political movement is critical. “As a transgendered woman of color, I do not have the luxury of completely separating what are ostensibly ‘transgender’ issues from issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship status.”

Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists & Policymakers, by Paisley Currah & Shannon Minter, was published on 19 June 2000 by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

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On the steps of City Hall at the press conference on 29 February 2000 announcing the public launch of the campaign for Int. No. 24, the New York City transgender rights bill. Front row: Council Member Margarita Lopez, Council Member Philip Reed, Juan Figueroa (executive director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund), Pauline Park, Council Member Ronnie Eldridge, Council Member Bill Perkins. Second row: Charles King (executive director, Housing Works), Carrie Davis, Council Member Gifford Miller, Melissa Sklarz, Donna Cartwright, Council Member Christine Quinn.

A history of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
Part I: the founding (1998-2000)

Of all the organizations that I have been involved with, I am probably most closely associated in the public mind with NYAGRA.

The idea for the organization now known as the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) originated in a conversation that I had with Paisley Currah in May 1998.  Paisley and I drove down to Washington D.C. for GenderPAC’s national lobby day, the second that we would participate in. While on the drive back up, Paisley turned to me and said, “You know, Pauline, we can do this in New York.” Paisley (who at that point was still using feminine pronouns but who transitioned several years later) pointed out that there was not a single transgender advocacy organization in the state that was actively engaged in the legislative arena.

I pointed out that I was at that moment on the board of directors of Queens Pride House, on the steering committee of Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), and coordinator of Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY). In short, I honestly felt that I did not have the time to get involved with founding another organization.  But Paisley persisted, and I agreed to help her with the new organization as long as I did not end up as its leader. Paisley’s organizational experience at that point was limited to participation in the Ithaca chapter of ACT-UP, a non-organization of an organization, and so her desire for my active involvement was perfectly understandable.

Paisley asked me to come up with a name for the organization, and so I thought through various possibilities, all of which had to have ‘New York’ and ‘Gender’ in them. It seemed to me that an actual acronym that spelled a word would be more effective and more memorable than a mere abbreviation. After much mental gymnastics, I eventually came up with ‘New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,’ which conveniently spelled ‘NYAGRA.’ That acronym evokes images of Niagara Falls, of course, which is a universally recognized landmark in the state. Paisley loved the name, and so did the other activists who attended our first meeting.

Paisley and I conferred on the activists that we should invite to the first meeting, but she left it to me to convene the meeting, which I did on June 30. David Valentine served as the gracious host for that historic first meeting, though his apartment in Greenwich Village unfortunately lacked air conditioning. Seven of us gathered around 1:30 p.m. on that hot June day in 1998: Paisley, David, and me, along with four others. Rosalyne Blumenstein was then the director of the Gender Identity Project at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (since renamed the LGBT Community Center) and as such was at that moment far and away the best-known and most prominent transgender activist in the city. Carrie Davis was a peer counselor at the GIP and would succeed Roz as director a few years later. David was at that time a Ph.D. candidate at New York University and was actually working on a dissertation on transgender. Paisley was at that point an assistant professor of political science on tenure track at Brooklyn College. Donna Cartwright was a copy editor at the New York Times.

Roz left the new organization after a dispute over her role in it. NYAGRA working group members decided to hold a meeting on October 24, concurrent with the TransWorld conference at the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn. TransWorld was the first conference by and for transgendered people of color in New York (and anywhere in the United States, as far as I knew), and it was jointly sponsored by ALP (a community center for LGBT people of color) and the GIP; given the GIP’s sponsorship, TransWorld was billed as the fourth in a series of transgender conferences organized under the auspices of the Center and the GIP (‘transexual/transgender health empowerment conferences,’ as the conference promotional material described them).

Until the founding of NYAGRA in June 1998, the GIP had been ‘the only game in town,’ as it were, when it came to transgender advocacy in New York City, and the director of the GIP had been the ‘go-to girl’ for media comment on transgender-related public policy issues as well as social services in the city. As such, Roz carried a great deal of weight; but she harbored resentments against those she felt – rightly or wrongly – had slighted her, and she made clear to those present at the NYAGRA meeting that October 24 that she wanted to use NYAGRA to punish Tim Sweeney for what she had perceived to have been a slight to her.

At the founding meeting on June 30, members had reached consensus about approaching the Empire State Pride Agenda to try to secure transgender inclusion in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) then pending in the New York state legislature. As deputy director of the Pride Agenda (or ‘ESPA,’ as everyone outside the Pride Agenda called it), Tim Sweeney would be a key interlocutor in the larger LGBT community; given that, it seemed to me foolish at best to commence any relationship with ESPA by needlessly offending its deputy director simply to redress a perceived slight pre-dating the founding of NYAGRA that had nothing to do with the organization’s legislative agenda, and I said as much to Roz. All of the founding members at the meeting and all of the new members who joined us at that October 24 meeting were in agreement on that point, and our refusal to allow Roz to use NYAGRA to prosecute her own personal political agenda – at the expense of the credibility and effectiveness of the new organization – prompted her to resign.

Fortunately, from that very first meeting (on June 30), there was an agreement that the primary mission of the organization should be to pursue transgender inclusion in legislation, especially in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) and the hate crimes bill both pending in the New York state legislature. All seven activists present at the first meeting agreed on one point: our first inter-organizational meeting should be with the Empire State Pride Agenda. There would be no ‘getting around’ ESPA, which as the leading lesbian and gay political organization in the state, played a leading role in the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition. When it came to SONDA, the Pride Agenda’s role was even more central: ESPA was founded (from the merger of two other organizations) specifically to get SONDA passed, and that gay rights bill was its flagship legislation.

And so on November 19 [check date], several activists representing NYAGRA met with Tim Sweeney (then ESPA’s deputy director) and Paula Ettelbrick (then ESPA’s legislative director) at the Pride Agenda’s office on Hudson Street in Manhattan. The NYAGRA contingent’s aim was to persuade the Pride Agenda to agree to amend both SONDA and the state hate crimes bill to add gender identity and expression in order to protect transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination and hate crimes, respectively.

With regard to the latter legislation, Tim referred us to the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition, which NYAGRA joined in January 1999; ESPA’s opposition to transgender inclusion in that bill would only become clearer in April 2000, as the bill headed for passage in the state Senate. As for SONDA, Tim stated unequivocally that ESPA was not prepared to consider transgender inclusion in their flagship legislation; he and Paula opined that members of the state legislature were simply not going to support transgender inclusion in the bill – a self-fulfilling prophecy coming from ESPA, as no legislator would brook their opposition to such inclusion.  From ESPA’s perspective, we must have seemed like upstarts, a bunch of transgender activists without any experience in legislative work in Albany or even at the local level. And while the NYAGRA name would become famous, at that moment, in November 1998, we were indeed unknown as an organization without a proven track record in legislative work.

Instead, Tim made a ‘counter offer’ of sorts, proposing that the Pride Agenda work with NYAGRA on local non-discrimination legislation, a suggestion that we ultimately agreed to, after significant internal discussion. It was clear to everyone present on the NYAGRA side – including Paisley Currah, Donna Cartwright, David Valentine, Sophia Pazos, Lisa Maurer (who participated by phone from Ithaca) and myself – that ESPA simply would not be moved on the issue of SONDA and that – as a new group without any resources and without any relationships with key legislators – we had no leverage to move ESPA. It was the unanimous consensus of the founding members of NYAGRA to accept an understanding with ESPA that the two organizations would work together on a local transgender rights bill and defer the question of transgender inclusion in SONDA to a later day.

Meanwhile, the new organization required infrastructure, and an organizational website was one of the first pieces of infrastructure that we could see we would need at the dawn of the Internet age. Paisley had set up a website at www.nyagra.org, though no thought was given at the time that it was technically the webmaster who would therefore be in a position to claim ownership of the website, and not the organization, should a dispute arise over its provenance – as in fact did happen. Meanwhile, the working group began to communicate regularly by e-mail, and David would set up a listserve for the founding members.

Slowly but surely over the course of NYAGRA’s early years, members of the ‘working group’ would begin to construct the rudiments of an organizational framework. But the critical decision that the founding members made at the onset to establish a ‘come one, come all’ policy for the working group would come close to undermining the organization within a year of its founding.

While there was initial consensus on legislative approach, there was dissensus from the start about NYAGRA’s organizational structure from the very beginning. At our very first meeting, I proposed a traditional board structure. Not only did I have no desire to be either president or chair of the board of directors, I was hoping that Paisley would agree to accept the top leadership title. But Carrie Davis insisted that there be “no hierarcy” in NYAGRA’s organizational structure, and Donna Cartwright derided a board structure as being ‘corporate’ and therefore inconsistent with the ideals of the organization. Ironically, Carrie worked for an organization (the Center) that had a very hierarchical staff structure governed by a self-selecting board of directors (i.e., one not chosen by its members), Equally ironic, Donna would go onto serve on the board of directors of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) some years later without any compunction. But on that hot June day in 1998, Carrie and Donna carried the day, defeating my proposal for a traditional board. Donna insisted on calling the assembled activists the ‘working group,’ a moniker that I thought was inappropriate for an advocacy organization, and worse still, insisted that the working group be open to everyone.

Hence the working group, as de facto board of directors, was open to everyone, and no vote could be taken to exclude anyone, regardless of behavior. At the time, I had a strong feeling that the ‘come one, come all’ approach that Donna insisted on and that the other founding members agreed to could lead to serious problems, and that intuition was prescient. In fact, the open door policy would very nearly be the undoing of the organization.

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In her capacity as executive director of GenderPAC, Riki Anne Wilchins has called for the creation of “a post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans.”  By way of a critique of that call, I will argue here that the discourse of a post-identity politics movement – far from providing a unifying philosophy and political strategy – is intellectually incoherent and politically counterproductive.  It is my aim here to articulate what I see as the racial politics implicit in the discourse and to offer an alternative conception of identity formation and transgender movement politics based on notions of community.

GenderPAC: Organizational History and Background

A little background on the organizational history of GenderPAC may be necessary to understand the context in which the new post-identity politics discourse was articulated.  GenderPAC was founded in November 1996 to be the national voice of the transgender community.  A number of different individuals and organizations came together to establish the organization in order to educate society on transgender issues and to advance a legislative agenda in Congress.  One of those individuals, Riki Anne Wilchins, was chosen executive director by the new board of directors.  Wilchins, a white post-operative male-to-female transsexual, had already founded The Transexual Menace.  However, as executive director, Wilchins began to take the organization in a very different direction. By the end of 1999, Wilchins shifted GenderPAC from the original vision of its founders to a very different organization with a very different mission. With Gina Reiss as managing director, Wilchins then went public with her intention to reject the original conception of a transgender advocacy organization in favor of a vague, rather inchoate concept of a ‘gender rights’ organization.

The particulars of the story are important to detail because of GenderPAC position as the only national (trans)gender advocacy organization with a significant budget and paid staff.  Before rejecting the concept of transgender advocacy, Wilchins had been regarded by many in the transgender community as its national spokesperson and GenderPAC had been recognized nationally as the voice of the transgender community. The critique here is not so much about personality issues – though there may very well be such issues – but rather about an entire strategy, which is not only incidentally flawed, but inherently flawed.

Wilchins’ rejection of GenderPAC’s original mission as a national voice for the transgender movement is symptomatic of the inherent problems of attempting to create a movement while denying the existence of a community upon which it is based.  Community is a necessary component of movement politics.  Organizational accountability to the community is not only the analogue, but also the concomitant, to – individual accountability to a board of directors.  Any refusal to acknowledge community as the basis of movement politics ultimately represents an attempt to evade responsibility to a larger collective.  Wilchins’ decision to reject the notion of transgender community organizing has had profound implications for the community and the movement that GenderPAC once claimed to represent.

In a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference, Wilchins attempted to articulate what she termed “a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.”

The speech, entitled “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” is perhaps the clearest articulation of the discourse of the ‘post-identity politics’ gender rights movement that Wilchins has championed, a discourse that I will simply call ‘the post-identity politics paradigm’ (or ‘PPP’ for short).  Wilchins gave speech at a plenary session of the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference.  Because of the importance of this speech for my critique, I will quote it in full.

The Gill Speech

A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights

by Riki Wilchins

Someone has just been kind enough to remind me that Tim is sitting right here, and I better be good. So I just want you to know I’m not intimidated…much. And since I’m not, I want to tell you about the last time I was intimidated.  Patricia Ireland had invited me to address NOW’s National Board on transgender inclusion.  For reasons which now escape me, I thought it would be in good taste to remind them of NOW’s purges of lesbian and bisexual women in 1969 and their resulting confrontation with the Lavender Menace.  So I wore my black Transexual Menace T-shirt with its blood-dripping red letters. Patricia introduced me and then sat down, looking tolerantly and encouragingly up.

Now there are only two ways to do this.  Way ONE relies largely on guilt, coupled with earnest appeals to good old-fashioned liberal values like tolerance and acceptance.  To wit: You should include us poor trannies because its the right thing to do and there are all kinds of women, and once we’ve had surgery we’re physically pretty much just like you, etc., etc.  Way ONE depends on your audience’s goodwill and well-honed consciences and it often works.  But it’s no fun. Not to do and not to be on the receiving end of. I mean, who enjoys feeling guilty? Between you and me, I’d much rather be bitchy.

So I chose Way TWO.  Now, Way TWO consists of building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.  Way TWO is a LOT more fun.  So I looked around the room at all these powerful, very serious and intimidating women, and said, “Many of you are no doubt wondering why a man with a vagina is standing here lecturing you on where feminism should go…” — I look down at Patricia here and notice she is now searching vigorously in her wrist for a good vein to open — “.. but consider for a moment that men with vaginas are what gender looks like when it’s de-regulated, and so my presence here today is a sign of your success and not your failure.”  And they got it. I was not going to plead for their acceptance or tolerance or ask them to validate my poor white post-operative body as female.  Instead I was going to recruit them — to take a step with me out of the old paradigm that had created these boundaries between us we were now so busily surmounting.  I was going to invite them to have a different kind of dialog, one whose origins lay in a totally difference place, one where our task was not surmounting our separateness but rather exploring the strengths of our already being together.  And that’s what I’d like to do with you this evening.

If you hoped to hear a lot about how we’re all basically bisexual or what how it feels to be a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” this is going to be a bit disappointing.  And if you want someone to tell you why you should add Bi and Trans to your giving, I’m none too good at that either.  I’ve never been trapped in anyone else’s body and I hope you haven’t either, although I was once trapped in Manhattan for almost 18 years and I suspect it feels pretty much the same.  And as far as my gender is concerned, I admit I do still occasionally awake quivering in the night with the conviction I am trapped in the wrong culture.  But we’re not going to do Way ONE tonight.  Because the gays and lesbians picked out for harassment or assault are almost always targeted because of their gender:  because they aren’t “just like everyone else” — because they are “visibly queer.”

I’m not going to tell you about Kinsey sexuality scales from 1 to 6, or tell you that debating bi and trans people in the gay movement is like debating gays in the military: they’ve always been here, they always will be, and they’ve always given and served with courage and distinction.  I’m not going to tell you that as far for our apparently endless public debate over whether gender belongs in a gay movement, that the boys we beat up after school, the girls we humiliated for looking just like the gym teacher, and all those people your mom and mine “just knew” were homosexuals – all that was about gender.  Because the gays and lesbians picked out for harassment or assault are almost always targeted because of their gender: because they aren’t “just like everyone else” — because they are “visibly queer.”

And so that if you want to know what it’s really like to transcend narrow gender stereotypes and what it costs, please don’t come up afterwards and ask me – just turn to that nice person sitting on your right or your left and ask them. Because chances are, they’ve been there.  And so it’s not so much a question of including transgender, as of recognizing that gender has always been a part of a gay agenda and always will be.  I’m not going to make these and a dozen other telling points we both know I could make because: first, if you’re here today you’re smart enough to probably know most of this. And second, because as donors and activists I don’t think our activism should come from a place of guilt or tolerance or even wanting people to feel included.  Giving is activism, and I believe we do activism because we have no other choice, because in our guts we have that impractical and totally inconvenient thing: a passion to make the world a better place, the spiritual faith that that is possible, and a personal vision of what that should look like.

So I’d like to recruit you for the next 15 minutes on a ride into another paradigm, another discussion of our bodies, identities, and desires. Fasten your genders, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.  I know it’s going to be bumpy, because I’ve been on it myself. Twenty years ago I was telling anyone who would listen that I WAS “trapped in a man’s body. ” My FTM friends were telling everyone they were “men trapped in women’s’ bodies.” Collectively we sounded like a bunch of internals organs plotting a prison break.  That’s how it was for me in 1980.

But then last month I was at Camp Trans outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where they’d just kicked us out again. I was throwing football with this boy-identified-dyke named Ellen who prefers being called Jesse.  Jesse was leaving the Lesbian Avengers and I asked him why. He replied that it was because of that tired old lesbian pecking order.  I told him I knew exactly what he meant. The cutest lesbians are always at the top, the least attractive at the bottom, and so on and so on.  Jesse looked at me pittyingly and said, “Well, dude… actually it’s more like the fags and trannie boyz are at the top, FtMs, boychicks, andros and faggot-identified dykes are in the middle, and the butches and femmes are at the bottom.”

I looked at him and said, “Obviously. I knew that. I just wanted to see if YOU knew that.”  The identities you and I spent such time coming to grips with, coming out about, and defending at such great cost are not even an issue for these kids. They are beyond the boxes in which you and I have made our lives.  For many of them it’s not about the right to be gay or lesbian, bi, trans or straight, but something they hold much more dear:  the right to be who and what they are, whole and complete and without omission, even if that doesn’t fit any of the pre-existing categories and means making up whole new names for themselves on the spot.

But there’s a funny thing about walls: they not only keep others out, they also end up keeping us in.  I am reminded here that Audre Lorde taught us the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house. Is it too much to say that the notion of the homosexual — and perhaps even gay identity itself — is not in some way an invention of heterosexuality? Perhaps even a re-affirmation — if only unconsciously — that the most important thing about us should be where we stand in relation to reproduction?

Would it be overreaching to say that just as light requires dark, and male requires an opposing female, so gayness actually requires an antecedent and opposing straightness? So that instead of struggling against a hetero-centric culture, gayness actually demands and solidifies it?  Is it possible that with these kids are onto something — that with these pre-fabricated identities of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender we are so quick to occupy that we are still living in the Master’s house?  And so when it comes to inclusion we are less interested in tearing down the house than in building a small, yet tastefully furnished addition out back? One which will hold Jesse and all these troubling new identities?

So I am very interested when my good friend Rich Tafel says that he doesn’t think gender is part of a gay movement, because it’s not sexual orientation, or when some activists denounce the “diluting” of gay rights with bi and trans issues.  Because I take it as axiomatic that if what we want is a civil rights movement for gays and lesbians, then these voices are right. We should keep the walls around our movement intact and get on with our business.  But there’s a funny thing about walls: they not only keep others out, they also end up keeping us in.

We are on the verge of creating a movement that says to its own young:  “Be all you can be, go wherever your heart and mind and talent can take you… Just don’t become too straight. Don’t find out you’re bisexual. Don’t change your body or gender too much. Because if you do, we’re not sure you’ll still qualify to be represented by a gay and lesbian movement.”  Such a movement, which sets out to free gay people, actually ends up erecting yet another set of barriers and constraints that keep them in.

It is beyond dispute that today gay rights, like feminism before it, is going from strength to strength. Yet just as young women in droves are refusing to identify as feminists, so I routinely speak before groups of young queers who refuse to identify as gay or straight – because they don’t want to leave any of their friends behind, because they don’t want to be known by something as simplistic as who they sleep with, or because they don’t even select their partners by sex.

They want not only their freedom as gay people, but paradoxically also their freedom not to be gay – to have their primary social identity determined by something greater than whom they sleep with or even whom they love.

They are not seeking submersion into large, impersonal pre-existing categories, but instead searching newer, smaller ways to be and understand who they are.  For twenty-somethings with buzz-cut lime-green hair, bull-rings in their nose, and androgynous hip-hop clothes, the harassment they get at school, at work, and on the street is not just about their orientation or even their sex but about their gender.

And this is where I’d like to talk a little about my own organization, a national tax-exempt group called GenderPAC because we’re the group working to ensure every American’s civil right to express their gender free from stereotypes, discrimination and violence.

Our work focuses on Congressional advocacy, hate crimes, job discrimination, impact litigation, and youth outreach.  And if that sounds like we cover the waterfront, it’s because we own that section of the waterfront: no other national group is focusing on issues of gender.

GenderPAC is a “post-identity” organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us.  I am fond of observing that GenderPAC has no “Allies Program,” because gender is too basic to be confined to any one group, and too fundamental to leave anyone behind. Gender rights are for all of us.

And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.

And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.  And so the question here today isn’t so much a matter of you accepting us or letting us in, but of you coming out to join us.

In a post-identity movement, who we are is not a pre-condition for working together – our identification as gender activists comes out of the work we do.  And so identity becomes not a cause of our politics, but an effect — not a wall to be defended and debated but something mobile, personal, and flexible that changes and grows with us as our understanding of ourselves changes and grows.  And all these confusing, even threatening new identities are not barbarians at the gate but a doorway out. Their messiness is not the problem, it’s the solution — a tactic, even an essential political goal.

And so the question here today isn’t so much a matter of you accepting us or letting us in, but of you coming out to join us.  Because success looks less like B and T inclusion than my friend Jesse, the football throwing ex-Lesbian Avenger who personally identifies as a queer trannie boy but politically as a dyke but who admits he may someday to want to take testosterone. Success looks like messy new identities we don’t like and can’t name that create possibilities and freedoms we never intended.

Because it is your work and your foundation over the last three decades that has made people like Jesse and me possible, that has made possible a broad-based, inclusive national movement for gender civil rights.  And so by now if some of you are wondering why a man with a vagina who lives with her lesbian lover is standing here lecturing you about where gay rights and gay giving should go, consider that lesbian men with vaginas is what gay liberation looks like when desire is de-regulated, and so my being here today is a sign of your success and not your failure.

I hope you will leave thinking less about how to refine the noun-list so no one feels excluded from our gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex,leatherqueer, questioning, straight sympathetic, youth movement, but rather to begin thinking of new foundations for our politics.  What will such a foundation look like?

Let me close by observing that in one thirty-day period in the beautiful island of Manhattan, I have been harassed as a dyke, a sex-change, a bitch, and a fag.  I live in one body — why can’t fight in one movement?  Why do I have to section my politics up into so many pizza slices: this wedge to women’s’ rights, this to gay rights, another for gender rights, and so on?

We keep building movements that are simpler than we are.  But discrimination is like my new Gap cable-knit sweater — I pull it here and it also tugs somewhere else. So that it’s never just about gender, but it’s always about gender and sexual orientation, or gender and race, or gender and age, or gender and class.

We need to begin building movements which are as rich and rude and messy and complex as the lives we lead, the challenges we face and the scars we bear.  We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences.  So that whenever there’s a wall, we should be with those outside of it.  When there’s a vote on inclusion, you and I should be standing among those voted on.

What I am interested in is my freedom NOT to be transexual — a category which was defined in my absence, which is irrevocably heterosexual, and whose sole purpose is annexing my social identity to the clothes I wear and what genitals I have – something I find demeaning in its inception and debasing in its execution.

No matter who is included we should always be left behind because as Alice Walker says – “never be the only one in the room.” And so I take it to be our responsibility as activists to always stand with those smaller voices forgotten at the margins. Just as I take it to be our responsibility to see which faces are alone or unrepresented in the room.

Because in the final analysis, the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights. Important as that is, it’s also enlightened self-interest: we all want our own rights. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.

And so when someone asks me, “What about GenderPAC, isn’t that the transgender organization?”

I say that no, it’s not. I reply that half our board and more than half our membership are gay, feminist, or youth-identified. A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender.

What I am interested in is my freedom NOT to be transexual — a category which was defined in my absence, which is irrevocably heterosexual, and whose sole purpose is annexing my social identity to the clothes I wear and what genitals I have — something I find demeaning in its inception and debasing in its execution.  What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do.

And so for me, the point of a gender movement is not only those familiar specimens inevitably corralled in the Binary Zoo: the stone butches and diesel dykes, drag kings and queens, leatherdykes and dyke daddies, radical fairies and nelly fags, the transexuals, transgender, crossdressers, and intersex.

But it’s also about the seventeen year-old Midwestern cheerleader who ruins her health with anorexia because “real women” are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It’s about the forty-six year-old Joe Six-Pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because “real men” are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It’s about the aging lesbian who suffers through a wholly unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don’t matter as much. And it’s about a shy, sensitive, and mostly straight young man who is repeatedly gang-raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he is perceived as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable.

In short, a broad-based and inclusive national movement for gender civil rights is not only about people like Brandon Teena, Amanda Milan, Christian Paige, Debbi Forte, Tyra Hunter, Marsha P. Johnson, and Mathew Shepard — people who lost their lives, who were picked out and picked on because they were slight or gay or blond or black or visibly queer — but about working until each and every one of us is freed from this most pernicious, divisive and destructive of insanities called gender-based oppression.  Thank you.

________________

Having quoted Wilchins’ speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference, I will now proceed to outline what I see to be the problems of the ‘new paradigm’ that her speech ostensibly articulates.  There are a number of such problems.

First, there is the problem of the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression.  Second, there is the problem of the practical application of Wilchins’ notions in the legislative arena.  Third, there is the problem raised by Wilchins’ conception of identity formation, as it might be applied to race.  Fourth, there is the parallel problem as applied to gender.  And fifth, there is the problem of the apparent contradiction of ‘post-modernism’ and liberal rights discourse in Wilchins’ thinking.  I will take each of these in turn.

The Conflation of Homosexuality and Transgender

At its heart, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is based on a misconception about the nature of individual identity and the relationship of sexual orientation to gender identity and expression. Wilchins’ analysis of the sex/gender binary is reductive, attempting to reduce one form of oppression to the other, rather than recognizing them as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression.  One cannot fully understand homophobia or genderphobia unless one maintains the conceptual distinction between homophobia and genderphobia.  Hence, in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins makes it impossible to successfully explain either.  In her Gill speech (quoted in full above), Wilchins declares,

And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.  And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.

In fact, it is not at all self-evident that “the mainspring of homophobia is gender.”  Not all gay people are gender-variant, with the ‘butch’ gay man and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ exemplifying the gender-conventional; the oppression they face could not therefore be attributed to their outward gender expression.  There are many cases of conventionally gendered lesbians and gay men facing discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation alone. Relatively ‘butch’ gay men, for example, have been attacked leaving gay bars despite— and one is almost tempted to hypothesize because of – their gender conventionality.  In fact, the very assertion of a self-conscious masculinity on the part of gay men in the 1970s may have provoked even more intense hostility on the part of some homophobic men who may have perceived those masculine gay men to be all the more threatening because of their relative masculinity; in other words, in the logic of a homophobe, if a relatively manly man can be gay, a manly man like me could be gay.

A more conceptually sophisticated analysis would recognize homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression, one in which neither is fully reducible to the other, though interrelated.  One could draw an analogy with explanations of racism based in class prejudice. Clearly, race cannot be reduced to class, because racial discrimination cannot be fully explained as class discrimination.  Similarly, discrimination and oppression based on sexual orientation cannot be fully reduced to oppression based on gender expression, especially in cases involving conventionally gendered LGBs.   But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins implicitly dismisses the distinct forms of oppression faced by conventionally gendered LGBs.

Clearly, gender variance is relative; but it is equally clear that the kind of oppression faced by relatively more gender-variant LGBs is likely to be more intense than that faced by more conventionally gendered LGBs; they are, in any case, different and distinct.  Collapsing homophobia into genderphobia provides Wilchins with a rationale for jettisoning the concept of ‘transgender,’ which she finds hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.  But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins is left without a conceptual framework for distinguishing between gender-based and non-gender-based homophobia.  Hence, Wilchins’ conceptual framework does not allow her to recognize the greater potential for discrimination and violence faced by gender-variant LGBs.

Ironically enough, then, Wilchins’ desire to focus on what she sees to be the gender-based roots of homophobia leads her inadvertently to minimize or trivialize the oppression that gender-variant LGBs face specifically because of their gender variance, as opposed to their sexual orientation alone.

While the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity leads to conceptual confusion, it also provides an opportunity for Wilchins to try to bridge what she perceives to be a gap between traditional ‘gay’ politics and the newer politics of transgender.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that GenderPAC’s philosophy and strategy are premised on a conflation of sexual orientation and gender, and that conflation allows Wilchins to position herself as the leader of a post-transgender organization, one which is guided by an ostensibly sophisticated conception of gender that is ‘hip,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘post-identity politics.’

Wilchins thus casts herself as the avatar of a new age in which GenderPAC will lead a gender rights movement that will supercede both the old gay and lesbian rights movement and the newer transgender rights movement.  What this all-inclusive ‘national gender rights movement’ ends up looking like, in practice, is an organization whose primary constituency would appear to be non-transsexual transgendered youth who are uncomfortable with any fixed gender identity and who reject the classic transsexual transition narrative.

GenderPAC’s membership seems to be especially heavy with college students, mostly of female birth sex, who are intrigued by Wilchins’ use of Butlerian terms such as ‘gender performativity’ and notions of gender fluidity that seem to apply so well to their own personal experiences at that stage of their lives.  Since many of these individuals have identified as lesbians at some point but seem dissatisfied with the inability of that term to adequately describe or encompass the gender-transgressive component of their identities, they are especially attracted to the way in which Wilchins seems to be able to bring the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity together.

Praxis Makes Perfect: Applying the Paradigm in the ‘Real World’

The faults of Wilchins’ approach can be observed by applying it to a current political battle engaged by the movement.  The focus of national efforts for many years has been passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the federal gay rights bill currently pending in Congress.  The New York state equivalent of ENDA is the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which was enacted by the New York State legislature in December 2003 after a 31-year struggle.  ENDA is being championed by the Human Rights Campaign, the wealthiest and most powerful national lesbian and gay political organizations; while the campaign for SONDA is being led by the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), the leading state lesbian and gay political organization in New York (and the largest state lesbian and gay political organization in the country.

In Wilchins’ view, the gay movement does not understand that gender oppression is at the root of homophobia and therefore seeks to exclude transgendered people in a futile attempt to appropriate heteronormativity; but the transgender movement too narrowly circumscribes the concept of gender because it is rooted in the medical model of transsexuality and therefore excludes non-surgical ‘gender queers.’

The equivalent of Wilchins’ desiradatum – ‘a national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ – would be a ‘national sexual freedom civil rights movement for all Americans’ that would remove ‘identity politics’ labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay.’    Sexual orientation is not only an important component of legal discourse – without which anti-gay discrimination cannot be addressed – it is also a legitimate organizing principle.  In fact, everyone has a sexual orientation, and ‘sexual orientation’ is usually defined (as it is, for example, in SONDA) as including heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.  In that sense, passage of ENDA at the federal level or SONDA at the state level would provide discrimination protections for heterosexuals as well as for LGB people.

The biggest controversy surrounding both ENDA and SONDA has been over the lack of gender identity or expression language in those bills, and the question arises as to how one can create a broad movement that includes all LGBT people.  (NYAGRA has spoken publicly in favor of transgender-inclusive SONDA and ENDA bills.)  But that issue aside, the simple reality is that a ‘sexual freedom’ movement that is all-inclusive and that abjures any gay-specific focus would lose its ability to engage lesbian and gay people in any meaningful way.  Only by naming the specific oppression faced by lesbian and gay people – viz., homophobia – can a movement hope to diminish their marginalization in society.

That is not to say that LGB organizations cannot work in coalition with non-LGBT organizations in getting  (ideally transgender-inclusive) gay rights legislation passed.  Because LGB people have distinct issues that most heterosexuals do not face, there will be a need for lesbian and gay organizations whose primary mission is to address homophobia.

Wilchins’ call to abandon the term transgender is roughly analogous to asking HRC or ESPA to change its name to the Campaign for Sexual Freedom.  In fact, there is an organization called the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.  NCSF describes itself as:

…a national organization committed to protecting freedom of expression among consenting adults. Based in Washington, D.C., NCSF works through legal initiatives, lobbying, outreach, and education to promote greater understanding of sexuality and human rights. Founded in 1997, NCSF mobilizes diverse grassroots communities to help change antiquated and unfair sex laws, and to protect free speech and advance privacy rights. NCSF is dedicated to ensuring that all consenting adults can express their sexual identity freely and openly, without fear.

It is unlikely that organizations such as HRC or ESPA would remove ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ from their mission statements and their literature and jettison the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ in favor of some broader but vaguer notion of ‘sexual freedom for all,’ and if that scenario seems extremely far-fetched, it is because such a move would represent a rejection of the fundamental principles around which lesbian and gay groups have been organized heretofore.

But Wilchins stakes out a much bigger territory than even a movement that covers both the transgender movement and the lesbian and gay movement.  Wilchins’ assertion that “no other national group is focusing on issues of gender” should come as a surprise to Patricia Ireland, a member of the (post-purge) GenderPAC board and former head of the National Organization for Women.  If NOW is not a national group focusing on issues of gender, what is it?  Perhaps Wilchins is attempting to suggest that NOW does not include transgender as an issue and therefore is only a ‘women’s organization.’  But NOW has in fact moved in the last few years to include transgender issues in its organizational mission; and of course, NOW is only one of many gender rights organizations.  And given Ireland’s role in NOW, with her membership of the GenderPAC board, it is all the more difficult to understand what basis Wilchins has for asserting that GenderPAC is the only national group focusing on issues of gender.

In this context, one can probably best understand Wilchins’ assertion as part of a marketing strategy under which GenderPAC is marketed as being ‘more’ than just a transgender organization, because it (ostensibly) has a broader conception of gender; broader than any lesbian and gay rights organization because it includes a focus on gender issues; and broader than any women’s organization because it includes genderqueers who are not part of the traditional mission of organizations such as NOW.

But for all that she claims to be engaged in a critique of binary thinking, Wilchins ironically constructs her own binary opposition, implicitly pitting a ‘transgender’ movement against a broader and more inclusive ‘gender’ movement. This is a false dichotomy.  Wilchins offers no evidence that a self-styled transgender movement cannot include both non-transgendered gender-variant individuals as well as issues faced by such individuals.  Clearly, there is no ‘either/or’ here.  There is no reason to jettison the concept of transgender simply because it is not all-inclusive; nor is there any reason to believe that a transgender movement cannot be based on a conception of gender oppression that encompasses the anorexic cheerleader or the ‘Joe Six-Pack’ alcoholic or the straight victim of prison gang rape.

Race, Gender, Identity Formation and the Politics of Community

The third difficulty with Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm lies in the way in which Wilchins misconstrues the nature of gender identity formation and political movements rooted in communities organized around such identities.  Underlying the discourse of a post-identity politics gender rights movement is the assumption that any exclusion is bad – both illegitimate and politically problematic – coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion.

The rationale implicit in this discourse would seem to be something like this: genderqueers (transgendered and gender-variant people, by any other name) have been excluded from the lesbian and gay movement, and that is a bad thing. Genderqueers (including male-to-female transsexuals) have been excluded from the women’s movement, and that is a bad thing.  The underlying assumption would seem to be that any movement that excludes anyone is morally suspect and politically questionable.  But the fundamental error is the failure to take account of the asymmetry of power between privileged and marginalized groups in American society.

A case in point is Wilchins’ reaction to an invitation to attend TransWorld in October 1998.  Co-sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the New York City Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center) and the Audre Lorde Project, TransWorld I (which took place at ALP in Brooklyn) was the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color (TGPOCs).  The organizing committee for TransWorld I made the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters, though the conference was open to everyone whether white or of color, transgendered or not.  As one of the members of the planning committee, I voted for that decision because I felt that it was necessary to ensure that the conference provide an opportunity for TGPOCs to speak for themselves.  Previous conferences in the series sponsored by the Center’s GIP (of which TransWorld I was the fourth) had featured largely conventionally gendered white men literally and figuratively talking down to transgendered people from the dais.  This conference would be different: it would feature transgendered and gender-variant people of color speaking from personal experience of oppression and marginalization as well as from expertise in health care, social services, and advocacy.

Wilchins’ reaction to the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters was to denounce the conference as ‘racist’ because it ‘excluded’ white people.  Her response to the invitation to attend TransWorld was not merely an expression of her personal pique at not having been invited to speak at the conference.  The rejection of TransWorld I and limited-membership formations – based on the assumption of a symmetry of ‘exclusion’ – demonstrates a failure to understand the difference between the power of a white elite vs. the power of marginalized communities, as well as a failure to understand the nature of institutionalized racism in this society.

The ‘exclusion’ of whites from the dais at TransWorld I cannot be equated with the historic exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in society, because those white service providers – whether physicians (such as surgeons and endocrinologists), psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers, or other ‘gender professionals’ – are in positions of power relative to the transgendered people of color who are their clients (or ‘patients’ or ‘consumers,’ however one may wish to describe them).  Such white gender professionals – most of whom are not themselves transgender-identified – exercise power over their clients as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of affording (or denying) access to hormones, sex reassignment surgery, psychological evaluation, legal change of sex, and other crucial aspects of transsexual transition.  Those professionals have access to resources – financial, legal, and organizational –that their clients largely lack, and the institutional power that they command therefore belies any ‘moral equivalency’ between their ‘exclusion’ from the dais at this one event and the exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in a white-dominant society brought about by pervasive discrimination based on race or gender identity that TGPOCs face.

The decision of the TransWorld I organizing committee to limit panels to people of color only was understood by committee members as an attempt to provide transgendered people of color themselves with a forum in which they could speak unhindered by service providers who had dominated the previous three ‘health empowerment’ conferences sponsored by the GIP.  That decision was informed by a recognition of the multiple oppressions – oppressions based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status (among others) as well as gender identity and expression – faced by transgendered people of color.

It is important to understand, however, that such oppressions are not merely additive in nature; in other words, it is not simply that a transgendered African American faces transgenderphobia in one context and racism in another; rather, these oppressions are interactive and mutually reinforcing.    For example, a transgendered African American woman may find no support as a person of color at a white-dominated center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities; but she may also find no support as a transgendered person at a community center or social service provider in her community of origin.

Related to oppressions based on race and ethnicity are those based on nationality and citizenship status.  Many TGPOCs are immigrants and face the same challenges as their non-transgendered compatriots, but without access to social services in their communities, because most immigrant service providers will not serve openly transgendered people.  Even in those rare instances where social service agencies may welcome them, transgendered people may be reluctant to come forward for fear of discrimination.  While LGBT community centers are springing up across the country, very few have any means of ensuring linguistic access for those who are not native speakers of English.

Those TGPOCs who are not US citizens do not have even the minimal legal rights that transgendered citizens enjoy; if they are undocumented, they are easily deportable; and while they live here in the United States, undocumented transpeople face exploitation because of their lack of legal status.   Hence GenderPAC’s call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans’ begs the question as to just who constitutes an ‘American.’  To define the category of ‘all Americans’ by way of citizenship would leave out the undocumented, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation.  But to include the undocumented would raise the question of whether or not GenderPAC is serious about working on behalf of this population.

While transgendered people of color certainly need legal protections from discrimination and violence, they do not have the luxury to regard legal rights as the sum total of the movement’s goals.  Juridical rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the liberation of transgendered people of color.  A movement that limits its focus to legal rights will not be able to satisfy the need for social justice that transgendered people feel deeply.  That movement, in order to serve transgendered people of color, must also address issues of race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status, as well as class, (dis)ability, environment, and every other form of oppression suffered by TGPOCs.  Hence, a broad social justice movement is desperately needed, and an organization that embodies those values is a necessary component of that movement.

Wilchins’ failure to understand the variegation of gender oppression by race and ethnicity is compounded by a failure to understand the variegation of gender oppression by demographic groups within the ‘transgender’ population.  Here, I will make reference to my own schema for describing the different populations involved.  The first of these can be labeled the transsexual: those who seek or have obtained sex reassignment surgery (SRS).  (I use the term ‘transsexual’ advisedly, recognizing that it is a part of a medical model of transgender as pathology; but it is also a term of self-definition for many transgendered people.)  The second, much larger, group could be labeled the transgendered, and would include those who live a significant portion of their lives presenting fully in the gender opposite their birth sex, but most of whom do not seek SRS.  A still much larger category would be the gender-variant, those who transgress gender boundaries to a significant extent, but most of whom who still identify with the sex assigned to them at birth and do not present fully in the gender opposite that birth sex.  As a series of concentric circles, this schema allows us to neatly describe a population with literally hundreds of self-identifying names.

The complexity of the transgender community and the variability of gender oppression across different transgender populations and different transgendered and gender-variant people provides the rationale for the use of ‘transgender’ by an organization or a movement.  Deployed strategically and with intellectual and political sophistication, ‘transgender’ becomes a useful organizing principle for a community under construction that is attempting to create a political movement.

Indeed, it can be argued – and I will argue here that GenderPAC failed to connect to community.  The discourse of a ‘post-identity politics’ movement has no role for communities of any kind.  The post-identity politics paradigm is all about “doing your own thing,” as the phrase popular in the 1960s and 1970s would have it; and that may account for GenderPAC’s appeal to genderqueer youth, especially female-bodied youth who do not relate to terms such as ‘transsexual or even ‘transgender.’  Wilchins apparently believes that gender is primarily or perhaps even solely a matter of self-expression; what she does not understand is that gender identities are constructed by individuals in the context of larger communities, including the broad national community that we call ‘society.’  Public fora and conferences such as TransWorld that have a circumscribed focus are necessary precisely because transgendered and gender-variant people do not exist solely as atomized individuals; they live in communities – even if some are profoundly alienated from communities, including communities of origin and communities of color.

At root, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is premised on an atomized individualism that does not recognize the social context in which gender identities are formed. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm reduces the problem of gender oppression to a simple society-wide oppression of genderqueers attempting to express their individual gender identities.  But the lack of conceptual sophistication regarding the variegation of gender oppression across different cultures and communities is not the only conceptual flaw in the discourse of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’  A reading of American history will show that the very notion of a ‘post-identity politics’ is fundamentally ahistorical, as it fails to acknowledge the identity politics of Jeffersonian liberalism, which was premised on an identity politics that excluded some from power because of their identity.  Identity politics did not begin in the 1960s; rather, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the African American civil rights movement were simply a different form of identity politics.  Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is rooted in an individual rights discourse of Enlightenment provenance that ironically enough – and fatally for its intellectual coherence – is at odds with Wilchins’ ostensible ‘post-modernism.’

Wilchins’ rather superficial critique of ‘post-identity politics’ really speaks only to the excesses of an exclusionary version of identity politics and does not acknowledge the origin of identity politics, much less address the issues raised by white skin privilege. GenderPAC’s call for a post-identity gender politics is analogous to Ward Connerly’s call for a color-blind society.  The discourse of a color-blind society – promoted by conservatives who aim to eliminate affirmative action – fails to recognize the specificity of racial and ethnic oppression and therefore renders impossible any effort to address it.  In certain profound sense, the call for a post-identity gender rights movement represents a ‘whitewashing’ of gender and transgender politics.   One can best understand the pernicious role that Wilchins has played in the transgender politics of the last decade by examining her use of the term ‘gender orientation.’

Implicit in Wilchins’ critique of identity politics is an assumption that identities are somehow fixed and exclusive.  Wilchins implies that identifying as ‘gay’ somehow precludes identifying as ‘transgendered’ or that identifying as ‘transgendered’ somehow precludes one from identifying as ‘genderqueer.’  But identities need not be mutually exclusive; rather more like Venn diagrams – overlapping and not entirely definable.

‘Transgender’ is an identity formation that offers the same kind of advantages by bringing together a loose collection of individuals – crossdressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender-variant individuals – who may have many differences but who can achieve greater political agency through coalition-building, which is precisely what the construction of a ‘transgender community’ represents when brought to bear on the creation of a transgender political movement.  Transgender offers the additional advantage of moving beyond the pathologizing medical model of transsexuality.  The fact that ‘transgender’ does not include everyone who might be identified as gender-variant, much less the total human population does not invalidate it as a construct.

The term ‘transgender’ can be deployed strategically – as the example of the campaign for Int. No. 24 in  New York City shows – in order to bring legal rights to individuals who face pervasive discrimination.  Similarly, terms such as ‘gender-variant’ or (if you prefer) ‘genderqueer’ can be deployed as well.  These are all clearly social constructions, and the one to be used in any given context depends on the particulars of that context.

Because of personal experiences of being excluded, transgendered and gender-variant people have become sensitive to the notion of exclusion of any kind.  Perhaps some of this sentiment is behind Wilchins’ insistence that a gender rights movement, to be legitimate, must include everyone.  But if the African American rights movement does not include everyone, does that invalidate it in some way?  Certainly, white people (including many Jewish Americans) have played an important role in the movement, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal whites in the South and from the North participated in Freedom Summer and other civil rights campaigns.  But the focus was clearly on dismantling Jim Crow, which directly affected African Americans in the South, even if it had an indirect impact on whites, especially those who supported the black aspiration for civil rights.  Was the African American civil rights movement ‘exclusionary’ because it did not specifically seek to include Latinos or Native Americans?  Or was it rather more effective because it chose to focus on the specificity of oppression faced by African Americans, which was distinct from that of other people of color?

To suggest that it is illegitimate to organize around identity formations is to suggest that those identities are illegitimate.  Indeed, such a suggestion represents nothing less than an attempt to invalidate efforts to address racial and ethnic oppression itself.

‘Paradigm-Shattering’ and the Disjuncture of the Liberal and the Post-Modern

Wilchins describes her work in GenderPAC as

…building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.

Wilchins’ argument is not consistently or rigorously ‘post-modern,’ and it is not so much ‘insubordinate’ as simply incoherent.

There is in fact a fundamental disjuncture at the heart of Wilchins’ thought, between the rights discourse of a ‘national gender rights movement’ and the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ thinking of post-structuralist theory that is superficially applied to the problem of gender-based oppression.  Liberal rights discourse is premised on the very unicity of the unified subject as well as the specific identity of that subject (in demographic and (sub)national terms) that Derridean deconstruction would render impossible.  Rights appertain to individuals, and individuals with individual identities, not to gender expression itself – to acts, to gestures, or to performances.  And rights presuppose at the very least the possibility of an objective moral order.  One need only cite a few passages from her Gill speech to demonstrate how little Wilchins understands the conceptual problems posed by this disjuncture.  For example, in the speech to Gill, Wilchins declares,

…in the final analysis, the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights. Important as that is, it’s also enlightened self-interest: we all want our own rights. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.

But post-structuralist thought renders impossible the articulation of positive assertions of normative right that are a requisite of rights discourse.  Phrases such as ‘moral center’ are meaningless to the Derridean, because the inherent instability of the relationship of signifier to signified undermines the possibility of statements that are consistent in meaning across time or place.  Hence, statements such as “The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us” are as meaningless and nonsensical as statements such as “The present king of France is bald.”  But her Gill speech is replete with such frankly normative statements, such as when Wilchins enjoins her audience to ‘build bridges’ in a spirit of inclusion:

We need to begin building movements which are as rich and rude and messy and complex as the lives we lead, the challenges we face and the scars we bear.  We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences.  So that whenever there’s a wall, we should be with those outside of it.  When there’s a vote on inclusion, you and I should be standing among those voted on.

To the post-structuralist theorist, injunctions to ‘bridge-building’ and to ‘inclusion’ are nothing but mere ‘utterances,’ because there is no such thing as objective moral obligation; given the inherently arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, there cannot be.

For at root, ‘post-modernism’ represents a challenge to the fixity of meaning.  For post-structuralists such as Derrida, the relationship between ‘signifier’ (e.g., word) and ‘signified’ (thing or concept) is inherently unstable and arbitrary.  If this is the case, there can be no conceptual ‘fundament’ to liberal rights discourse, because the meaning of the term ‘right’ itself cannot be fixed, any more than ‘individual’ can be:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.  This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions….

Liberal rights philosophy is precisely the kind of ‘totalizing’ discourse of which Derrida speaks in this passage.  Traditional philosophy – including the normative political philosophy of Locke and the liberal Enlightenment – is undermined by a deconstruction of the relationship between word (logos) and concept.  For the post-modernist, a normative project such as the construction of a ‘national gender civil rights movement’ is not only hopelessly old-fashioned, it is an impossibility, because the deconstruction of the unified subject and the relationship between word and concept makes it so.  Wilchins does not seem to understand that the central core of post-structuralism is the disjuncture between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ In her Gill speech, Wilchins declares,

It’s also about the seventeen year-old Midwestern cheerleader who ruins her health with anorexia because “real women” are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It’s about the forty-six year-old Joe Six-Pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because “real men” are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It’s about the aging lesbian who suffers through a wholly unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don’t matter as much. And it’s about a shy, sensitive, and mostly straight young man who is repeatedly gang-raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he is perceived as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable.

But post-structuralist theory denies the very possibility of empirical ‘testing’ of such statements.  The ageing lesbian’s hysterectomy cannot be judged necessary or unnecessary, because such empirical hypotheses (e.g., “the ageing lesbian’s hysterectomy was wholly unnecessary”) is reduced to nothing more than an utterance, a line in a text.  For post-structuralist theorists such as Derrida, there is no external reality against which the ‘accuracy’ of such statements may be judged.  Rather, a post-structuralist theorist would characterize such statements as part of a text that in turn constitutes an element in a larger discourse.  One could speak of a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ or a ‘progressive’ or a ‘feminist’ discourse on (trans)gender rights; but post-structuralist theory provides no mechanism by which to measure the greater or lesser ‘accuracy’ of such discourses; indeed, the very concept is alien to post-structuralism.  Instead, there is (in the words of Derrida) only an infinite field of substitutions.

Furthermore, the deconstruction of the sovereign self means that these statements about anorexic cheerleaders, ageing lesbians, and straight victims of gang rape are not – cannot be – about ‘real’ people, but rather constitute a repertoire of discursive gestures whose relation to any such individuals is in a very profound sense purely rhetorical.  Invoking such figures as examples of individuals who are the objects of GenderPAC’s advocacy work demonstrates quite clearly that Wilchins does not understand the logical implications of her use of ‘post-modernism’ as a conceptual framework for her political philosophy.  For post-structuralist theory does not merely challenge the identities that Wilchins refers to in her Gill speech as “those familiar specimens inevitably corralled in the Binary Zoo”; post-structuralism challenges the very notion of individual or collective identity altogether.  It is not merely gender or gender identity that are performative, it is individual identity itself.  There is no individual to liberate or upon whose behalf to advocate.  Rather, there are a series of signifiers that are used to construct a text whose meaning is inherently ambiguous.  In the conclusion to her Gill speech, Wilchins laments,

Let me close by observing that in one thirty-day period in the beautiful island of Manhattan, I have been harassed as a dyke, a sex-change, a bitch, and a fag.  I live in one body — why can’t fight in one movement?  Why do I have to section my politics up into so many pizza slices: this wedge to women’s’ rights, this to gay rights, another for gender rights, and so on?

But Derrida has opened the possibility of the deconstruction of the sovereign self; hence there is (in this conception) no single unified subject that we can unambiguously label ‘Riki Anne Wilchins.’  Instead, ‘Riki Anne Wilchins’ becomes nothing morethan a nominal device for constructing a text about identity.  And the notion of ‘one movement’ becomes nothing more than a mere utterance whose connection with any actual collective entity in the ‘real world’ is ambiguous at best.   In her Gill speech, Wilchins declares,

GenderPAC is a ‘post-identity’ organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us.

But if one were to take Derrida (by way of Butler) seriously, then there can be no unified subject ‘I’ and therefore no unambiguous collective ‘we’ or ‘us.’  Speaking to Gill, Wilchins describes

…a broad-based and inclusive national movement for gender civil rights [that] is not only about people like Brandon Teena, Amanda Milan, Christian Paige, Debbi Forte, Tyra Hunter, Marsha P. Johnson, and Mathew Shepard — people who lost their lives, who were picked out and picked on because they were slight or gay or blond or black or visibly queer — but about working until each and every one of us is freed from this most pernicious, divisive and destructive of insanities called gender-based oppression.

But the deconstructive turn in post-modernism renders such statements mere textual devices.  One cannot meaningfully speak of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ because there is no collectivity that one can unambiguously point to as constituting ‘all Americans.’  To the post-structuralist theorist, the phrase constitutes nothing more than a discursive gesture, a rhetorical device, if you will.   While GenderPAC’s gender politics may be more appealing to some than that of a 1970s lesbian-feminist, a Log Cabin Republican, an evangelical Christian, or an Islamic fundamentalist, a rigorous and consistent post-structuralist theorist could not assign any greater moral value to one normative discourse over another or any greater weight to the empirical claims of one over another; at best, the post-structuralist could only discuss the philosophic and conceptual implications of each of these world views.  Unfortunately, Wilchins herself gives no indication of how, from the post-modern ethos she would embrace, she would find a middle ground between the Enlightenment concept of the self and the deconstructive reduction of identity to textual device, or how she would create a conceptual foundation for positive moral statements such as the ones that she makes in her Gill speech.

In short, the notion of a post-modern ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ is inherently contradictory and intellectually incoherent.  Poststructuralist theory of the Derridean sort that informs the work of Judith Butler – which Wilchins in turn takes as the conceptual fundament for her own thought – challenges not only identity formations of the sort that Wilchins labels ‘identity politics,’ but also undermines the very possibility of affirmative statements about individual and collective human needs and human rights that are at the heart of the GenderPAC strategy and philosophy that she labels her ‘post-identity politics paradigm.’

That Wilchins does not recognize this problem, let acknowledge it, demonstrates the superficiality of her use of terms such as ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-identity politics.’  Just as a Derridean ‘field of infinite substitutions’ is no ground on which to build either a discourse of rights or a gender rights movement, so a thoroughly ‘post-modern’ analysis moves us well beyond liberal rights discourse to entirely another realm.

Conclusion

It is no accident that the GenderPAC board split over precisely the issue of the scope and definition of the organization’s mission, with Wilchins engineering a purge of those board members who supported a continued commitment to the transgender community in both word and deed.  GenderPAC’s rejection of a clear link with the transgender community left the organization unmoored from its tethering, making it vulnerable to incidents such as the contretemps over the use of ‘gender orientation’ as the rallying cry for national gender lobby day 2000.  As the term ‘gender orientation’ has no basis in social theory , it is the perfect example of a term that has no currency because it does not circulate in any community.  Wilchins‘ reconfigured GenderPAC is a  ‘post-transgender’ organization that would create and lead a ‘post-identity politics’ movement. It is a movement that Wilchins imagines to encompass the lesbian and gay movement, the transgender movement, and the women’s movement, and yet (she imagines) is somehow larger than the sum of all of these parts.  In her 2000 speech to the Gill Foundation, Wilchins declared:

Our work focuses on Congressional advocacy, hate crimes, job discrimination, impact litigation, and youth outreach.  And if that sounds like we cover the waterfront, it’s because we own that section of the waterfront.

But claiming ownership of ‘the waterfront’ is quite different from doing serious legislative work that brings people legal rights.  Wilchins  creates the impression that she offers a strategy informed by a deep study of theory.  But close and careful scrutiny of Wilchins’ call for a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ shows it to be at best a clever marketing slogan.

Wilchins admonishes lesbian and gay organizations to see gender transgression as the root of the oppression of LGB people, failing to understand homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing but distinct forms of oppression.  Conflating the two forms of oppression deprives Wilchins of the ability to engage in a probing analysis of their complex interrelationship. Wilchins’ insistence that the transgender movement reconfigure itself as a broadly conceived gender rights movement is roughly equivalent to asking lesbian and gay organizations to redefine themselves as part of a broad movement for sexual liberation – but one in which homophobia is not specifically addressed and in which ostensibly ‘old-fashioned’ identities such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are abjured.   But the movement that Wilchins envisions is one that does not speak to the truths of our lives as transgendered and gender-variant people, whether LGB or not.

Failing to take account of (let alone effectively address) the multiple oppressions of transgendered and gender-variant people of color, Wilchins’ GenderPAC instead offers slogans such as ‘gender, racial and affectional equality.’  Nor does her call for “a national gender rights movement for all Americans” address issues of race, ethnicity, national origin, or citizenship status in any meaningful way.  A movement that purports to include everyone includes no one, because it does not speak to the specificity of particular forms of oppression, which must be named in order to be addressed.

Wilchins’ discourse is not truly liberational, because it fails to take into account the totality of individual human experience.  A crucial part of our humanity is the experience of community – admittedly ambivalent and complex for many transgendered and gender-variant people – but a sine qua non for human existence as well as a necessary element of any successful political movement.

What the ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ does not recognize is how identity formations – such as ‘transgender’ as well as ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘people of color’ – can be strategically deployed to form community, which is the basis of any successful social or political movement.

Finally, Wilchins fails to recognize – let alone address – the inherent contradiction of a rights movement that is ostensibly ‘post-modern.’  Any attempt to try to construct a ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ that is rigorously poststructuralist is bound to failure, because of the fundamental disjuncture between a liberal rights discourse that depends on the unified subject as its fundament and a theoretical framework that denies the very possibility of a unified subject who is the ostensible bearer of those rights.  If the hallmark of the ‘post-modern’ is a rejection of ‘logos’ and the very notion of a stable and unambiguous relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ then no truly ‘post-modern’ political movement is possible, because post-modernism rejects the possibility of affirmative normative statements that are the requisite for an objective moral philosophy upon which ‘rights’ movements must of necessity be based.

______________________________________________________________________

Pauline Park is co-founder and co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (< HYPERLINK “http://www.nyagra.com” www.nyagra.com>).  Founded in June 1998, NYAGRA, is the first statewide transgender advocacy  organization in New York.  As coordinator of the legislative work group on gender-based discrimination, Park led the successful campaign for enactment of Int. No. 24 (Local Law 3), the transgender rights bill passed by the New York City Council and signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in April 2002.  Park was instrumental in getting the New York State Dignity for All Students Act amended to include gender identity and expression, and she continues to serve as the NYAGRA representative to the DASA Coalition.

Park received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has written widely on gender, race, and LGBT politics.  She co-founded Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) in 1994, Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997, Queens Pride House (a center for the LGBT communities of Queens) in 1997, and the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens in 2002.  Park is also a member of the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) and the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY).

This article is based on a presentation to the 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality:Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality (February 27, 2002).

Introduction

In her capacity as executive director of GenderPAC, Riki Anne Wilchins has called for the creation of “a post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans.”  By way of a critique of that call, I will argue here that the discourse of a post-identity politics movement – far from providing a unifying philosophy and political strategy – is intellectually incoherent and politically counterproductive.  It is my aim here to articulate what I see as the racial politics implicit in the discourse and to offer an alternative conception of identity formation and transgender movement politics based on notions of community.

GenderPAC: Organizational History and Background

A little background on the organizational history of GenderPAC may be necessary to understand the context in which the new post-identity politics discourse was articulated.  GenderPAC was founded in November 1996 to be the national voice of the transgender community.  A number of different individuals and organizations came together to establish the organization in order to educate society on transgender issues and to advance a legislative agenda in Congress.  One of those individuals, Riki Anne Wilchins, was chosen executive director by the new board of directors.  Wilchins, a white post-operative male-to-female transsexual, had already founded The Transexual Menace.  However, as executive director, Wilchins began to take the organization in a very different direction. By the end of 1999, Wilchins shifted GenderPAC from the original vision of its founders to a very different organization with a very different mission. With Gina Reiss as managing director, Wilchins then went public with her intention to reject the original conception of a transgender advocacy organization in favor of a vague, rather inchoate concept of a ‘gender rights’ organization.

The particulars of the story are important to detail because of GenderPAC position as the only national (trans)gender advocacy organization with a significant budget and paid staff.  Before rejecting the concept of transgender advocacy, Wilchins had been regarded by many in the transgender community as its national spokesperson and GenderPAC had been recognized nationally as the voice of the transgender community. The critique here is not so much about personality issues – though there may very well be such issues – but rather about an entire strategy, which is not only incidentally flawed, but inherently flawed.

Wilchins’ rejection of GenderPAC’s original mission as a national voice for the transgender movement is symptomatic of the inherent problems of attempting to create a movement while denying the existence of a community upon which it is based.  Community is a necessary component of movement politics.  Organizational accountability to the community is not only the analogue, but also the concomitant, to – individual accountability to a board of directors.  Any refusal to acknowledge community as the basis of movement politics ultimately represents an attempt to evade responsibility to a larger collective.  Wilchins’ decision to reject the notion of transgender community organizing has had profound implications for the community and the movement that GenderPAC once claimed to represent.

In a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference, Wilchins attempted to articulate what she termed “a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.”

The speech, entitled “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” is perhaps the clearest articulation of the discourse of the ‘post-identity politics’ gender rights movement that Wilchins has championed, a discourse that I will simply call ‘the post-identity politics paradigm’ (or ‘PPP’ for short).  Wilchins gave speech at a plenary session of the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference.  Because of the importance of this speech for my critique, I will quote it in full.

The Gill Speech

A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights

by Riki Wilchins

Someone has just been kind enough to remind me that Tim is sitting right here, and I better be good. So I just want you to know I’m not intimidated…much. And since I’m not, I want to tell you about the last time I was intimidated.  Patricia Ireland had invited me to address NOW’s National Board on transgender inclusion.  For reasons which now escape me, I thought it would be in good taste to remind them of NOW’s purges of lesbian and bisexual women in 1969 and their resulting confrontation with the Lavender Menace.  So I wore my black Transexual Menace T-shirt with its blood-dripping red letters. Patricia introduced me and then sat down, looking tolerantly and encouragingly up.

Now there are only two ways to do this.  Way ONE relies largely on guilt, coupled with earnest appeals to good old-fashioned liberal values like tolerance and acceptance.  To wit: You should include us poor trannies because its the right thing to do and there are all kinds of women, and once we’ve had surgery we’re physically pretty much just like you, etc., etc.  Way ONE depends on your audience’s goodwill and well-honed consciences and it often works.  But it’s no fun. Not to do and not to be on the receiving end of. I mean, who enjoys feeling guilty? Between you and me, I’d much rather be bitchy.

So I chose Way TWO.  Now, Way TWO consists of building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.  Way TWO is a LOT more fun.  So I looked around the room at all these powerful, very serious and intimidating women, and said, “Many of you are no doubt wondering why a man with a vagina is standing here lecturing you on where feminism should go…” — I look down at Patricia here and notice she is now searching vigorously in her wrist for a good vein to open — “.. but consider for a moment that men with vaginas are what gender looks like when it’s de-regulated, and so my presence here today is a sign of your success and not your failure.”  And they got it. I was not going to plead for their acceptance or tolerance or ask them to validate my poor white post-operative body as female.  Instead I was going to recruit them — to take a step with me out of the old paradigm that had created these boundaries between us we were now so busily surmounting.  I was going to invite them to have a different kind of dialog, one whose origins lay in a totally difference place, one where our task was not surmounting our separateness but rather exploring the strengths of our already being together.  And that’s what I’d like to do with you this evening.

If you hoped to hear a lot about how we’re all basically bisexual or what how it feels to be a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” this is going to be a bit disappointing.  And if you want someone to tell you why you should add Bi and Trans to your giving, I’m none too good at that either.  I’ve never been trapped in anyone else’s body and I hope you haven’t either, although I was once trapped in Manhattan for almost 18 years and I suspect it feels pretty much the same.  And as far as my gender is concerned, I admit I do still occasionally awake quivering in the night with the conviction I am trapped in the wrong culture.  But we’re not going to do Way ONE tonight.  Because the gays and lesbians picked out for harassment or assault are almost always targeted because of their gender:  because they aren’t “just like everyone else” — because they are “visibly queer.”

I’m not going to tell you about Kinsey sexuality scales from 1 to 6, or tell you that debating bi and trans people in the gay movement is like debating gays in the military: they’ve always been here, they always will be, and they’ve always given and served with courage and distinction.  I’m not going to tell you that as far for our apparently endless public debate over whether gender belongs in a gay movement, that the boys we beat up after school, the girls we humiliated for looking just like the gym teacher, and all those people your mom and mine “just knew” were homosexuals – all that was about gender.  Because the gays and lesbians picked out for harassment or assault are almost always targeted because of their gender: because they aren’t “just like everyone else” — because they are “visibly queer.”

And so that if you want to know what it’s really like to transcend narrow gender stereotypes and what it costs, please don’t come up afterwards and ask me – just turn to that nice person sitting on your right or your left and ask them. Because chances are, they’ve been there.  And so it’s not so much a question of including transgender, as of recognizing that gender has always been a part of a gay agenda and always will be.  I’m not going to make these and a dozen other telling points we both know I could make because: first, if you’re here today you’re smart enough to probably know most of this. And second, because as donors and activists I don’t think our activism should come from a place of guilt or tolerance or even wanting people to feel included.  Giving is activism, and I believe we do activism because we have no other choice, because in our guts we have that impractical and totally inconvenient thing: a passion to make the world a better place, the spiritual faith that that is possible, and a personal vision of what that should look like.

So I’d like to recruit you for the next 15 minutes on a ride into another paradigm, another discussion of our bodies, identities, and desires. Fasten your genders, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.  I know it’s going to be bumpy, because I’ve been on it myself. Twenty years ago I was telling anyone who would listen that I WAS “trapped in a man’s body. ” My FTM friends were telling everyone they were “men trapped in women’s’ bodies.” Collectively we sounded like a bunch of internals organs plotting a prison break.  That’s how it was for me in 1980.

But then last month I was at Camp Trans outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where they’d just kicked us out again. I was throwing football with this boy-identified-dyke named Ellen who prefers being called Jesse.  Jesse was leaving the Lesbian Avengers and I asked him why. He replied that it was because of that tired old lesbian pecking order.  I told him I knew exactly what he meant. The cutest lesbians are always at the top, the least attractive at the bottom, and so on and so on.  Jesse looked at me pittyingly and said, “Well, dude… actually it’s more like the fags and trannie boyz are at the top, FtMs, boychicks, andros and faggot-identified dykes are in the middle, and the butches and femmes are at the bottom.”

I looked at him and said, “Obviously. I knew that. I just wanted to see if YOU knew that.”  The identities you and I spent such time coming to grips with, coming out about, and defending at such great cost are not even an issue for these kids. They are beyond the boxes in which you and I have made our lives.  For many of them it’s not about the right to be gay or lesbian, bi, trans or straight, but something they hold much more dear:  the right to be who and what they are, whole and complete and without omission, even if that doesn’t fit any of the pre-existing categories and means making up whole new names for themselves on the spot.

But there’s a funny thing about walls: they not only keep others out, they also end up keeping us in.  I am reminded here that Audre Lorde taught us the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house. Is it too much to say that the notion of the homosexual — and perhaps even gay identity itself — is not in some way an invention of heterosexuality? Perhaps even a re-affirmation — if only unconsciously — that the most important thing about us should be where we stand in relation to reproduction?

Would it be overreaching to say that just as light requires dark, and male requires an opposing female, so gayness actually requires an antecedent and opposing straightness? So that instead of struggling against a hetero-centric culture, gayness actually demands and solidifies it?  Is it possible that with these kids are onto something — that with these pre-fabricated identities of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender we are so quick to occupy that we are still living in the Master’s house?  And so when it comes to inclusion we are less interested in tearing down the house than in building a small, yet tastefully furnished addition out back? One which will hold Jesse and all these troubling new identities?

So I am very interested when my good friend Rich Tafel says that he doesn’t think gender is part of a gay movement, because it’s not sexual orientation, or when some activists denounce the “diluting” of gay rights with bi and trans issues.  Because I take it as axiomatic that if what we want is a civil rights movement for gays and lesbians, then these voices are right. We should keep the walls around our movement intact and get on with our business.  But there’s a funny thing about walls: they not only keep others out, they also end up keeping us in.

We are on the verge of creating a movement that says to its own young:  “Be all you can be, go wherever your heart and mind and talent can take you… Just don’t become too straight. Don’t find out you’re bisexual. Don’t change your body or gender too much. Because if you do, we’re not sure you’ll still qualify to be represented by a gay and lesbian movement.”  Such a movement, which sets out to free gay people, actually ends up erecting yet another set of barriers and constraints that keep them in.

It is beyond dispute that today gay rights, like feminism before it, is going from strength to strength. Yet just as young women in droves are refusing to identify as feminists, so I routinely speak before groups of young queers who refuse to identify as gay or straight – because they don’t want to leave any of their friends behind, because they don’t want to be known by something as simplistic as who they sleep with, or because they don’t even select their partners by se

They want not only their freedom as gay people, but paradoxically also their freedom not to be gay – to have their primary social identity determined by something greater than whom they sleep with or even whom they love.

They are not seeking submersion into large, impersonal pre-existing categories, but instead searching newer, smaller ways to be and understand who they are.  For twenty-somethings with buzz-cut lime-green hair, bull-rings in their nose, and androgynous hip-hop clothes, the harassment they get at school, at work, and on the street is not just about their orientation or even their sex but about their gender.

And this is where I’d like to talk a little about my own organization, a national tax-exempt group called GenderPAC because we’re the group working to ensure every American’s civil right to express their gender free from stereotypes, discrimination and violence.

Our work focuses on Congressional advocacy, hate crimes, job discrimination, impact litigation, and youth outreach.  And if that sounds like we cover the waterfront, it’s because we own that section of the waterfront: no other national group is focusing on issues of gender.

GenderPAC is a “post-identity” organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us.  I am fond of observing that GenderPAC has no “Allies Program,” because gender is too basic to be confined to any one group, and too fundamental to leave anyone behind. Gender rights are for all of us.

And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.

And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.  And so the question here today isn’t so much a matter of you accepting us or letting us in, but of you coming out to join us.

In a post-identity movement, who we are is not a pre-condition for working together – our identification as gender activists comes out of the work we do.  And so identity becomes not a cause of our politics, but an effect — not a wall to be defended and debated but something mobile, personal, and flexible that changes and grows with us as our understanding of ourselves changes and grows.  And all these confusing, even threatening new identities are not barbarians at the gate but a doorway out. Their messiness is not the problem, it’s the solution — a tactic, even an essential political goal.

And so the question here today isn’t so much a matter of you accepting us or letting us in, but of you coming out to join us.  Because success looks less like B and T inclusion than my friend Jesse, the football throwing ex-Lesbian Avenger who personally identifies as a queer trannie boy but politically as a dyke but who admits he may someday to want to take testosterone. Success looks like messy new identities we don’t like and can’t name that create possibilities and freedoms we never intended.

Because it is your work and your foundation over the last three decades that has made people like Jesse and me possible, that has made possible a broad-based, inclusive national movement for gender civil rights.  And so by now if some of you are wondering why a man with a vagina who lives with her lesbian lover is standing here lecturing you about where gay rights and gay giving should go, consider that lesbian men with vaginas is what gay liberation looks like when desire is de-regulated, and so my being here today is a sign of your success and not your failure.

I hope you will leave thinking less about how to refine the noun-list so no one feels excluded from our gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex,leatherqueer, questioning, straight sympathetic, youth movement, but rather to begin thinking of new foundations for our politics.  What will such a foundation look like?

Let me close by observing that in one thirty-day period in the beautiful island of Manhattan, I have been harassed as a dyke, a sex-change, a bitch, and a fag.  I live in one body — why can’t fight in one movement?  Why do I have to section my politics up into so many pizza slices: this wedge to women’s’ rights, this to gay rights, another for gender rights, and so on?

We keep building movements that are simpler than we are.  But discrimination is like my new Gap cable-knit sweater — I pull it here and it also tugs somewhere else. So that it’s never just about gender, but it’s always about gender and sexual orientation, or gender and race, or gender and age, or gender and class.

We need to begin building movements which are as rich and rude and messy and complex as the lives we lead, the challenges we face and the scars we bear.  We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences.  So that whenever there’s a wall, we should be with those outside of it.  When there’s a vote on inclusion, you and I should be standing among those voted on.

What I am interested in is my freedom NOT to be transexual — a category which was defined in my absence, which is irrevocably heterosexual, and whose sole purpose is annexing my social identity to the clothes I wear and what genitals I have – something I find demeaning in its inception and debasing in its execution.

No matter who is included we should always be left behind because as Alice Walker says – “never be the only one in the room.” And so I take it to be our responsibility as activists to always stand with those smaller voices forgotten at the margins. Just as I take it to be our responsibility to see which faces are alone or unrepresented in the room.

Because in the final analysis, the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights. Important as that is, it’s also enlightened self-interest: we all want our own rights. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.

And so when someone asks me, “What about GenderPAC, isn’t that the transgender organization?”

I say that no, it’s not. I reply that half our board and more than half our membership are gay, feminist, or youth-identified. A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender.

What I am interested in is my freedom NOT to be transexual — a category which was defined in my absence, which is irrevocably heterosexual, and whose sole purpose is annexing my social identity to the clothes I wear and what genitals I have — something I find demeaning in its inception and debasing in its execution.  What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do.

And so for me, the point of a gender movement is not only those familiar specimens inevitably corralled in the Binary Zoo: the stone butches and diesel dykes, drag kings and queens, leatherdykes and dyke daddies, radical fairies and nelly fags, the transexuals, transgender, crossdressers, and intersex.

But it’s also about the seventeen year-old Midwestern cheerleader who ruins her health with anorexia because “real women” are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It’s about the forty-six year-old Joe Six-Pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because “real men” are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It’s about the aging lesbian who suffers through a wholly unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don’t matter as much. And it’s about a shy, sensitive, and mostly straight young man who is repeatedly gang-raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he is perceived as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable.

In short, a broad-based and inclusive national movement for gender civil rights is not only about people like Brandon Teena, Amanda Milan, Christian Paige, Debbi Forte, Tyra Hunter, Marsha P. Johnson, and Mathew Shepard — people who lost their lives, who were picked out and picked on because they were slight or gay or blond or black or visibly queer — but about working until each and every one of us is freed from this most pernicious, divisive and destructive of insanities called gender-based oppression.  Thank you.

________________

Having quoted Wilchins’ speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference, I will now proceed to outline what I see to be the problems of the ‘new paradigm’ that her speech ostensibly articulates.  There are a number of such problems.

First, there is the problem of the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression.  Second, there is the problem of the practical application of Wilchins’ notions in the legislative arena.  Third, there is the problem raised by Wilchins’ conception of identity formation, as it might be applied to race.  Fourth, there is the parallel problem as applied to gender.  And fifth, there is the problem of the apparent contradiction of ‘post-modernism’ and liberal rights discourse in Wilchins’ thinking.  I will take each of these in turn.

The Conflation of Homosexuality and Transgender

At its heart, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is based on a misconception about the nature of individual identity and the relationship of sexual orientation to gender identity and expression. Wilchins’ analysis of the sex/gender binary is reductive, attempting to reduce one form of oppression to the other, rather than recognizing them as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression.  One cannot fully understand homophobia or genderphobia unless one maintains the conceptual distinction between homophobia and genderphobia.  Hence, in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins makes it impossible to successfully explain either.  In her Gill speech (quoted in full above), Wilchins declares,

And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.  And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.

In fact, it is not at all self-evident that “the mainspring of homophobia is gender.”  Not all gay people are gender-variant, with the ‘butch’ gay man and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ exemplifying the gender-conventional; the oppression they face could not therefore be attributed to their outward gender expression.  There are many cases of conventionally gendered lesbians and gay men facing discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation alone. Relatively ‘butch’ gay men, for example, have been attacked leaving gay bars despite— and one is almost tempted to hypothesize because of – their gender conventionality.  In fact, the very assertion of a self-conscious masculinity on the part of gay men in the 1970s may have provoked even more intense hostility on the part of some homophobic men who may have perceived those masculine gay men to be all the more threatening because of their relative masculinity; in other words, in the logic of a homophobe, if a relatively manly man can be gay, a manly man like me could be gay.

A more conceptually sophisticated analysis would recognize homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression, one in which neither is fully reducible to the other, though interrelated.  One could draw an analogy with explanations of racism based in class prejudice. Clearly, race cannot be reduced to class, because racial discrimination cannot be fully explained as class discrimination.  Similarly, discrimination and oppression based on sexual orientation cannot be fully reduced to oppression based on gender expression, especially in cases involving conventionally gendered LGBs.   But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins implicitly dismisses the distinct forms of oppression faced by conventionally gendered LGBs.

Clearly, gender variance is relative; but it is equally clear that the kind of oppression faced by relatively more gender-variant LGBs is likely to be more intense than that faced by more conventionally gendered LGBs; they are, in any case, different and distinct.  Collapsing homophobia into genderphobia provides Wilchins with a rationale for jettisoning the concept of ‘transgender,’ which she finds hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.  But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins is left without a conceptual framework for distinguishing between gender-based and non-gender-based homophobia.  Hence, Wilchins’ conceptual framework does not allow her to recognize the greater potential for discrimination and violence faced by gender-variant LGBs.

Ironically enough, then, Wilchins’ desire to focus on what she sees to be the gender-based roots of homophobia leads her inadvertently to minimize or trivialize the oppression that gender-variant LGBs face specifically because of their gender variance, as opposed to their sexual orientation alone.

While the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity leads to conceptual confusion, it also provides an opportunity for Wilchins to try to bridge what she perceives to be a gap between traditional ‘gay’ politics and the newer politics of transgender.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that GenderPAC’s philosophy and strategy are premised on a conflation of sexual orientation and gender, and that conflation allows Wilchins to position herself as the leader of a post-transgender organization, one which is guided by an ostensibly sophisticated conception of gender that is ‘hip,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘post-identity politics.’

Wilchins thus casts herself as the avatar of a new age in which GenderPAC will lead a gender rights movement that will supercede both the old gay and lesbian rights movement and the newer transgender rights movement.  What this all-inclusive ‘national gender rights movement’ ends up looking like, in practice, is an organization whose primary constituency would appear to be non-transsexual transgendered youth who are uncomfortable with any fixed gender identity and who reject the classic transsexual transition narrative.

GenderPAC’s membership seems to be especially heavy with college students, mostly of female birth sex, who are intrigued by Wilchins’ use of Butlerian terms such as ‘gender performativity’ and notions of gender fluidity that seem to apply so well to their own personal experiences at that stage of their lives.  Since many of these individuals have identified as lesbians at some point but seem dissatisfied with the inability of that term to adequately describe or encompass the gender-transgressive component of their identities, they are especially attracted to the way in which Wilchins seems to be able to bring the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity together.

Praxis Makes Perfect: Applying the Paradigm in the ‘Real World’

The faults of Wilchins’ approach can be observed by applying it to a current political battle engaged by the movement.  The focus of national efforts for many years has been passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the federal gay rights bill currently pending in Congress.  The New York state equivalent of ENDA is the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which was enacted by the New York State legislature in December 2003 after a 31-year struggle.  ENDA is being championed by the Human Rights Campaign, the wealthiest and most powerful national lesbian and gay political organizations; while the campaign for SONDA is being led by the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), the leading state lesbian and gay political organization in New York (and the largest state lesbian and gay political organization in the country.

In Wilchins’ view, the gay movement does not understand that gender oppression is at the root of homophobia and therefore seeks to exclude transgendered people in a futile attempt to appropriate heteronormativity; but the transgender movement too narrowly circumscribes the concept of gender because it is rooted in the medical model of transsexuality and therefore excludes non-surgical ‘gender queers.’

The equivalent of Wilchins’ desiradatum – ‘a national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ – would be a ‘national sexual freedom civil rights movement for all Americans’ that would remove ‘identity politics’ labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay.’    Sexual orientation is not only an important component of legal discourse – without which anti-gay discrimination cannot be addressed – it is also a legitimate organizing principle.  In fact, everyone has a sexual orientation, and ‘sexual orientation’ is usually defined (as it is, for example, in SONDA) as including heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.  In that sense, passage of ENDA at the federal level or SONDA at the state level would provide discrimination protections for heterosexuals as well as for LGB people.

The biggest controversy surrounding both ENDA and SONDA has been over the lack of gender identity or expression language in those bills, and the question arises as to how one can create a broad movement that includes all LGBT people.  (NYAGRA has spoken publicly in favor of transgender-inclusive SONDA and ENDA bills.)  But that issue aside, the simple reality is that a ‘sexual freedom’ movement that is all-inclusive and that abjures any gay-specific focus would lose its ability to engage lesbian and gay people in any meaningful way.  Only by naming the specific oppression faced by lesbian and gay people – viz., homophobia – can a movement hope to diminish their marginalization in society.

That is not to say that LGB organizations cannot work in coalition with non-LGBT organizations in getting  (ideally transgender-inclusive) gay rights legislation passed.  Because LGB people have distinct issues that most heterosexuals do not face, there will be a need for lesbian and gay organizations whose primary mission is to address homophobia.

Wilchins’ call to abandon the term transgender is roughly analogous to asking HRC or ESPA to change its name to the Campaign for Sexual Freedom.  In fact, there is an organization called the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.  NCSF describes itself as:

…a national organization committed to protecting freedom of expression among consenting adults. Based in Washington, D.C., NCSF works through legal initiatives, lobbying, outreach, and education to promote greater understanding of sexuality and human rights. Founded in 1997, NCSF mobilizes diverse grassroots communities to help change antiquated and unfair sex laws, and to protect free speech and advance privacy rights. NCSF is dedicated to ensuring that all consenting adults can express their sexual identity freely and openly, without fear.

It is unlikely that organizations such as HRC or ESPA would remove ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ from their mission statements and their literature and jettison the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ in favor of some broader but vaguer notion of ‘sexual freedom for all,’ and if that scenario seems extremely far-fetched, it is because such a move would represent a rejection of the fundamental principles around which lesbian and gay groups have been organized heretofore.

But Wilchins stakes out a much bigger territory than even a movement that covers both the transgender movement and the lesbian and gay movement.  Wilchins’ assertion that “no other national group is focusing on issues of gender” should come as a surprise to Patricia Ireland, a member of the (post-purge) GenderPAC board and former head of the National Organization for Women.  If NOW is not a national group focusing on issues of gender, what is it?  Perhaps Wilchins is attempting to suggest that NOW does not include transgender as an issue and therefore is only a ‘women’s organization.’  But NOW has in fact moved in the last few years to include transgender issues in its organizational mission; and of course, NOW is only one of many gender rights organizations.  And given Ireland’s role in NOW, with her membership of the GenderPAC board, it is all the more difficult to understand what basis Wilchins has for asserting that GenderPAC is the only national group focusing on issues of gender.

In this context, one can probably best understand Wilchins’ assertion as part of a marketing strategy under which GenderPAC is marketed as being ‘more’ than just a transgender organization, because it (ostensibly) has a broader conception of gender; broader than any lesbian and gay rights organization because it includes a focus on gender issues; and broader than any women’s organization because it includes genderqueers who are not part of the traditional mission of organizations such as NOW.

But for all that she claims to be engaged in a critique of binary thinking, Wilchins ironically constructs her own binary opposition, implicitly pitting a ‘transgender’ movement against a broader and more inclusive ‘gender’ movement. This is a false dichotomy.  Wilchins offers no evidence that a self-styled transgender movement cannot include both non-transgendered gender-variant individuals as well as issues faced by such individuals.  Clearly, there is no ‘either/or’ here.  There is no reason to jettison the concept of transgender simply because it is not all-inclusive; nor is there any reason to believe that a transgender movement cannot be based on a conception of gender oppression that encompasses the anorexic cheerleader or the ‘Joe Six-Pack’ alcoholic or the straight victim of prison gang rape.

Race, Gender, Identity Formation and the Politics of Community

The third difficulty with Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm lies in the way in which Wilchins misconstrues the nature of gender identity formation and political movements rooted in communities organized around such identities.  Underlying the discourse of a post-identity politics gender rights movement is the assumption that any exclusion is bad – both illegitimate and politically problematic – coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion.

The rationale implicit in this discourse would seem to be something like this: genderqueers (transgendered and gender-variant people, by any other name) have been excluded from the lesbian and gay movement, and that is a bad thing. Genderqueers (including male-to-female transsexuals) have been excluded from the women’s movement, and that is a bad thing.  The underlying assumption would seem to be that any movement that excludes anyone is morally suspect and politically questionable.  But the fundamental error is the failure to take account of the asymmetry of power between privileged and marginalized groups in American society.

A case in point is Wilchins’ reaction to an invitation to attend TransWorld in October 1998.  Co-sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the New York City Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center) and the Audre Lorde Project, TransWorld I (which took place at ALP in Brooklyn) was the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color (TGPOCs).  The organizing committee for TransWorld I made the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters, though the conference was open to everyone whether white or of color, transgendered or not.  As one of the members of the planning committee, I voted for that decision because I felt that it was necessary to ensure that the conference provide an opportunity for TGPOCs to speak for themselves.  Previous conferences in the series sponsored by the Center’s GIP (of which TransWorld I was the fourth) had featured largely conventionally gendered white men literally and figuratively talking down to transgendered people from the dais.  This conference would be different: it would feature transgendered and gender-variant people of color speaking from personal experience of oppression and marginalization as well as from expertise in health care, social services, and advocacy.

Wilchins’ reaction to the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters was to denounce the conference as ‘racist’ because it ‘excluded’ white people.  Her response to the invitation to attend TransWorld was not merely an expression of her personal pique at not having been invited to speak at the conference.  The rejection of TransWorld I and limited-membership formations – based on the assumption of a symmetry of ‘exclusion’ – demonstrates a failure to understand the difference between the power of a white elite vs. the power of marginalized communities, as well as a failure to understand the nature of institutionalized racism in this society.

The ‘exclusion’ of whites from the dais at TransWorld I cannot be equated with the historic exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in society, because those white service providers – whether physicians (such as surgeons and endocrinologists), psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers, or other ‘gender professionals’ – are in positions of power relative to the transgendered people of color who are their clients (or ‘patients’ or ‘consumers,’ however one may wish to describe them).  Such white gender professionals – most of whom are not themselves transgender-identified – exercise power over their clients as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of affording (or denying) access to hormones, sex reassignment surgery, psychological evaluation, legal change of sex, and other crucial aspects of transsexual transition.  Those professionals have access to resources – financial, legal, and organizational –that their clients largely lack, and the institutional power that they command therefore belies any ‘moral equivalency’ between their ‘exclusion’ from the dais at this one event and the exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in a white-dominant society brought about by pervasive discrimination based on race or gender identity that TGPOCs face.

The decision of the TransWorld I organizing committee to limit panels to people of color only was understood by committee members as an attempt to provide transgendered people of color themselves with a forum in which they could speak unhindered by service providers who had dominated the previous three ‘health empowerment’ conferences sponsored by the GIP.  That decision was informed by a recognition of the multiple oppressions – oppressions based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status (among others) as well as gender identity and expression – faced by transgendered people of color.

It is important to understand, however, that such oppressions are not merely additive in nature; in other words, it is not simply that a transgendered African American faces transgenderphobia in one context and racism in another; rather, these oppressions are interactive and mutually reinforcing.    For example, a transgendered African American woman may find no support as a person of color at a white-dominated center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities; but she may also find no support as a transgendered person at a community center or social service provider in her community of origin.

Related to oppressions based on race and ethnicity are those based on nationality and citizenship status.  Many TGPOCs are immigrants and face the same challenges as their non-transgendered compatriots, but without access to social services in their communities, because most immigrant service providers will not serve openly transgendered people.  Even in those rare instances where social service agencies may welcome them, transgendered people may be reluctant to come forward for fear of discrimination.  While LGBT community centers are springing up across the country, very few have any means of ensuring linguistic access for those who are not native speakers of English.

Those TGPOCs who are not US citizens do not have even the minimal legal rights that transgendered citizens enjoy; if they are undocumented, they are easily deportable; and while they live here in the United States, undocumented transpeople face exploitation because of their lack of legal status.   Hence GenderPAC’s call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans’ begs the question as to just who constitutes an ‘American.’  To define the category of ‘all Americans’ by way of citizenship would leave out the undocumented, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation.  But to include the undocumented would raise the question of whether or not GenderPAC is serious about working on behalf of this population.

While transgendered people of color certainly need legal protections from discrimination and violence, they do not have the luxury to regard legal rights as the sum total of the movement’s goals.  Juridical rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the liberation of transgendered people of color.  A movement that limits its focus to legal rights will not be able to satisfy the need for social justice that transgendered people feel deeply.  That movement, in order to serve transgendered people of color, must also address issues of race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status, as well as class, (dis)ability, environment, and every other form of oppression suffered by TGPOCs.  Hence, a broad social justice movement is desperately needed, and an organization that embodies those values is a necessary component of that movement.

Wilchins’ failure to understand the variegation of gender oppression by race and ethnicity is compounded by a failure to understand the variegation of gender oppression by demographic groups within the ‘transgender’ population.  Here, I will make reference to my own schema for describing the different populations involved.  The first of these can be labeled the transsexual: those who seek or have obtained sex reassignment surgery (SRS).  (I use the term ‘transsexual’ advisedly, recognizing that it is a part of a medical model of transgender as pathology; but it is also a term of self-definition for many transgendered people.)  The second, much larger, group could be labeled the transgendered, and would include those who live a significant portion of their lives presenting fully in the gender opposite their birth sex, but most of whom do not seek SRS.  A still much larger category would be the gender-variant, those who transgress gender boundaries to a significant extent, but most of whom who still identify with the sex assigned to them at birth and do not present fully in the gender opposite that birth sex.  As a series of concentric circles, this schema allows us to neatly describe a population with literally hundreds of self-identifying names.

The complexity of the transgender community and the variability of gender oppression across different transgender populations and different transgendered and gender-variant people provides the rationale for the use of ‘transgender’ by an organization or a movement.  Deployed strategically and with intellectual and political sophistication, ‘transgender’ becomes a useful organizing principle for a community under construction that is attempting to create a political movement.

Indeed, it can be argued – and I will argue here that GenderPAC failed to connect to community.  The discourse of a ‘post-identity politics’ movement has no role for communities of any kind.  The post-identity politics paradigm is all about “doing your own thing,” as the phrase popular in the 1960s and 1970s would have it; and that may account for GenderPAC’s appeal to genderqueer youth, especially female-bodied youth who do not relate to terms such as ‘transsexual or even ‘transgender.’  Wilchins apparently believes that gender is primarily or perhaps even solely a matter of self-expression; what she does not understand is that gender identities are constructed by individuals in the context of larger communities, including the broad national community that we call ‘society.’  Public fora and conferences such as TransWorld that have a circumscribed focus are necessary precisely because transgendered and gender-variant people do not exist solely as atomized individuals; they live in communities – even if some are profoundly alienated from communities, including communities of origin and communities of color.

At root, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is premised on an atomized individualism that does not recognize the social context in which gender identities are formed. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm reduces the problem of gender oppression to a simple society-wide oppression of genderqueers attempting to express their individual gender identities.  But the lack of conceptual sophistication regarding the variegation of gender oppression across different cultures and communities is not the only conceptual flaw in the discourse of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’  A reading of American history will show that the very notion of a ‘post-identity politics’ is fundamentally ahistorical, as it fails to acknowledge the identity politics of Jeffersonian liberalism, which was premised on an identity politics that excluded some from power because of their identity.  Identity politics did not begin in the 1960s; rather, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the African American civil rights movement were simply a different form of identity politics.  Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is rooted in an individual rights discourse of Enlightenment provenance that ironically enough – and fatally for its intellectual coherence – is at odds with Wilchins’ ostensible ‘post-modernism.’

Wilchins’ rather superficial critique of ‘post-identity politics’ really speaks only to the excesses of an exclusionary version of identity politics and does not acknowledge the origin of identity politics, much less address the issues raised by white skin privilege. GenderPAC’s call for a post-identity gender politics is analogous to Ward Connerly’s call for a color-blind society.  The discourse of a color-blind society – promoted by conservatives who aim to eliminate affirmative action – fails to recognize the specificity of racial and ethnic oppression and therefore renders impossible any effort to address it.  In certain profound sense, the call for a post-identity gender rights movement represents a ‘whitewashing’ of gender and transgender politics.   One can best understand the pernicious role that Wilchins has played in the transgender politics of the last decade by examining her use of the term ‘gender orientation.’

Implicit in Wilchins’ critique of identity politics is an assumption that identities are somehow fixed and exclusive.  Wilchins implies that identifying as ‘gay’ somehow precludes identifying as ‘transgendered’ or that identifying as ‘transgendered’ somehow precludes one from identifying as ‘genderqueer.’  But identities need not be mutually exclusive; rather more like Venn diagrams – overlapping and not entirely definable.

‘Transgender’ is an identity formation that offers the same kind of advantages by bringing together a loose collection of individuals – crossdressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender-variant individuals – who may have many differences but who can achieve greater political agency through coalition-building, which is precisely what the construction of a ‘transgender community’ represents when brought to bear on the creation of a transgender political movement.  Transgender offers the additional advantage of moving beyond the pathologizing medical model of transsexuality.  The fact that ‘transgender’ does not include everyone who might be identified as gender-variant, much less the total human population does not invalidate it as a construct.

The term ‘transgender’ can be deployed strategically – as the example of the campaign for Int. No. 24 in  New York City shows – in order to bring legal rights to individuals who face pervasive discrimination.  Similarly, terms such as ‘gender-variant’ or (if you prefer) ‘genderqueer’ can be deployed as well.  These are all clearly social constructions, and the one to be used in any given context depends on the particulars of that context.

Because of personal experiences of being excluded, transgendered and gender-variant people have become sensitive to the notion of exclusion of any kind.  Perhaps some of this sentiment is behind Wilchins’ insistence that a gender rights movement, to be legitimate, must include everyone.  But if the African American rights movement does not include everyone, does that invalidate it in some way?  Certainly, white people (including many Jewish Americans) have played an important role in the movement, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal whites in the South and from the North participated in Freedom Summer and other civil rights campaigns.  But the focus was clearly on dismantling Jim Crow, which directly affected African Americans in the South, even if it had an indirect impact on whites, especially those who supported the black aspiration for civil rights.  Was the African American civil rights movement ‘exclusionary’ because it did not specifically seek to include Latinos or Native Americans?  Or was it rather more effective because it chose to focus on the specificity of oppression faced by African Americans, which was distinct from that of other people of color?

To suggest that it is illegitimate to organize around identity formations is to suggest that those identities are illegitimate.  Indeed, such a suggestion represents nothing less than an attempt to invalidate efforts to address racial and ethnic oppression itself.

‘Paradigm-Shattering’ and the Disjuncture of the Liberal and the Post-Modern

Wilchins describes her work in GenderPAC as

…building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place.

Wilchins’ argument is not consistently or rigorously ‘post-modern,’ and it is not so much ‘insubordinate’ as simply incoherent.

There is in fact a fundamental disjuncture at the heart of Wilchins’ thought, between the rights discourse of a ‘national gender rights movement’ and the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ thinking of post-structuralist theory that is superficially applied to the problem of gender-based oppression.  Liberal rights discourse is premised on the very unicity of the unified subject as well as the specific identity of that subject (in demographic and (sub)national terms) that Derridean deconstruction would render impossible.  Rights appertain to individuals, and individuals with individual identities, not to gender expression itself – to acts, to gestures, or to performances.  And rights presuppose at the very least the possibility of an objective moral order.  One need only cite a few passages from her Gill speech to demonstrate how little Wilchins understands the conceptual problems posed by this disjuncture.  For example, in the speech to Gill, Wilchins declares,

…in the final analysis, the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights. Important as that is, it’s also enlightened self-interest: we all want our own rights. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.

But post-structuralist thought renders impossible the articulation of positive assertions of normative right that are a requisite of rights discourse.  Phrases such as ‘moral center’ are meaningless to the Derridean, because the inherent instability of the relationship of signifier to signified undermines the possibility of statements that are consistent in meaning across time or place.  Hence, statements such as “The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us” are as meaningless and nonsensical as statements such as “The present king of France is bald.”  But her Gill speech is replete with such frankly normative statements, such as when Wilchins enjoins her audience to ‘build bridges’ in a spirit of inclusion:

We need to begin building movements which are as rich and rude and messy and complex as the lives we lead, the challenges we face and the scars we bear.  We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences.  So that whenever there’s a wall, we should be with those outside of it.  When there’s a vote on inclusion, you and I should be standing among those voted on.

To the post-structuralist theorist, injunctions to ‘bridge-building’ and to ‘inclusion’ are nothing but mere ‘utterances,’ because there is no such thing as objective moral obligation; given the inherently arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, there cannot be.

For at root, ‘post-modernism’ represents a challenge to the fixity of meaning.  For post-structuralists such as Derrida, the relationship between ‘signifier’ (e.g., word) and ‘signified’ (thing or concept) is inherently unstable and arbitrary.  If this is the case, there can be no conceptual ‘fundament’ to liberal rights discourse, because the meaning of the term ‘right’ itself cannot be fixed, any more than ‘individual’ can be:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.  This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions….

Liberal rights philosophy is precisely the kind of ‘totalizing’ discourse of which Derrida speaks in this passage.  Traditional philosophy – including the normative political philosophy of Locke and the liberal Enlightenment – is undermined by a deconstruction of the relationship between word (logos) and concept.  For the post-modernist, a normative project such as the construction of a ‘national gender civil rights movement’ is not only hopelessly old-fashioned, it is an impossibility, because the deconstruction of the unified subject and the relationship between word and concept makes it so.  Wilchins does not seem to understand that the central core of post-structuralism is the disjuncture between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ In her Gill speech, Wilchins declares,

It’s also about the seventeen year-old Midwestern cheerleader who ruins her health with anorexia because “real women” are supposed to be preternaturally thin. It’s about the forty-six year-old Joe Six-Pack who wraps his car around a crowded school bus on the way home from the bar because “real men” are supposed to be heavy drinkers. It’s about the aging lesbian who suffers through a wholly unnecessary hysterectomy because certain kinds of gendered bodies simply don’t matter as much. And it’s about a shy, sensitive, and mostly straight young man who is repeatedly gang-raped his first year in prison because, within that environment, he is perceived as genderqueer, genderdifferent, or simply gendervulnerable.

But post-structuralist theory denies the very possibility of empirical ‘testing’ of such statements.  The ageing lesbian’s hysterectomy cannot be judged necessary or unnecessary, because such empirical hypotheses (e.g., “the ageing lesbian’s hysterectomy was wholly unnecessary”) is reduced to nothing more than an utterance, a line in a text.  For post-structuralist theorists such as Derrida, there is no external reality against which the ‘accuracy’ of such statements may be judged.  Rather, a post-structuralist theorist would characterize such statements as part of a text that in turn constitutes an element in a larger discourse.  One could speak of a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ or a ‘progressive’ or a ‘feminist’ discourse on (trans)gender rights; but post-structuralist theory provides no mechanism by which to measure the greater or lesser ‘accuracy’ of such discourses; indeed, the very concept is alien to post-structuralism.  Instead, there is (in the words of Derrida) only an infinite field of substitutions.

Furthermore, the deconstruction of the sovereign self means that these statements about anorexic cheerleaders, ageing lesbians, and straight victims of gang rape are not – cannot be – about ‘real’ people, but rather constitute a repertoire of discursive gestures whose relation to any such individuals is in a very profound sense purely rhetorical.  Invoking such figures as examples of individuals who are the objects of GenderPAC’s advocacy work demonstrates quite clearly that Wilchins does not understand the logical implications of her use of ‘post-modernism’ as a conceptual framework for her political philosophy.  For post-structuralist theory does not merely challenge the identities that Wilchins refers to in her Gill speech as “those familiar specimens inevitably corralled in the Binary Zoo”; post-structuralism challenges the very notion of individual or collective identity altogether.  It is not merely gender or gender identity that are performative, it is individual identity itself.  There is no individual to liberate or upon whose behalf to advocate.  Rather, there are a series of signifiers that are used to construct a text whose meaning is inherently ambiguous.  In the conclusion to her Gill speech, Wilchins laments,

Let me close by observing that in one thirty-day period in the beautiful island of Manhattan, I have been harassed as a dyke, a sex-change, a bitch, and a fag.  I live in one body — why can’t fight in one movement?  Why do I have to section my politics up into so many pizza slices: this wedge to women’s’ rights, this to gay rights, another for gender rights, and so on?

But Derrida has opened the possibility of the deconstruction of the sovereign self; hence there is (in this conception) no single unified subject that we can unambiguously label ‘Riki Anne Wilchins.’  Instead, ‘Riki Anne Wilchins’ becomes nothing morethan a nominal device for constructing a text about identity.  And the notion of ‘one movement’ becomes nothing more than a mere utterance whose connection with any actual collective entity in the ‘real world’ is ambiguous at best.   In her Gill speech, Wilchins declares,

GenderPAC is a ‘post-identity’ organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us.

But if one were to take Derrida (by way of Butler) seriously, then there can be no unified subject ‘I’ and therefore no unambiguous collective ‘we’ or ‘us.’  Speaking to Gill, Wilchins describes

…a broad-based and inclusive national movement for gender civil rights [that] is not only about people like Brandon Teena, Amanda Milan, Christian Paige, Debbi Forte, Tyra Hunter, Marsha P. Johnson, and Mathew Shepard — people who lost their lives, who were picked out and picked on because they were slight or gay or blond or black or visibly queer — but about working until each and every one of us is freed from this most pernicious, divisive and destructive of insanities called gender-based oppression.

But the deconstructive turn in post-modernism renders such statements mere textual devices.  One cannot meaningfully speak of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ because there is no collectivity that one can unambiguously point to as constituting ‘all Americans.’  To the post-structuralist theorist, the phrase constitutes nothing more than a discursive gesture, a rhetorical device, if you will.   While GenderPAC’s gender politics may be more appealing to some than that of a 1970s lesbian-feminist, a Log Cabin Republican, an evangelical Christian, or an Islamic fundamentalist, a rigorous and consistent post-structuralist theorist could not assign any greater moral value to one normative discourse over another or any greater weight to the empirical claims of one over another; at best, the post-structuralist could only discuss the philosophic and conceptual implications of each of these world views.  Unfortunately, Wilchins herself gives no indication of how, from the post-modern ethos she would embrace, she would find a middle ground between the Enlightenment concept of the self and the deconstructive reduction of identity to textual device, or how she would create a conceptual foundation for positive moral statements such as the ones that she makes in her Gill speech.

In short, the notion of a post-modern ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ is inherently contradictory and intellectually incoherent.  Poststructuralist theory of the Derridean sort that informs the work of Judith Butler – which Wilchins in turn takes as the conceptual fundament for her own thought – challenges not only identity formations of the sort that Wilchins labels ‘identity politics,’ but also undermines the very possibility of affirmative statements about individual and collective human needs and human rights that are at the heart of the GenderPAC strategy and philosophy that she labels her ‘post-identity politics paradigm.’

That Wilchins does not recognize this problem, let acknowledge it, demonstrates the superficiality of her use of terms such as ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-identity politics.’  Just as a Derridean ‘field of infinite substitutions’ is no ground on which to build either a discourse of rights or a gender rights movement, so a thoroughly ‘post-modern’ analysis moves us well beyond liberal rights discourse to entirely another realm.

Conclusion

It is no accident that the GenderPAC board split over precisely the issue of the scope and definition of the organization’s mission, with Wilchins engineering a purge of those board members who supported a continued commitment to the transgender community in both word and deed.  GenderPAC’s rejection of a clear link with the transgender community left the organization unmoored from its tethering, making it vulnerable to incidents such as the contretemps over the use of ‘gender orientation’ as the rallying cry for national gender lobby day 2000.  As the term ‘gender orientation’ has no basis in social theory , it is the perfect example of a term that has no currency because it does not circulate in any community.  Wilchins‘ reconfigured GenderPAC is a  ‘post-transgender’ organization that would create and lead a ‘post-identity politics’ movement. It is a movement that Wilchins imagines to encompass the lesbian and gay movement, the transgender movement, and the women’s movement, and yet (she imagines) is somehow larger than the sum of all of these parts.  In her 2000 speech to the Gill Foundation, Wilchins declared:

Our work focuses on Congressional advocacy, hate crimes, job discrimination, impact litigation, and youth outreach.  And if that sounds like we cover the waterfront, it’s because we own that section of the waterfront.

But claiming ownership of ‘the waterfront’ is quite different from doing serious legislative work that brings people legal rights.  Wilchins  creates the impression that she offers a strategy informed by a deep study of theory.  But close and careful scrutiny of Wilchins’ call for a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ shows it to be at best a clever marketing slogan.

Wilchins admonishes lesbian and gay organizations to see gender transgression as the root of the oppression of LGB people, failing to understand homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing but distinct forms of oppression.  Conflating the two forms of oppression deprives Wilchins of the ability to engage in a probing analysis of their complex interrelationship. Wilchins’ insistence that the transgender movement reconfigure itself as a broadly conceived gender rights movement is roughly equivalent to asking lesbian and gay organizations to redefine themselves as part of a broad movement for sexual liberation – but one in which homophobia is not specifically addressed and in which ostensibly ‘old-fashioned’ identities such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are abjured.   But the movement that Wilchins envisions is one that does not speak to the truths of our lives as transgendered and gender-variant people, whether LGB or not.

Failing to take account of (let alone effectively address) the multiple oppressions of transgendered and gender-variant people of color, Wilchins’ GenderPAC instead offers slogans such as ‘gender, racial and affectional equality.’  Nor does her call for “a national gender rights movement for all Americans” address issues of race, ethnicity, national origin, or citizenship status in any meaningful way.  A movement that purports to include everyone includes no one, because it does not speak to the specificity of particular forms of oppression, which must be named in order to be addressed.

Wilchins’ discourse is not truly liberational, because it fails to take into account the totality of individual human experience.  A crucial part of our humanity is the experience of community – admittedly ambivalent and complex for many transgendered and gender-variant people – but a sine qua non for human existence as well as a necessary element of any successful political movement.

What the ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ does not recognize is how identity formations – such as ‘transgender’ as well as ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘people of color’ – can be strategically deployed to form community, which is the basis of any successful social or political movement.

Finally, Wilchins fails to recognize – let alone address – the inherent contradiction of a rights movement that is ostensibly ‘post-modern.’  Any attempt to try to construct a ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ that is rigorously poststructuralist is bound to failure, because of the fundamental disjuncture between a liberal rights discourse that depends on the unified subject as its fundament and a theoretical framework that denies the very possibility of a unified subject who is the ostensible bearer of those rights.  If the hallmark of the ‘post-modern’ is a rejection of ‘logos’ and the very notion of a stable and unambiguous relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ then no truly ‘post-modern’ political movement is possible, because post-modernism rejects the possibility of affirmative normative statements that are the requisite for an objective moral philosophy upon which ‘rights’ movements must of necessity be based.

______________________________________________________________________

Pauline Park is co-founder and co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (< HYPERLINK “http://www.nyagra.com” www.nyagra.com>).  Founded in June 1998, NYAGRA, is the first statewide transgender advocacy  organization in New York.  As coordinator of the legislative work group on gender-based discrimination, Park led the successful campaign for enactment of Int. No. 24 (Local Law 3), the transgender rights bill passed by the New York City Council and signed into law by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in April 2002.  Park was instrumental in getting the New York State Dignity for All Students Act amended to include gender identity and expression, and she continues to serve as the NYAGRA representative to the DASA Coalition.

Park received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has written widely on gender, race, and LGBT politics.  She co-founded Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) in 1994, Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997, Queens Pride House (a center for the LGBT communities of Queens) in 1997, and the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens in 2002.  Park is also a member of the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) and the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY).

This article is based on a presentation to the 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality:Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality (February 27, 2002).

Riki Anne Wilchins, “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference.

Katie Szymanski, “Identity Crisis: Politics Shapes Debate Between Gender Groups,” BAY AREA REPORTER (Jan. 2001).

Donna Cartwright, Pauline Park, et al., “An Open Letter to Gender Rights Activists” (Jan. 3, 2001) at HYPERLINK “http://www.nyagra.tripod.com” www.nyagra.tripod.com.

H.R. 2355, 107th Cong. (2002); S. 1276, 107th Cong. (2002).

i The New York State Senate passed SONDA (A.1971) on December 17, 2002, and it was signed into law later that day by Governor George Pataki.  See “SONDA Passes State Legislature” in Agenda: The Voice of the Empire State Pride Agenda (winter/spring 2003), pp. 4-7.

Riki Anne Wilchins, “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference.

Agenda, id.

See National Coalition for Sexual Freedom at HYPERLINK http://www.ncsfreedom.org www.ncsfreedom.org.

See, e.g., Patricia Ireland, “GenderPAC Speaks Out on 30 Years of Title IX” (Aug. 1, 2002) at www.gpac.org.

Pauline Park, “Transgendered People of Color Take Center Stage,” LESBIAN AND GAY NEW YORK (Nov. 19, 1998).

Park, Ouderkirk Lecture, supra note 23

WARD CONNERLY, CREATING EQUAL: MY FIGHT AGAINST RACE PREFERENCES (2000),  pp. 2-4.

Paul Schindler, “Bloomberg Set to Sign Transgender Rights Law,” Lesbian and Gay New York (9 May 2002), p. 4.

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2^nd ed., 1966), p. 186.

Wilchins, Gill speech, supra note 1.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, DECONSTRUCTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE (1982).

JACQUES DERRIDA, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE (trans. Alan Bass) (1978).

Id. at 289.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, THE DECONSTRUCTIVE TURN: ESSAYS IN THE RHETORIC OF PHILOSOPHY 16-17(1983).

Id.

Id.

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