Black Feminism Free of Transmisogyny Liberates Everyone
An intra-communal dialogue on transmisogynoir might save us all
“I think what Alice Walker revealed is that many of our Black Feminist faves are probably TERFs,” commented Dr. Jenn M. Jackson. “Not only that, they have a host of terms, concepts, and theoretical principles they can attempt to marshal to navigate around their transphobia. It just is what it is.”
Alice Walker, the pioneering author of The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and many other canonical works of Black feminism, took to her blog on March 4, 2023 to express solidarity with the anti-trans rhetoric of J.K. Rowling, the controversial author of the Harry Potter series.
Since 2020, Rowling has used her own blog to align with trans-exclusionary radical feminism, and doubled down amidst critiques from lifelong fans and several icons from Harry Potter film adaptations.
Walker’s blog post defended Rowling’s character, stating, “I consider J.K. Rowling perfectly within her rights as a human being of obvious caring for humanity to express her views about whatever is of concern to her. As she has done.”
The post went on to perpetuate the myth that a child’s sense of gender identity is credible if, and only if, it resonates with being cisgender.
Walker’s reliance on propaganda to make that point is predictable, given that in a 2018 New York Times interview, she praised author David Icke, a Holocaust-denier who claims that if the Holocaust did happen, Jewish folks funded it. This time, Walker’s conspiracy-of-choice centered on the word “guy”:
“The use of ‘guy’ for both male and female eroded the ability of children to easily feel confident in which gender they were,” Walker writes. “From that confusion, considered irrelevant, apparently, to the forming of young minds, has come much cutting off of parts and restructuring of essential physical equipment. If such restructuring is freely chosen at eighteen or twenty, at least there is a sense the person involved may have lived long enough to know, definitely, what is desired. Younger than that, I feel there may in fact be reason, later on, to mourn and weep. After all, the human body is a miracle, of whatever sex, tampering with a miracle is unlikely to serve us.”
While Walker caught many by surprise, social conservatism amongst Black feminists is not new.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the We Should All Be Feminists author whom Beyoncé sampled in her feminist anthem “Flawless,” has deemed Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric “perfectly reasonable.”
At Spelman College, a historically-Black institution founded for women, trans-exclusionary radical feminist ideology reared its head when the school began admitting women of trans experience.
And, while hip hop legend Lauryn Hill has not endorsed anti-trans rhetoric per se, fans have criticized lyrics referencing ‘girl men, drag queens, and the lies of social transvestism.’
Going Inward
“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
This famous line from The Combahee River Collective’s manifesto (1977) is often quoted to convey the ways in which Black women’s intersectional oppression is the inverse of patriarchal white supremacy, and arguably the most recognizable manifestation of its underbelly.
We must also note, however, that cisgenderism is a pretext of patriarchal justifications for misogyny and sexism. Thus, we can apply an intersectional lens even to misogynoir itself, noting that Black women are not monolithic and can still hold privilege(s) that oppress each other, intra-communally.
Black feminists like Walker and Adichie, for example, scapegoat Black trans women guiltlessly, due to transmisogyny, which privileges all cisgender women — and even trans men, some argue.
In Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007), trans biologist Julia Serano illustrates transmisogyny, writing:
“[W]hen the majority of jokes made at the expense of trans people center on ‘men wearing dresses’ or ‘men who want their penises cut off’, that is not transphobia — it is transmisogyny. When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia — it is transmisogyny.”
Serano’s overarching point is that trans women report the highest levels of discrimination among all transgender sub-groups, mainly because society punishes them for exhibiting the exact same feminine behaviors for which cis women are rewarded, while simultaneously denying them recognition as men.
For instance, research on the gender pay gap shows that trans women reap fewer benefits from medical transition that trans men do. Whereas medical transition can beget salary and titular promotions for trans men, trans women lose almost a third of their salary, are respected less, and are harassed more.
To be sure, all trans people face disproportionate violence. For example, trans people collectively are three times more likely to experience physical violence when interacting with the police.
Notably, however, trans women accounted for over half of anti-LGBTQIA+ homicide victims. What is more, 92% of anti-trans homicide victims from 2013 to 2018 were trans women, and 70% of these trans women were Black. This epidemic was one impetus for coining ‘transmisogynoir,’ which expanded upon the trans-inclusive scholarship of Moya Bailey, who coined ‘misogynoir.’
It seems the next hurdle became convincing some Black cis-feminists that humanizing Black trans-feminists protects them. There have been instances of Black cis-feminists using anti-trans slurs, referring to trans folx by genitalia/sexual organs, or deadnaming trans folx. Yet, ironically, dehumanizing these Black women for ignorance can end in the same way transmisogynoir does.
So, we must innovate rather than destroy.
Growing Forward
Below are strategies for unlearning of transmisogyny, primarily based on what information could have spared me intra-communal harm within Black feminist spaces. Let’s dig in. (For an overview of gender roles/identity/expression/dysphoria, see 5 Unconscious Biases to Learn about Non-Binary People).
First, femmephobia is core to cis-patriarchy. Normalizing violence against femininity in men not only disconnects men from their humanity, it also distracts us from solutions to patriarchal violence that involve examining how we socialize boys into what bell hooks* theorized as dominator culture.
Instead, we default to the cis-normative expectation men should have always be ready to meet violence with violence. It is not uncommon for Black feminists to seek protection for Black girls/women by holding Black men to a cis-patriarchal/femmephobic standard of affect and behavior, without realizing the root causes of misogynoir remain.
Nevermind that both cis and trans Black women are sidelined in the mainstream feminist and trans liberation movements; or that Black men often displace anger at white male authority onto both groups; or that trans Black women are infantilized, pathologized, and sexualized similarly to cis Black women.
Second, comprehending the origin of gender matters less than defending trans people’s lives. The very crux of gender-policing involves asserting, with impossible certainty, what the source of gender allegedly is or is not. Both anti-trans people and cis-feminists typically offer the same two explanations.
Some believe in a genetic basis for the gender binary, arguing that it is a set of innate and immutable traits that are strictly male or female. Yet, this conveniently erases intersex people. Further, not only do levels of sex hormones vary widely across people, sex hormones also fluctuate throughout life.
Others believe gender is a God-given, predetermined trait. Yet, this assumption ignores the entire canon of [Black] feminist theology that debunks religious patriarchy as a farce.
Ironically, not all transfeminists agree on the origin of gender, either. While some challenge transmisogyny with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, others are wary that a misreading of ‘performance’ as theatricality — instead of mere behavioral enactment — suggests that trans-ness is an act or charade, not an embodied sense of identity.
Bottom line: protecting trans people matters more than searching for certainty in any of these stances.
Third, trans-exclusionary feminists of the 21st century are not making history, they are repeating it. They are invoking a legacy, not just reacting to trans people’s relatively recent increased visibility.
For instance, in 1979, Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979), in which she argues that, “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves…Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive.”
A year prior, feminist philosopher Mary Daly — Raymond’s thesis adviser — published Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1987), which argued that sex reassignment surgery could not “produce women” unless it resulted in female chromosomes and a female life history.
More recently, University of Melbourne professor Sheila Jeffreys published Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (2003) and Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (2014) — the former framed trans men as traitors motivated to attain male privilege.
And the effects of transmisogyny can be traced all the way back to the contempt showered upon Mary Jones, perhaps the very first openly-trans Black woman who was criminalized and ridiculed in court.
There is also the vitriol directed at Frances Thompson (b. 1840), who was among the first openly-trans Black women in the U.S.; William Dorsey Swann (b. 1858, MD), the first drag queen within the United States, whose home local officials burned after she died; and Lucy Hicks Anderson (b. 1886, KY), a trans pioneer who was charged with fraud after filing for a financial allotment guaranteed to wives of soldiers.
It is, and always has been, socially acceptable not only to mock or mob Black trans women when they ask, “Ain’t I a woman?”, but also to make them pay with their lives for such authenticity and courage.
We can end this fatal epidemic by realizing transmisogynoir is about preserving patriarchal power, not just rejecting a seemingly foreign identity. Yet this power is such a facade, a slew of scapegoats are necessary to make its ‘naturalness’ believable. The bull’s eye shifts as needed, and we are all fair game.
The similar trajectories of many struggles for freedom prove it is not a question of whether or if the powerful will need another scapegoat, but who will be next — withstanding this requires solidarity.
Perhaps this is what Fannie Lou Hamer meant by, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
