Recently I became aware that Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, is anti-transgender. (See his tweets.) I looked up more about him, and discovered that he'd co-authored a book with Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, 2000).
The subtitle was more or less what I wanted to ask him: why do people say anti-transgender things?
So I bought a copy of the book. One of my takeaways is how he structured it.
Part I discusses "free speech and the nature of history." This includes chapters on "the freedom of speech that must be considered when dealing with Holocaust denial, and why we need to respond" and "the nature of history, the difference between history and pseudohistory, and ways of knowing that anything in the past happened," as well as whether it's possible to say that any statement about real-world events is more true than another.
Part II examines "the denial movement" itself, including "personalities and organizations" and "ideological and political motives and the larger social context" as well as "the flaws, fallacies, and failings in their arguments".
Part III looks specifically at "the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests" while refuting those claims with "historical facts" and "show[ing] how we know that the Holocaust happened." One chapter is allocated to each of these false claims. They are "the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork"; "the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude"; and "the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than an unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war."
Part IV is a reframe. There, "we pull back to look at the bigger picture of Holocaust studies." Historians and the public do engage in "'history wars' in various fields," and these dialogues aren't the same as "what the Holocaust deniers are doing."
Hypothetically, if someone wanted to write a book about why people say anti-transgender things, this would be one way to organize it, yes? Maybe I'll do so. Or maybe you, dear reader, will do it first.
"The trans and nonbinary is the rejection of gender as an organizing apparatus for one's subjectivity. It is the refusal to be required to show up in the world on gendered grounds in order to show up in the world at all." (Dr. Marquis Bey, 19:37–19:50)
On definitions:
Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" was a talk she gave in San Francisco in 1983 and later revised to publish as an essay. "A 'closed text,'" she suggests, "is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the 'open text,' meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work." Whether a text has formal structure isn't the same as whether its meaning is open or closed. In fact, certain kinds of structures may help to open up the text.
Hejinian says:
"Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children. Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement producing a gap.
* * *
Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition."
Hil Malatino's Trans Care (2020): "I will never argue against the importance of articulating gender identity... But frustration persists, because whenever I articulate the spectrum, I brush up against the ineffable. ... The identities we claim, no matter how complex our list of modifiers, always seem to say both much more and much less than I'd like."
Something else I'd add to a book on transgender epistemology is why cis people feel entitled to know facts about transgender people, including whether a specific person is trans at all.
"Complete and total strangers, acquaintances, and even friends don’t have a 'right' to know if someone is trans any more than they have a 'right' to know if someone has an 'innie' bellybutton or an 'outie' bellybutton, whether they have webbed feet, or whether they’re circumcised. These are personal matters that can be shared on a need-to-know basis. Are there situations where someone probably should tell another person that they’re trans? Absolutely. I can think of several. But 'you happen to work in the same office' is not one of them."
— CNN's Anti-Trans Bias Shines Through, Refuses to Update Transphobic Headline: Two CNN reporters cozy with the Florida GOP obscure the truth behind one of the more horrific anti-trans policies to be implemented in the country. Parker Molloy, The Present Age, February 2, 2024
From a cisgenderist epistemological perspective, one might jump to asking: What are those hypothetical situations in which a trans person is obligated to disclose their identity to a cis person, or in which the cis person might be harmed if they don't?
But from a trans perspective, I'd dwell a bit more on the vastly greater number of situations in which no one has a right to know if you're trans, your transness doesn't hurt them, and you don't have to tell them.
Moving toward transgender epistemology is about making that shift in perspective, framing, and emphasis.
Moreover, why cis people should consider themselves experts:
There is, Julia Serano writes, a "false impression that cissexual 'experts' (whether academic or clinical) are capable of understanding transsexuality better than transsexuals themselves — an idea that is as problematic as suggesting that male 'experts' can understand womanhood better than women, or that heterosexual 'experts' can understand homosexuality better than gays and lesbians."
(Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, "Chapter 7: Pathological Science," first published 2007, 3rd edition published 2024.)
In the following chapter (Chapter 8: Dismantling Cissexual Privilege), Serano also notes that many cis people "assume that they are infallible in their ability to assign genders to other people," and so they "develop an overactive sense of cissexual gender entitlement. This goes beyond a sense of self-ownership regarding their own gender, and broaches territory in which they consider themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of which people are allowed to call themselves women or men."
Add systems thinking too: seeing systems rather than the individuals within the systems.
Anything that's not corpus linguistics.
Also, speaking of how we study the historical archive:
"How do we care for these traces of past lives that haunt us in ways that are loving, insofar as they offer a balm through providing evidence of past trans flourishing and joy, and terrifying, because they testify to the conditions of intensive violence that these subjects lived within and through? How do we care for these ghosts that take such care of us?"
— Hil Malatino (Trans Care, University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
Also: "We need to address what constrains care, what marks certain bodies and subjectivities as (un)deserving of it, and call attention to the epistemologies, systems, and technologies that contribute to such unjust apportioning, even as we must navigate them in order to get (some of) our needs met." (Malatino)
Also:
"Four principles to create a life-serving economy
* * *
#1: Be clear on the changes we seek
* * *
#2: Be accountable to someone else
* * *
#3: Find your people (human and otherwise)
* * *
#4: Move towards the light"
— from a March 22, 2024 email sent by B. Lorraine Smith
TL;DR! — Why We Need a Specifically Trans Epistemology, Riki Wilchins, Medium, March 7, 2024
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