Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law by Isaac West (review)

Transgender legal issues represent an elaborate nexus of discursive power, material realities, and theoretical intrigue. Isaac West’s Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law joins work such as Paisley Currah, Richard Juang, and Shannon Minter’s Transgender Rights and Dean Spade’s Normal Life to offer an insightful engagement with the legal entanglements of transgender phenomena.¹ As the pluralization of “citizenship” in the book’s title suggests, West employs citizenship in a broad and inclusive manner and he approaches the topic from a number of perspectives. Each of the chapters of the book provides a valuable perspective on transgender citizenship by focusing on divergent cases in which individuals and groups negotiate transgender legal discourse. These chapters are organized by scope, moving from an individual activist’s experience, through examples of university, city, and federal activism. The book focuses on the “mobilizations of legal discourses in everyday life” (18) in order to make new arguments about agency, identity politics, and performative articulations of the law.

The first chapter considers the activist agency that Debbie Mayne deployed to challenge legal barriers limiting her safe use of public restrooms. Methodologically distinct from the rest of the book, this chapter uses archival research on Mayne’s personal correspondence to complicate the limiting public record that is only legible through legal discourse. This methodology becomes a guiding argument in the chapter as West uses Mayne’s “hidden transcript” to reveal her “performative repertoire” of activist strategies (43). The archival research West draws upon provides an intriguing, albeit brief, glimpse into the richness of Mayne’s correspondence.

The three subsequent chapters focus on three different sites where activists attempt to shift the legal landscape to render it more amenable to transgender people. To elucidate the productive potential of queer coalitional politics, West discusses a student organization formed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR), which ran a successful campaign to improve the accessibility of public bathrooms for gender nonconforming people and people with disabilities. PISSAR’s work, as West points out, shows how public restrooms exemplify the “infusion of cultural norms into architecture,” which has parallel impacts on seemingly disparate communities (67). In the chapter that follows, West discusses his own involvement in advocacy efforts to amend the Human Rights Ordinance of the city of Bloomington, Indiana, to include gender expression. Although drawing heavily upon critical legal studies, West offers a queer portrait of this type of activism by suggesting that “advocates work within, outside, and against the law, sometimes vacillating between positions at a moment’s notice” (95). This type of vacillation is complicated further by West’s final chapter, which examines the federal legal battle for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). West reads the failure to pass ENDA as an example of public contestations and negotiations of the law, and ultimately, as a success for queer identity politics.

The sheer breadth of these sites showcases the ambitiousness of the project and the scope of the author’s treatment of citizenship. Although the book’s range is undoubtedly a strength, it presents the significant challenge of forging the various examples into a unified narrative, particularly given the use of divergent methodological approaches. When West discusses his own activist involvement in the attempt to change Bloomington’s Human Rights Ordinance, readers may be curious to more fully understand the author’s position and relationship to transgender citizenship. By the conclusion of the book, West summarizes his argument by saying, “As trans people performatively do and undo the law through their quotidian practices, the law is revealed to be a set of unstable signifiers continually modified through their invocation” (183). Although West capably supports this depiction of the law, it remains unclear whether “trans people” are required to performatively enact transgender citizenship or, given his own involvement in transgender rights activism, whether this enactment of the law is more widely available...