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57 3 On the Fear of Small Numbers A Twenty-first-Century Prolegomenon of the U.S. Black Transgender Experience ENOCH H. PAGE AND MATT U. R ICHAR DSON Grateful for an opportunity to frame the debate on Black trans (i.e., transgender and transsexual) challenges, we reject the idea that U.S. Black trans subjects should be observed and studied in isolation. Millions of Blacks share experiences of the African Diaspora and their consequential concerns about sexually racist and gendered practices of oppression. These oppressive practices, to which all Blacks generally are subjected, cause us concern because they worsen Black life, which impacts Black trans subjects, and they routinely manage many processes of the racial state, including industrialization or deindustrialization, medicalization, occupation, education, professionalization, incarceration, militarization , immigration, and deportation. This chapter considers how Black trans subjectivity is constituted through racialized institutional practices that broadly demand from all Blacks their conformity with gendered embodiments of racially disciplined civility. We define Black trans subjectivity as a racialized embodied experience of gender variance that ranges beyond the state’s preferred binary gender code. In addition, we use the term “gender racialization” in reference to a process of divisive naming that is used by the agents and residents of states to mark gendered and sexualized bodies as subjects and objects of racism (a system for inequitably distributing resources to these differently raced marked groups). Thus, we presume that the standards of racialized gendered civility would be quite helpful to the state when it dangerously troubles the Black trans subject. This endeavor presents several major analytical themes we believe most urgently require scholarly attention. Delineating the Population Embodying Trans Subjectivity It is difficult to determine the size of the Black trans population, but it may be safe to estimate a percentage in proportion to the White trans population that is analogous to the percentage of Black U.S. residents (12.3 percent) provided by the 58 ENOCH H. PAGE AND MATT U. RICHARDSON 2000 census as compared to White U.S. residents (77.1 percent). Conway (2001) estimates a prevalence of persons who possess strong cross-gender feelings and longings to be on the order of 1:50 and 1:150 respectively. Conway surmises that between 1 in 200 and 1 in 1,000 people actually make physical transition without surgical intervention; and those who do make transition via surgical intervention are between 1 in 500 and 1 in 2,500 persons. As she explains, many such persons engage in cross-dressing part time and adopt a full-time gender-variant persona (i.e., neither male nor female), and many have intense transsexual feelings and prefer to be the other gender if possible. The Colonizing Discipline of Anti-Black Transphobia Regardless of their class position, Black transpeople as a diverse and small segment of the United States and global population are questing for an elusive cultural citizenship in ways constrained by the state-imposed discipline of anti-Black transphobic and/or homophobic attitudes and actions. As Gilman argues, the Black female body becomes the past and present lens through which forms of deviant White female sexuality are viewed (Ifekwunigwe, 1999). This is significant because Black trans subjects generally transgress racialized gender boundaries by moving out of and/or into feminine forms of racialized gender expression. Limiting options for work according to this calculus is just one way that the state disciplines minorities into acceptably and unacceptably gendered modes of racial subjection. In whatever domain of social life it occurs, racial discipline normatively confines biological males to expressing racialized masculinity and biological females to expressing racialized femininity (Page, 2006). Confirming this analytical model, Ferguson argues that “contemporary state formations lubricate the mobility of capital by enlisting middle-class minorities ” through getting them to join the capitalist project that sustains White male supremacy. In the wake of signing on to varying degrees of Whiteness, the “minority middle classes ascend to power through appeals to normativity and thus become the regulators of working-class racial, gender and sexual differences” (Ferguson, 200, pp. 29, 17). Along these same lines, we suggest that Black middle-class subjects who enact this survival strategy are trying to avoid the capitalist delineation of some bodies as being less worthy than others (Bhattacharyya, Gabriel & Small, 2002, p. 5). We further observe that African diasporic subjects generally build lives within these postcapitalist relations of production that, in Ferguson’s terms, are “characterized by the normalization of racialized...

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