Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa

Conclusion: “Extra-Transsexual” Meanings and Transgender Politics

Conclusion “Extra-Transsexual” Meanings and Transgender Politics In the 1990s and early 2000s, the word “transgender” was rarely spoken in South Africa. Gender liminality was largely medicalized and criminalized , and it fell outside the purview of activism. In interviews, doctors told me stories of celebratory parties thrown for their postoperative patients, while self-identified transsexuals shared concerns about their inabilities to attain legal documentation and their forced and botched surgeries. Over the following ten years of transition, concerns and connections shifted; increasingly, transsexuals who could afford to do so traveled outside of South Africa (especially to Asia) to attain surgeries, while activists advocated for South Africans at the margins of gender as part of a nascent self-defined transgender sociopolitical movement. Simultaneously those at the borders of gender and sexuality have faced escalations in sexual violence as their legal rights have increased during the transition to democracy. How and why have issues facing gender liminal South Africans shifted since the end of apartheid? What does it mean for South Africans to define their gendered identifications both in collaboration with and opposition to those in the global North? And how are activists advocating for the raced and classed concerns of those who do not clearly fall within gendered binaries? Sex in Transition concludes by discussing these questions, as well as the ways that the paradoxes of gender, sex, and race illuminate what South African legal scholar Angelo Pantazis terms “extra-transsexual meanings—meanings for people who are not transsexuals” (1997: 468). Pantazis highlights how South African opposition to legal recognition of transsexuals was based in fears of the radical implications of such meanings : “the law has been against the recognition of transsexualism precisely because it perceives the extra-transsexual meanings and seeks to control them” (ibid.). He suggests that legal approaches have largely endeavored 231 232 / Sex in Transition “to pathologize, to minoritize, and only then to sympathize and legalize ” (470). As this text has demonstrated, extra-transsexual meanings are those with significance for both gender liminal communities and for cisgender people, as well as for broader understandings of gender.1 Here, I ask about the potentials and pitfalls of “extra-transsexual meanings ” through an analysis of the burgeoning transgender movement in South Africa. “Transgender” is a term with growing significance in the global South that can function paradoxically as a community-building tool and Northern imposition simultaneously. This Conclusion queries the implications and importance of bringing attention to gendered discrimination , and the possibilities of such work to effect change in all South Africans’ lives. I also return to the concept of transition articulated throughout this text here. As the range of conundrums explored in the chapters of Sex in Transition indicate, gender liminality takes many forms. David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (2007) describes the nuances of this concept, based on his work in New York City: “Transition” is a complicated idea, one which often refers to someone’s physical transition, through sex reassignment surgery, from one gender position to another. But transition does not necessarily require or imply surgery. One can begin transition by taking hormones, or transition by adopting one’s desired gender in one’s workplace or at home through more mundane technologies of clothing. The paths to transition are as varied and complex as the lives that undergo this shift. (Valentine 2007: 258n5) As chapters have focused centrally on paradoxes and questions, not particular subjects or communities, the range of “transitioning” in South Africa emerged here. Gendered transitions linked to South African histories , and especially the transition from apartheid to democracy, have been shown through changing concepts of “sex” and “transsexual”; through the parameters of medical experimentation; through necropolitical narratives of those who plan their own gender transitions; through the imposition of concepts of stabane; and through the production of race through drag. Taken together, these interventions help us think about “sex in transition” in both senses—both sex as it changes for individuals and sex during the political transition. Conclusion / 233 Sex in Transition has addressed and put into conversation theories from the global North and South, testing the ways that well-known theorists such as Foucault, Butler, and Mbembe have produced work that travels spatially and temporally in concepts such as biopower, performativity , and necropolitics. But perhaps the most crucial parts of the theoretical pastiche woven together in this text are the complexity and multifaceted contributions of lesser...