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>> 163 5 In Defense of an Impure Transgender Politics Up to this point we have engaged how trans people employ legal discourses and redeploy the terms of these rhetorical cultures across a variety of domains. In addition to efforts to gain official state recognition, trans people negotiate the legal regulation of their bodies, the spaces in which they work and live, and others’ understandings of their claims to citizenship. Far from uncritically adopting the normativities undergirding legal discourses, the trans people featured thus far demonstrate a dynamic relationship with these norms as they rework them in their activism and everyday lives. By privileging the law as an everyday practice of managing stranger-relationalities rather than an external set of rules and regulations created by legislatures and courts, we gain a more expansive view of how the law operates in and through cultural flows of meaning-making. If we avoid the reductionist logics of representation, wherein legal texts are accepted as deterministic discursive arrangements of culture, and aim instead to account for how it is that the law is a lived experience facilitated, but not foreclosed, by these conditions of possibility, a different evaluation of legal agencies becomes available to us. In these concluding pages, I will revisit some of the themes and concepts from previous chapters to lay the foundation for some speculative comments on the prospects of trans identities and politics. My muse is a magazine cover image and the associated feature story in the New Republic (TNR) on the future of transgender rights advocacy. On the one hand, the image and story can be read as somewhat normative, from the trans person featured on the cover to the linking together of transgender and previous civil rights movements to the rehearsal of expected narratives about transgender life experiences. On the other hand, the 164 > 165 corner identifying this issue as the summer books issue of the magazine. Berkley’s hair is styled so as to give the appearance of being disheveled, although we know from the sheen of styling products the hair has been pushed forward purposefully, and the noticeable stubble above the lip completes the look of what would be an otherwise unremarkable photograph of a trendy, young, svelte, light-olive skinned man, were it not for the block lettered caption: “HE WAS BORN IN A WOMAN’S BODY. NOW HE IS A SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN.” This caption intends to shock the reader in at least two ways—first, by revealing Berkley’s trans identification through the trope of “being born in the wrong body,” and second, by announcing Berkley’s vexed legal status, a fact made all the more shocking because of the assumed privilege men of a certain race and class tend to enjoy. Framing Berkley’s face, the cover encourages the assumed cisgender viewer to read the straightforward stare as a demand for equality and recognition—I say “assumed cisgender viewer” because the tone implied by the subsequent phrase on the cover “Welcome to America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle” presumes a lack of familiarity with the topic. The intended juxtaposition between text and photo dislodges the visual as a transparent truth about sex and gender as it crudely reminds us Berkley was a woman and is now a man. (Berkley is not the focus of the essay so it is not clear if Berkley would narrate identity within this linear logic of female to male.) Berkley’s image is not threatening in the usual sense of the word: he appears to be a typical man, not the conservative fantasy of the mentally ill sexual pervert who preys on children or women in bathrooms; nor is Berkley projecting anger or rage. For precisely these reasons, then, we might read the image as threatening due the ways in which it asks uninformed or unsupportive cisgender viewers to question their own investments in denying their fellow transgender citizens full and equal treatment under the law. On what basis and to what ends could one justify looking Berkley in the eyes and arguing against access to legal protections from discrimination and violence? There are, of course, other possible readings of this cover and the accompanying article. For some, Berkley’s image may appear to be not queer enough to sustain an important intervention into public culture. His dress, pose, and overall appearance do not necessarily initiate a sustained critique of gender norms or markers. Without reading the caption identifying Berkley as transgender, one could interpret this image...

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