GENE DEMBY, HOST:
Just a heads-up, y'all - this episode contains some salty language, including some slurs.
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DEMBY: What's good? You're listening to CODE SWITCH. I'm Gene Demby.
B A PARKER, HOST:
And I'm B.A. Parker.
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DEMBY: Over the last few years, we've seen several waves of panics around trans people - and trans women, in particular - and today on the show, we're looking at the history of those panics and how they've evolved over time.
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DEMBY: All right. Parker, did you watch "Sex And The City" at all?
PARKER: For sure. I mean, I was, like, 15 or whatever. I wasn't supposed to be watching it.
DEMBY: (Laughter) You was young at fads. OK.
PARKER: And proud of it.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
PARKER: Anyways (laughter), I remember moving to New York City later on and being like, this is nothing like my life in New York - because, like, first of all, you can't get around in heels in New York. They tricked you.
DEMBY: Yeah. I mean, that's why Carrie was always taking cabs - you know what I mean?
PARKER: Yeah. I remember there was a scene in the movie where Carrie, like, finally relents and is, like, slumming it by finally taking the subway.
DEMBY: (Laughter) Anyway, I bring it up because there's a scene I've been thinking about that has aged particularly badly from that show - but it's aged badly in a way that is possibly illuminating.
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JULES GILL-PETERSON: This scene and this whole episode, I think, kind of shows up on, like, you know, cringiest episodes of "Sex And The City" lists that, you know, get published online every so often.
PARKER: Wait, Gene, who's that?
DEMBY: Oh, that's...
GILL-PETERSON: I'm Jules Gill-Peterson. I'm a historian by day - not sure what that means I am by night.
DEMBY: But back to this episode of "Sex And The City.".
GILL-PETERSON: Samantha is relocating to the Meatpacking District. You know, that's a big, bold move...
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GILL-PETERSON: ...At this time period for her, as kind of a rich, white New York socialite, and anyways, it turns out that there are some girls on the street.
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SARAH JESSICA PARKER: (As Carrie Bradshaw) There they were - Samantha's friendly neighborhood preop transsexual hookers - half man, half woman, totally annoying.
GILL-PETERSON: But there's one scene in particular where she's in bed with her boyfriend. You know, they're carrying on outside, interrupting her private moment, and she not only opens the window to yell at them, but...
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I'm going to come up there and kick your a**.
GILL-PETERSON: ...Like, fills a pot with water and throws it - the water - onto one of them...
DEMBY: Oh, my God.
GILL-PETERSON: ...Kind of triumphantly.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Come on, ladies, let's move it along.
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, and, like, the scene kind of ends with the cops showing up.
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KIM CATTRALL: (As Samantha Jones) You heard the man. Move it along.
GILL-PETERSON: Coming back to it in recent years and actually sitting down and watching the whole episode, I was like, OK, yes, this is really cringey - but weirdly enough, what stuck out to me was just how blatant it all was.
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CATTRALL: (As Samantha Jones) I am paying a fortune to live in a neighborhood that's trendy by day and tranny by night.
GILL-PETERSON: Even though it's terrible, it just felt really clarified to me, and so, like - I don't know. It's a weird reaction to have, but it just sort of felt like, oh, I get it now. I see what's going on here, even underneath the so-called humor.
DEMBY: So Jules - she teaches U.S. history at Johns Hopkins.
GILL-PETERSON: Specifically, trans history.
DEMBY: And she recently wrote a book called "A Short History Of Trans Misogyny." And in that book, she talks about this scene, and the point she's making is that one of the really big things that's changed in the 20 years since that episode aired...
PARKER: Wow, has it really been 20 years?
DEMBY: It's really scary to think about. Oh, my God. But Jules said that the way we talk about those women, those Black, trans women that Samantha called the cops on - you know, in that show, they were only kind of comic relief, or used to show the quirky, local flavor in New York City. We've moved away from that.
GILL-PETERSON: There has been this really huge shift in the content of representation in the media, of particularly Black, trans women. This kind of, like, growing attention and fascination, and kind of this - I don't know, this kind of campaign to humanize, and to think about suffering and violence, has sort of replaced the sort of impetus to make fun of and demean in the first place, and I think there's also been this message that, like, the point is to pay attention, and I don't know that I agree. I'm not sure just paying attention to something does anything, and actually, in some cases, I think it kind of extends that dehumanization. It suggests that to be, you know, a Black, trans woman is primarily to be a victim of violence, and that itself is just, like, a dehumanizing proposition.
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DEMBY: And so that's what we're getting into today because Jules says panics about the way people lived and how they performed gender - they go back to the end of the Civil War, and they kind of tend to take the same general shape - and it's a history, she says, that's also about race and place and how those things get policed.
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PARKER: OK, so Gene, you're talking to the historian Jules Gill-Peterson about her book, "A Short History Of Trans Misogyny."
DEMBY: Yeah, and to get into this, we should define some terms.
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DEMBY: You write that the word transgender had two related but distinct births. Can you talk about those two related but diverging origin stories?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, yeah. So, like, this is a story that takes us back to the 1990s. The term transgender has a longer history, but it's a very nerdy, academic subject...
DEMBY: (Laughter).
GILL-PETERSON: ...For another day. But in the '90s, you start to see it emerge in two places. So first, you have, you know, mostly white, queer activists start to use this term transgender in the sense that probably most people would recognize it today - as a kind of nonmedical reclamation of challenging gender norms or departing from your gender assigned at birth without necessarily medically transitioning. And, you know, it's supposedly meant as this kind of challenge to the powers that be and to everyone's gender - right? - to kind of think more complexly, kind of the earliest sort of, like, let's break down the binary kind of thing.
But that's, like, a very small group of people. And honestly, they're marked by their class - it's, like, a lot of artists, a lot of performers, right? And that's, I think, the story that we most tend to hear that this is, like, this progressive, emancipatory movement to challenge gender on behalf of trans people but for everyone. And interestingly, that's, like, a very tiny part.
The second sort of birth of this term that finishes that story is that transgender was also just basically a social service term, right? It's, you know, for HIV-AIDS outreach, workers for public and community health centers, for state and local bureaucracies. And so you have a lot of outreach being done by HIV-AIDS organizations, by health centers and also by sort of the city's kind of public health apparatus. They're the ones that really take on transgender.
It's, like, a term you start seeing in grant applications to get money from federal agencies or from private foundations. And it's this term that is supposed to make clear what's different about those kinds of poor, Black and brown and sex-working kinds of people from specifically gay and lesbian people, who are more middle class and have different living conditions.
And so transgender is really this word that is introduced primarily to stress that gender and sexuality are different, that, you know, to be a trans woman is a matter of your gender - has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Those girls on the street are nothing like the gay men who maybe live, you know, nearby in Chelsea, and that we should treat them separately, right?
But the big problem with that is that the girls on the street did not agree. Like, you had anthropologists and other people out there at the time going and asking these women - or telling them, hi, you're a transgender woman. And they'd be like, what are you talking about (laughter)? Like, yeah, I'm a girl. I'm a woman. But I'm gay. Like, I'm part of the gay world. Gay is sort of like a class status. It denotes your working conditions. It denotes, like, who you know. It denotes what scene you're a part of. It's, like, part of a vibrant working-class world that's existed for decades.
And so transgender kind of comes in, like, to drive a wedge - a class wedge - between those women working the streets and a kind of - increasingly kind of assimilationist, you know, civil rights and gay marriage-oriented middle class that doesn't really want to have anything to do with these poor women, despite the kind of LGBT umbrella going on.
And so I think part of what happened over time is that, like - I mean, I'm editorializing, but that's, like, my real analysis of what happened is this kind of social service model really pathologized those girls on the street - said that they're - they have backwards ideas about themselves. It's actually inappropriate for them to call themselves gay. They need to understand that they have a gender identity, not a sexuality, which is just a very middle-class distinction. They tried to sort of impose that on them. And so I think over time, what you see is kind of a mainstreaming of that transgender ethos in order to basically tell a more feel-good story about what, in reality, is basically a story about gentrification.
DEMBY: You make a point in the book to talk about the constraint of a term like trans, about how it's been used to describe people in different cultural and historical contexts - you know, from - different from the contemporary American one - and people who might not ever describe themselves as such, right?
GILL-PETERSON: Oh, absolutely. I've always just had this intense skepticism about universal terms that are supposed to encompass everyone. And the term trans - the term transgender - you know, has had this incredible career. It has great PR. And the thing that is its greatest strength - that it's supposedly radically inclusive, right? But one of the things that - this is, like, a shift that happened in my teaching over a number of years, when I was just struggling how to kind of introduce students to the term trans. And I just wanted to say, like, I'm not bringing you this concept because, like, this is the end of history. We found the right word...
DEMBY: Right.
GILL-PETERSON: ...I actually started to say, this term is just ethnocentric. And that's a loaded thing to say. But really simply, it comes from one specific culture - right? - like, the United States (laughter). It's an English word, right? It was invented by a single class, you know, of people with a certain degree of education. And then they went on to claim it could apply to anyone in the entire world. And that's just simply not true.
I mean - or if we think about what that means, like, an ethnocentric term is a term that takes one culture's perspective and applies it, you know, as a yardstick to measure the entire rest of the world. And that, to me, is just sort of an elementary kind of point of, like, no. I don't want to do that, you know, even as, like, someone who identifies as trans.
DEMBY: You make a distinction between trans womanhood and transfeminized people. What is the difference there? And I guess why do you think it's so important for us to hold those differences in our head?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah. Well, I will say I'm very reluctant to coin terms (laughter)...
DEMBY: OK.
GILL-PETERSON: ...Because I see it happen every day in academia, and it's - honestly, it's jargon. It can be annoying. It can be abstract. This is, like, the first, I think, and the only time in my career I've ever coined a term.
DEMBY: OK.
GILL-PETERSON: And it was after much reflection. And it came from a confusion and a frustration.
DEMBY: OK.
GILL-PETERSON: Like, we live in a time period where identity is so highly valued. We tend to sort of talk as if identity determines our life experiences. And so if you know what kind of person someone is, then you can know so many things about them. And that kind of language, I think, is often idealistically over-precise. It often misrecognizes how things work.
And so, like, if we want to talk about violence that trans women experience or the general attitudes towards trans women - what we call trans misogyny - right? - the set of attitudes and beliefs about trans women that isolate and degrade them, well, one of the things that's kind of tricky about that is it's a pretty imprecise kind of set of attitudes and presumptions, right? And they don't even always work cleanly. It's like, really hard to transition to be a girl or a woman in the world. There are no resources and support for that. Everything is kind of stacked against you. And so a lot of trans girls and women, you know, take - can take a long time to transition.
Like, for me, it took a really long time. But that doesn't mean I wasn't subject to trans misogyny before I transitioned. And I actually really struggled for years to understand how some of the worst experiences that had ever happened to me in my life were also the experiences where pre-transition, I was actually most treated like a girl or a woman, and that was often like a vector of abuse - that an abusive person kind of could clock me even before I had, you know, understood my own identity and could, quote-unquote, you know, treat me "terribly" - right? - like in a misogynist way. But that was a peculiar kind of treatment, and I was like, well, what is that called?
Right? 'Cause it was not my identity. It was not my visibility as a girl or a woman. It was something else. And so I settled on this term transfeminization, which is just like a verb, right? Think about to transfeminize someone - basically to treat them presumptively as kind of expressing transfemininity, as being a dangerous threat, as, you know, basically being worthy of both a kind of preemptive strike or violence, but also being put down in general.
And I wanted to create this term just to give us something that would allow us to talk about groups of people or individuals who experience transmisogyny without being trans women, either because it's not obvious that they are. We don't know that they are, because they're not out, they haven't transitioned or because they're genuinely not transwomen, right? They're just treated like they are.
DEMBY: So, in the book, you write about some groups that have been transfeminized, and maybe flattened into this category, even though the term trans doesn't speak to how they understand themselves. There are two-spirit people among Indigenous folks in the United States, and then you write about hijras in India.
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, exactly. Right, and, you know, when it comes to hijras, this is a group of people, you know, who have a vast and complex history that I'm certainly not an expert in and couldn't really, you know, boil down, but suffice it to say, you know, in short, they're, you know - in the 19th century, when the British are establishing colonial rule over what is today India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, you know, hijras have been around already for hundreds if not thousands of years as an ascetic or a devoted type of person. There are many different kinds of people who live ascetic lives on the Indian subcontinent. But these are people that the British perceive to be male, people who dressed and lived as girls and women, usually from a young age, and who are initiated into discipleships and have a really important, culturally sanctioned role in supporting the household. And so they might be, you know, around to bless marriages or the birth of a child. And it was sort of, you know, understood that their kind of sacred infertility could enhance the fertility of households. And so they had, like, a role.
You know, they made a living through singing and dancing and providing blessings and a kind of spiritually sanctioned form of begging or receiving alms. And the British, you know, as they're trying to figure out how to kind of pacify - that's their term - you know, Indian society and kind of establish the power of colonial rule in ways more than just pure military violence and repression, end up targeting this group of people because they see them as a threat to colonial order, and they, you know, basically scapegoat them as a population to demonstrate British power and show the rest of - you know, these are the consequences for stepping out of line.
And hijras were seen to step out of line in so many ways. They're accused of being sex workers, even though they weren't at that time. They were accused of seducing, quote-unquote, "normal" men into sodomy and all of these sorts of, you know, accusations that allowed the British ultimately to pass a really strong police law that expanded police powers, targeted hijras for, in fact, genocidal eradication. So there's this kind of long history there in which something that the British see as like gender trouble - right? - gender non-normativity, gender deviance is being categorized that way.
But that's not because it inherently was the case, right? That's a British, like, strategy. That's a British play that they're bringing for another purpose of colonization. It's not because hijras inherently are, you know, this or that gender. It's not because hijras would have considered themselves to be trans. And to this day, they don't necessarily consider themselves to be trans.
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DEMBY: When we come back...
GILL-PETERSON: I think the truth about transfemininity, and particularly working-class sex workers and Black and brown trans women, is that they have not been marginal. They are on people's minds. They are in people's fantasies. They are in people's search histories.
PARKER: That's coming up. Stay with us.
DEMBY: Gene.
PARKER: Parker.
DEMBY: CODE SWITCH.
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PARKER: We've been hearing from Jules Gill-Peterson. She's a historian and the author of the book "A Short History Of Trans Misogyny."
DEMBY: To do that, we started talking about the idea of a trans panic in particular, which is actually a really specific legal defense that is used in courts today.
PARKER: OK. I'll admit I am not familiar with this. So how does this work?
DEMBY: Well, Jules said that, you know, trans panic is a way for somebody who was accused of attacking or even killing a trans person to sometimes get their sentences reduced or even just get acquitted outright for the crimes that they're accused of.
GILL-PETERSON: For someone who's attacked or even maybe killed a trans woman, that involves saying, you know, I - maybe I was on a date with this person or having sex with her or whatever - hanging out with her. And at some point, I learned that she was trans or she disclosed that she was trans. And that revelation, you know, so disturbed me that I basically experienced a kind of legal insanity. And to protect myself from the threat of her existence, you know, I acted. And so, you know, maybe that was wrong and bad, but, like, any reasonable person would do that.
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GILL-PETERSON: I was like, OK, how long has all this stuff been around, (laughter) right? And as I was looking back in time, I was just thumbing through, you know, all of the archival records I've collected. And I was just looking for accounts from trans women, you know, talking about a date gone wrong or, you know, a guy, you know, attacking her in the street. And I could find them, you know, about as far back as the 1890s. But I didn't really see them before that. Like, there were trans women, but they didn't talk about, like, people clocking them in the street. And they didn't talk about going on dates and having to disclose their trans status as something dangerous. It just kind of starts happening in the 1890s.
But what I did see was that these characteristic kind of trans panic scenes were happening earlier - a couple of decades earlier - but they were not happening to trans women. They are happening to people like hijras, whose mere presence in public was panicking. You know, the British state was panicking - right? - colonial authorities. But then I was like, OK, but then what happened, right? Like, sure, a state or a government can treat a whole group prejudicially and target them. But, like, how do we get from there to, you know, women on the street in the 1890s being attacked when they're on a date?
And then I saw, like, through a number of sources that the bridge was really the police and basically that police officers - right? - they are the - sort of the frontlines of the state on the street. And so, of course, you know, in British India, it's police officers' job to stop hijras in public, right? And what they would often do is, you know, detain them in full view of other people and then defeminize them - cut their hair, remove their clothing, rip off their jewelry, force them into men's clothing. And this is happening in the 1870s, 1880s.
At the same time period in the United States, in Canada, you have federal, you know, Indian agents entering reservations where Indigenous groups have been forced to live and singling out people - right? - who might today identify as two-spirit - cutting their hair, removing their jewelry, forcing them into men's clothes, forcing them to do hard labor. This kind of trans panic and violence is being executed first by the police. But if you think about the spectacle of it in public, it's happening in plain sight. And you have the police officer demonstrating - kind of like a teacher - on behalf of the state and the law how everyone else is supposed to treat this group of people.
And I think that's actually, you know, kind of the bridge where then you start to see this sort of radiate outward into just everyday life. And you start to see men who are sex work customers or men who are just going on a date - right? - kind of playing the same role. They're acting out a similar violent script that is not the product of their, like, inborn evilness or, like, something psychologically wrong with them. They're actually acting, you know, with impunity informally on behalf of the state.
DEMBY: Yeah. I mean, just listening to you right now makes me think about the story you tell about Mary Jones, right? Can you tell us...
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...About Mary Jones and just her life?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah. I mean, Mary Jones is just one of the most incredible people that you ever get the privilege to meet as a historian or just a reader of U.S. history. So yeah, Mary Jones is really part of a first generation of Black New Yorkers experiencing emancipation. New York state - you know, it took a very long time for New York state to abolish slavery, and it did it in a very conservative way very slowly over many years. But by the time Mary Jones was an adult, she was part of this generation where, you know, all Black New Yorkers were ostensibly free. And so in the run-up to the Civil War, this became a real lightning point.
You know, New York City was the capital of finance and kind of the capital of the industrial North. And so often, you know, white Southern politicians were very resentful of that. There's this whole smear campaign against New York City. And so they'll point to all sorts of things and say, this is not the kind of country we want to have. And one of them is that Black New Yorkers in general live freely - right? - that they're out there. Like, one of them is just that Black New Yorkers are dressed well, right? They're cultural tastemakers. Their music is more popular. Their - you know, their dance styles are more popular. And they're out strolling Broadway, you know, with well-to-do white gentlemen and women as well. And this is terrible - right? - like, in the white supremacist imaginary.
But one of the kinds of people who's out strolling Broadway are sex workers. And Mary Jones is one of them. And she's a pretty - you know, she blends in very well. She passes perfectly, right? And, you know, she gets arrested, yeah, you know, in the 1830s, ostensibly because she had stolen the wallet of a white client. And she's put on trial, and it becomes this huge spectacle in the press.
And like you were saying, what's so fascinating is, like, although supposedly in the course of her arrest, the police officer, you know, finds out that, you know, she has a male body, like, that's not really the spectacle. It's not that she's trans. And under oath in court, by the way, she testifies that - they ask her, like, why do you wear women's clothing? And she says, well, you know, I've always dressed this way among my own people, which is to say amongst free Black people. And she says, in New Orleans, I always dressed this way.
And at the time, yeah, sex work is not illegal, right? And there's no official New York City Police Department. There are private police officers, and that's who arrests her. But she's put on trial. She - you know, she ends up getting convicted. And she is sent upstate to a men's prison, and she gets out later.
But part of what's so fascinating is, one, she's lampooned in the press - this is sort of the disturbing part - as proof of what would happen if slavery were abolished nationwide, that there would be, quote-unquote, "practical amalgamation" - that there would be sex across the color line. And Mary Jones is made to emblematize that because she's actually selling it - right? - and and white men are paying for the privilege.
So the press basically turns her into a satire. There is this, like, incredible image of her that's created after the trial. You know, this picture of a beautiful Black woman dressed very finely. And it says underneath, the man monster. And that kind of juxtaposition is supposed to signal - right? - that it's actually Black women's propriety that is the proof that they are, you know, corrupt and immoral. It's that they could pass so well.
And so part of what really kind of stopped me was I was like, oh, my God, she wasn't clocked, right? Like, her clients didn't know she was trans. And the police didn't know she was trans. In fact, like, no one knew she was trans until she was put on trial and told them. And so I was like, oh, that structure of trans misogyny doesn't exist yet in the 1830s. That trans panic doesn't exist yet, but here is a Black trans woman in this era. It doesn't mean her life was easy. She's part of this, you know, generation that has a certain kind of freedom, kind of like a capitalist freedom, right? In the sort of capitol in the North in New York City. But it's hardly a freedom at all.
DEMBY: You can make your money.
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, she's making money, right? But at the same time, even though she's kind of an entrepreneur of her own self, she is subject to and is basically one of the first people to experience a kind of police violence and carceral violence that is very characteristic of the modern era. So actually, the story of her life sadly is that, over the decades, she's getting arrested more and more and more. It shows up in the press over and over and over and over.
And she becomes a joke. In fact, when other people get arrested and they're, quote-unquote, "cross-dressing," they'll call them Mary Jones. Like, it's like a moniker. And she spent so much of her life upstate in men's prisons, where we can only imagine, you know, what her experience was like. But the one thing that I think is still really powerful, too, is that reference to New Orleans. Like, that's the thing that really caught my eye.
DEMBY: Can you say more about why it caught your eye? Because when you said - when I read it in your book, I was like, OK. So she lived the kind of life that allowed her, in the 1830s, to travel back and forth from New York City to New Orleans, La., like...
GILL-PETERSON: Right?
DEMBY: Like, how - there were so many things you have to hold in your head about, like, just the way she can move through space and what that must have been like. But also, why would a Black person in 1830s, like, voluntarily go to the Deep South. It was fascinating. Yeah.
GILL-PETERSON: I know, right? No. That's exactly what went through my mind, too, because people have been writing about Mary Jones for quite a long time, but no one had ever written about this line in the court testimony. The question that she had been asked was, why do you wear women's clothing? She didn't have to say because I wear it in New Orleans, right? That was totally irrelevant to the case.
DEMBY: Yeah.
GILL-PETERSON: The transcript for her trial is very short, as most antebellum trial transcripts are. So it's like a pretty big deal that she said that, and they wrote it down. And I don't know why. And there's really no way to find out why. And so instead, I chose to imagine that she was trying to communicate something, you know, for - either for posterity or for herself.
And we'll never totally know why. And so instead, I was kind of, you know, able to turn to a really rich and growing field of Black feminist historians and, you know, scholars like Saidiya Hartman, who have really helped kind of flesh out a methodology of speculation - of taking archives that are, you know, very, very sparse and actually still using every methodology in our toolkit to reconstruct as much as possible.
And so what I end up doing in the book, which was really just sort of an immersive exercise for me was, OK, we don't know the details, but let's take it on faith that when she testified that she had been to New Orleans, that it's true. What would it have been like? What would the city have looked like, smelled like? Who might she have met there? Where in the city might she have gone? And what might have drawn her there, right? Maybe she wanted to embrace and dare and live a kind of mobility and freedom that so few people like her had ever done.
And also, if we come back to the 21st century, what does Mary Jones have to tell us about, you know, two centuries of our attention on Black trans women being trained on only the worst things that have ever happened to them and not thinking about their demonstrated courage - right? - their political sophistication, their understanding, their diagnosis of the problems of the American project, right?
And I just think, again, it's like Mary Jones can tell us a lot about the criminalization of sex work, about the advent of trans panic and trans misogyny, you know, the mechanics of law and policing. But there's just so much more there. And although we'll never know the full truth about her, I think that's exactly the point, right? What are we going to do about the fact that we still don't want to know and don't tell the full truth about Black trans women today?
DEMBY: You write that a big part of what animates trans misogyny is a fear of closeness, of proximity - quote, "transfeminity is too sociable, too connected to everyone, too exuberant about stigmatized femininity, and many people fear the excess of transfeminity and sexuality getting too close," end quote. A lot of what we talked about today from "Sex In The City" to Mary Jones is about, you know, air quotes, "respectable society" trying to keep trans women at an arm's length. So how do you think we should be thinking about these ideas of proximity and community differently than we are?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah. Ooh, I love that. I mean, it calls to mind to me what, as a U.S. historian, I might say, is one of the principal kind of creations of the United States. Racial segregation is just one of the enduring forms that this country has promulgated, naturalized, entrenched, exported - you know, not the only place in the world to do it, but, you know, it has really created a system. And part of what racial segregation does is provide all these alibis for how we conceive of community - right? - that you can acknowledge that you live in the same polity as other kinds of people, but you don't have to know them. You don't have to live in the same ZIP code. You don't even have to drive on the same roads as them. You don't have to shop in the same stores. Your kids don't have to go to the same schools, right?
And I really see gender, broadly speaking, as derivative of that racial project. You know, gender does involve segregation as well, but I think, in the U.S., it often ends up kind of working, you know, hand in hand. It's kind of in cahoots with racial segregation. And so when it comes to you, you know, trans misogyny and the way we talk about gender, and, particularly, you know, Black trans women, there is this kind of arm's-length work. I mean, so much about trans people is, like, you don't really know trans people. You've never met them. I mean, there aren't that many of them around, but, like, you just need to think about them differently in your own mind privately and kind of go under that, like, empathy process.
But there is, I think, this real fear of, by sociability - I mean, the fact that, you know, gender, desire - these are things that connect us. And I think the truth about transfemininity, and particularly working-class sex workers and Black and brown trans women, is that they have not been marginal. They have not been hidden off in an underground or just to the side. They have been extremely important to the history of the service economy. They are like the premier sex workers. Like, they have been in position - they have been next to men in power for centuries, like in the nation's capital, you know, all over this country. Like, these women are everywhere, right? They are on people's minds. They are in people's fantasies. They are in people's search histories. They are in people's dating and relationship history. They are not hidden or absent. They have just been secreted and devalued and punished for actually what they really hold, which is quite a lot of power. And that's actually an incredible source of strength.
But I think the first thing we have to do is to admit - right? - that it's everyone else who has been trying to maintain this fiction of separation or an arm's-length relationship. And I think, ultimately, if gender has anything, you know, valuable to teach us, it is radical interdependency. And I think that that could allow us to completely reframe the kind of competing rights framework that we often see today. What I mean by that is that, like, well, there are women's rights and trans rights. And we can only have so many rights, so they're impinging on one another.
And so you'll have anti-trans feminists be like, my womanhood is not secure if a trans woman can play sports or use the bathroom, or frankly, I think, more importantly, if a trans woman is working on the street corner in a neighborhood in my city. Or you have gay men being like, you know, I don't want to be associated with effeminacy, and I don't want to be, you know, libeled by homophobic stereotypes. Or you have straight men who are like, I don't want to acknowledge my desire and interest. I want to disavow those relationships, keep them secret. I don't want it to threaten my masculinity. You know, there's just all of these kinds of ways that people try to refuse that original social relationship they already have to transfemininity.
And so I think if we break through that, we can break out of this kind of competing rights and scarcity framework, and we can start to think about what solidarity looks like, which is to say, like, a politics of solidarity is, I don't share your immediate material interests, but I'm willing to put myself on the line for what you need because I understand, one, that it has inherent value, but also that because one group of people has been so degraded and experienced so much inequity, prioritizing them actually does serve everyone, because if we had created an American society in which Black trans women were genuinely free to enjoy life on their own terms, well, by definition, everyone else would already be well served because that is already the one, you know, group experience that is the most devalued. But we've never actually tried that. And I think if we were to give up the punitive pretense of repressing that and actually think about being in solidarity with those girls, I think we would have, you know, a roadmap to a much less unequal and a much more enjoyable world for everyone.
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DEMBY: Jules Gill-Peterson is a historian at Johns Hopkins University, and she's the author of "A Short History Of Trans Misogyny." Jules, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate you so much.
GILL-PETERSON: Oh, my goodness. Gene, thank you. This has been a fabulous conversation. I'm very grateful.
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DEMBY: And that - that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch - all one word. If email's more your thing, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or, you know, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
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DEMBY: This episode was produced by Jess Kung and Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Leah Donnella, and our engineer was James Willetts.
PARKER: And a big shout-out to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive - Christina Cala, Courtney Stein, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and Lori Lizarraga.
DEMBY: As for me, I'm Gene Demby.
PARKER: And I'm B.A. Parker.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
PARKER: Hydrate.
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DEMBY: Like, are you a Carrie, or are you a Miranda? Or are you a hater of the franchise?
GILL-PETERSON: I feel embarrassed because I think that, ultimately, I'm probably a Miranda, but, like, no offense to the character because, like, you know, I'm a bookish, kind of uptight scholar.
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