The Trans Woman of Color's History of Sexuality

Abstract

I n s e a s o n 3 o f S e x a n d t h e C i t y ( 200 0 ) , Samantha moves into a $7,000 a month apartment in New York City’s rapidly gentrifying Meatpacking District. In a series of now infamous scenes, she confronts a trio of Black trans women whose sex work in the early hours of the morning is driving her to open hysteria. “I didn’t pay a fortune to live in a neighborhood that’s trendy by day and tranny by night,” Samantha exclaims at brunch. Her first attempt to resolve the issue is to patronize the women by complimenting their looks before asking if they would kindly move to another block. (Narrates Carrie Bradshaw: “Samantha always knew how to get her way with men, even if they were half-women.”) But when they return and are loud enough to stall an orgasm with her boyfriend, Samantha opens her bedroom window, screams, “Shut up, you bitches! I called the cops!” and hurls a pot of water onto one of them. “I am a tax-paying citizen and a member of the Young Women’s Business Association! I don’t have to put up with this!” she rants to herself before launching the liquid projectile. A police car then appears on the street, and Samantha watches, triumphantly, as the Black trans women move on. The episode, as contemporary devotees of the series openly admit, hasn’t aged especially well over the past twenty years.1 When the series was given a sequel, And Just Like That, Kim Cattrall, who played Samantha, chose not to return. But what that temporal marker of not ageing well signifies, I gather, is that the conventions of representing trans people, especially Black trans women, have since traversed the arc of the so-called trans tipping point, where framing racialized trans femininity and sex work as the butts of jokes colludes with actual social death and material vulnerability.2 To that we might add that trans women are the subject of an avalanche of contemporary moral panics that trade in even more vicious fantasies of