Strange Tensions

Abstract

This article analyzes the history of trans identities and intersex subjectivities to understand intersex and trans intercommunity relations and identify coalitional strategies. Citing Black and postcolonial studies scholars such as Riley C. Snorton and Zine Magubane, it concludes that trans identity and intersex subjectivity share a colonial racial history. Specifically, it builds on Snorton's “analysis of gender as a racial arrangement wherein the fungibility of captive flesh produced a context for understanding sex and gender as mutable and subject to rearrangement in medicine and law” to account for how the same racial arrangement of gender also formed intersex subjectivity. Trans identity and intersex subjectivity, then, have roots in colonialism and slavery, and the ungendering of Black flesh made interchangeable goods. This history has left a legacy of intercommunity tension in the form of whiteness. Consequently, addressing sex/gender as a racial arrangement is necessary to address tensions and build coalitions.