Trans* of color im/possibilities in trans language activism

In “Trans Language Activism and Intersectional Coalitions,” Lal Zimman offered a compelling account of the complexities and challenges of trans language activism in the current political moment. Zimman urged that “trans people's linguistic issues are best addressed as part of coalitions built on intersectional models of sociolinguistic justice” because “transphobia's impacts are felt most intensely when coarticulated with other axes of oppression.” However, Zimman importantly demonstrated that “the most visible and well-resourced types of trans (language) activism tend to represent the perspectives of relatively privileged trans people, in which racism, colonialism, ableism, classism, and other kinds of subjugation can easily manifest.” Indeed, we find ourselves in the middle of many binds, and the stakes are high. How do we carefully critique dominant trans language activism when all trans people are under attack? How do we contest invisibilization without falling into the many traps of visibility? How do we advance activist efforts without prioritizing the most privileged activists? How can we center the most marginalized without objectifying and exploiting them?

Although I alone cannot answer all of these questions (here or elsewhere), I offer something that I believe Zimman sets the foundation for and gestures to in this piece: the possibility that in the pitfalls and failures of dominant trans language activism lie queer, radical, and liberatory possibilities. In a conversation between Green and Bey about the relationship between Black feminist thought and trans* feminism, Green (2017, p. 447) stated, “The fear of losing categories isn't the trap. The trap is believing that these categories have the capacity to deliver us to ourselves fully and wholly.” Green continued: “Identities like language help to bring us closer to a thing or a being, but we never fully arrive at the materiality, the flesh of the matter, and I don't know if we should try to remedy that.”

The youngest interlocutor in my ethnographic research with sex working transgender Latinas in Chicago exemplifies Green's wise words. Mercury is 18 years old and disabled. To describe her gender identity, she uses the words “transgender,” “transgender woman,” “trans femme,” “demi-girl,” “non-binary,” and “woman” interchangeably. To describe her racial identity, she uses the words “Black,” “Black Latina,” “Afro-Latina,” “Afro-Puerto Rican,” and “Puerto Rican” interchangeably. How she articulates her race and gender changes depending on how she feels and who she is speaking to. Yet, she explains that “no one word fits me perfectly.”

Mercury lives in a homeless shelter that is lauded as a model of queer progressiveness, inclusivity, and “intersectionality” in Chicago. The staff, however, construct Mercury as “difficult” and “complicated.” She expresses rage, slips between race and gender categories, and pushes the boundaries around taken-for-granted understandings of “trans,” “Latina,” “Black,” and “disabled.” Not only does she challenge normative notions of gender and race more generally, but also those that attempt to be intersectional but actually police Blackness and fail to account for the movement and ruptures that occur within and between identity categories. To be clear, the punishment for not fitting into normative, and even transnormative, race and gender categories is high. The staff at the homeless shelter often threaten to call the police on Mercury when they view her as “hostile” or “violent.”

At the same time, Mercury takes pleasure in not fitting easily into any one gender or race category. She might identify as Puerto Rican to a staff member one day, but the next day, chastise the same staff member for calling her Puerto Rican and demand she be called Afro-Puerto Rican, and then on another day, clarify that she only identifies as Black and use the opportunity to “educate the staff about not mis-identifying people.” She laughs when telling me about this. This is a way for her to reclaim some power in an otherwise disempowering situation.

When discussing the erasure of Afro-Latinidad/Black-Latinidad, I ask Mercury if it is frustrating that there isn't one racial category that feels right to her. She replies, “I mean, Black Latin Americans don't fit. I don't fit. I don't even fit in with the Black Latin Americans that don't fit. It's not easy, but I don't think fitting in would ever feel good to me.” It is from a state of ontological impossibility that Mercury shows the movements and ruptures that can occur within and between different identity categories and regularly calls out anti-Black racism, colorism, and cisgenderism within Chicago's social service sector. For these reasons, she is a model for trans Black Latina potentiality.

I am reminded of “The X in Latinx Is a Wound, Not a Trend” by Alan Pelaez Lopez. Lopez (2018), a queer Afro-Indigenous artist and scholar, argues that the “X” in “Latinx” signifies the wounds of settler-colonialism, anti-Blackness, feminicides, and the inarticulation of the Latin American experience. Lopez explains, “The ways in which I experience the world cannot be articulated because there is no language in place that contextualizes living through colonialism, anti-Blackness and femicides.” They recognize the importance of calling attention to both systems of oppression and the inarticulations they create, much like Mercury does when moving through labels and calling out staff. Furthermore, Lopez contends that only in recognizing our wounds can we “see ourselves in all of our complexity, history, and to hopefully, imagine a future.”

Inspired by Lopez, Mercury, and Green, I invite us to dwell in the space between the linguistic and the material, and to reposition the im/possibilities of the various binds we find ourselves in as opportunities for trans fugitivity, freedom, and joy. Such work, I argue, has important implications for transgender studies and the more recent field of trans of color critique.

Zimman poses a number of urgent questions at the end of the piece, including “What are the priorities of trans people of color, poor trans people, disabled trans people, and trans people in precarious immigration situations?” My research interlocutors are poor, sex working, transgender, Latinas, many immigrants, and some disabled. In fact, they demonstrate all three challenges outlined by Zimman: (1) They are excluded from more privileged and resourced spaces where dominant trans language and trans language activism circulate, (2) they are policed and penalized by dominant language ideologies in trans language activism and outside of it, and (3) they espouse a variety of responses to and experiences with trans language use. However, it is important to note that they are keenly aware of these realities and, in response, often actively play with linguistic, gendered, and racial systems and categories. As a sociocultural anthropologist, I am interested in trans Latinas’ everyday engagements—which are often playful—with oppressive systems. With/in linguistic, gender, and racial limitations, my interlocutors create possibilities.

For instance, around the time that the Women's March banned pussyhats because the concept “pussy” is purportedly trans-exclusive, the trans Latina sex workers in my research, who have not received genital reconstructive surgeries, regularly talked about their “pussies.” They exposed that cisgenderism, biological determinism, and respectability politics undergird popular feminist and trans-inclusive activism. For them, pussy was not a physical body part synonymous with cisgender vagina, but a variety of body parts, a cluster of meanings—economic, erotic, performative—and a source of power that can “grab back” against cisgenderism and racism more broadly in their everyday lives, as well as white cis-centric feminism and transnormative LGBTQ activism in the post-Trump era. They joked a lot about their pussies and how they can “actually grab back.” Their jokes were funny precisely because they had penises. But instead of a pussy being a contradiction to a penis, I argue that their joking—like larger gendered ideologies held by sex working trans Latina women—allows space for both and challenges cisgenderist assumptions about the body, genitals, and the limits of the words we use to describe genitals (Bolivar, 2021).

My research, more broadly, focuses on how sex working trans Latinas fantasize and manifest other ways of being, knowing, and loving that exist beyond racist-cisgenderism, and beyond transnormativity and normative Latinidad (Bolivar, 2022). BIPOC trans women's everyday engagements with trans activist language and its liberatory potential merit further research. Such research has important implications for transgender studies, especially as it continues to grapple with its racial “issues.”

In the ground-breaking special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly entitled We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies, Ellison et al. (2017, p. 162) called for transgender studies to reckon with how it uses the Black subject “as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.” Since then, Black trans studies and trans of color critique have been blossoming. Vital work has analyzed the “transgender tipping point” and the politics of visibility (Beauchamp, 2019; Glover, 2016; Gossett et al., 2017). Scholars have written about the hypervictimization of trans people of color and their association with death (Stanley, 2021; Vidal-Ortiz, 2009; Westbrook, 2020), via the lens of necropolitics, for example (Snorton & Haritaworn, 2013). However, I argue that by focusing on violence, trans of color critique runs the risk of inadvertently reproducing the hypervictimization of trans people of color, even as it seeks to challenge it. I join in with others—academics, activists, and people who identify neither as academics nor activists—and call for more work on trans of color life, love, and joy. How trans people of color creatively engage with language and language activism is a particularly fruitful way to answer this call. A rich scholarly foundation has already been laid for this work (Bey, 2022; Green & Ellison, 2014; Glover & Glover, 2019; Mendoza, 2023; Santana, 2019; Steele, 2022).

However, as we elevate trans of color life, love, and joy to combat hypervictimization, I caution against reinforcing a second, related stereotypical representation of trans women as super-activists or “revolutionary actors whose every breath is a ready-made utopian longing for freedom” in the words of Gill-Peterson (2023, p. 94). Critical attention to BIPOC trans people's language usage and everyday experiences also helps to get us out of this binaristic bind. For instance, in my own research, my interlocutors’ play with and around racialized and gendered terms, such as “pussy,” is not easily characterized as a direct refusal of racist-cisgenderism and other intersecting systems of oppression but perhaps better understood as a “disidentification” as theorized by Muñoz (2009, p. 12), or “neither attempts to identify with nor reject,” but rather a third strategy that “tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form.” Further, although many of my interlocutors’ words, actions, and fantasies reach toward a world without racist-cisgenderism, sometimes they fall short, reinforcing anti-Black beauty standards, for example. And often, they fall somewhere in between. Recognizing this reality, while vexed, allows sex working trans Latinas to work across the full spectrum of humanity, draws attention to the messy and often painful work of coalition-building, and, of course, the centrality of addressing anti-Blackness in all work toward liberation. Zimman reminds us that “coalition politics are not inherently liberatory, and can be undermined by members’ inability to agree upon shared priorities, unwillingness to recognize complicity in others’ oppression, or reliance on white/settler models of coalitions that ‘absorb’ and ‘obscure’ difference.” Attention to the linguistic issues of trans women of color is also instructive for the difficult, ugly, and yet necessary work required for intersectional coalition-building.

As I underscore Zimman's astute concerns about dominant language activism, and Gill-Peterson's insights about the figure of the trans woman of color activist, I also want to trouble the “activist” label more broadly and acknowledge the linguistic and political creativity of those who do not self-identify as activists. In my own research, this included people whose lives were most precarious, often those struggling with addiction, living on the streets, and thus channeling all of their energy into survival. Although many of the most influential activists have been and are in similar circumstances, I want to draw attention to those who do not identify as activists or have been identified as activists. Perhaps it is with them that some of the most valuable lessons about liberation lie.

Lastly, as we elevate the language and politics of the most marginalized—trans women of color, sex workers, homeless folks, and those struggling with addiction—I also caution against the ever-present threat of appropriation (which exists alongside constant policing) and the feelings of hopelessness it can produce. Gossett et al. (2017) explained that visibility, representation, and appropriation of trans people of color within racial capitalism are often presented as “doors” but are actually “traps.” However, they wrote that “In addition to doors that are always already traps, there are trapdoors, those clever contraptions that are not entrances or exist but rather secret passageways that take you someplace else, often someplace as yet unknown” (p. xxiii). Therefore, following Gossett et al. (2017, p. xx), I invite us to think about the many tensions described by Zimman as “a radical invitation to fantasize and dream otherwise.”

The author declares no conflicts of interest.