The Impossible Trans Body: Non/Images of Gender in Regimes of Whiteness

In 2022, amid escalating verbal and physical attacks on transgender people, conservative news magazine The Post Millennial shared the story of Julie Jaman, who was banned from the Port Townsend YMCA after reporting a trans woman for using the locker room. Jaman recalls “hear[ing] a male voice” while showering after her regular swim (Nightingale, 2022). That voice belonged to Clementine Adams, a trans woman who was chaperoning girls from the day camp. The story circulated through conservative media, resulting in a petition to “Let Julie Swim.” A local news site, the Port Townsend Free Press, declared, “Mountain View Pool No Longer Safe for Many Women and Girls” (Scaratino, 2022). As with most anti-trans dog whistles, many accounts of Jaman’s story suggest that Adams’s mere presence is inherently harmful. This is to say: transphobic rhetoric locates the threat of trans people not in any action but in our very bodies. Throughout conservative coverage of Jaman’s story, Adams does not interact with the girls in the locker room, but the idea of her gender-nonconforming body appears as reason enough for Jaman’s outrage. The YMCA clarified that Adams was fulfilling her job as an employee and escorting the youth under her supervision (Grey, 2022). However, The Post Millennial still conjures a sense of menace by describing Jaman “hidden behind thin, sheer shower curtains,” as if trying to escape some monster. From this hiding place, Jaman asked, “Do you have a penis?”—a question that repeats throughout conservative reports. A U.K.-based newspaper, The Spectator, devoted an entire article to speculating about Adams’s genitalia and arguing for mandatory genital checks (Mull, 2022). The imagined phallus—one that no one in this locker room actually saw—conspires with gender essentialism to render Adams’s body as an inherent violation of the “women’s” space. This brief article explores the trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) body as what Adela Licona (2018) calls a non/image: a “visual and affective rhetorical claim without (the need for) an actual referent” (p. 169). I use TGNC here specifically to emphasize nonconformity. Anti-trans rhetorics frequently invoke the gender-transgressive body as a sign of moral perversion. In this case, Adams’s mere presence—regardless of her actions or corporeality—justifies anti-trans hostility. In what follows, I provide a brief exploration of the “monstrous” TGNC body as a non/image, which renders all trans people as inherent aberrations regardless of what shape or actions our bodies take. The contradictions that shape the non/image demonstrate the impossibility of