If you’re familiar with trans spaces, you’re probably aware of the concept of “passing”. For those who are out of the loop though, passing is when a trans person can “pass” as a cis person to a generic passerby. Essentially it’s when you cannot be visibly identified as non-normative by most people.
This concept comes as a result of the heavy brutalization and social ostracization trans people are subjected to globally every day. To avoid being brutalized themselves, trans people often adopt personality traits and appearances that are extreme and traditional in their relation to gender and gender roles, a response that both relieves and worsens repression of trans people in one fell swoop.
The problem with passing of course is that cisheteronormative society doesnt care if you pass on the surface, but rather needs an Other, something alien and invading, in order to justify their brutal conformity to their norms. This conformity of course is imposed not on the trans Other at all, since to be effective, the Other must be made alien, but is imposed on the already cisheteronormative, who then perpetuate the Othering of those even moderately non-conforming.
This is, as always, compounded by the dual problems of capitalism and the state. The state’s militant arm of control, the police, have a long history of using the considerable resources at their command to make life hell for groups at the margins of society, in particular Queers building communities at the fringes. Capitalism both co-opts and denies non-conforming identity, marketing us expensive product as a means of expression while funding hate groups and anti-Queer legislation. The power of capitalist reinforcing of cisheteronormative conformity as the only way to exist within society cannot be overstated.
It is the supreme law that has permeated through the whole of modern society that a trans person must be striving for the unattainable and undesirable goal of cisheteronormative conformism by any means available, and trans communities have not avoided this societal sentiment at all. In fact in many cases trans communities act to reinforce hopeless conformism more than anyone. This must be countered if we are to make any headway against cisheteronormativity. To “pass” cannot continue to be passed off as the goal of trans existence if we wish to become a force for real change.
To be non conforming as a community is needed and it represents a radical shift. Turning away from the politics of conformity and assimilation and towards the politics of the Queer insurrection is the only way to effectively combat the rampant liberalism and cisheteronormativity we see in our communities and our culture. We can no longer wait for acceptance we know will never come, but we must embrace the fringes and the radical associations we can build today. In the words of the Invisible Committee;
To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection. It is to once again hear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.
We’re setting out from a point of extreme isolation, of extreme weakness. An insurrectional process must be built from the ground up. Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary.
The wait must end comrades, and the insurrection must be realized in a new and non conforming forms if it is to succeed and live on!
