"Trans Literature" is definitely a thing now -- a distinct genre of thinking. The genre divides into three sub-genres, I think: the confessional autobiography, the manifesto, and the theoretical treatise. Each of these sub-genres has its set of canonical texts (for example, respectively, Jennifer Finney Boylan's "She's Not There", Julia Serano's "Whipping Girl", and Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble"). But it is rare to see a work that mixes personal testimony, political seriousness, and analytic rigor in equal measure. (The latter is especially hard to find, as most trans "theory" takes its stylistic cue from postmodern philosophy and feminism. While both these sources have many virtues, clarity of expression is not one of them.)
The great merit of Rachel Anne Williams's "Transgressive" is that she DOES manage to combine these sub-genres, and does so with wit and panache. An expansion of her blog posts, "Transgressive"'s topics range from the harangue of "passing", the devaluing of feminine "softness", dysphoria as a symptom of modernity, the incoherence of "autogynephilia", the fetishization of transwomen's bodies, and many more.
Williams's chapter, "Gender Agnosticism", expresses, I think the key idea of the book, which is that "gender" is not the kind of hard-edged concept that many of us, whether "gender essentialists" or "gender-critical" feminists seem to take it to be. Is being trans something you clearly know -- you identify as either one side or the other of the gender binary, even as your self-identification does not match your gender assigned at birth? Or is gender a sheerly conventional notion, a performance that can be modified or discarded at will? Williams questions any simple formula for pinning down "gender", for coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for applying the concept and making the gender-judgment "male" and "female". Gender agnosticism is an admission that "gender", "Gender identity", and "transgender" are essentially ambiguous concepts, the borders of which may be real but are also quite fuzzy and indistinct, something like a Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" that resists neat, formulaic definition. She proceeds phenomenologically by asking the question: if you are trans, must you know it immediately and non-inferentially, as a person "born in the wrong body"? Maybe -- there are plenty of transpersons who describe their gender in precisely that way using that metaphor. But then again maybe not. There is no necessity at work here. Williams cites her own experience as a counterexample, gradually coming to the realization that she was trans and needed to transition medically. Is the desire for medical transition or the presence of gender dysphoria the single criterion for being trans? Again, no: it can be but it may not be. Williams shifts our attention away from abstract ideas of "gender" and "trans-ness" toward the concrete details of particular cases. "Gender Agnosticism" rejects certain knowledge of what counts as "gender", and even what one's own gender is: certainty does not apply here, and while that does not make "gender" meaningless or arbitrary, it does acknowledge it's ambiguity and messiness. Gender is less something known than something lived.
In short, this is a wonderful book, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly to transwomen and transmen, to philosophers in either the analytic or continental leagues, and to cis allies and the gender-curious. --LMN
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- Heather GrayReviewed in Canada on May 23, 2019
Complex and nuanced perspectives; accessible and engaging writing
