Abstract
Recent legislation targeting transgender individuals has relied on trans-antagonistic discourses depicting transgender communities as led by a perverse ideology and as attaining the status of a cult. Trans-affirming opponents to these laws have responded with a biopolitical analysis suggesting that the state is denying the means of life to a marginalized group or that right-wing pundits are manufacturing a transgender crisis to expand state power via a state of exception. However, trans-affirming activists overlook political economy in their biopolitical analysis such that both these legislative attacks and their trans-affirming opposition validate late capitalism. In the following, I use post-Marxist theory to reveal a catch-22 whereby both anti-transgender legislation and its ostensible opponents uphold neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy. Whereas anti-transgender legislation appears aligned with neoliberal austerity and the seemingly implacable privatization of (previously) public space, opponents continue to recapitulate medicalizing narratives for transgender subjects that are bound up in late capitalist tensions and erase class within these discourses (plausibly resourcing transgender subjects who become “respectable” through whiteness and wealth). In the process, trans anti-capitalist activisms are overshadowed or occluded, perhaps constituting a trans capitalist realism in which trans anti-capitalism is rendered impossible. Implications for global gender nonconforming communities are explored within the context of US and Global North cultural imperialisms, and more explicitly leftist opposition to legislative attacks are reviewed.
