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.
Over the past few years the US has witnessed a suite of disparate legislation attacking transgender communities. One prong of these legislative attacks aims to restrict gender-affirming care to the age of majority (Alfonseca 2023), effectively prohibiting transgender youth from accessing medical interventions associated with gender transition, such as hormone therapy, pubertal suppression, and surgery. A second prong prohibits drag performance in “public” venues (that receive financial support from the state), such as libraries, schools, public parks, and places of worship (López Restrepo 2023). Though apparently disparate, these two prongs may be treated together as they present a coordinated attack with transgender subjects as their targets. These proposals emerge from a US political right wing that construes “transgender” (nebulously defined) as a dangerous political ideology, even alleging that gender-affirming care constitutes widespread child abuse (Goodman 2022). For instance, a reporter for the conservative news publication the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles, recently stated during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC, a major fundraising event) that “If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology” (Kilander 2023). Similarly, a commentator for the same publication, Matt Walsh, recently summarized the crisis: “[transgender people] will prey upon my children and try to turn my own sons and daughters into mutilated, mutant, self-loathing, hollow, twisted shells just like themselves. . . . A beautiful and innocent kid one day seemingly out of nowhere, gets sucked into the gender cult and is devoured by it. . . . I would rather be dead than have that happen to my kids” (Walsh 2023).
Insofar as supporters of these legislative measures have explicitly stated a shared political goal of suppressing transgender individuals and communities, these attacks may present an existential threat (Goodman 2023). Transgender advocates note that restricting gender-affirming care to the age of majority may explicitly aim to suppress transgender youths, thereby forestalling these individuals from becoming transgender adults (Jones 2021). Similarly, transgender advocates observe that a broad application of laws prohibiting drag performance may bar transgender individuals from all public life (Goodman 2023). Biopolitical theory foregrounds the framing of existential threat put forth by transgender advocates.1 A classical Foucauldian interpretation would observe that sovereign power—the right to grant or withhold the means of life (i.e., health) —is dispersed through the social body and often enacted through a widespread professional class, in this case health care professionals, especially physicians (Foucault [1963] 1994, [1975] 1990, 2008), such that these laws mark an ironic reassumption of sovereign power by state actors. Following Agamben (1998), these laws represent a sociopolitical situation in which transgender people have become “homo sacer,” individuals whose murder or repression becomes legal through states of exception—crises that legitimize the suspension of ordinary law. It follows from this analytic that the US right wing may precipitate crisis with regard to transgender visibility and representation to suspend the normal operations of law, thereby consolidating political influence. Indeed, eradicating transgender people entirely from public life nearly defines the conditions of “bare life” to which homo sacer is relegated (Agamben 1998), in which case Agamben may have been prescient (it seems much less likely that right-wing pundits explicitly drew from Agamben's corpus, albeit subverting his work as political advice). These legal steps certainly represent innovation over prior state repression of transgender visibility in public. Snorton and Haritaworn (2013), drawing from necropolitics (the purview of the state to withhold the means of life, consigning some constituents to death), suggest that widespread persecution has often served to relegate transgender women of color (who are least able to assimilate into normative, white, womanhood) to sex work or other informal economy (Nuttbrock 2018). They further observe that measures suppressing street sex work, such as “prostitution-free zones” implemented in Washington, DC in 2006, have previously served to erase (visible) transgender people from public life (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). This new escalation, then, likely responds to increased transgender visibility in US public life since 2014, perhaps even representing new surveillance practices enacted by the US security state (Fischer 2019).
A single-minded focus on sovereignty or state repression (exemplified in the political discourse mobilized by transgender advocates) may not fully conceptualize the political risks, though, perhaps overlooking the organization and collusion of US political and economic power (Zinn [1980] 2015; Nonini 2005; Winters and Page 2009; Bashir 2015). Even as biopolitical theorists, drawing from Marxist theory (Nigro 2008; Bidet 2016),often posited the coordination of contemporary social orders as serving or co-evolving with economics (Foucault 2008; Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005, 2011; Bidet 2016; Rao 2015), though “capitalism” was sometimes not well-defined (Mau 2023), contemporary transgender advocates seem to theorize sovereignty as detached from (political) economy. Regardless, post-Marxism, that is, critical readings of Marxist theory, especially regarding twentieth- and twenty-first-century tensions (Therborn 2010), are necessary to fully conceptualize the risk of anti-transgender legal measures.2 In fact, late capitalism has closed any gap between economic and political power, such that the two usually share the same ends (Jameson 1991; Bashir 2015; Caporaso and Levine 1992; Schnellenbach and Schubert 2015). Post-Marxist analysis, then, is critical to conceptualizing how and in which ways these legislative attacks favor late capitalism, a prerequisite for their success in US contexts. In the following, I argue that post-Marxist theoretical tools reveal a catch-22 whereby legislative attacks consolidate late capitalism while provoking a (liberal, progressive) response that colludes in that consolidation. By extension, the political danger of these legislative attacks lies not just in suppressing transgender communities, but also in shoring up late capitalism.3
Transgender Entanglements with Late Capitalism
Prior to these legislative attacks, late capitalism had already pervaded into “transgender” practices and praxis,4 as transgender individuals serve as both consumer and worker under this economic system. Insofar as late capitalism represents an “intensified invasion of bodies and spaces” (Hennessy 2000: xxii), this economic system foregrounds embodiment and body modification for transgender individuals, as any changes to the body (i.e., surgery, hormone therapy, changes to clothing or hair style) are monetized and subject to the marketplace. However, late capitalism also defines the terms of labor for transgender individuals. Ultimately, late capitalism serves as a sociopolitical backdrop to transgender phenomena.
Late capitalism scaffolds transgender practices insofar as all modes of transgender body modification (i.e., surgery, hormone therapy, changes to clothing/hair), as well as socio-legal changes (i.e., name/gender changes) are connected to capital. Certain modes of transgender body modification (i.e., surgery, hormone therapy) are discursively connected to biomedicine such that they are primarily accessible through medical authorities and tied to biomedical industries. Working just prior to enactments of austerity and deregulation of the global economy through the 1970’s generally characterized as neo-liberal (Venugopal 2015), Harry Benjamin consolidated a suite of biomedical interventions (i.e., hormone therapy, surgery; Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association 1985) for a “transsexual phenomenon” that he identified as clinical and the purview of biomedicine (Benjamin 1966). Indeed, narratives of “gender dysphoria,” of a gender identity that deviates from primary/secondary sex characteristics, partially descended from the clinic, such that their grounding in transgender subjectivity has received considerable critique (Stone 1992; Misse 2022). Roselló-Peñaloza (2018) even suggests that the clinic partially produces gender dysphoria through Foucauldian mechanisms (the authority of medical providers in attending to the health of the individual body, as well as socius, Foucault [1963] 1994), as well as through iteration via psychiatric professionals evocative of Catholic confessional (Foucault [1975] 1990; Rosello-Peñaloza 2018). So, a clinical “transsexual phenomenon” undergirds transnormativities that naturalize North American and/or Global North narratives of being “trapped in the wrong body” necessitating technologies to amend the body (Vipond 2015; Misse 2022). Though likely not Benjamin's intention, this consolidation foregrounded the commodification of his suite, the transmutation of body modification procedures into a (medical) service attached to industry. Through the 1960’s and 1970’s, pharmaceutical companies dedicated millions to advertising testosterone and estrogen as inextricably linked to masculinity and femininity, respectively (even though both are present in most humans regardless of sex assignment; Ostertag 2016; Preciado 2013). Testosterone has since grown to generate billion-dollar profits over the past twenty years with profit increases anticipated (Statista 2014; Technavio 2023), though profits may be attributable to widespread marketing of testosterone replacement therapy to cisgender men (Muncey et al. 2022; Chen et al. 2018). Even so, transgender access to hormone therapies occurs in the context of marketing of testosterone for profit. Similarly, surgical options have also significantly expanded since Benjamin's (1966) initial consolidation (Ostertag 2016), with attendant profits for biomedical industries. Though it is unclear if transgender access of body modification technologies constitutes a significant revenue stream for biomedical industries, the latter dictate the terms of access for transgender individuals via production, as observed in testosterone shortages in Canada from 2020 to 2023 (CSEM 2023). With the expansion of access to biomedicine via informed consent models (Schulz 2018) and increasing insurance coverage (Padula and Baker 2017), transgender identity has become more intimately related to biomedicine and capital. Insofar as cosmetics and fashion also constitute lucrative industries, though, late capitalism pervades into all transgender (and cisgender) technologies of the body. So, transgender practices (medicalized and nonmedicalized) are inextricably linked to market forces in late capitalism.
Late capitalism also coordinates transgender labor in collusion with state repression. Because crossdressing was criminalized in the US from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (Sears 2008, 2014), working within formal economy as someone visibly gender nonconforming was also prohibited. So, gender nonconformity remained largely clandestine through the latter half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first (Gleeson 2021; King 1994; Allen 2014), with participation in formal economy only plausible for individuals able to assimilate into idealized (white) gender archetypes (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013; Krell 2017) via their own race/class advantages. Though transgender assimilationism has historically required concealing one's status as trans via “passing” (Gleeson 2021; Phillips and Rogers 2021), “mainstream” transgender acceptance may increasingly only demand alignment with white supremacist heteropatriarchy (Schilt 2011; David 2017), advantaging those transgender people with sufficient race/class advantage (following gay, assimilationist strategies that have yielded new homonormativities [Duggan 2002], homonationalisms [Puar 2007], and homocapitalisms, [Rao 2015]). Narrow pathways to formal economy historically tied (some) transgender individuals to private enterprise, such as transgender evening performers through the 1960s and 1980s (i.e., Christine Jorgensen, La Coccinelle; Meyerowitz 2004), as well as drag performance, sometimes described as “female impersonation” (Baker 1995; Brown 2008; Edgar 2011; Farrier 2016). However, transgender labor within late capitalism has generally resided within informal economy, especially sex work (Nuttbrock 2018). Aizura (2014) observes that relegating transgender women of color (globally) to informal economy also serves to identify them as a surplus work force, such that they are necessary to disciplining the global proletariat with a sense of false scarcity (there are entire communities ready to replace the worker due to their own, abject life circumstances). Anti–sex work policies such as Washington, DC's “prostitution-free zones” serve to further consign individuals unable or unwilling to assimilate into white, middle-class, gender archetypes to Agambenian conditions of bare life (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). By extension, though, transgender labor in global sex industries are critical to the normal workings of late capitalism. Late capitalism coordinates transgender labor, then, by offering narrow pathways to formal economy (for transgender individuals with sufficient race/class advantages), while also constructing a surplus work force relegated to sex work that supports global sex trade as well as disciplining the global proletariat.
Transgender subjects, then, are attached to late capitalism, through their roles as consumers (of medicalized and nonmedicalized technologies of the body) and as workers (who either endorse late capitalism via assimilationism or constitute an auxiliary workforce, a lumpenproletariat to discipline the proletariat). Insofar as these interconnections were established prior to recent legislative attacks, late capitalism necessarily and materially foregrounds transgender “cultural crises” precipitated in US, Canadian, and European contexts.
Legislative Attacks Consolidate Neoliberal Capitalism
Despite entanglements between transgender subjects and late capitalism, legislative attacks targeting transgender subjects ironically consolidate and support late capitalism, as well, via associated political economy: neoliberal democracy. Per Ayers and Saad-Filho (2015: 603),
Neoliberalism is the contemporary mode of existence of capitalism. This global system of accumulation emerged gradually, since the mid-1970s, through successive attempts to stabilize the global economy, reduce the power of labour, recompose capitalist rule and restore profitability after the disarticulation of the Keynesian-social democratic consensus, the paralysis of developmentalism and the implosion of the Soviet bloc.”
Neoliberal democracy coordinates “stabilization” of a capitalist, global economy through many vectors, but necessarily through austerity measures aimed at limiting state intervention in economy (Thorsen 2010). Ayers and Saad-Filho (2015: 608) observe, though, that neoliberal democracy has increasingly lapsed into emerging authoritarianisms, an “illiberal agenda towards civil liberties and collective action,” under the influence of international markets. Indeed, Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) argue that market pressures, that is, widespread income inequality, necessitate collective organizing along multiple lines of social difference, such that maintaining late capitalism requires contradiction between limiting state interventionism in the economy while simultaneously enacting state repressions against marginalized social groups. As collective organizing and civil liberties pose an imminent threat to a global bourgeoisie, authoritarian measures that suppress civil liberties may preserve global capital flows (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018; Holdren and Tucker 2020). Though these slippages to authoritarianism ironically risk granting more authority to the nation-state to regulate all areas of life, such as the economy (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015), authoritarian neoliberalism suppresses civil liberties and collective action while continuing economic deregulation. So, political economy may be evolving into a neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy in the context of these emerging contradictions. Insofar as measures targeting transgender subjects in the US are closely aligned with neoliberalism, they further consolidate late capitalism.
Legislative attacks on transgender health care are bound up in late capitalism via their enactments within neoliberal democracy. Indeed, these measures propose austerity measures reducing state health-insurance spending for identified “medical conditions”; emerging legislation closely aligns with the underlying mechanisms of late capitalism (Thorsen 2010). Especially because transition-related costs can be significant (Lerner and Robles 2017; Canner et al. 2018; Feldman et al. 2021), reducing public health insurance coverage diverts transgender individuals to private insurance companies in order to pursue medical care (insofar as the health insurance marketplace established via the Affordable Care Act permits individuals to enroll with private insurance if state insurance does not provide coverage for identified conditions; Kim, Braun, and Williams 2013). The latter ensures a stream of revenue ultimately benefiting private insurance companies, as well as pharmaceutical companies, further supporting late capitalist accumulation of wealth for the bourgeoisie, or managerial/owner class (Taibbi 2014). However, these legislative measures also lay bare inconsistencies and contradictions between neoliberalism and democracy (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015). Insofar as these legal measures target marginalized communities while simultaneously limiting state intervention that impedes capitalist accumulation (i.e., state health insurance), these measures enact a neoliberalism that drifts from democracy to authoritarianism. More, though, they largely impugn individuals who meet eligibility criteria for state health insurance, in particular low income (as state health insurance is not universal in the US, Sommers et al. 2016; Camillo 2016), disproportionately affecting racialized cohorts in the US (Donohue et al. 2022; Raha 2017), further demonstrating neoliberal democracy's “illiberal agenda towards civil liberties” (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015: 608).
Legislation criminalizing drag performance in state-sponsored venues also solidifies linkages to late capitalism for transgender subjects. Insofar as neoliberal democracy has involved certain slippages to authoritarianism in the context of “market-driven imperatives” (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015; Bruff 2014; Tansel 2017; Bruff and Tansel 2019; Hall, Massey, and Rustin 2013), it is unclear to what extent (ostensibly democratic) political decision-makers must legitimize neoliberal austerity measures within an often-contradictory late capitalist context. Notably, politicians in the US have begun to use heterosexist invective to legitimize measures to defund public libraries. For instance, the Missouri legislature recently legitimized defunding public libraries as they make “sexually explicit material” (i.e., material with nonheterosexual content) available to children (Cineas 2023; EveryLibrary 2023). Similarly, legislation banning drag performance in state-sponsored venues has largely responded to the popularity of drag queen storytimes, in which a drag performer reads an age-appropriate story to children, often in the context of a public library (Barriage et al. 2020). Insofar as these events drove interest in public institutions (Barriage et al. 2020), they undermine continued efforts to defund public services, like libraries (Swist et al. 2022), under late capitalism. Criminalizing them, then, may be aligned with political discourse that conflates public libraries with the sexualization of children as a thin legitimation for continued defunding of public institutions under neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy. Notably, US politicians routinely use similar arguments to advance neoliberal austerity in health care for transgender youth. US politicians, then, continue to advance discourses that impugn transgender (and queer) subjects partially to maintain a mythos of nominal democracy (that there may be some rationale for austerity measures that is representative of widespread opinion) in a context of ambiguous authoritarianism. However, even nominal democracy (i.e., concern for the welfare of children) is bound up in authoritarianism by limiting civil liberties for transgender subjects (i.e., drag queens) in some limited contexts. More, though, prohibiting drag performance in public space does little to impede transgender subjects in private spaces, including commerce. Indeed, public space is rapidly vanishing in the US as it is transmuted into space for private commerce (i.e., stores, restaurants, entertainment venues; Kohn 2004). So, laws prohibiting drag performance in public venues even support transnormativity (Vipond 2015; David 2017), and the increasing commodification of transgender (David 2017). For instance, Sephora, a major cosmetics company, proudly advertises that they offer “Classes for Confidence” to support transgender individuals in choosing cosmetics to “celebrate what fearless looks like—you” (Sephora Accelerate n.d.), but also plausibly to generate profits. The latter may be unaffected by “drag bans.” Legislation prohibiting drag performance in state-funded venues, then, serves to draw resources away from those venues via neoliberal capitalist austerity while leaving intact revenue streams that benefit ruling-class interest.
Legislative attacks limiting transgender health care for youth and the contracting of transgender subjects in state-sponsored venues (i.e., public schools, libraries, etc.) reinforce late capitalism via neoliberal austerity. Post-Marxist analysis reveals that these laws target transgender subjects partially due to a late capitalist context in which market forces drive neoliberal democracy to neoliberal authoritarianism. While sometimes constituting explicit neoliberal austerity (i.e., reduced government spending), the internal contradictions and ambiguity introduced within late capitalism also lead US politicians to provide fragile (and cis-heterosexist) rationales for austerity, thereby nominally asserting democratic process (i.e., representation of constituents who ostensibly hold the latter rationales as public opinion). However, by targeting marginalized communities, these politicians (led partially by market forces) consolidate neoliberal authoritarianism within late capitalism.
Responses to Legislative Attacks Collude with Late Capitalism
Whereas anti-transgender legislation consolidates late capitalism through neoliberal austerity, the (liberal, progressive) response from transgender advocates similarly consolidates late capitalism. These (well-intentioned) responses collude in late capitalism by objecting to emerging authoritarianisms while overlooking the market pressures that buoy them.
Trans-affirming objections to laws limiting state coverage for transgender youth have frequently objected to implicit authoritarianisms while leaving linkages to capitalist profit underexamined, even as the latter are critical to the development of the former (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015). Objections have generally reiterated medicalized articulations of transgender subjectivity (Kronk and Dexheimer 2021; Dewey and Gesbeck 2017; Vipond 2015) that rely on late capitalist context, for instance endorsing transgender identity as a psychiatric condition with biomedicine offering “medically necessary” treatment (Huppke 2023; Migdon 2023), often citing major medical authorities such as the American Medical Association (AMA), American Psychiatric Association (APA), and so forth. Advocates have noted the mental health vulnerabilities of transgender youth, even suggesting that gender affirming care meaningfully prevents suicide for this cohort. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently endorsed the perspective that “gender affirming care is life saving care” (ACLU 2021). By extension, transgender identity is further conflated with mental illness that can only be relieved via medical intervention tied to biomedical industries. However, by leaving biomedical industries underexamined, transgender advocates overlook the market forces that ironically drive neoliberal austerity as enacted by these laws. Instead, transgender advocates imagine a relatively immature biopolitics (more typical of early twentieth-century Germany or the US; Lemke, Casper, and Moore 2011)5 in which these austerity measures constitute genocide as, per ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, they are intended to “root out trans kids at a young age” and “so that kids will become cis” (Jones 2021). The latter framing, while accounting for emerging authoritarianism, dislocates these laws from the late capitalist context driving these authoritarianisms. In addition, reference to class conflict is also obscured. Whereas these laws may reflect a more mature biopolitics whereby the life chances of low-income, transgender youth of color are increasingly circumscribed under neoliberal authoritarianism,6 the latter framing (of a more explicitly genocidal necropolitics) decontextualizes legislative measures likely to affect low income youth of color and repositions these measures to imply vulnerability for all transgender youth, including those with access to race and class advantages. By imagining vulnerability as extending to white, wealthy families and their transgender children, media discourses expand on a “respectable trans subject” (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013: 74) who is implicitly white and wealthy. Similar to observations of Transgender Day of Remembrance (Lamble 2008), these transgender advocates risk appropriating for white, wealthy subjects, the violences directed toward low-income, transgender people of color. More, though, these framings imply that legislative reform provides anodyne, even as market pressures guide neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015; Bruff 2014; Tansel 2017; Bruff and Tansel 2019; Hall, Massey, and Rustin 2014), such that using administrative, legal structures to advance civil rights often enacts more authoritarianism. For instance, Spade (2015) observes how laws prohibiting hate crimes (or attaching higher penalties to hate crimes) reinforce a prison industrial complex that impugns people of color (inclusive of queer and trans). By overlooking late capitalist context, then, transgender advocates reinforce its enactment of neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy.
Transgender affirming opposition to “drag bans” similarly reiterate late capitalism by attending to emerging authoritarianisms while overlooking economy. Media responses concerned with prohibitions of “male/female impersonation” in public venues have frequently reconstituted these prohibitions as a suspension of normal law, that is, rights to free speech in the US, and as criminalizing the presence of any transgender people in public life, outside of their own homes (Nossel 2023; Putterman and Swann 2023). Though neoliberal slippages toward further authoritarianism are plausible (given the US historical context of criminalizing gender nonconforming dress outside of the private home; Sears 2008, 2014), this analysis overlooks the late capitalist context for these measures. Notably, these critiques misconstrue “public venues,” meaning funded by public monies or state funded, to instead mean outside of the private home. By extension, these critiques overlook the neoliberal context, that venues receiving state funding are obliquely targeted by these measures, in favor of a critique of authoritarianism that excepts the market pressures driving neoliberal authoritarianism. Similarly, this analysis overlooks how transgender individuals may avoid persecution by assimilating into (white, middle-class) gender norms (de Vries 2012; Wong 2021; Raha 2017; Logan and Ciszek 2021; Duncan-Shepherd and Hamilton 2022; Gleeson and O'Rourke 2021), sometimes “passing” as cisgender. Even if applied broadly to criminalize crossdressing outside of private homes, the primary targets for these legislative attacks might be individuals who do not conform to white, middle-class performances of gender, plausibly because they are not white nor middle-class. However, prominent discourse regarding “drag bans” has continued to be silent on intersections with class and race, exporting risk to the white, middle class, in particular overlooking that drag performance often parodies white, middle-class gender norms (Baker 1995; Lawrence 2011; Farrier 2016). White, bourgeois framings of drag performance as a worthy art (Middlemost 2020), while appearing to validate drag performance in public venues, may also run the risk of transmuting class and race critique into another distinction of white, bourgeois taste (Bourdieu [1964] 1984). Ultimately, transgender-affirming discourses that observe emerging authoritarianisms in “drag bans,” overlook a late capitalist context that includes the defunding of public institutions, as well as a more sophisticated bio-/necropolitics that targets transgender women of color internationally (Aizura 2014; Raha 2017), arguably to guarantee a surplus workforce to regulate a global proletariat (Aizura 2014; Hardt and Negri 2005).
Liberal, progressive responses to these anti-transgender laws ironically consolidate late capitalism, then, by leaving late capitalism and neoliberal authoritarianism qua democracy unexamined. Indeed, they may become complicit when implying that legislative reform under neoliberal authoritarianism may paradoxically have democratizing effects. Ultimately, without an analysis of late capitalism, objectors to these laws theorize a relatively immature biopolitics (typical of the US and Germany in the early twentieth century; Lemke, Casper, and Moore 2011; Foucault 2008) that overlooks contemporary political economic mechanisms (i.e., neoliberal authoritarianism) that impugn transgender women of color internationally and that enact harms that extend far beyond transgender subjects.
Conclusion
Post-Marxist analysis reveals that recent anti-transgender legislation closely aligns with late capitalism. However, trans-affirming condemnations of that legislation are frequently complicit, as well. The political risks, then, may be greater than trans antagonisms (as implied by transgender advocates), as they are situated within the privation of previously public space and austerity measures intended to further privatize health care. The privatization of previously public space is particularly concerning (Kohn 2004), as public space has been critical to popular, anti-capitalist movements, such as Occupy Wall Street. Anti-trans legislative attacks (and their progressive, liberal opposition) work in tandem, then, to render transgender, anti-capitalist activism impossible. Drawing from Fisher (2009), discourses surrounding these legislative measures may constitute a transgender “capitalist realism,” whereby transgender subjectivities are inextricably bound to capitalism such that anti-capitalist trans activism is foreclosed because gender-affirming care is “life-saving care.” Rather than reduce social difference to economics (as social justice activists sometimes suggest; Bhattacharya 2015), post-Marxist perspectives may be a necessary corrective to an identitarian focus that overlooks political economy (Fisher 2013).
Unfortunately, the political strategies behind anti-transgender laws in the US are being taken up in other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, suggesting that the US may still serve as a legal model for global community in the context of widespread cultural imperialisms. In fact, Canada's Conservative Party recently voted to include within their platform prohibitions of gender-affirming care for transgender youth (Dubey 2023). Insofar as trans-antagonistic scholars and activists have mobilized globally, especially in the United Kingdom (Makwana et al. 2018; Horbury and Yao 2020; Giametta and Havkin 2021), the legislative strategies may increasingly be mobilized outside of the US. However, the uptake of these laws reveals yet more contradictions within late capitalism, as Global South countries have only recently begun adopting transgender-affirming policy, including human rights protections and repealing colonial-era laws criminalizing transgender individuals (Sawant 2017; Pamment 2019; Redding 2020; Dicklitch-Nelson and Rahman 2022), reflecting neoliberal democracy as previously practiced in the US and likely influenced by broader cultural imperialisms that ensconce and legitimize Global North cultural forms (Dutta and Roy 2014; Parker, Aggleton, and Perez-Brumer 2016; Dilanyan, Beraia, and Yavuz 2018; Ung Loh 2018; Mount 2020). It is unclear how widespread these legal measures may become given a context in which US global leadership may be waning, especially regarding economic and political influence (Rapley 2023). After major political upheavals during the Trump administration, military failures in Afghanistan, an increasing drift toward domestic affairs (Kaminski 2023), and tenuous membership in international partnerships (i.e., World Health Organization, Paris Climate Agreement; Edwards 2018; Abrams 2019; Birdsall and Sanders 2020; Parmar and Furse 2021), the US is increasingly doubtable as a global leader and may instead comprise a declining empire (Rapley 2023). Notably, US political leaders (Donald Trump) have also been the subject of mockery by other world leaders (a “hot mic” caught several world leaders privately mocking former President Donald Trump [Wintour and Mason 2019]). It is plausible, though, that the popularity of these measures may be their enactment of neoliberal authoritarianism without impeding capital flows within late capitalism, thereby partially resolving apparent contradictions (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015).
Post-Marxist perspectives, though, reveal ways that legal restrictions on public performance and health care coverage for transgender subjects ironically coincide with seemingly progressive measures ostensibly supporting transgender inclusion, insofar as both are coordinated within late capitalism. Laws limiting rights for transgender subjects have narrowly aligned with neoliberal austerity such that they serve as biopolitical regulation for low-income individuals, often people of color (since qualification for state health insurance requires low income in the US). So, transgender individuals with sufficient race and class advantage may be relatively unaffected. US policy ostensibly supporting transgender civil rights have similarly been protective of (white, wealthy) transgender subjects, explicitly folding transgender subjects (who are sufficiently aligned with white supremacist capitalism) into US imperialisms (cultural, economic, and military), into homonationalism (Puar 2007). For instance, President Joseph Biden restored the right for transgender service members to serve in the US miliary on nearly his first day in office (De Luce and Pettypiece 2021), guaranteeing that transgender people could serve in US military projects. Similarly, laws prohibiting anti-transgender discrimination are largely only accessible to individuals with race and class advantages (who can afford a costly civil suit) and hate crimes legislation extends criminal sentences, thereby supporting a prison industrial complex that targets low-income people of color (Spade 2015). By extension, seemingly progressive transgender legislation operates to deny the means of life to transgender people of color subjected to US imperialisms (i.e., Global South subjects, transgender people of color in the US; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013; Aizura 2014; Caravaca-Morera and Padilha 2018). From this perspective, then, recent anti-transgender laws serve as late capitalist biopolitics (a means to regulate the lives of low-income, transgender youth of color), whereas transgender-supportive laws serve as late capitalist necropolitics (a means of denying the means of life to low-income transgender people of color). In so doing, anti-transgender and ostensibly supportive laws reveal late capitalist slippages to authoritarianism. On the one hand, the resumption of state power to direct public institutions (i.e., health care, libraries) with such granularity reflects nuanced authoritarian operations, even as nation states relinquish economic regulations to support global capital flows (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005, 2011; Mann 1997; Spivak and Butler 2011; Dasgupta 2018). On the other hand, laws advancing transgender civil rights use a veneer of neoliberal democracy to resume state power via anti-discrimination (especially within the US military) and hate crimes legislation (Spade 2015).
Moving Forward: Reviving Anti-Capitalist Resistance
Insofar as liberal, progressive responses to anti-transgender legislation collude with late capitalism by invoking an immature biopolitics naive to contemporary (neoliberal authoritarian) context, objections to anti-transgender laws are unlikely to succeed in their stated aims. For instance, the argument that transgender subjects become deserving of the means of life due to an underlying psychiatric condition necessitating “medically necessary treatment” may be unsuccessful given that neurodiverse peoples have generally fallen under the rubric of being denied the means of life. Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009), as well as Foucault ([1961] 1988) observe that ascriptions of madness often legitimize disenfranchisement such that a diagnosis with a psychiatric condition has historically provided rationale for withholding the means of life from presumptive political subjects. Decades of deinstitutionalization and austerity directed toward US mental health systems (as well as increasing “institutionalization” of neurodiverse individuals in jails and prisons; Fakhoury and Priebe 2007; Chisholm et al. 2019) similarly suggest that a psychiatric frame for transgender subjectivity is no guarantee that one's health needs will fall under the purview of state coverage.
Given the limitations of resistance strategies bound up in late capitalism, leftist critique may be indispensable in addressing trans-antagonistic legislation. Though social policy may be bounded or limited in late capitalist milieux (Spade 2015; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), policy favoring the demands of organized labor and/or socially marginalized groups may have democratizing effects that disrupt late capitalist mechanisms (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2015). However, policy must work to cross-purposes with late capitalist political economy, and neoliberalism in particular. For instance, rather than simply rebut trans exclusions from state-funded health care, a Marxist critique of trans-antagonistic health care legislation might instead recapitulate calls for truly universal health coverage in the US (Sen 2015), while condemning moves to neoliberal austerity. Similarly, they might interrogate medicalizing frames for everyday experiences that suggest that some human needs (medical in nature) supersede others and legitimize state support (Conrad 1992, 2005; Kronk and Dexheimer 2021), as well as continuing to critique pharmaceutical industries (Reiff 2019). A Marxist critique might also disrupt the boundedness of health coverages based on nation-state belonging (i.e., extending health coverage to undocumented immigrants; Wallace et al. 2013), thereby resourcing Hardt and Negri's (2005) multitude in resistance to global oligarchy. With regard to drag bans, a Marxist and/or leftist critique might destabilize “art” as signaling bourgeois taste, instead reconstituting “art” as vital community activism (Nossel 2016). Current events provide the example of performing in public venues, like public libraries, thereby invigorating them, such that drag bans are particularly pernicious as they plausibly seek to defund public institutions and privatize any previously “public” spaces (the latter especially causing problems for populist organizing, i.e., Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter; Kohn 2013; Beech and Jordan 2021). Leftist critique might also suggest the building of mutual aid networks within communities to meet needs outside of state policy, given the latter's limitations (Spade 2015, 2020).
Anti-transgender legislation and its opponents simultaneously advance late capitalism. By overlooking political economy, opponents to this legislation miss the underlying mechanisms driving authoritarianism, thereby undermining their stated aim of disrupting authoritarian emergences. Resistance to trans-antagonistic legislation is most likely to succeed, then, if grounded in anti-capitalist, Marxist, and/or leftist critique, as well as moving forward a more intersectional liberation (along the lines of race and class). Indeed, Marxist critique may be imperative if transgender activists and advocates hope to win a more just world.
Notes
It is unclear if transgender advocates, often legal scholars, explicitly or intentionally draw from biopolitical theorists when conceptualizing existential threats to transgender communities.
Post-Marxism (and neo-Marxism) have multiple meanings and uses as terms (Toscano 2007). For instance, Price (2021: 49) uses “Post-modern Neo-Marxism” to describe “foreign enemies and infiltrators” who pose a threat to “Western civilization” while extolling the aegis of “God Emperor Trump.” Scholars drawing from Marx (i.e., Foucault) have sometimes insisted that their work does not constitute (neo-, post-) Marxist scholarship (Bidet 2016; Nigro 2008), likely to avoid confusion, given disparate meanings. I use post-Marxism here to mean scholarship that draws from critical readings of Marx, especially with consideration for twentieth- to twenty-first-century context, regardless of how scholars identified their own work.
I use Jameson's (1991) definition here, such that “late capitalism” refers to multinational capitalism.
I use transgender broadly as an umbrella term inclusive of gender nonconformity (from assigned-at-birth sex/gender) in self-perception (identity) and material expression (culture signs of femininity/masculinity), primarily used in Global North countries, whereas I narrowly define “transsexual” by its clinical definition through the 1960s in the US and other Global North countries. Though I observe that emerging transnormativities often imply a transsexual narrative due to close linkages with the clinic, I use “transgender” to imply a broad coalition of individuals with shared (collective) experiences of gender nonconformity, drawing from Feinberg's (1999) emphasis on collective organizing (itself inspired by Marxist principles). Following Metcalfe (2021), I do not theorize a primordial transsexuality outside of culture, though I do theorize an underlying ontology to gender nonconforming phenomena (Lewis 2016), contrasting discourses that reduce “transgender” to Global North cultural decadence (M'Baye 2013; Holleran 2020) and/or cultural pathology (Raymond 1979, 2021).
US and German biopolitics were informed by the Eugenics Movement through the early part of the twentieth century (Reilly 2015), as well as scientific racisms that coevolved with theories of “sexual inversion” (Snorton 2017; Somerville 2000). Health policy, then, included repression of individual deemed dangerous to the health of the body politic, for instance leading to forced sterilization of individuals with physical or mental “disabilities,” as well as the repression of racialized communities and gender minorities (Brechin 1996; Clouse 2020; Pegoraro 2015). Though Germany, under Nazi rule, enacted more explicit purges to administer to the health of the body politic, the US (and other wealthy countries) enacted similar repressive policies due to a biopolitics informed by eugenics.
Evidence that hormone therapy reduces suicide ideation, depression, anxiety, or other mental health concerns are preliminary and limited, such that limiting access to gender affirming care better describes the regulation of life (biopolitics) than withholding the means of life and consigning to death (necropolitics). Though extant evidence suggests that transgender youth (and adults) may observe reductions depression, rates of depression were generally clinically insignificant in the first place (White Hughto and Reisner 2016; Aldridge et al. 2021; Tordoff et al. 2022). Notably, though, transgender adults recall less lifetime suicide ideation (there were no effects on lifetime suicide attempts) if they had wanted, and then had access to, pubertal suppression (Turban et al. 2020), though the latter study relied on convenience sampling and also controlled for a number of predictive socio-demographics.
