June 2016 saw the US-based multinational bank Goldman Sachs flying the pink, white, and blue transgender flag outside its Manhattan headquarters. It saw the United Nations Human Rights Council passing a resolution to appoint an “Independent Expert” to study violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It saw Pentagon officials announcing the end of the ban on transgender people serving in the US armed forces. No longer occupying a position on the margins of civic and economic life, transgender people, it would seem, are increasingly valued as employees, as consumers, as victims in need of saving, and now in the United States, as potential warriors.
Valued is right. The recognition of transgender as a source of value, not only for corporations but also for nonprofit sectors that have embraced the rhetoric of the market, has become a popular theme for the ideologues of the current capitalist moment. Whether rescuing trans “victims,” profiting from the creativity of gender-diverse employees, or carving out new transgender-specific consumer markets, the neoliberal creed now presents discrimination against trans (and GLB) people as “an enormous waste of human potential, of talent, of creativity, of productivity, that weighs heavily on society and on the economy” (Park 2015: 1). As the head of the largest GLBT advocacy group in the United States explained at the Davos World Economic Forum, “Around the world, businesses have far outpaced lawmakers in embracing the basic premise that the hard work and talents of all their employees—regardless of who they are or whom they love—are rewarded fairly in their workplaces. . . . No executive wants to lose the next brilliant employee to a competitor simply because the business has not caught up with the times in terms of inclusive policies” (Griffin 2016).
Of course, precisely how transgender becomes a source of value depends on its location vis-à-vis the “coloniality of power,” as guest editors Vek Lewis and Dan Irving point out in the introduction to this issue. Understanding “how contemporary ‘architectures’ of power differentially and unequally affect trans and sex/gender-diverse people across the globe,” they write, requires us to “grapple with the complexity of trans/gender capitalist and colonial relations, including the ways in which the transgender paradigm itself, which is of US origin, can be epistemologically and politically complicit.” For example, an activist writing about the UN Human Rights Council's decision to appoint an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity suggests that “employing SOGI/LGBTI/queer/trans as a singular palatable thing, rather than a queer, feminist and anti-colonial resistance,” fails to “trouble the normativity of a human rights discourse that leaves colonialism, racism and global north exceptionalism largely unchallenged” (Hoosain Khan 2016). Directing our attention to particular identities in need of rescue masks the processes and structures that manufacture privilege and precarity alongside commodities. Such an approach also makes possible the emergence of a “comprador LGBT movement” (some of largest LGBT organizations doing international work are funded by the US State Department) that advances the interests of global capitalism, economic imperialism, and militarism (Long 2016). Indeed, as we were drafting this introduction, one of us received a fund-raising solicitation from a US-based international LGBTQ rights organization with “Fight ISIS” in its subject line.
This special issue of TSQ on what the authors call trans- political economy (TPE) provides a timely and necessary intervention in trans studies. In their extensive introduction, Lewis and Irving lay out the contours of TPE as it currently exists and map the field's relation to the feminist, antiracist, and decolonial work in political economy that made it possible. The articles that follow demonstrate how trans studies and political economy's reigning binaries, labor-capital and transgender-cisgender, obscure the centrality of racializing, colonizing, and gendering processes within the architectures of power they purport to interrogate. As Lewis and Irving point out, and as the contributors empirically demonstrate, the production of vulnerability in racialized and colonized gender-nonconforming populations is not accidental but integral to capitalism and the neoliberal political project—from the commodification of a legible minoritizing trans identity in asylum claims to the economic value attached to whiteness, able-bodiedness, and hegemonic gender, to the cultivation of trans entrepreneurship in the new sharing economy, to the affective yet marginalized labor demanded of some trans people in the Global South.
Far from inserting a conservatizing identity politics into the field of political economy, and far from simply asking that trans and sex/gender-diverse people be added to such already existing categories as worker and consumer, Lewis and Irving and the contributors to this issue reveal how the narrowly constructed “proper objects” of trans studies and political economy (e.g., gender, labor, class, the economy) have been “complicit in necropolitical devaluations of trans lives and actually existing strategies crafted for trans survival.” Certainly the efforts of TPE scholars to remedy these exclusions are far from complete. But at a moment when “the main center of discontent within the capitalist dynamic is increasingly shifting [from production] to struggles over the realization of value” (Harvey 2016), the field's attention to “the ways that particular trans lives become imbued with (or stripped of) value,” as Lewis and Irving put it, augurs well for its significance in the years to come.
