Cisgenderism of the Other

"Story, I think, should be the mortal enemy of the trans writer, who upon setting foot in the blast zone of literature will find herself irradiated with unwanted narrative energy. Everyone will ask, What happened to her? No one will ask, What does she think? - Andrea Long Chu

"I will be accused of confusing it all. Of course I am not!" - Derrida

"I have only one gender; it is not mine." - Derrida, mistranslated.

Trans people argue with each other about gender. Usually this happens online, and then it's called "discourse" but sometimes they make it into the academy, and then its called "a necessary intervention in gender studies." Thirty years after Susan Stryker's strong words to Victor Frankenstein, the academy of gender studies is still largely the domain of cis people. So it's generally on the internet, on tumblr, on X, on Bluesky, on Discord servers: trans people argue about gender.

The argument is usually related to the question of who gets to be trans, or what counts as being trans. One of the most common positions, at least popular these days within many online trans communities I have been a part of, is that someone is trans if they identify as trans. That's it. Anyone is allowed to claim the title. This is of course a compelling answer, and I'm not sure if it's really challenged by the fact that sometimes people claim to be trans in bad faith, in order to perpetrate some kind of trick. The fact that right-wing trolls might pretend to be trans temporarily and in bad faith doesn't really mean much here because, well, to claim the identity "trans" means to claim it in good faith. But there's also something unsatisfying about this answer.

What compounds this is that sometimes the circumstances of some group of trans people's transness is used in a politically cynical way to attack the access of other trans people to transgender care. For example, there are many trans people who do not want to use hormones. This is absolutely fine, and not in any way a conflict with their transness, but transphobes can point to these people and say look, you don't need to use hormones to be trans and rhetorically use these people to restrict hormones. Several variants of this argument exist. Sometimes the battleground isn't about the use of hormones, but about some other particular technology of transition. Or sometimes it's about whether one needs dysphoria to be trans. Often it feels like both sides of any of these arguments has drawbacks: the existence of trans people who don't feel dysphoria means that if transition is locked behind a medical diagnosis of dysphoria there will be trans people denied care. That dysphoria isn't necessary is easily confused with the idea that dysphoria isn't real, i.e. that the myriad experiences which are bound together under the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria do not in fact constitute a coherent medical condition and instead arise from the parsing the lives of trans people through the lens of medicalization. For trans people who have found use in the concept of gender dysphoria to describe their experiences, for whom self-theorizing relies on this concept, not only is it difficult to accept this idea that "gender dysphoria isn't real" but insofar as this idea conflicts with their psychic reality, it is probably incorrect.

It is tempting to say that none of these questions need be resolved, or they wouldn't need to be if we lived in a world that respected the freedom and autonomy of trans people, but in a politically hostile environment, when resources are limited, and access to the medical techniques of transition are gatekept, the questions of "validity" or of "real transgender" vs. "fetishist" seem to gain real political stakes. The answer to the question "why should you, a trans woman, care if some man is out there identifying himself as an AGP?" is not hard to understand in a world where trans women are routinely forced to prove that they are not AGP in order to access basic care, respect, or legal recognition. Further, all of these questions are intimately tied with some of the most personal and sensitive experiences of the lives of a marginalized and oppressed population. So when a position is staked out that misses some contour or nuance of the situation, there will be people out there who feel erased and undermined by that lost nuance, feel that there are political consequences for them, and they will be out for blood.

To make matters worse, it is not hard to mobilize a mob against a trans person, especially a trans woman. Watching the ease with which people, even in spaces which are meant to be LGBTQIA+-friendly, are able to turn against a trans woman if they feel that she has committed some offense which warrants the reaction is truly mystifying. One almost wouldn't believe the possibility of it if it didn't happen over and over and over again. It even makes me nervous to continue this line of thought, since I know I will be publishing this piece on the internet for anyone to read. So I'm not going to. Let's talk about Jacques Derrida instead.

In October 1870, France granted the Jews in Algeria citizenship to the country of France. In 1940, citing the German occupation, which as Derrida notes was certainly not a German occupation of Algeria, this citizenship was revoked. For a young Derrida, this was something of a traumatic experience. In practical terms it meant that he was declared a non citizen, was forced to a different school, locked out of much of the life he enjoyed as a French citizen before this point. Then in 1943 this citizenship was granted again. Above the material concerns of this loss of citizenship, Derrida was also struck by something which troubled his young and rigid mind—he was born "French" and then at a certain point this "Frenchness" which was up till then integral to his identity was revoked in the name of his "Jewishness" something which he had previously not thought all that much about. Then a few years later, his Frenchness was regranted. Imagine this experience: to be suddenly told or to suddenly realize that something which was central to your identity was partial, was political, was tenuous, and could be easily revoked by a simple speech act of the right government official, and reversed just as simply.

Derrida talks about this experience and what it did to him in one of his more interesting and personal books Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. For anyone who's interested in getting into Derrida, who wants to know what his project was all about, this book is a great introduction to him. While still dense and requiring some resolve to get through, it is short, and in many ways it is more grounded than some of his other work in the real political stakes of his project.

I'll try to give a brief background on him in case you've never heard of him, or you only know of him as some dense French theorist who uses intentionally obscure language in his secret project to destroy Truth or The West. Derrida is credited with developing a technique called deconstruction, which again is an extremely mis- and overused term in philosophical discourse. In its popular conception^[1] deconstruction amounts to simply showing that "what your interlocutor just said was bullshit" and to show that nothing is "real" that "truth is fake." Derrida spent quite a lot of energy fighting this conception of his work. Let's hear from him:

"This childish armory comprises one single weak polemical device. Its mechanism amounts roughly to this: 'Ah! So you ask yourself questions about truth. Well to that very extent, you do not as yet believe in truth; you are contesting the possibility of truth. That being the case, how do you expect your statements to be taken seriously when they lay a claim to some truth, beginning with your so-called questions? What you are saying is not true because you are questioning truth. Come on! you are a skeptic, a relativist, a nihilist; you are not a serious philosopher! If you continue, you will be placed in a department of rhetoric or literature!'"^[2]

Far from being an assault on the mere possibility of truth, the project of deconstruction is concerned with uncovering and understanding truth. Put most simply (in fact, reductively simply), deconstruction is a technique for analyzing a hierarchy (usually a binary oppositional hierarchy) and reevaluating the primacy of one term over the other. Something that is good to always keep in mind reading Derrida is that he started out as a phenomenologist, and so his concerns are usually intimately tied in with actual experience. His dense language and difficult writing are not a result of some purposeful pretension or an attempt to keep the layman out of philosophy, but rather they are a necessary consequence of a theorizing that wants to uncover gaps between the world as it is thought and the world as it is. One of the reasons Monolingualism of the Other makes such a good introduction to Derrida's work is that as it is more directly about his relationship to language, and about the difficult relationship between language and experience, it serves as an explanation for why his writing can be so hard to read. If you're afraid to pick up a book by Derrida, he understands: "inside language there is a terror, soft, discreet, or glaring; that is our subject."^[3]

In Monolingualism of the Other Derrida begins by setting out a series of apparently contradictory theses which he intends to demonstrate. He then imagines an interlocutor objecting to these as mere sophistry, and when Derrida replies that he means them seriously, and he seriously intends to demonstrate them, the interlocutor insists that Derrida demonstrate his argument with reference to his personal experience. "Since you want to narrate your story, give testimony in your name, speak of what is 'yours' and what is not, it remains for me, one more time, to take your word for it."^[4] What follows from Derrida is anything but a simple memoir, or as he terms it "anamnesis," a word which conjures a patient recounting his history to a doctor (for Derrida I guess the patient-doctor relationship is a metaphor for a situation in which an experience must be made legible to another.) After quite a lot of abstract theorizing, and attempts and reattempts to explain himself, the interlocutor complains "that is a rather abstract way to narrate a story, this fable you jealously call your story, a story which would be solely yours." Derrida responds "In its common concept, autobiographical anamnesis presupposes identification. And precisely not identity. No, an identity is never given, received, or attained;... in whatever manner one invents the story of a construction of the self, the autos, or the ipse, it is always imagined that the one who writes should know how to say I."^[5] For Derrida, this anamnesis is impossible, because what he is trying to describe is a "disorder of identity." In order to stand before the other and say "I experienced X" one needs a language to explain it in, and if the experience deals with an alienation from the very language used to explain the experience, not only is the account of the experience itself suspect, but so indeed is even the subject "I" that is spoken. Indeed even to say "I am alienated from my language, the only language I speak" is not correct, because there is no I which can experience the alienation. "[T]his inalienable alienation...structures the peculiarity and property of language."^[6] What's worse is that this fraught relationship to language, having only one language but having no "mother tongue" is in fact a universal situation. Young Derrida was not French, not in a way that he could claim French as his, and this was made clear to him when his citizenship was revoked. He could not lay claim to possession of the only language that he spoke. Hence his opening contradiction: "I only have one language; it is not mine." But of course this situation is universal:

"the master does not possess exclusively, and naturally what he calls language, because, whatever he wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politico-phantasmic constructions"^[7]

A man born in Paris learns French the same way Derrida did being born in Algiers, but the man in France owns French, not because of any natural process or transcendent ontology, but rather because of the political construction of the nation of France. Both relationships to the language are politically and socially contingent. This similarity is a catastrophe: if both relationships to language are contingent, then he has in fact failed to explain what he set out to explain in the first place, which is his own particular alienation to language. "How do we interpret the history of an example that allows the re-inscription of the structure of a universal law upon the body of an irreplaceable singularity in order to render it thus remarkable?"^[8]

If this seems like an interesting question, you can read the book to see how he answers it, but instead of producing a mere summary, what I wanted to do here is to explain that actually this is not (only) a book about language. This is a book about gender. Already it will probably be possible to see the beginning of where I am going here from what I have already said. The notion of gender identity is also politically contingent, despite frequent hegemonic insistence that it is somehow natural, ontological, congenital, etc. There is a hard to articulate alienation that comes with transness which is not explained merely by this political contingency which also applies to cis/normative genders. Finally, trans subjects are often troubled to deliver a literal anamnesis (on the day that I write this, my girlfriend has an appointment with a therapist to acquire a letter for transition care.) Derrida has quite a bit more to say on the subject of gender, when he thinks he is talking about language.

In order to heighten the power of Derrida's work for theorizing about gender, I'm going to retranslate some passages. My French is rusty, so I will largely be relying on the Patrick Mensah translation that I read, but here and there I will change a word to elucidate the interpretation that I found latent already in the text. Right from the opening then we have Derrida's powerful injunction:

"Picture this, imagine someone who would cultivate womanhood.
What is called womanhood.
Someone whom womanhood would cultivate." ^[9]

Immediately we see Derrida entering right at the heart of a serious contemporary debate about the nature of gender: is gender a choice, or are we "born this way"? To put it in different terms, did I cultivate womanhood, or did womanhood cultivate me? Obviously there are actions I have taken which one could think of as being cultivation of womanhood. "I chose to take hormones" seems in a sense to be uncontroversially true, but it misses the fact that the very I who is now taking hormones did not exist prior to that choice. Transition structures my very self, my "ipseity" to use Derrida's word. A choice implies alternatives, but to not transition was not an option, it was a kind of death. Derrida is cis, but he is quick to point out:

"The cisgenderism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. Not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute habitat. It is impassible, indisputable" ^[10]

Here we see again the same dilemma: if transition is simply a matter of choosing to transition, then to be cis would function as a sort of default, but this is not the case. Derrida explains that cisgenderism is not some easy transparent relationship to one's own gender, or if it is it is because there are political processes that make it transparent. Whatever 'cisgenderism' is to Derrida, it structures the way he sees the world, his "ipseity."

Derrida then has his interlocutor respond that this is pure sophistry and after a bit of back and forth the interlocutor to what he sees as a clumsy elision on Derrida's part:

"You have just added 'sex' to 'gender.' That changes many things. A 'sex' is no 'gender,' nor is the sex a fetish."

Derrida's response is interesting, if flawed:

"I'm not aware of the necessity of these distinctions. Psychologists and scholars in general can have good reasons for upholding them. Nevertheless, in all rigor, and stretched to their extreme limit, I do not believe them to be tenable. If we do not take into consideration, in an always very determined context, some external criteria ... then I do not know where we can find internal or structural features in order to distinguish rigorously between a gender, a sex and a fetish.'" ^[11]

Here we see maybe the cracks in a gender theory from a cisgender man writing decades ago, even with the aid of a helpful mistranslation. In particular stating that there is no structural difference between a gender and a fetish might take things a bit too far, but there is a point to be made here—the difference between these terms is largely political, and has to do with the relationship to others, with external political factors. At the time Derrida was writing this, Blanchard was in the middle of setting out his theory of HSTS and AGP trans women, and so this point of Derrida's makes perfect sense in the context within which he was writing: between a gender and a fetish it seems sometimes the gap is politics. In particular, while there are people who identify as "just having a cross-dressing fetish" instead of being "actually trans," frequently this split is not a matter of the personal identification of the subject under discussion, but rather it is imposed by an external body (frequently the medical establishment.) To further complicate matters, someone might initially identify themselves as "just a fetishist" and then later process this as "incorrect" and realize that they were either repressing or misunderstanding their own desire to transition. What this all shows is the tenuousness of trying to ground this distinction as something hard and firm inside the structure of a gender or a fetish, and how contingent this distinction is on other factors.

Fundamentally what Derrida is describing in this text is a knot that catches a lot of contemporary discourse around gender and transition. I'm sure that if you ask any trans person you know, they all have experience of cis people in their life expressing shock at the existence of transphobes along the lines of "I just don't understand why they care so much, why can't they just leave other people alone, you're not hurting anyone" and while this is well-intentioned and the point they want to make is largely true, it is missing an important shade of meaning. When I tell you that I am a trans woman, I am in fact telling you that I am a woman. This does not just affect me, but it affects you too. Indeed, up to now you may have a certain conception of what a woman is, and if you yourself are a woman (or a man, or nonbinary) this conception of what a woman is constitutes a part of your self. The fact of my womanhood may therefore challenge your conception of yourself. It is a misstep if you project your womanhood onto me, but it is equally wrong to think that our womanhoods are unrelated. Again, Derrida is very concerned with this conflict. Here we start getting really into some dense passages:

"[W]hat if, while being attentive to the most rigorous distinctions and respecting the respect of the respectable, we cannot and must not lose sight of this obscure common power, this colonial impulse which will have begun by insinuating itself into, overrunning without delay, what they call, by an expression worn enough to give up the ghost, 'the relationship to the other'! or 'openness to the other'!
But for this very reason, the cisgenderism of the other means another thing, which will be revealed little by little: that in any case we speak only one gender—and that we do not own it. We only ever speak one gender—and, since it returns to the other, it exists asymmetrically, always for the other, from the other, kept by the other. Coming from the other, remaining from the other, and returning to the other." ^[12]

What the cisgenderism of the other reveals is among other things an internalized other in the trans subject that produces both distress but which is necessary for her survival. In Derrida's again flawed but interesting analysis:

"Clockiness indicates a hand-to-hand combat with femininity... Throughout the story I am relating, despite everything I sometimes appear to profess, I concede that I have contracted a shameful but intractable intolerance: at least for womanhood, insofar as gender is concerned, I cannot bear or admire anything other than pure passing. As I do in all fields, I have never ceased calling into question the motif of 'purity' in all its forms (the first impulse of what is called 'deconstruction' carries it towards this 'critique' of the phantasm or the axiom of purity, or towards the analytical decomposition of a purification that would lead back to the indecomposable simplicity of the origin), I still do not dare admit this compulsive demand for a purity of passing except within boundaries of which I can be sure: this demand is neither ethical, political, nor social. It does not inspire judgment in me. It simply exposes me to suffering when someone, who can be myself, happens to fall short of it. ... Above all, this demand remains so inflexible that it sometimes goes beyond the physical point of view, it neglects even 'mannerism' in order to bow to a more hidden rule, to 'listen' to the domineering murmur of an order which someone in me flatters herself to understand, even in situations where she would be the only one to do so ... [a]s if I were the last heir, the last defender and illustrator of womanhood." ^[13]

Derrida has captured here a puzzle that I sometimes feel trapped in. I have an impulse in me which tells me whether or not what I am doing with regards to clothing, voice, makeup etc. is "working," and to fall short of this mark is a dysphoric experience, it produces suffering. When I started learning how to use makeup, the impulse was processed as a voice in my head saying, "you look clownish, you are a Man In A Dress," when I started voice training frequently the sounds I would produce would register to me as echos the voices I'd heard from mock-performances of femininity in any of a number of intentionally or unintentionally misogynist portrayals of womanhood. I know that I am not alone in this impulse. I do not claim that it is universal, because the variety of transfeminine experience is very broad, and attempts to theorize it as a whole are doomed to commit the sorts of erasure they mean to rectify, but in any number of online communities there are places you can go to share photos and ask the important question "do I pass?" The purposes of these is generally either to assuage or equally to confirm fears that one is in fact grotesque and beyond hope. That these impulses and standards are fundamentally colonial is no more clearly present on forums where people measure brow ridges and other bone shapes, dredging up old phrenological terminology and theories that were used (to a large extent still used, albeit usually more subtly) as technologies of colonial control. In the attempt to ground "passing" in terms of some scientific objectivity one reveals this "purification that would lead back to the indecomposable simplicity of the origin." The impulse or desire to pass is still there, it is not something that can be done away with, and it is not something that we could even wish to be rid of, it is simply a fact of the gendered experience of (some) transsexual subjects. It is a result of the broader desire to have our gender validated, which is not a specifically transsexual desire. Derrida notes, I think correctly, that the right question is not how to do away with this impulse (which is impossible not because it is some necessary evil but because even the articulation of boundaries on what constitutes this impulse is not possible) but to analyze how the expression of this impulse reverberates ethically, politically and socially.

Okay it's time to break kayfabe, at least a little bit, and bring this sprawling post to a conclusion. What's the point of all this mistranslation? Derrida's book is about the relationship between language, colonialism and identity. On the one hand then, that it lends itself to an analysis of gender is not surprising in the least. Indeed, feminism has, since its inception, involved taking anti-colonial critiques and applying them to gender.^[14] This link has been with feminism since the beginning, and it has been deeply ambivalent. I do not pretend any kind of novelty in reading Derrida's account of his "disorder of identity" stemming from his relationship to language and empire and finding a narrative that maps easily to my identity, my gender and my relationship to patriarchy.

There is something else to this comparison though. Derrida is not focused in this book with the situation of being an indigenous subject of empire, having an indigenous language that the empire is suppressing. He had no identity to fall back on when he lost French citizenship in 1940. Until that point, Judaism had not been a big part of his life. He wasn't very observant, he didn't speak Yiddish or Ladino, and the most he says about a Jewish community is that Algiers was where "the Jewish community happened to be concentrated."^[15] His relationship to language was monolingualism, but it was not the monolingualism of the "mother tongue." He was monolingual, but in a language that he did not have claim to—in a language that was given to him as a colonial subject of empire. Another argument in trans circles both online and in the academy is the idea that "transgender" is somehow a Western idea, and that to use the descriptor "trans woman" when talking about transfeminine populations outside the West is "taking a Western concept and applying it to non-Western embodiments," to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Derrida's argument about his own situation of monolingualism is that his is the disorder of identity. It is not trans genders that cannot be compared across cultures, it is cis ones. I am under no illusion here that there is any magical anti-colonial, anti-racist or even feminist consciousness that suddenly grows when you start to trans your gender, but insofar as transition involves recognizing your place in a gendered hierarchical society to be different than was originally assigned to you at your birth it is hard to see how this process can be framed as fundamentally colonialist. On the other hand, the arguments that somehow being transgender is colonialist actually all go through as arguments that being cisgender is colonialist. I am reminded here of David Henry Hwang's hit play M. Butterfly which begins by talking about the ways in which Asian men are feminized by Western stereotypes, and then tracks the transformation of a Parisian man into the role of M. Butterfly. Hwang's conclusion: it is the Western men who are feminized. There is a critique here to be made (and I'm sure many have) of the way that this play reverses these terms without really doing anything to question the neat equation of femininity with shame, but that's not really the point here. The point is that in both cases it is the role of cisgender masculinity that is destabilized, that is troubled, by the relationship of empire to colony, not the role of any transed gender. This is one of the points Derrida is getting at with his analysis of monolingualism.

Finally, as a kind of coda, I want to add that I realized while writing this another book that was influencing me here is the wonderful novella The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza. I will likely have a post in the future delving more into her work, but this is a work about borders, madness, language and gender. One of the plot threads in the book centers around a secret language that some of the (women) characters can speak that the (man) protagonist cannot understand. This concept captures for me something deep about the way gender works.

Gender, like language, structures our identity. Whether or not "gender identity" is coherent as a concept is another question entirely. One of the ideas central to Derrida's book Monolingualism of the Other is that language is in a sense a unique position to structure our desires, because it is the medium in which we both think and express them, and so it is in fact prior to our self-hood, and what I hope I've at least suggested here is that gender is, for different reasons, also in this position. There is no concept of "me, but if I didn't transition" because that person would not be me.