Transgender Rights: a Review

Transgender Rights (ed Paisley Currah, Richard M Juang, and Shannon Price Minter, Univ of Minnesota Press 2006) is a welcome collection of articles that provide thoughtful depth to a consideration of the rights of trans people.

The writers are ones I recognize from the last nearly-twenty years of work on trans issues: Judith Butler, Dallas Denny, Ruthann Robson, Phyllis Randolph Frye, Julie A. Greenberg, Taylor Flynn...
It shows up my early writings for the superficial treatment that they were - and that was all they could be. Twenty years ago there simply was no discourse about trans identities and rights.

Shannon Minter's article is an eloquent treatment of the ways in which gay and trans histories overlap, while current gay rights movements dismiss trans issues as 'add-on'. Gay writers claim gender-variant people in the past (cross-dressing women, Stonewall drag queens, for example) as gay, though they are equally well understood as trans. Minter points to a divergence in the 70s away from overtly gendered identities among gay and lesbian people, and toward a more professional, fitting-in strategy. He identifies this trend as both classist and racist, and points to the current outcome of the repudiation by gay people of trans people.

There is a fascinating extract from a superior court in Colombia about whether the mother of an 8 year old intersex child should or should not be permitted to consent to irreversible surgery for her daughter. What is the role of the state in supporting the family as a private sphere free from state activitiy? In supporting a child against possible discrimination within the family? Who gets to decide among treatment options when the medical profession is divided? The court concluded that because the child was 8, there was no urgency to the surgery (as there might have been if she was an infant) and refused to authorize the mother's consent to surgery till after puberty; but ordered the state to provide interdisciplinary support to the family.

Pursuing Protection for Transgender People through Disability Law examines the stream of thought that says that trans people should not rely on disability rights protection since such protections are premised on a less-than status of being disabled. Relying on an analysis of the 3-pronged definition of disability in the ADA, (including someone with an impairment, or perceived to have one) the authors argue that all antidiscrimination work should focus on the fact of phobic attitudes as the problem, rather than focusing on a 'deficiency' in an individual; and from that perspective a disability analysis is helpful to trans people.

Judith Butler looks at the DSM as a regulatory document that constructs gender, to the disadvantage of anyone who does not fit into the binary ccategories.

Dean Spade's article "Compliance is Gendered" is riveting. He set up the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and works with gender-variant poor people and people of colour. He says that queer politics have been completely concerned with achieving privilege for middle-class queers (shared property rights, etc) at the expense of poor and people of colour. And he demonstrates how viciously trans people are treated by a 'support system' including jails, women's shelters, and social supports, which are utterly gendered; but a system which denies access to gendering services to most trans people, consigning them to inappropriate, dangerous, life-threatening circumstances.

Dallas Denny does a useful history of trans communities in the US in the late twentieth century; and Shannon Minter's piece has some useful historical perspectives also.

This book is a keeper.