C. Riley Snorton’s “Black on Both Sides” and anti-trans legislation
Our state governments continue proposing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, including banning gender-affirming care for trans kids.
There are over 300,000 trans children aged 13-17 living in the United States, and almost 40% of them live in states that have introduced transphobic legislation. At least 22 states have passed legislation banning gender-affirming care for transgender kids under 18, according to a map by the Human Rights Campaign.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is requesting medical records of transgender children who are seeking care outside the state. Last month, a queer clinic in Georgia received a subpoena requesting private medical records for trans kids from Texas. The request arrives following Governor Greg Abbott's signing of a bill preventing trans kids from receiving any hormone therapy or puberty blockers last June. The law went into effect last September. Seattle Children's Hospital also received a subpoena from Paxton in November.
Florida also removed a policy that allows trans people in the state to choose their gender on IDs, and 24 incarcerated trans women in the state are denied medical care, including hormone therapy. Last fall, in a bill combined with abortion restrictions, Nebraska passed a bill banning gender-affirming care.
Last year, 87 anti-trans bills were passed; so far in 2024, over 200 bills have been introduced.
Erin Reed, an independent LGBTQ+journalist and trans activist who tracks U.S. anti-trans legislation, writes that anti-trans bills nationwide are built "on the fear of transgender regret. Proponents of these bills use this rationale to justify banning care and show no sign of halting their efforts."
Her work describes how misinformation about trans identity is weaponized and spread across the country, including from our elected officials and media, and how this weaponization is then normalized through anti-trans legislation.
She adds: "Publishing stories that center on transgender regret and portraying them as a common narrative distorts the reality around gender-affirming care that has been found by over 50 studies and every major medical organization: that gender-affirming care improves and saves lives for transgender people."
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Trans people are losing their rights, while anti-trans violence is also on the rise.
From 2021 to 2022, violence against the LGBTQ+ community rose more than 30%. In 2023, over 50 trans people were murdered worldwide. This year so far, three trans people were killed in Mexico, including the country's first nonbinary judge; a 43-year-old trans woman was killed in a hit-and-run in Arizona.
Clinics providing care for queer and trans people are also being targeted. In October, a queer clinic in Georgia burned down; officials say the arson was intentional.
These policies and acts are happening because our state governments—birthed from an ideology that certain (white, cis-hetero) bodies were worthy while (nonwhite, disabled, non-binary) others were not—choose to continue to subjugate the trans community. Rather than meet the needs of an already marginalized community, the state wants a homogenous country, and they will violently repress our most marginalized, especially those who dream, live, and fight for a world built outside the control of white, cis-heteronormative, Christian men.
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A friend recommended I more deeply engage with the work of C. Riley Snorton, a Bronx-born transgender scholar, activist, and writer, to learn trans and queer history and better understand the structures and ideologies behind the transphobic violence we are seeing today.
Snorton's writing focuses on gender, race, and sexuality, in particular, Black trans identity, including Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low.
In 2017, they published Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, which "identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence."
Snorton touches on James Marion Sims' violent medical experiments against Black femme bodies and how "slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable," changeable. They connect the gender-based violence of the plantation to the medical experiments of the 19th century, using language like "an unruly body within plantation economies"; "'hospital' as a site of racial containment and suffering"; and, on Sims' experiments on Black women, "here, there are no bodies (except, tacitly, Sims's), because his 'patients' were nobodies according to the precepts of law and medicine."
Black on Both Sides requires intentional, slow reading. (I have sat with Chapter One for over a month.) It challenges the binaries we have around flesh and the body and the role whiteness and a chattel slavery economy plays in how we understand both. A country created to empower white men who viewed other bodies as disposable will continue to pass and rationalize legislation that threatens every part of trans life and identity, including passing legislation that controls the care this community receives and how they can identify.
Black on Both Sides helps to explain how the disposability of a nonwhite body, for economic or medical reasons, is normalized in the United States, from the genocide against Indigenous communities to medical experiments on Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the Black and Brown imprisoned people who harvest the foods we eat to the banning of gender-affirming care. Anti-trans/LGBTQ+ legislation is a natural consequence of empires/systems built on controlling and having power over a perceived other.
Snorton describes how the state actively works to "perpetuate racialized gender as the norm and as the necessary and naturalized consequence of the current order of things." Their work invites us to address how and why modes of dispossession/violence occur against the trans community and what structures, not just legal ones, are used to normalize transphobic violence, and how these structures uplift oppressive, homogenous systems that determine the conditions the Black queer and trans community lives in.
In solidarity,
-Olga