“Why is ‘cisness’ conceptually urgent?” Sophie Lewis asks Emma Heaney in this wide-ranging conversation on the occasion of the publication of Heaney’s edited collection, Feminism Against Cisness (Duke University Press 2024). The book brings together essays by eleven scholars including Cameron Awkward-Rich, Margaux Kristjansson, and Kay Gabriel, on historiographical as well as strategic political questions, addressing everything from the theorization of “gender as accumulation strategy” to the dark money fueling today’s anti-trans organizing. In the introduction, Heaney takes on the challenge of offering an account of sexual difference adequate for feminism’s purposes, building on Jules Gill-Peterson’s “Estro Junkie” (2021) and Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now (2019), among others. Here, the long-time interlocutors discuss reproductive labor, counterrevolution, TERFs, and the archive of practices of gender freedom to articulate the relation of cisness to feminism. The conversation took place on video call in June 2024 and was subsequently transcribed and edited for length and clarity.
SL: Emma! There’s so much we could talk about. Your thesis is stated in the simplest possible terms in your introduction’s opening words: “Cisness is feminism’s counterrevolution.” Then, I’m thinking of the end of your introduction, where you say that “feminism against cisness” ought to be a redundancy. Can you tell me a bit about that distinction for you, the struggle between “is” and “ought”?
EH: Originally, that line at the end was “feminism is definitionally against cisness.” Then my interlocutor, Durba Mitra, said, “you know, that’s not true.” Feminism, as you’ve outlined in your book Enemy Feminisms, often is very much on the side of cisness. Indeed, in the contemporary moment, the self-described feminists who get the most column inches and the biggest megaphones promote a feminism that is only cisness. TERFs’ only project—the only content of what they call a politics—is the repeated assertion that they know what ovaries, cervixes, and uteruses mean; that a uniform set of social experiences arise from the functioning of those structures and organs; that this uniform experience is definitional, natural, and eternal. Then they just mock trans people. That’s it.
I guess my original impetus was to say: “that’s not true: it is not feminism to make confident assertions about certain organs and mocking descriptions of the bodies of trans people.” But then interlocutors, including you and Durba [Mitra], motivated me to soften the claim, and to say, not that it is so in the world that we inhabit, but rather, that it ought to be. And I think that's fine, because really, I don’t care about defending the word feminism—all I care about is honing an analytic and a set of solidarities that produce gender freedom. A lot of time has been wasted at the level of critique—not that the critique isn’t important and correct. I’m saying it is. But in both of my statement’s iterations, the declarative one and the more attenuated one, the point is that the powerful, bourgeois, mostly white, people who confidently speak in feminism’s name and proffer cisness as the heart and eternal import of feminism are incorrect and have to be defeated. That’s the polemical motivation for the collection, the reason for the prominent placement of that claim.
SL: Fascist white supremacism has been one of cis feminism’s forms of appearance, one that is now re-emergent. Yet, too, the popular account of the so-called “second wave” as simply transphobic is itself an (epistemic) product of counterrevolution. In your book, The New Woman, you outline this in the early twentieth century, while in your newer work you identify it in the aftermath of the utopian 1960s. In your piece in TSQ in 2016, “Women-Identified Women: Trans Women in 1970s Lesbian Feminist Organizing,” you were, as now, provincializing cisness.
In the evolution of your work, I perceive a clearer and clearer articulation of a dialectic internal to feminism. In 2016 you articulated it as two intertwined strands of feminism: one pursuing the transcendence of gender, on the one hand, and a second, pursuing women’s autonomy, on the other. Now, in 2024, you restate the dialectic differently, via a conversation that happened over the kitchen table between Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. They are talking about what it means to be a woman, and Johnson claims that reproductive labor is the ground of womanhood, in response to which Rivera scoffingly interjects: “that’s oppressive.”
You show that Marsha—prior to being corrected by Sylvia—is already doing feminist theorizing when she says that women are “good for” care labor. She is valorizing that labor while her friend emphasizes refusal, and this is an instance of the debate between gender transcendence and autonomy that you were delineating years ago. In both cases, the dialectic offers a way to claim femininity qua pleasurable—
EH: Collective—
SL: Difference? Or… collective autonomy. Versus—
EH: Transcendence or abolition.
SL: Right. And in that moment in women’s liberation, in the early 70s, unfortunately, transcendence was often being (mis)understood as androgyny. There were screeds against femininity everywhere. Simultaneously, there were celebrations of femininity that were also oriented toward transcendence. I’m thinking of Mario Mieli and others here. Even my problematic fave Shulamith Firestone had elements of femmephobia and of femmephilia in her thought, and she was also talking about the abolition of “the sex distinction itself.”
EH: This link between the theoretical articulation in the older piece and what rises out of the moment between Johnson and Rivera helps me to think about this allergy to something called “femininity” or “women’s role,” or the social markers of femininity, that surged in the ‘70s in radical feminist spaces. For instance, the “bra burning” at the Miss America Pageant in 1968, which was an almost caricatural moment when people decided to throw brassieres and girdles into a trash can and light them on fire. Somehow this event becomes the sole thing that people know about this five-year period of feminist organizing!
But then, among certain populations of people that were given primacy in the ’90s, I think that there was a response that was saying: femininity is what feminism is. What your reading of that moment allows us to do is to consider the limits of thinking of femininity as an individual practice of adornment, or care, or pleasure. Because, of course, it is these things. But how does that enter the political?
What Johnson and Rivera’s conversation allows us to do is to disinvest in this idea of femininity as an individual identity, to engage it as an aesthetic, political and relational effect of a material set of historical conditions. What Johnson, specifically, allows us to do is to say: something called femininity arises out of my desire—little Marsha Johnson’s desire—to follow her mother into the kitchen, and to learn certain skills, gestures, and practices of provision. What she’s saying is that that affinity, that loving, that mutuality, was productive of something called sex identity for her. And so… why is this important? Why is it important for us as queer communists, as communist feminists?
The task is to see the way that the politics that arise out of that observation of Johnson’s concerns collective political movements that have sprung out of that very place of mutuality and regard. I’m talking about, for example, the public housing movement, the welfare rights movement, the indigenous resistance to child removal, trans DIY healthcare, tenants’ rights, migrant justice, anti-incarceration and prison abolition work, women’s re-entry work, labor organizing in feminized sectors like nursing, political work around public hospitals—the movements are legion that have emerged and circulated within these bonds, fortified by the question: how are we going to help people live today? And that goes for the activities that never attain the dignity of movement work; every time a queer or trans person or a woman splits a dose of hormones, offers another a couch, a shoulder, a meal, or care around an abortion, a birth, a surgical procedure, every time people in community care for each other within and beyond the bounds of legal or biological family.
Johnson says that this affinity for the sex “woman” arose out of the work that her mother did to help people live, to allow her, the young Johnson, and her siblings, et cetera, to live. And what we call “femininity” in a political sense is that legacy—that history of life-making. We have to understand this history in this way. We have to understand these movements that I’ve listed as the substance of feminism. Which is to say that the goal of something called “feminism” is to generalize these conditions as daily life, not to escape them: to make everybody collectively responsible for the kinds of provision that Johnson’s mother produced.
An aesthetics arises from this history: certain fabrics, cuts of garments, ways of putting on a face, kitchen smells, kitchen laughter, the kinds of fat distribution that estrogen produces, the ways of moving the body that emerge from having wide hips or wanting to emphasize your hips, gestures of care, just as examples: these things that have been denigrated and associated with triviality and entrapment can be valorized as the harbingers of a general freedom. And you don’t need to identify with these aesthetics as your own personal attributes. They are available to anyone interested and are not compulsory for anyone. Anyone can access some of these aesthetics, can recombine them, can respectfully say this or that part is not for me or the way I and mine care for each other looks and sounds differently. It’s about the recognition that we can move toward whatever set of aesthetics are the output of a history of social reproduction for any individual person or community.
What’s interesting is—I just realized this as I was listening to you speak—when Rivera comes in and says, “That's oppressive to women,” she also says, “If you have a lover, if you have a friend that you care about, make him do the washing up, make him do it.” And actually, what Johnson is saying is the same—this is the dialectic that you have observed. They are both saying: generalize this labor, collectivize it, make it everybody’s responsibility, make life-making everyone’s pleasure, everyone’s privilege. This is, as you say, the dialectic between the two of them, there is no ultimate opposition (there is an opposition in the scene, but not in the larger production of thought that emerges from the scene). Both are saying that these are the valuable acts—these social activities—and that they ought to be distributed universally, uncordoned by assigned sex, and that they are productive of love, affection, care, and veneration. It’s so helpful, the way that you are thinking about that. And that’s sort of the substance of my commitment.
SL: In a sense, it’s the same injunction as the one I formulated under the banner of “full surrogacy.”
EH: Yes.
SL: Or a different language might be (as in Pinko’s pages) “the communization of care”—the abolition of care in its capitalist form, via the positive supersession of the private nuclear household, meaning a transcendence of the sexual division of labor. When we talk about “mothering against motherhood,” which is to say, to pit the collective labors of lifemaking against the social form of the family, we are talking about what you call, in your introduction, “the anti-essentialism that has too often been misconstrued as essentialism.” Historically, yes, the work of motherhood has been sexed, but that sexedness has been historically circumscribed all the way down. And to say that we can mother against this world is to recognize the historic force of a form of labor that has also built this world and might help un-build it. We don’t know exactly what “transcendence” or synthesis would look like, but what we can say now is that “every cook can mother.”
We have both invoked a new standard for what might qualify as mothering, one that goes beyond the act of gestating and beyond the legal designation of mother. You make the case powerfully in your essay “Is a Cervix Cis?,” in which you reflect on a year of gazing at your organs on sonogram screens and suggest that this experience actually convinced you anew of the ideological status of assigned sex. You insist that “The cervix is not the threshold to a holy vessel. The hymen is not a mark of morality. They certainly aren’t anything for me to hang my identity on or for anyone else to view as the definitional structures of my personhood.” In fact, you suggest that non-cisness is the condition of all bodies. “Is a cervix cis?” No. Is a body cis? Also no. Unless the possessor of the body invests in cisness, an investment which must always, then, be against the body.
As such your work gives rise to a horizon, a coalition, a constituency, for feminism, that goes far beyond self-identifying women. It goes far beyond the politics of representation, and it also makes clear how very, very many of us are outside of cisness. This observation builds on Cathy Cohen, who suggested that “most of us” are not cis, simply because the cis(hetero)sexual is a concept that is developed against proletarian, trans, colonized, disabled, etc., claims on equal status and regard. And on that basis, I’d like to ask about the sense in which, for you, feminism is of women and for women, in the present moment.
You make plain that patriarchy brutalizes many people who are not women (whom it doesn’t categorize as women either). Are there dangers, then, inherent in mobilizing feminism as women? For instance, when you are listing feminisms against cisness, you include the line: “For women to march together, to gather unmediated by men, to, in their being together, reject the hierarchy imposed by sexual difference.” You include several other formations as well, but you’re very much making space for the “women marching together” aspect of feminism: you’re not backing away from this. “Gathering unmediated by men.” You do not leave that out.
EH: Yes, and leaving it out was a huge temptation. That sentence is only possible amid other sentences affirming other lines of autonomous organization. Meaning, the point that women’s autonomy is important to feminism only works when it is clear a) that this is not the only form of autonomy that is important to feminism and that b) the category of women, like any other historically contingent political identity, is riven by internal antagonisms of, most significantly, race, class, and cisness. It’s not about everybody being the same, as liberal iterations of the politics have suggested. Autonomy is, in fact, primarily valuable because political action is a place where antagonisms emerge directly because people are not needing to tamp them down in order to defend themselves against larger violences, and ideally, can be dealt with. What do you think?
SL: I find this persuasive. My understanding of your project is that, at certain moments, you affirm the category “woman,” while at others, the category seems on the brink of dissolving itself. Maybe that’s a function of its dialectical character. You say that “It is cisness, not the historical category woman that limited feminist revolutionary horizons.” And you say that “when woman is a conceptual or political problem, it is a racial and class problem.” I think I’m less confident than you, in the capacity of “woman” to not be a racial/class problem.
EH: I should have written “women.” Regret! About “woman” I have nothing to say, about women, yes. I think this is a principal point of tension between our theoretical and political orientations and it’s something I’ve very much wanted to continue clarifying in conversation with you and others.
SL: Which brings us to the two “knotted materialisms” animating your analytic. You are adding a new strand to the Marxist theorization of patriarchy. The base strand consists of a classic Marxist-feminist insight into the valuelessness of reproductive labor in its relation to monetized work. You are preserving this heuristic, but you are also putting it into collaboration with a second and distinct materialism, one dedicated to elucidating the reproduction of a link between “penetrability” and subordination. This is your innovation. This complementary Marxist materialism illuminates what you call the denial of the universal penetrability of bodies, the association of penetrability with subjection, and the subsequent partition of populations into penetrable and non-penetrable.
Lay it out for us, then: How does marrying together these materialisms help get us out of what you call the “unsatisfactory, vague conciliations” that have dogged Marxist-feminist conversations since the so-called “housework debates”? How does your second materialism—which has to do with sexual difference rather than reproductive labor—interact generatively with the first?
EH: The vocabulary of “reproductive labor” produces moments of great clarity. But I’ve heard a lot of incredulity (among Marxists, even) in response to the idea that the sum total of what this category is, is: who does the washing up? And that’s why the second component of the theoretical articulation is necessary: because what people are asking for is an account of this broader realm of social experience that is not captured comprehensively by the “reproductive labor” analysis. It’s about sexual violence. It’s about intimate relationships. It’s also about forms of social relation and social value that are organized around a register of social experience that arises out of the reproductive/productive labor split, but is not totally described in those particular Marxist-feminist terms, in my view.
So, “penetrability” is the theoretical articulation that arose for me out of trying to account for this set of social relations that are embedded in this organization of labor but are not exhaustively accounted for by an analysis wedded to a critique of political economy. It holds true both in the negative—in terms of accounts of sexual violence, interpersonal social organization of aggression and hatred and loathing and minimizing and condescension and so on—and in the positive—in terms of the solidarities, mutualities, and pleasures produced by the organization of labor into these two categories (i.e., one set of people goes into this category of feeling the onus of reproductive labor).
SL: In the context of the so-called sex wars, Ellen DuBois and Linda Gordon talked about the latter in terms of “seeking ecstasy on the battlefield.” And this insistence on the possibility—no, necessity—of collective pleasure in sexual difference pending revolution is the central target of the annihilatory drive of the feminism-of-cisness as it currently manifests in so-called “gender critical” gloating about Trump’s anti-trans “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism” executive order (e.g., J.K. Rowling and Julie Bindel tweeting approvingly). Thus while I appreciate and build on the best of the “white feminism” scholarship that mushroomed in 2021, as I see it, we have to go, in fact, even deeper into the evil that has been wrought in the name of women’s emancipation, and actually grapple with the counterrevolutionary and fascistic seductions in play. Which is not to say that “white feminism”—whiteness—is not central to all of the forms I explore in my book: imperialism, purity, the suffragist KKK, police feminism, femonationalism, TERFism, and so on. But the point is to say that these feminisms didn’t simply “leave some people out.” They were not merely adjacent to fascism, or tricked into it, or instrumentalized and tokenized within it. To say those things is actually to deny the women in question the respect they deserve as enemies.
I am indebted to you for this analysis, Emma. It is you who made me see, in the New Woman, the relation of enmity between our people and a counter-insurgent feminism: one that comes after moments of liberatory breakthrough. The counterrevolution takes the form of capital making a subgroup of women an offer. “You may now advance within the terms of the existing hierarchy of values as an individual emancipated woman.”
EH: A class of women, a race-caste of women. That’s what your contribution is, with Enemy Feminisms. The problem is not only that certain women claim that feminism comes down to them personally being able to say, “I can be CEO of x, y, or z.” It’s also a problem when feminism comes down to “There’s a possibility for us right now,” where the “us” is class-bound, and race-bound. You want to understand, at different inflection points in history, What was the effect of certain claims for women’s rights and for feminism? What was their political context, and how did those claims (and activities precipitated from those claims) work in that moment? That’s the obligation that you take on: to understand that history.
SL: And I’m trying to uncover what happens when one truncates one’s critique of patriarchy. I’m suggesting we might approach this in a similar way that Marxists have understood the “socialism of fools,” by which I mean a conspiracist account of capitalism—a conspiracist materialism, a bad materialism—which can generate the comforts of an apparent concreteness and self-purity. Not dissimilarly, in the “feminism of fools” one gets the consolations of cisness, of maternalist nationalism, of misandry, and so on.
EH: “Cisness is all I have!” is the implication of this politics. It’s all they have to differentiate their claims from simple white supremacy or simple class supremacy. It’s the only way that they can name themselves as resistant political subjects fighting power rather than just benefiting from it, wielding it.
SL: And why is this “cisness” conceptually urgent? Cisness is the naturalization of assigned sex. You write that cisness “obfuscates the reality women with the fiction woman.” It is also “the ableist apprehension of bodies into good and bad.” Cisness is, therefore, “the colonial destruction of kinship structures,” and it is “the white supremacist obliteration of personhood in the service of capital extraction, and a component of bourgeois antipathy for the poor, working, and racialized people of the world.” This is a materialist way of understanding cisness, entirely different from the representational politics that dominates “pro-trans” feminism in the liberal field.
EH: All of my claims about cisness are essentially about: What forms of life had to be edited out from conventional wisdom in order to enthrone bourgeois ideas about sex as universal? Indigenous ways of being in the world needed to be obliterated as legitimate (or even as existing) in order for this to happen. As C. Riley Snorton has traced, black communal expressions and forms had to be pathologized, policed, punished, extracted from, and held up as an antithesis to the correct, the respectable, and the natural, such that a certain set of ideas about bodies, about social roles, about what kinds of public gender would be recognizable, would be livable. This is the history of cisness.
Cisness is the way to name the historical process through which myriad forms of collective life were punished, made invisible, marginal, or pathological such that one way of living could appear as the natural, neutral, correct, and healthy one; the productive, the orderly, the non-criminal, the thing compatible with goodness and sociality. This is also the story of sex and gender moving from the realm of public recognition to the realm of private truth. All other ways of life had to be subjected to the presumption that they must strive toward that ideal. This is a way of thinking that connects this history of sex as a racial technology to Victorianist accounts of the “angel of the house,” and the persecution of sex workers, with trans history, trans studies ideas, and disability liberationist ideas about what kind of bodies are valuable. But, it’s not only an historical emergence; it’s not only a simple chronological process that runs from before cisness to the epoch of cisness. Cisness is the conceptual tool that names the regime of power regularly revitalized to put down challenges to the social order of assigned sex, as these challenges arise in history when such a revitalization serves capital and white supremacy. We are living in such a historical moment.
The critical term “cisness” clarifies the points of contact between different scholarly arguments about the appropriate bourgeois standards of comportment, of life narrative, of the consolidation of a bourgeois class identity against both the febrile aristocracy and the many forms of racialized monstrosity, including that of the metropolitan proletariat. As you alluded to earlier, there’s a homology between bourgeois whiteness and cisness. These are mutually constitutive social forms. That’s the point. But we’ve needed a way to talk about the elements of that that are about assigned sex. I’m trying to avoid saying “gender,” here!
SL: We ought to drop “gender” or “the binary” and instead use “cisness,” because we can have sexual difference without cisness. Correct?
EH: That is what I’m advocating. Cisness, as the racialized presumption of sexed naturalness, actually affords a great deal of gender expansiveness to white bourgeois people, and in our era this modality of cisness is most visible and significant in the availability of masculine priority to bourgeois white women. One has only to think of the centrality of Crossfit and machine gun masculinity to a MAGA woman like Marjorie Taylor Greene, herself a crusading transphobe. Or TERF valorization of an ill-defined normal, neutral expression of gender over a mocked femininity, which also often comes with a sort of confession of youthful masculinity, presented as the tragedy that they might have been trans boys or misrecognized as such. Or the liberal commitment to the “successful” woman leader who has triumphed over the attempts to contain her in the limiting work of social reproduction. We might think of Greene, J.K. Rowling, and Hillary Clinton as emblematic hanks of this braid. How do we name the reality that these groups of women attain priority and power from the ways they work, work out, dress, and carry themselves, ways that supposedly violate the “stereotypes” or norms of “female gender?” I’m saying that they are not violating norms. Rather, the latitude for white women to engage in masculinist behaviors, even the incentive to do so, is itself an exercise of cisness as a way to express white identity in this moment. The presumed normalness and neutrality of the sex of white people––the cisness of whiteness in other words––is emphasized and enacted, rather than violated by these social forms.
The complement of this incentivized white gender latitude, is that cisness racializes the masculinity and femininity of BIPOC people (even when these modes are being expressed in supposed alignment with assigned sex and also when they are in a perceived non-alignment) as artificial, pathological, exaggerated, indeed, as not cis. Consider, for example, Greene’s recent mockery of the eyelashes of her colleague Jasmine Crockett. Greene saying “Look at this false way of doing sex!” is her shoring up of her own cisness by mounting a white supremacist attack on a Black woman’s audacity to choose to adorn her own body in a feminine way. Or consider the entire history of pathologizing the projected masculinity of men of color, particularly Black men. These are all ways that cisness produces the “hyper”-gender of people of color, the pathologizing of supposed conformity with assigned sex.
On the other side, we have the now persistent reality that successful women athletes of color, both cis and trans, are policed with the cudgel of biological gender difference. How do we name the fact that attacks on Black and Arab female-assigned professional and Olympic athletes and the attack on young trans girls and women in high school and collegiate athletics are part of the same regime of sex? The most prominent named targets at the high school and collegiate level have also been Black trans girls and women. Cisness names the damned if you conform, damned if you violate nature of the racial order of sex. Or conversely the production of specific forms of regard and self regard stemming from being “not like the other girls” that are, in fact, part and parcel of power for bourgeois white women. How do we name that this racial form is distinct from butchess and trans masculinity because it is precisely the racial and class dimension of cisness that allows bourgeois women to access masculine priority without being exposed to transphobia, without being associated with the racialized history of transness and queerness? This needle is thread through the constant focus on the moderate, healthy, natural quality of the gender expressions of white women, in other words, through the rhetorical expression of whiteness as the possession and arbiter of cisness. The flipside of this regime exposes cis women of color to transmisogyny and transphobia, to the racialized assertion that their femininity is artificial and/or that their masculinity (whether expressed or simply projected) is unnatural and disqualifies them from the opportunities due women.
Cisness provides a vocabulary for all this. The analytic categories of “the binary” and “gender” actually obfuscate these matters, because an analysis through the binary would view the bourgeois white woman engaged in non-normative gender activities as the antagonist to tradition and has nothing to offer an analysis of the racialized pathologizing of sex, especially when it’s a pathologizing of supposed conformity with assigned sex roles. This accords with Jules Gill Peterson’s analysis of trans misogyny in her new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.
SL: This reminds me of your point that cisness generates a multiplicity of racial and class others. Back in 2016, when you were writing about trans women in 1970s organizing, I was attempting, in Salvage, to articulate why it is that SWERFs (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminists) are almost always TERFs and vice versa. I was stumbling towards the same answer you would give: that it is an inherently racializing, imperial construction of femaleness, i.e., cissexual womanhood, that renders the sex worker and the transfeminine person as womanhood’s economized others.
What you say is: “People who are racialized or poor, people with disabilities, and, most overtly, people who are called trans or gender nonconforming: these are the people made to bear all the weight of the universal non-cisness of bodies because they are made to represent that fact.” It’s sex workers, too, right? One could say “whorephobia,” but I tend to say “femmephobia,” where “femme” is the non-cis articulation of femininity that is “contaminated” by direct market mediation, which is to say, by money. This is the femininity to which SWERFS and TERFS object, on the basis that femme-ness is more “artificial” than cis femaleness.
EH: We don’t want to say “artificial”... You mean, the reality that everybody modifies their body, right?
SL: Yes. Cyborgicity. What’s wrong with claiming “artificiality”?
EH: Because it sort of participates in the production of a natural body.
SL: Well, but artifice is the truth of the natural. As when Susan Stryker says “You are as constructed as me … I challenge you to … discover the seams and sutures in yourself.” Anyway, I think we agree. My point is that the SWERF/TERF fantasy is profoundly a fantasy of organicity, which is partly a fantasy of being clean of the taint of commerce and techne, daintily removed from the spheres of work and money.
This whorephobic, femmephobic feminism fantasizes and, to an extent, materially creates a space where certain women can feel uncontaminated by circuits of accumulation. It is of primary importance to cissexuality that the woman can experience herself as “not for sale.” She is not prostituting herself. She is organically linked to a version of earthly biology she (falsely) imagines as heteroprocreative.
EH: Yeah.
SL: My last question for you today, Emma, concerns children. The transfeminist decolonial 1970s often gave great attention to the question of youth liberation, of children’s liberation. The same cannot be said of our contemporary moment, and yet the current anti-trans, so-called “anti-gender,” global coalition is centrally a war on children. There is a brief gesture towards children in your introduction: you say that “it is not analytically precise to say that children are like women in their common vulnerability to sexual assault. Rather, an ideology of sexual difference that imbues the feminine with—in fact defines the feminine as—powerlessness reproduces itself through the sexual abuse and assault of children who are in a materially powerless relation to adults.” I would like to hear your thoughts about the ruling class’s alarm and hatred vis-à-vis the anti-cis desires and practices manifest in children’s speech and children’s actions all over the world today.
EH: I think that, actually, you and Andrea Long Chu have written what I would care to say about this, along with Joanna Wuest and Jules Gill-Peterson in Feminism Against Cisness. (What Chu did in the “Freedom of Sex” was to identify, not TERFs, but a separate group of cis culture warriors: the TARLs: trans-antagonistic radical liberals.) Clearly there was a central event underlying the scaling-up of the current peculiar obsession with trans kids with the motivation of preventing trans kids from existing. This central event was the ideological capture of the liberal organs of conventional wisdom production, The New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic and so on. What is happening in all those panicked op-eds about children at risk of trans “contagion” is a reaction to something that was declared ten years earlier on a Time magazine cover, namely, the “trans tipping point” but is actually more recent. For five years, young middle class kids have contested the compulsory nature of cisness in a newly vocal and visible way, threatening the racialized and class partitioning of gender nonconformity. Here, we are seeing a concerted widespread class-bound reaction, which disciplines white middle class kids differently than poor kids and kids of color. We are living through an inflection moment of counterrevolution to the long, audacious project of trans freedom. I do not think it is overstating the case to say that what has occurred in the last ten years is the shaking of the dungeon walls that nineteenth-century medical science tried to put trans life in by producing the bourgeois narrative of transness, first as a metaphor explaining same sex desire and later as a minoritarian affliction. The essentially expansive and collective nature of non-cisness has been made available to middle class kids with internet access. And the bourgeoisie has spasmed in response. The death throes of cisness have been glimpsed, knocking on the chamber door of the white bourgeoisie. The trans eliminationist convergence among TARLs, TERFs, and MAGA expresses an aligned class position bent on extinguishing the cultural productions of youth that express the non-compulsory nature of cisness and reveals its status as ideology. The collection is fighting this moment of containment, of extinguishing which this reinvigoration of the compulsoriness of cisness aims to achieve.
What is really central is that, absent an analytic of cisness as a structuring ideology (as opposed to the principal way it’s understood: as an individual identity) we can’t understand and combat these extremely violent people who claim to be operating on behalf of girls, often in the service of feminism, and may even genuinely imagine themselves to be doing so. And, as a concluding provocation, I’ll add that while Engels wrote correctly that the severing of production from reproduction was the “world historical defeat of the female sex,” he also returned to the idea that one of the corollary gender effects of capitalism was the loss of male dignity in the recurrent cycles of crises, the emblem of which was low-wage women in industrial manufacture and laid-off men at home darning socks. Consider the scale of problems produced by this frame that, even as the lie of bourgeois marriage gives way to a generalized comradely sex love, this will involve the promotion of women to real work, not the demotion of men to housework. Consider the scale of problems produced by the sense that there is something scabby, bourgeois, or lumpen (used pejoratively) about gender provocations both feminist and queer. This is to say that also in communist traditions the horizon of women’s freedom is dogged by a silly attachment to the cisness of the bourgeoisie, the mode of expression of which is an allergy to girl stuff, stemming from a chump’s acquiescence to capital’s ruse that dignified work is the production of surplus value. No—to darn a sock is the highest calling. ⊱