I also see a connection with the environment. I think there are parallels between the failure to address the implications of our planet’s finite resources and our dependence upon it, and the idea that human potential is boundless. While I want people to be free to live as they choose, I also believe that human bodies have limits. And I am concerned about the influence on young people of the idea that, with the aid of technology, these can be transcended.
- Susanna Rustin, ‘My hope for a more open discussion of women’s and trans rights is fading’, The Guardian, 13 October 2021
Yes, you’ve seen that quote before - two posts ago. But I can’t stop thinking about it. I am determined not to be too much in the business of TERF debunking here - I tend to think that as long as Julia Serano exists to do the definitive job for the record, nobody else needs to. But this quote won’t leave my head, despite (because of!) its argument being so flimsy. It tells us so much about how TERFs understand the body and the environment, the link between the two, and what they think the trans apocalypse will really consist of.
To very quickly dispense with the argument that “the limits of the body” shouldn’t be “transcended with the aid of technology” - nope, sorry, try again. You can’t draw a clean line between the ‘natural’ body and external technology. See Haraway, see Lewis, see your own reading glasses and shoes. Trying to place a line between ‘natural and embodied’ and ‘external and artificial’ is always an ideological move, whether it’s lamenting the use of antidepressants or, in this case, presenting gender transition as the wasteful over-use of precious, external resources.
So what kind of resources are being used here? The parallel is explicitly-made: finite ones. Industrial powers thought they could keep drilling for oil forever, but they were wrong - we’re going to run out. (This part, to be clear, is true). And similarly, trans people think they can keep… being? Living in their bodies, enjoying their lives, maybe taking some hormones? But of course they’re wrong, because we’re going to run out of, er… oestrogen? Pronouns? Blue hair dye? Joy?
That last one may well be the closest. Marika Rose’s beautiful essay, What does a gender critical feminist want?, is a text I return to over and over when I feel unmoored and frantic over the seemingly random and inexplicable cruelty of TERFism. There are threads of coherence, Rose argues, which coalesce around TERFs’ “inability to imagine gendered embodiment or bodily modification as sites of pleasure and desire as well as suffering and violation.” She goes on to link this vision of embodiment to white feminism’s historic role in propping up property rights and empire:
When middle class white feminists enter the public sphere they do so by promising to carry their role of moral enforcers from the domestic to the public sphere, promising (like Wollstonecraft) to ensure that children are educated into their proper roles as citizens or (like Josephine Butler) to hold the British Empire to the moral standards it professes. A world built on property is a world built on propriety and the capitalist work ethic, a world built on self-denial and self-discipline. The ethics of propriety are the ethics of ressentiment – I am not allowed to do the things I want to do, and nor should you be.
It does seem, then, that the “finite resource” that Rustin accuses trans people of recklessly wasting is… joy. We can’t all just express ourselves and exist in our bodies as we want to, say the TERFs - there’s a limited supply of joyful embodiment to go around, and we all have to accept our ration.
In viewing joyful gendered embodiment - let’s just call it trans joy - as a finite resource, Rustin remains trapped in the extractive mindset which she chides trans people for having. She is unable to see that joy is not a fossil fuel: it is not drilled for, extracted, refined, distributed, sold, and fought over. Joy is wind or sea power; whether we’re there to capture it or not, it will keep returning unbidden, wave after after wave.
This, then, is the apocalypse that TERFs fear so much: the final surrender of their regulating power. As Rose writes, queerness “threatens to expose the truth that a world built on property and propriety isn’t what anyone wants”. It’s true, then - we do bring an apocalypse of sorts. Queer, joyful, playful embodiment must be imagined as finite, because if it’s infinite, we could all have been enjoying it all along, and that would be the end of the world.
I have written about gender transition so far as if it happens without recourse to any specific material resources, but of course, that’s not quite right. Some people do need stuff to transition - hormones, for example. I was flippant earlier about the idea running out of oestrogen, but access to hormones in the event of supply chain collapse is a real concern for many trans people. After reading the first two posts from this newsletter, a friend told me:
My gender apocalypse tidbit is I went from "better not go on testosterone because what if the government goes full fash and it gets taken away/I regret it, or I lose it due to general apocalypse" to "oh shit better get that transition in before that happens.”
Trans people seeking a hormone prescription know, more than most, about scarcity and lack. You don’t wait five years to see a doctor on the NHS, or pay hundreds to see one slightly quicker, and come away under the illusion that you can get these things from a vending machine. It’s not silly, then, to worry about where hormones might come from after a social upheaval which disrupts our supply chains even more than they already have been. This kind of concern is also raised (if almost always in bad faith) about revolution: where are you going to get your hormones when you’ve overthrown the government? But Margaret Killjoy reminds us to separate the resource from the system that distributes it:
All the time people ask me how we can continue to make this or that object (eyeglasses, let’s say, or antibiotics). The answer is deceptively simple: we’ll just continue to make those things. Our economic system is not what grows and distributes food, nor conducts research, nor builds houses. People do.
It’s true: the scarcity (or otherwise) of oestrogen, for example, is relative. A cis woman can go to her GP with symptoms of the menopause and have it prescribed more or less instantly. A trans woman might wait years for exactly the same drug - and it is exactly the same one, in the same packaging. People distribute things, and could distribute them differently. What counts as scarce - and whose experience of scarcity counts - is relative. Humans made things this way, and we could make them differently. Our potential, after all, is boundless.