Jules Wong (Pennsylvania State University), “Ambivalences of Trans Recognition”

Forthcoming in Hypatia

By Jules Wong

It was in rural Pennsylvania, on the edges of Dutch country, where I experienced a defining moment of gender recognition. Stopping for gas on that bright fall afternoon, I was seen and received by an older attendant, in a way the significance of which neither of us could know to expect. What can I do for you, sir? […] The men’s bathroom is the second on the right. The man did not—could not—know that I am transmasc and nonbinary. But he picked up what I was putting down. We went merrily along.

Why was it that I was rather seamlessly recognized by someone who, in all likelihood, is untrained in the social innovations to gender concepts, practices, and norms? In my regular community, I wasn’t ‘stealth’ or passing. This recognition success must have had to do with my race and the fact that I was driving another guy. Where racialization confounds and fractures gender assessments, traditional gender roles and expectations fill in the gaps.

My article, “Ambivalences of Trans Recognition,” sprouted from the mixture of delight, confusion, and doubt sparked by this episode. I hope to reach audiences in social philosophy and critical theory, and feminist and trans philosophy. I advance the position that gender recognition, and recognition in general, might not fulfill the self-development and freedom it promises, according to an influential account; but that does not entail that recognition is only a false promise. As I say in the paper: “Recognition is both good and bad, and when it is good it is also bad.”

First, I characterize the ‘meh’ phenomenology of recognition. Centering the norms that mediate recognition, I examine the entwinement of clocking—being spotted as trans—and recognition. Even for those of us who wish to pass (and who consequently treat clocking as misrecognition), there are good reasons to think of passing as itself misrecognition, and clocking as recognition. Moreover, it is often important to our survival to participate in our own clocking. In doctor’s offices, for instance, we can usually only become recognized as needing transition-related healthcare by strategically taking up concepts that are foreign or mismatched to our lived experience. We might need to make it seem like we hate what we see in the mirror and want a one-way ticket to the other gender to get the treatments we need when, in truth, we find aspects of our bodies more or less livable.

Moreover, it is hard to deny that increased recognition has produced brutal effects. Anti-trans legislation went from a political diversion to a primary plank of American conservatism (and, to some extent, centrism). Being seen can mean being made available for violence. The people who suffer the most under this hypervisibility are those who are racialized and poor. These negative effects should lead us to refuse to treat recognition as a solution to antagonism. And, as I show, recognition of a person’s moral status cannot be divorced, philosophically or in practice, from recognition of their body or aesthetic. Recognition accrues the tacky residue of racialization, disability, gender misfitting, and poverty. I go on to show why we ought to draw the stronger conclusion that recognition is ambivalent in itself, as a norm for orienting emancipatory struggle, and not simply ambivalent in its effects.

I suggest a methodological shift that will help keep the ambivalence of recognition in view. Rather than think of recognition as a value, we might do better to study geographically and temporally bounded practices of recognition. I read Susan Stryker’s rich account of the intimacies afforded by a San Francisco BDSM dungeon for the where, when, who, and how of recognition. The embodied poetics she describes illustrate how trans recognitive practices can contribute to the development of subjectivity and agency. Agency, Stryker suggests, is not a property of a person so much as a ‘place’ in which she feels herself to be. Trans recognitive practices enable, then, self-articulation and self-transformation. Yet, I caution against regarding trans practices as purified from ambivalence, seeing as trans communities and practices are not islands isolated from and untouched by oppressive and dominating forces—especially racism and racial antagonism, as I underscore.

My arguments support trans critiques of recognition politics. To critique recognition’s bad effects and recognition as a norm, however, does not entail abandoning it—either as a matter of strategy or creative resistance. I hope to have illuminated the texture of gender recognition whilst expanding the study of the normative ambivalence that besets critique and praxis.