The Un-importance of Wearing Clothes
...and the problem of "social transition" as a private right.
Two pivotal misunderstandings, as I would broadly synthesize them, of the anti-trans politics now engulfing the United States:
1. That the state always acts repressively, in a top-down manner, and does so motivated by a moral drive called transphobia.
2. That defenses of trans people as rights-bearing private individuals can oppose the state’s exercise of power anchored in sex and gender.
2024 appears likely be consumed by political escalation, by which I mean the Lovecraftian road to a national ban of some sort on transition depending on the outcome of fall elections and the primacy of state legislatures in generating more aggressive legislation targeting classes of trans people already subject to vulnerability by the administrative state. Missouri’s House Bill 2885, for example, has made headlines for proposing felony criminal charges (up to four years in prison, or a $10,000 fine) and sex offender registration for any schoolteacher or counselor who “commits the offense of contributing to [the] social transition” of a minor. The bill defines “social transition” as “the process by which an individual adopts the name, pronouns, and gender expression, such as clothing or haircuts, that match the individual’s gender identity and not the gender assumed by the individual’s sex at birth.”1
The criminalization of what the bill calls “support, regardless of whether the support is material, information, or other resources” is a spectacular declaration of state power, not only over school employees, of course, but through them, over students themselves. The bill’s sponsor, state Representative Jamie Gragg, suggested it would specifically restore the dominion of parents over their children: “This is to put the social learning development of our children back in the hands of the parents.”2
The root absurdity and danger of HB 2885 is perhaps less Gragg’s than medicine and psychiatry’s, without which he would have no bill. The term “social transition” is one of the many pseudo-psychiatric terms found in the glossary of transgender healthcare. The ABC News article in which Gragg was quoted above also cites a psychiatrist to explain why trans youth wear clothing, style themselves, and use names and pronouns in everyday speech, as if these are genuinely confounding practices requiring expert clarity and reassurance. Indeed, the article then refers to a body of medical research demonstrating “that social transitioning had ‘positive and immediate’ benefits on child development, with improvements in mood, self-esteem, and social and family relationships, as well as a reduction in anxiety.” The move from politician to medical expert is utterly conventional in journalism on anti-trans legislation at this point, but pause over the astounding delusion at hand a moment longer: the article is attempting to explain why people have names, wear dresses or hoodies, and paint their nails—or don’t, and so on. In other words, “social transition” betrays a liberal strategy of medicalized respectability, claiming that for trans youth, style is uniquely an aspect of their psychological development and mental health—apparently unlike other young people, or, for that matter, unlike adults.
Who, precisely, is meant to be persuaded by this claim? It is certainly not Representative Gragg.
The term “social transition” has a non-trans history in the psychology of adolescence. In the 1980s, it was an operative metaphor for describing adolescence through the American trope of a rocky period of self-making, what one psychologist in 1978 termed “the difficulty of adolescence as a transitional period.” The primary “transition” that concerned psychologists at the time was school, where social shifts in friend groups and hierarchies from middle school to high school affected a young person’s self-esteem and mental integrity, resulting either in positive self-actualization or, if the social transition went poorly, “problem behavior.”3
The term “social transition” was only later adopted by psychologists and psychiatrists looking to powerfully expand their jurisdiction over trans youth to include entirely non-medical practices that often spur parents to reject or harm their kids: wearing a dress, cutting or growing out hair, wearing a binder or a bra, wearing makeup, or adopting a new name and pronouns. Making those banal but concrete practices of changing gender into psychiatric events was intended to convince anxious and angry parents that they shouldn’t put down their children. By the same token, tying practices of clothing and self-description to healthy development overinflated them with a pathological degree of significance, upping the ante and creating a lucrative target, both for parents of trans youth who wanted to stop their children from transitioning and, now, politicians.
I don’t mean to imply that psychiatry directly caused HB 2885, just that it clearly holds one part of the blame for inventing the root vulnerability that Gragg has taken advantage of in Missouri. If anything, the attachment of sex offender felonies to a teacher complimenting a teenager’s haircut exposes, once and for all, how fraudulent the medicalization of transition has been all along. Gragg can claim the right of the state to control children’s dress and speech (masquerading as the rights of parents) through teachers and counselors, in part, because psychiatry and medicine first claimed the right to regulate trans youth’s practices of transition .
Still, the causal events that led to HB 2885 run far deeper than the shallow history of “social transition” as an especially foolish psychiatric fiction. Here lies the far bigger problem raised by this bill. Not only will psychiatrists prove to be the least effective political allies of trans youth in Missouri, but contemporary queer and transgender culture’s elevation of the private right to dress as the sine qua non of politics is also quite useless as a political strategy.
Part of what I gather stuns in bills like HB 2885 is their audacity. The law would target the most conservative, least politically subversive of all transgender practices: individual style, identification, and language-use. In the case of minors, “social transition” is also a cheap compromise offered to young people who are refused blockers and hormones by disapproving parents and doctors, but that compromise is offered in a broader queer and transgender culture that has elevated self-identification through style as the ultimate arbiter of being transgender, making it much harder to advocate for a genuine right to transition for anyone, teenager or adult.
Mainline transgender politics are almost entirely cultural in scope and form, having shrunk away from the concrete demands of ending criminalization, securing access to housing and welfare payments, and free, on-demand access to hormones and surgeries that characterized the transsexual liberation movement of the 1970s. Indeed, “transgender” was a term invented by crossdressers to conserve their wealth and legal rights by shrinking transition down to the scale of the private individual’s “lifestyle.” The Society for the Second Self, a national transvestite social club that epitomized this outlook, eventually solicited donations from the readers of one of its newsletters in the 1970s by asking that they “support THE organization which supports YOUR right to personal expression.”4 Non-profit corporations like Ariadne Kane’s Outreach Foundation in Boston proclaimed “transgenderism” as a sign of the individual’s enlightenment, through style, beyond traditional gender roles. “I am not interested in sex reassignment surgery for myself,” explained Kane at a professional development workshop for nurses in 1975. “Labels are deceptive. Every case must be considered by itself because of the complexities, the genesis, the etiology and even the existentialism of it. In my case, my gender state is compatible with my biological sex.”5
Over time, the crossdresser’s middle-class philosophy has become the dominant current of US queer and transgender culture, which strategically draped itself in the language of 1970s radicalism to certify its good political taste. (This is a major concern of my next book project, so I can promise far more detailed and minutely archival accounts of these events to come.) In the 1980s and 1990s, crossdressers suggested that all people under the transgender umbrella shared a right to dress, meaning that being transgender was fundamentally a matter of personal taste and flexibility in a consumer culture. Today, declarations that intentionally gender-bending style equals political radicalism have become so pervasive as to be banal. One can look to the actual fashion industry (where the imperative to “de-gender” clothing is indistinguishable from wealthy white transvestites fifty years ago); the intense stress on the “validity” of private identification in language or fantasy as what makes someone transgender, not transitioning; and the high value conferred on nonbinary aesthetics and correlate identities in which androgyny’s historically white masculine form has been granted the grandiose power to resist or escape the gender binary.
All of this is to say, the material problems conditioning the possibility of transition have been replaced over the last four decades by the First Amendment right of the private individual to dress however they see fit. (Even as psychiatry continued to claim shared jurisdiction over what it came to call “social transition.”) I worry that freedom of expression will be the only one that survives the tide of anti-trans legislation unless something changes. The least successful type of anti-trans law to date is the so-called “drag ban,” which, as the case in Florida shows, cannot withstand First Amendment challenges not because there is right to transition, but because private businesses cannot be restricted by the state from selling drag as artistic entertainment alongside food and drinks.6 Note the difference.
HB 2885 is a different matter altogether. Students have very limited First Amendment rights on school campuses, meaning that they cannot present themselves as private individuals enjoying the right to dress as they please.7 Their self-expression is governed from the outset by a competing set of custodians, from parents to schoolteachers, to psychiatrists and doctors, to the Missouri House of Representatives. Trans youth’s interests are therefore materially extraneous to the mainline of contemporary queer and transgender culture, whose architects were wealthy, college-educated adults whose prior enjoyment of full-citizenship was the very reason they demanded only the affirmation of a right to dress.
I suspect that part of the genuine shock of bills like HB 2885 is that most people reasoned that LGBT liberalism’s elevation of the private individual over all other political concerns would inoculate dress and language from state interference. It evidently has not. What perhaps has been misunderstood, then, is how the state exercises power. The law cannot prohibit being transgender, for there is no such state of being. The state has no need to target people’s interior selves, either, for the law can seize people where it always has, in concrete social practices that it simply declares are the undesirable traits of transgender people—namely, practices of transition.
It is perhaps comforting to frame right wing extremism as the singular cause or agent of anti-trans politics. If that were so, then it really would be meaningfully political to deliberately appear transgender through style or elections of language. But while the right may be responsible for escalation, it is nevertheless true that liberalism, including the enthusiastic liberalism of queer and transgender people’s characteristically middle-class culture, has sustained, if not magnified the vulnerability on which the right is presently cashing in. There never should have been a psychiatric category like “social transition” to cast such flimsy but powerful aspersion on young people’s clothing, style, and names. Yet there is, and it seems to me that the task confronting we who seek to defeat anti-trans politics today is to reckon with how flaccid restricting the ideal of being transgender to the private individual’s taste is proving to to be in the maelstrom from which we cannot hide in paeans to clothing ourselves “beyond the binary.” The State of Missouri may very easily outmaneuver that gambit and too much is at stake.
HB 2885, Missouri House of Representatives, https://documents.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills241/hlrbillspdf/5874H.01I.pdf.
Kiara Alfonseca, “Missouri teachers who support a trans minor's social transition could face felony, be put on sex offender list under proposed bill,” ABC News, March 5, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/US/missouri-bill-teachers-support-minors-transitioning-felony-sex-offender-list/story?id=107803364.
Roberta G. Simmons, “Social Transition and Adolescent Development,” Adolescent Social Behavior and Health no. 37 (Fall 1987): 33, 42.
See Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess) Records, Series III. California State University Northridge Special Collections.
Ariadne Kane, “ The TV TG TS Phenomenon: Discussions of Transvestism, Transgenderism & Transsexualism,” June 14, 1975, p 12. J. Ari Kane-Demaios Papers, Box 7, Folder 2, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
Zach Schonfeld, “Supreme Court refuses to revive Florida drag show law,” The Hill, November 16, 2023, https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4313812-supreme-court-refuses-to-revive-florida-drag-show-law/.
The referential Supreme Court case here is Tinker v. Des Moines (1969).