Disability and the Sexual Politics of Fascism: Intersex Exceptions and Trans Exclusions

• In Event: CDSC Sponsored Panel: Disability in an Age of Fascism (HYBRID)

Abstract

Divergent relations between transness and disability have proliferated in the contemporary United States—informed consent, as a refusal of medical authority, has expanded but faces legal attacks; the diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria purports to depathologize transness even as discourses of viral contagion, like Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, proliferate; and ongoing trans disavowals of disability coincide with legal strategies for extending Americans with Disabilities Act protections to trans people. A double face of recognition and state violence, long critiqued in trans studies, modulates these uneven relations between trans and disability. The problem is not simply how trans people are, or are not, recognized as disabled, but rather how state projects of sex mobilize ideas about disability.

To these ends, this paper examines how discourses of disability appear in US state bills criminalizing medical transition, particularly in their exemption of intersex interventions. The same medications and surgical techniques prohibited for trans youth are, in most care bans, explicitly green-lit for intersex youth. Both criminalization and exemption invoke disability. Multiple relations to disability undergird trans criminalization; transness as madness (ontology) is compounded by transition as harm (a disabling event). In turn, while this porosity between trans and disability is mobilized to withdraw medical access, the conflation of intersex and disability instead requires treatment. I argue that these exceptions serve as an overlooked fulcrum for state transphobia, one that pivots on disability and enforces what Dennis Tyler terms sociolegal disabilities. Bans and exemptions both securitize care to the singular end of a cisgender life. Intersex is enfolded into and trans is excised from the state via divergent associations of disability with care or with pathology. While such incorporation through exceptionalist nationalisms might appear outmoded under a sexual politics of fascism, I connect theories of sexual exceptionalism and ablenationalism to reveal the respective continuity of sexual freedom and disability inclusion with nationalism and eliminatory curative violence Ultimately, while this slippage between trans, intersex, and disability has been weaponized, it also affords new sites of solidarity on the front lines of a sexual politics of fascism.

Author

• Sarah L Orsak, University of Virginia-Main Campus