Banning (Trans) gender(s) in a time of Border Enforcement

• In Event: Beyond Settler Nations: Sites and Relations of Indigenous Im/migrant Solidarity 

Abstract

This paper explores illegality through debates about trans legibility in the context of the US settler colony. Building upon Mae Ngai’s enduring theorization of the “impossible subject” (2004), this essay discusses the trans subject as a parallel historical and contemporary impossibility in the context of (colonial) atmospheric violence (Fanon 1961: Stanley 2021). As evidenced by the escalating political force of conjoined xenophobic and transphobic policies in the current historical moment, analyses that interrogate the ideological relationship between xenophobia and transphobia under the US empire are not only timely, but necessary. Moreover, theorizing “illegalization” on stolen land, requires attention to and action against the criminalization of forbidden genders, which are always entangled with outlawed and “undesirable” races and sexualities. Black Trans Studies teaches about the problem and violence of gender for black people, and it follows that sex/gender fails to constitute itself as a biological and material constant for Indigenous people and migrants of color, in addition to its blatant incommensurability with Intersex and many disabled people. Thus, this paper shares learnings from the author’s field research in so-called “Texas” during the last five years, tracing how border militarization emerges in parallel to the public criminalization of trans people on the frontlines. This essay offers one response to questions brought into clearer focus by the Trump administration’s agenda to restore a nation of “good” white citizens through the promotion of the biologically essentialist nuclear family vis-à-vis border and immigration policy.

Author

• Citlalli Alvarez, Harvard