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PANEL: “Categorical Difficulties: Trans Subjects and the Politics of Legibility”

This panel will trace the epistemic violence faced by gender non-conforming people, arising from the narrowly-defined gender categories available to officially identify and classify trans folks. In order to be legible within legal and social systems, gender non-conforming people are forced to narrate themselves through reductive, binary categories. This often comes at the expense of having the ability to define and imagine different ways of organizing gendered or non-gendered identities, histories, and bodies. As a result, for those who fall under the umbrella term transgender, the gaining of political recognition, civil rights, and access to community benefits often comes at the expense of their own ability to define themselves. This panel will investigate these contradictions and offer strategies for navigating the politics of transgender.

Brief Abstracts:

Tristan Josephson – “Immutability and the Fixing of Legibility in U.S. Asylum Cases”

This paper focuses on U.S circuit court cases that deal with trans asylum seekers.  I will begin with a brief discussion of how the legal procedure of applying for asylum functions as a process of subject production, and then I will examine how discourses of immutability structure the ways that trans asylum seekers can make themselves recognizable and legible in court cases. I’ll center my analysis of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Hernandez-Montiel v. INS (2000), a precedential case which enabled certain trans subjects to access asylum.

Jaime Becker – “Gender System Persistence: Processes and Mechanisms”

Gender systems insist on biological (females/males) and social binaries (women/men) despite the wide range of biological and social human beings that exist empirically. This produces inequality, to varying degrees, between women and men and renders invisible or highly problematic those people who cannot or do not choose to conform to the binary at all.  This research explores the nexus between interactional processes and macro-structural gender systems through an ethnographic study of gender non-conformists. If sex-categorization can’t be done, then what happens to gendered status distinctions, assumptions of self-other competence, and a myriad of gendered stereotypes? …

Carmen Fortes – “Creating A Space for Ourselves: Gender Identities at Play in the ‘Hole in the Wall Saloon’”

This paper is an ethnographic study of the lived experience of masculine-to-feminine (MTF) transgender persons at a Northern California city bar.  The study attempts to explore the meaning of place and participant demographics (age, race, and gender) in the presentation of gender identities.  In this paper I aim to (1) examine Durkheim’s characterization of social norms and their development; (2) provide detailed illustration of how place and other factors (history) allow or provide for gender fluidity in identity; and (3) challenge the binary notions of gender by illustrating their fluidity.

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TransAction Week is one of the LGBT Resource Center’s annual weeks and is designed to raise awareness on issues impacting transgender people and to celebrate the transgender community. Some events include a keynote speaker; Trans 101, an educational workshop; Trans-forming Body Image, a program exploring transgender body image; Gender-Palooza, a fun event exploring gender; and Trans Safe Zone, a two-hour training to increase awareness and sensitivity to transgender issues. This year, TransAction week will take place from Nov. 15th – Nov. 19th 2010.

For more information, please email Cory Dostie at cadostie@ucdavis.edu or see the LGBT Center’s website: http://lgbcenter.ucdavis.edu/events/trans-action-week

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