Interview: Paisley Currah – Sex Is As Sex Does
Transgender activist Riki Wilchins interviews political theorist and leader in trans studies Paisley Currah.
by Riki Wilchins
CUNY political theorist Paisley Currah—and an early leader in trans studies and a founding editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) —is known for his writing on law and public policy. His newest book is Sex Is As Sex Does. Assigned Media caught up with him while on fellowship at Princeton.
AM: You take some quietly subversive positions about gender identity, the separation of sexual orientation from gender identity, and about biological sex. You’re smiling…
PC: It means you read the book. A lot of interviewers have a script and haven't actually engaged with my ideas. So yeah, I’m smiling.
AM: What was your inspiration?
PC: I was looking at different legal definitions of sex and trying to figure out some Master Key that would explain all these crazy things. I realized these bureaucrats didn't care about some ideal definition of sex or gender: they only cared about how any particular definition impacted their agency's work and the machinery of government.
AM: Sex Is shows that although sex is defined in ways that hurt trans people, it’s often not out of transphobia.
PC: Yeah, exactly. One of the book’s goals is dislodging transphobia as the global explanation for everything. New York State has had a pretty good policy on changing your driver's license because it’s progressive. But if you look at the history of driver's license reclassification , even red states made that possible. Not because they love transgender people, but because governments surveil and track people and it’s in their interest for us to be walking around with identity documents that reflect who we are.
AM: Where does gay marriage fit?
PC: My students think it’s all about falling in love and I’m like: yeah, maybe. Governments regulate marriage as a legal instrument for the transmission of property over generations. But the existence of trans people undermines this whole edifice of the biological family of two cisgender people whose children inherit as their biological issue. But with a trans person, it’s like: Oh my God, this is just too crazy. Once I realized that, like, I stopped trying to come up with the ideal sex definition and the Master Key.
AM: And as you’ve written, driver’s license laws are often in conflict with marriage laws and are different from incarceration policies. While transgender is the heart of these, it doesn't explain them, because trans wasn’t really around when they were written. It’s shocking how much that has reversed today, with thousands of laws regulating sex in which trans is specifically targeted.
PC: As I say in the book, sex is a decision the government makes about who you are. That classification is baked into our legal system so the state can distinguish between men and women so it can privilege men. Trans people were like not anticipated. It wasn’t like, Oh, let's have the sex system so we can harm transgender people. Then the women's movement chipped away at the ability to treat men and women differently, which lowered the stakes. Governments were like, Okay, well, some trans people can change their sex sometimes, but not all the time. So trans people were the accidental beneficiaries of liberal feminism—which is kind of funny because in my little bubble, everybody hates liberal feminism and loves trans stuff.
But now defining sex to target transgender people. Many bills are framed as protecting women and girls, but they’re a Trojan horse for a longer term strategy to erode states treating men and women equally. A judge ruling against affirming care wrote in his decision, Oh, by the way, it's possible that the states can treat men and women differently. That was just one paragraph so no one really noticed. But if that gets taken up in the Supreme Court, it could erase decades of equal protection law. The right doesn’t have a two-year plan: they have a 40-year plan.
AM: What’s interesting in terms of your work is just how much these bills struggle with defining sex. It’s almost comical: these bizarre, convoluted definitions of “A female is a body that has organs to gestate a fetus and provides an ovum or one gamete to reproduction…” As you’ve said, sex is lots of things and even on a biological level, it’s surprisingly hard to define.
PC: Exactly. These bills start by stating that there’s just two sexes and it's a scientific fact. But the more science looks at sex, the more it's all over the place and the less binary it is. It’s this weird moment where legislators are trying to use the force of law to declare what's true. It appears to be a battle over facts. But it's actually just a political battle over who gets to count.
AM: I actually think it's a religious battle masquerading as a political battle. It’s like night of the Living Dead: white Christian nationalism has occupied the zombie corpse of the old, dead Republican Party
One of the stories in Sex Is that really jumped out at me is how Napoleon first instituted his government tracking sex to calculate how many young men he could draft. You reminded me how until the early 20th century, sex was not a government property at all: If it was tracked in the family Bible or in local church records. So another quietly subversive thing you’re doing is refocusing us away from the theoretical over sex to what sex does as a practice, a technology.
PC: In trans studies, everybody is so sophisticated about sex and gender and can recite Butler backwards in their sleep. But there's a lack of sophistication when talking about the state. But sex is bound up in the formation of states. So you have it creating inventories for who's in which village, what their names are, and what sex they are—just so Napoleon can come back 15 years later and conscript the boys into his army,
AM: You and Susan Stryker have critiqued the separation most of us take for granted between sexual orientation and gender identity saying this “is simply foreign to most places and times.”
PC: Anthropologist David Valentine was prescient about that. The separation created a legibility for people in movement discourse: here are women, gays, and transgender people. Like marching down the street in a parade. I understand those kinds of moves. But looking at what the category does, it kind of erases a lot of difference. People talk about transgender people being more vulnerable to incarceration. But It's more like people of color are more vulnerable to being incarcerated. And poor people. And gender nonconforming people. We need to look at these differences and omissions within transgender communities to address larger injustices—which I did in my book, Transgender Rights.
AM: Gender identity was a technology invented by the medical system to manage intersex bodies and genitalia, which we uncritically put at the center of transgender. Because US anti-discrimination law privileges immutable characteristics. But we now expect gender identity do all kinds of work—anything and everything.
PC: It's this American thing that I have a property, I own myself, I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And part of that ownership then becomes gender identity as a property you have. This totally resonates in the American political tradition. So we can be good workers and productive citizens instead of thinking more broadly about gender identity and what it is.
AM: It’s great to see you grappling with these questions and at Princeton of all places. Returning to CUNY is going to be difficult. As the saying goes, How do get them back on the farm, after they've seen Paree?
PC: Reentry is going to be very tough because here at the Institute for Advanced Study is where Einstein walked. Wow.
AM: What I find fascinating is your skepticism of essentializing gender. You understand that transgender political and legal advocacy depends on gender identity as this fixed and immutable property. Even if it’s a winning legal and political argument, you obviously don't believe that as a philosophical proposition. Ironic, since you’re a founder of trans studies.
PC: Critical Race Theorists first enunciated this dual approach: We’re going to defend race as a category in the here and now, but we're also going to take race apart. It’s funny because trans studies is its hippest iteration and is all about deconstructing everything. But it's just yet another identity field, organized around this neoliberal diversity machine that promotes every identity as having its own department.
AM: Your skepticism about transgender as an identity is threaded through almost everything I've read.
Interesting that you highlight race. You slipped into one piece that how “trans feminized people of color have become the hyper-visible talismans progressive queer and trans politics. (If you know the names Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, you'll know what I mean.) But the visibility does no good for her if she's only a figure for other people.” I love that because we spent years trying to get people to say her name, but now you're saying, Look, it's not doing any good if you're only a figure for the people. Again you keep coming back to this almost Marxist analysis of, What work is being done here?
PC: My students all know who she is as this famous trans woman now. But her big issues were rent and poverty. That's totally dropped out of the history.
AM: You and people like Dean spade have really tried to bring a stronger economic analysis and pull us back to the everyday, concrete problems of trans lives.
PC: What's happening in Republican-controlled states is terrible, but we're getting this new narrative that life in blue states is Nirvana. Life’s not great if you have lack of health care, income inequality, and incarceration—all happening in blue states, too.
AM: I think that’s part of your economic lens. You note that capital has always had a need for labor, and—whether it's the horrors of chattel slavery or welfare policy—they’re happy to shift sex definitions as needed over keeping some abstract commitment to a specific version of binary gender.
PC: Right. I mean, cisgender could be a useful word sometimes, but like—Riki, you were you were doing this before they invented the word cisgender in terms of trying to point out that like gender norms oppress everybody—and I feel the problem with cisgender and transgender, it creates these two camps that supposedly have similarities between them.
AM: Thank you for your time, Paisley.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.