Imagining Trans Cartoonist Communities
March 16 2024
oh I am Noodling.
I am interested in the formation of “transgender” as a stable category of identity wholly distinct from sexuality that also serves as an umbrella term to capture a set of also stable identities(trans woman, trans man, nonbinary most notably). At the same time it seems like transgender is always expanding and contracting - originally it was intended as a way to group transexual identities with crossdressing and genderqueer identities and other varied, non-normative gendered experiences while positioning those as Distinct from being gay or being a lesbian, a project which predates the emergence of the term transgender but definitely made the way for it. And the inclusion of transexual in transgender was also originally pretty fraught like Virginia Price’s assertion that transvestism and actually I think also transgender were specifically for people who wanted to live [as the opposite gender] but not medically transition. Vs transexuals who medically transitioned. BUT ANYWAY. Then we arrive at transgender as this broad term for all of these different embodied experiences where it supplants transexual which becomes seen as derogatory bc of it’s connection to medicalization and it gets kind of wittled back down to just being binary trans experiences only you know, without the “requirement” of medical transition to self-identify*. At least I remember in my early 20s it still being an online discussion in the queer spaces I was in if being nonbinary or genderqueer was being “transgender” or a secret third (fourth, fifth?) thing. And now we’ve sort of swung back around to “yeah it’s everything” but there’s always some sort of defined outlier- butch lesbians? he/him lesbians (who may or may not be butch)? I’m rambling now, but my POINT IS I’m obviously thinking about what it means to define this project in that terminology.
For my perspective, transgender is an umbrella term that I use to collate a variety of non-normative gendered experiences, which to me does include sexuality de facto. Not even getting into the history of how sexuality has been gendered. It’s more useful to me to think of transgendered along such broad lines because it allows me to track the places where non-normative gendered experiences rupture and buckle against normative expectations. Real Is A Lesbian A Woman shit. And I mean, not to use my personal experiences as a starting point for analysis, I’m literally just Some White Guy, but it’s hard for me to work with a more closed off definition of transgender because my sexuality is transgendered; the things I desire have been radically altered through my transition, such that I underwent the classic Lesbian to Feminine Gay Guy pipeline, and I say classic because there’s definitely a group of people Online who would be like “oh yeah mood” even if that description of my sexuality might be at odds with the institutionalized** depiction of sexuality as stable and not dependent on gendered experience.
Anyway I’m thinking about this because I’m reading through Imagining Transgender right now. I get hesitant writing about these “older” sources because I’m sure there’s plenty out there that is contemporary and builds on this book and you know, you do get scolded if you aren’t citing contemporary research, and yeah, I will read that stuff too, but I actually think work from the 80s-2000s is particularly useful in this context because it also serves as a primary source: it’s a snapshot of how the institutionalization of what transgender means happened and how it is used in academic and activist spaces, not that those are “separate” but as Valentine points out, activists and academics who claimed there was a transgender community with a stable meaning of transgender in fact (at least partially) produced that meaning. Imagining it made it real. !
I don’t think all contemporary trans scholarship takes for granted what transgender means, but I do think a lot of it does. And I mean in 2024 transgender does have a more stable definition than it did in, what 2007, because we had the whole Transgender Tipping Point moment. And so like yeah what does it mean to be hosting interviews with transgender creators! Because it’s been very interesting to me that so far everyone I’ve asked about trans community in comics has been more or less like ‘what is that’ when I’ll freely admit I took the existence of a, if not many, transgender communities in comics for granted. And my taking it for granted in a way has produced some kind of trans community in comics because I am pointing to these cartoonists and saying “these are transgender cartoonists.” I am specifically speaking with folks who also self-identify as cartoonists and that’s an important caveat, but nonetheless, I’m the one putting them together into the same space, in a very literal sense, the same webpage, and suggesting they have a shared identity that relates to a shared community. And I think they do!!!!! But that’s still producing and not describing!!! Or it’s both!!!
* i mean there are definitely people and trans people specifically who do believe and insist that "transgender" requires medical transition which is honestly so funny like you've managed to go all the way back full circle against what the word was created to capture