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Journal of Feminist Scholarship Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Volume 17 Issue 17 Fall 2020 Article 4

Fall 2020

Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

Niamh Timmons Oregon State University, [email protected]

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Part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, and the Other Feminist,

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Timmons, Niamh. 2020. "Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 17 (Fall): 46-63. 10.23860/jfs.2020.17.04.

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Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

Cover Page Footnote Cover Page Footnote I would like to thank the editors for their help, Orion Benedict for their support, and Qwo-Li Driskill whose guidance has greatly shaped this project. I'm also indebted to the activism of Black Trans Women, such as Tourmaline, who've been doing amazing work revitalizing these histories.

This special issue is available in Journal of Feminist Scholarship: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol17/iss17/4

46

Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

Niamh Timmons

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the ways in which Transfeminism and Trans Women can be more

integrated and entangled within feminist disability studies and Disability Justice, and vice versa. This

would make the field a seemingly rich arena for considering the linkages between Trans Women,

Transfeminism, dis/ability, and feminism. Yet, the primary texts of the feminist disability studies

consistently leave out Trans Women in their analyses. Specific inclusion and highlighting the experiences

of Trans Women, especially Trans Women who are disabled, is often missing from disability rights and

disability justice projects. This is especially alarming given the way Trans folks, particularly Trans

Women, have been medically and socially constructed as “disabled” or existing in proximity to disability.

Instead of nitpicking the gaps in which Trans Women and Transfeminism have been excluded from

conversations about disability, I want to turn towards how Transfeminism and the histories of ableism

towards disabled peoples and Trans Women can be entangled with one another. I divide the article into

three main sections: Disability Studies and Activism and Trans Women, the Monster and the Freak, and

Potential Entanglements. The first section addresses what engagements Trans Studies and Disability

Studies have had with one another, as well as how that has played out in terms of Trans Activism and

Disability Rights and Disability Justice. The second section looks at the histories and discourses in the

ways in which Trans and disabled peoples have been constructed as the “monster” and the “freak” via

freak shows of the nineteenth century, media reporting, and TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist)

rhetoric. The third section builds on the entanglements suggested previously and reads the activisms of

STAR, Marsha P Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera in a genealogy of Disability Justice principles, via the work of

Sin’s Invalid.

Keywords: Trans Feminism, Monstrous, Feminist Disability Studies

Copyright by Niamh Timmons

Content Notification: mentions of transmisogyny, anti-blackness, and ableism

In 2019, Black trans activist and filmmaker, Tourmaline, released her film Salacia which depicts the

vibrant culture of the now lost Seneca Village, a thriving Black community in early nineteenth century

New York City. An actor playing Mary Jones, a Black trans sex worker, appears prominently throughout

the film.1 Her work, on Seneca Village and Mary Jones, breathes life into historical Black Trans Women’s2

lives; it weaves across historical time to showcase the historical persecution and also the joy in Black frans

life (Wally 2020). Tourmaline’s projects are heavily influential to this article and how I think of the

importance and tensions of Black trans life. I am also interested in how these figures, who are cast as

deviant by those outside their communities, are linked to disability studies. Yet, when I turn to disability

studies, particularly feminist disability studies, I see a disinterest or avoidance in thinking about the

issues of Trans Women. This article is an intervention that calls feminist disability studies to not only pay

attention to Trans Women but also highlight how the kinds of historical figures that Tourmaline

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

47

celebrates should be read as an important part of disability genealogies. Figures like Mary Jones matter

not only to Black and trans communities but to disabled communities as well.

In her thinking of a potential “critical disability studies methodology,” Julie Avril Minich (2017)

moves toward recentering the field and practice of disability studies to its social justice aims. Minich

argues that disability studies must move beyond merely investigating accessibility and “normativity:”

And I must emphasize that this scrutiny of normative ideologies should not occur for its own sake but with

the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for people with stigmatized bodies and minds. In other

words, I argue for naming disability studies as a methodology rather than a subject in order to recommit the

field to its origins in social justice work. (6)

In this article, I argue for the project of a critical disability studies methodology by looking at how the

principles of Transfeminism can be connected, or as I assert here, already have unexamined connections,

with feminist disability studies, Disability Justice, and disability studies at large. Emi Koyama (2003) in

her “Transfeminist Manifesto” argues that, “Transfeminism is primarily a movement by and for trans

women who view their liberation to be intrinsically linked to the liberation of all women and beyond”

(245).3 Here I take up Minich’s approach of disability studies as a methodology and also the framework of

Koyama’s Transfeminism by deliberately centering Trans Women4 in order to understand how Trans

Women, who are often left out of disability analysis, fit into the project of disability studies and Disability

Justice. This is especially important given the project of feminist disability studies and the dynamics of

transmisogyny. Julia Serano (2007) writes,

[b]ecause anti-trans discrimination is steeped in traditional sexism, it is not simply enough for trans activists

to challenge binary gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism)—we must also challenge the idea that femininity

is inferior to masculinity and femaleness is inferior to maleness. In other words, by necessity, trans activism

must be at its core a feminist movement. (16)

As such, my project works to trans-form feminist disability studies and further argue that Trans Women’s

oppression and activisms are integral to feminist disability studies. By doing so, the subfield will benefit

from engaging the intrinsic patriarchal structures, racisms, and ableism that are all at play in

transmisogyny.5 I argue for studying the lives and the works of Trans Women and how they connect to the

feminist disability studies project, and not duplicating their existence in a way that is used to “gender

trouble” (Mog 2008). This is a preventive measure to address critiques made by trans scholars regarding

the ways in which Queer Studies has largely only engaged trans people and issues as a means of troubling

gender and sexuality rather than categories of analysis that deserve study (Stryker 2004, 241).

Additionally, in this article I critically address how Black Trans Women are most impacted by

transmisogyny and ableism. To do so, I not only use Minich’s critical disability studies methodology but

also a Disability Justice framework. In the primer of the Disability Justice and arts organization, Sins

Invalid, Disability Justice activist Stacey Milbern (2016) writes:

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have

strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our

bodies, but because of them. We understand that all bodies are caught in these bindings of ability, race,

gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them. (14)

Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Vol. 17 [2020], Iss. 17, Art. 4

48

This is especially relevant given the emphasis on white Trans Women’s experiences and lives by

Cishetero6 society, and also by often queer and Trans communities, given their social affinity to dominant

structures. Emily Skidmore (2011) notes that the “good transsexual,” as defined by figures such as

Christine Jorgensen, is “able to articulate transsexuality as an acceptable subject position through an

embodiment of the norms of white womanhood, most notably domesticity, respectability, and

heterosexuality” (271). This continues to this day with white Trans Femininity, and the pursuit of bein g

akin to Cisgender Women, as the center of Cishetero narratives. This narrative is often reproduced in

trans communities. Thinking with Skidmore, this article highlights the disabling conditions of entwined

racism, ableism, and transphobia, and how they disproportionately impact Trans Women of Color.

This project weaves critiques of transfeminism and trans studies as produced by Black trans

scholars. Elías Krell (2017, 237) argues, via the work of the activist Tourmaline, for a reframing of

transfeminism away from academic scholarship and into trans activisms and histories. I follow the

arguments of Krell and Tourmaline and locate the genealogies of a disability Transfeminist project in the

lives of Black Trans Women. This serves as a methodological reminder and approach for potential future

activist and scholarship in feminist disability studies to not only focus on activist histories but also locate

them as central in the genealogical work pursued in disability and trans studies. Black disability studies

scholars Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley (2019) provide a template in which the critical work of

Black studies can be done within feminist disability studies, describing how to engage Black disabled

histories:

This is not a project of posthumously assigning people a label that they wouldn’t have chosen for themselves

but looking critically at the context of a life and thinking through disability as an equally powerful force in

shaping a person. By reassessing our heroes of the past with the lens of disability, we can provide more

texture and more humanity to our portrayal of our ancestors. (34)

I utilize Bailey and Mobley’s suggestion for a project of understanding historical figures in a genealogy of

disability without categorizing them as disabled. I am extending this project to the genealogy of Black

Trans Women as a central part of both Transfeminism and feminist disability studies.

Instead of suggesting new forms of theory or praxis to bridge feminist disability studies, Disability

Justice, and Transfeminism with one another, I turn to the already existent traces that point us to the

kinship and methodological usage of these practices and ways of thinking. I do this by focusing on the

lives, experiences, and activism of Black and Trans Women of Color, specifically Mary Jones, Frances

Thompson, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. This

project is concerned both with how to chart the ways that genealogies of “the monster” and “the freak”

reveal the similarities in reactions to disabled and Trans Women, and with the activisms of Trans Women

of Color as part of a disability genealogy.

Trans Studies/Disability Studies and the Absence of Trans Women

While this project is not about dwelling on the lack of scholarship including Trans Women in feminist

disability studies, I think it is essential to chart the relationship between Trans Women and trans studies

with disability studies. To do so, I look at the way “feminist disability studies” has been framed as a

subfield and how Trans Women and trans studies could benefit that project. I also look more broadly

about how the fields of trans studies and disability studies have been engaging one another. I make the

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

49

case that disability studies scholars have refused to address transness—trans people also have an ongoing

legacy of rejecting potential associations with disability. Chris Bell (2006) in his critique on the whiteness

of disability studies, writes, “I want to stress that Disability Studies is not the only field of inquiry wherein

individuals of color are treated as second-class citizens. If anything, Disability Studies is merely aping the

ideology of the vast majority of academic disciplines and ways of thinking that preceded it and which it

now sits alongside of” (281).7 The result of this has led to the discomfort and inhospitality of disability

studies and movements as an intellectual and activist space for People of Color. As such, trans and

disability scholars and activists need to similarly examine this tension with whiteness, an issue that also

exists within trans studies. Both the trans and disabled subject is presumed as white and this tendency

needs to be challenged and grappled with.

As it currently stands, the subfield of “feminist disability studies” has been unable to factor in

Trans Women into their discussions.8 In the introduction to Feminist Disability Studies, Kim Hall (2011)

writes, “Feminist Disability Studies makes the body, bodily variety, and normalization central to analyses

of all forms of oppression” (6). Elsewhere Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2005) writes in her review of the

burgeoning subfield, “Feminist Disability Studies questions the dominant premises that cast disability as

a bodily problem to be addressed by normalization procedures rather than as a socially constructed

identity and a representational system similar to gender” (1559). Based on these descriptions of feminist

disability studies, the subfield should be a vibrant arena in which transness as a category would help

reveal the ways gender, race, and class are entangled in the process of normalization. Failing to engage

Trans Women as part of this analysis is a significant gap in the methodology that Garland-Thomson is

highlighting. Her analysis also suggests, by exclusion, the categories of possible gender representation

systems, revealing cisnormative underpinnings. The most visible connection between transness and

disability is the way that trans people have been deemed disabled by medical institutions. Often, trans

people who wish to undergo some medical transition must be diagnosed with gender dysphoria in order to

access hormones or gender-affirming surgeries. Dean Spade (2003) makes the point about the

performance of gender that trans people must undergo to receive trans-specific healthcare, “[t]he medical

approach to our gender identities forces us to rigidly conform ourselves to medical providers’ opinion

about what ‘real masculinity’ and ‘real femininity’ mean, and to produce narratives of struggle around

those identities that mirror diagnostic criteria of GID [gender identity disorder]” (29).9 Over the last

decades, insurance companies were resistant to cover trans-related healthcare as they deemed it merely

cosmetic (Stryker 2017, 139). In the 2010 O’Donnabhain v. Commissioner case, which argued that GID

provides a rationale for covering sex assignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy,

O’Donnabhin noted, “I have to accept the stigma of being labeled as having a disorder [or] a mental

condition . . . in order to get benefits. I haven’t liked this diagnosis from the very beginning. But I’ve got to

play the game” (quoted in Strassburger 2012, 345-46). Susan Stryker (2017) writes on the complicated

relationship trans people have with medical institutions:

But medical science has always been a two-edged sword—its representatives’ willingness has gone hand in

hand with their powers to define and judge. Far too often, access to medical services for transgender people

has gone through has depended on constructing transgender phenomena as symptoms of a medical illness or

a physical malady, partly because “sickness” is the condition that typically legitimizes medical intervention.

(52)

All of this points to the tense relationship that trans people have with medical institutions. This also

produces a distance in which many trans people want to divorce themselves not only from medicalization

and pathologization but also disability broadly. Eli Clare (2013) points this out, “I often hear trans

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50

people—most frequently folks who are using, or want to use medical technology to reshape their bodies —

name their trans-ness a disability a birth defect” (262). What is revealed is a tension between being trans

and being labeled disabled. Disability is both potentially a means to be cured and also something to be

avoided. As such, this notion of “defectiveness” permeates trans discourses, often overlapping with

medical discourses about transness. As a Trans Woman who is disabled, I have often thought about the

ways in which trans as an identity category does and does not relate to disability. I have noticed this

ableism in trans communities firsthand and the inability of much of trans discourse to account for this

relationship and the possibility of being trans and disabled.

To this end, Alexandre Baril and Catriona Leblanc (2015) make a vital critique, “1) trans studies

assumes an able-bodied trans identity; and 2) disability studies assumes cis* disabled identity (that is,

without ‘voluntary’ transition)” (31).10 This division often makes it difficult to not only have experiences of

being a trans disabled person recognized, but also inhibits the potential to build coalitions and alliances

between trans and disabled activisms. As Jasbir Puar (2017) argues, “[h]istorically and

contemporaneously, the nexus of disability and trans has been fraught, especially for trans bodies that

may resist alliances with people with disabilities in no small part because of long struggles against

stigmatization and pathologization that may be reinvoked through such an affiliation” (35). Thus, there is

a definite space of tension where trans people are uncomfortable and resist associations with disability. As

Puar notes, this often comes at the expense of working in solidarity with disabled people and their own

frustrating experiences with the medical establishment. It should also be noted that many scholars (; and

Baril 2015; Clare 2013; Puar 2014 and 2017) understand disability and transness as identity categories

with no overlap, and often they ignore the existence of disabled trans people. In actuality, the two

disciplines share a lot in common as Ashley Mog and Amanda Lock Swarr (2008) point out, “Transgender

studies, much like disability studies, works with the lived bodily experience of people who fit outside of

hegemonic gender norms and the ways in which people negotiate corporeal experiences that run up

against societal barriers that only privilege certain bodies.” (9) Alison Kafer in Feminist, Queer, Crip

(2013, 157) suggests that there’s a coalitional possibility between the struggles between disabled and trans

activism. However, I believe that it should not just be thought of as a coalition, rather there needs to be an

examination of how disability and transness are deeply entangled. I push for not only the examination of

the nexus that Puar describes, but also for acknowledgement of the contemporary and historical

entanglements between disability and transness.

In this space, I have tried to chart the ways that disability and trans studies have often failed to

understand one another and the critical relevance shared between the two. Given these critiques, there

needs to be space where both trans and disability scholars and activists are more accountable to one

another. Puar (2014) importantly asks us,

[w]hat kinds of political and scholarly alliances might potentiate when each acknowledges and inhabits the

more generalized conditions of the other, creating genealogies that read both entities as implicated within

same assemblages of power rather than as intersecting at specific overlaps? (78)

As such, I do not want to dwell in the world of criticizing these ideas in relation to one another. Instead, I

am interested in a project that begins a more conversational approach to Transfeminism and Disability

Justice praxises that already exist. Through this, we can view transness and disability as relational and

can urge the activism and scholarship of both to become invested in one another.

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

51

The Monster and the Freak

One of the first steps necessary for this project is to think about the ways in which both disabled people

and Trans Women are constructed as monstrous. Monstrosity has its roots in discourses that construct

non-normative bodyminds, such as disabled and Trans Feminine peoples, as monstrous. Asa Simon

Mittman (2012) argues,

[a]bove all, the monstrous is that which creates this sense of vertigo, that which question our (their,

anyone’s) epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us .

. . to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization. (8)

For Margrit Shildrick (2011, 20), the monstrous is what nature can “disturbingly” make while producing

an Other to make sense of the Self, it is the construction of an “unnatural” monstrous subject that

constitutes the construction of what and who is normal. In other words, the monstrous is constituted in

deviance, away from perceived notions of normalcy. Moreover, leaning into Mittman’s description of the

monstrous, the deviance of the monstrous subject then produces confusion and tension for the self. It is

very much a self-perpetuating cycle of who gets to be counted as “normal” and as an idealized subject.

Thus, the process of who is determined as monstrous is not a static category and is ever-shifting.

Interestingly, Shildrick in her listing of figures casts “encephalitic infants” and “conjoined twins” with the

replicants and man-made androids from Blade Runner in the same category of the monstrous, which

makes the “disturbing” and “naturalness” harder to pin down (20). However, it is useful when

understanding how Trans Women are constructed as monstrous.

Exclusion from the norm is also what motivates ideas of trans people, specifically Trans Women,

as deviant and perverse. Trans studies scholar C. Riley Snorton (2017, 20) addresses the ways in which

medically examined bodies of enslaved people and policing of Blackness in the nineteenth century are

intrinsically linked. At the same time, as many disability scholars have noted, disability cannot be

divorced from the idea of the monstrous, resonating with medicalization of enslaved people’s bodies. In

writing about the freak shows of the nineteenth century, Garland-Thomson (1996) notes:

Although extraordinary bodily forms have always been acknowledged as atypical, the cultural resonances

accorded them arise from the historical and intellectual moments in which these bodies are embedded.

Because such bodies are rare, unique, material, and confounding of cultural categories, they function as

magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment. Like the bodies of

females and slaves, the monstrous body exists in societies to be exploited for someone else’s purposes. Thus,

singular bodies become politicized when culture maps its concerns upon them as meditations on individual

as well as national values, identity, and direction. (2)

In disability studies, the disabled body becomes a space, and in the case of the freak — the public display

of disabled people for amusement — that makes able-bodied/minded societies feel secure in themselves.

Using this foundation of the intrinsic connections with disability and the construction of the monstrous, I

want to turn to the ways that Trans Women have been constructed as monstrous. Anson Koch-Rein

(2014) points out that, “[t]he monster . . . is a central figure in representations of trans*, serving widely

divergent narratives of transphobic insult and trans* resistance alike” (135). In other words, the monster

is central to understanding transness as a group of oppressed identities and, as I explore in this article, is

also how that moniker could be reclaimed.

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There are two forms of the “monstrous” that I want to engage in with regard to Trans Women.

First, the historical roots of the construction of Trans Women in the nineteenth century as monstrous,

and second how we might read narratives of “monstrosity” in experiences of Trans Women of Color

today.11 In 1836, Mary Jones, a Black Trans Woman sex worker, was arrested and put on trial for stealing

money from a client. Jones was sensationalized in a lithograph that depicted her well-dressed with the

caption “the Man-Monster.” Unlike disability that was on display at freak shows at the time, the

monstrousness assigned to Jones was far more ambiguous. Tavia Nyong’o (2009) argues, “Sewallly’s [sic]

monstrousness lay both in his [sic] evident race and in the shocking conflation of the gender binary

around which the dynamics of middle-class propriety pivoted” (98). Additionally, her monstrosity to

white middle-class society could be located in the fact that Jones had sexual relations with white men,

thus upsetting gender, racial, and sexual norms of the time. The category of the “monster” produces an

Other in order to make sense of the Self. There is no evidence that Jones was considered a “monster”

within the Black community, in fact, Jones argued that she was accepted within Black communities. On

the other hand, her story is often erased within Black historical narratives. Nyong’o (2009) writes:

That Sewally’s [sic] story should be seen as too sensational for black history is doubly ironic given in that the

sole record we have of his [sic] own words testifies to his [sic] own convictions that he [sic] was accepted in

the black community of his day. Sewally [sic] told the police at the time of his [sic] first arrest that his [sic]

cross-dressing persona had been accepted at balls thrown by African Americans in both New York City,

where he [sic] was born and raised, and New Orleans, which he [sic] had visited. His [sic] public claims must

be read carefully in their context of interrogation and ridicule, in which acceptance by his [sic] own people

was perhaps the one refuge from scorn he [sic] could easily claim without fear of contradiction. (100)

The case of Mary Jones’ life reveals the monster is a subjective category. It also reveals the ambiguous and

multiplicities of the construction of Black Trans Women as monstrous. Several decades later, this

ambiguity would begin to dissipate.

Almost thirty years later, Frances Thompson, a disabled Black Trans Woman, was arrested for

cross-dressing in Memphis. Following the Memphis Riots of 1866, where Thompson was raped, she

testified before a Congressional committee about her experience and the Riots. Her testimony, along with

four other Black women, pointed to the racialized and gendered violence that had happened in Memphis.

Her arrest for cross-dressing in 1876 was used by white conservatives to undermine her testimony

because of her transgender status. Hannah Rosen (1999) writes that:

Similar to the disparagement of black women prior to the riot, newspaper editors described Thompson as

‘lewd,’ associated her with prostitution, and portrayed her as the epitome of ‘unvirtuous’ gender and

sexuality. They attributed to her ‘vile habits and corruptions,’ decried her ‘utter depravity,’ and accused her

of using her ‘guise’ as a woman to facilitate her supposed role as ‘wholesale debaucher’ and ‘procuress’ of

numberless young women for prostitution. The papers then used these charges to condemn their Republican

opponents, reminding their readers that the Republican Party—now referred to as ‘the Frances Thompson

Radical Party’—had relied upon Thompson’s ‘perjurious evidence’ to condemn white men in Memphis for

violence and brutality. (284)

An article that appeared in the Pulaski Citizen in 1876 (Pulaski is a small town in south-central Tennessee

where the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865) serves as an example of the vitriol directed at Thompson:

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

53

Thompson is well known to the people of this city as a low minded criminal of the most revolting character . .

Not being to pay the fine a lot of male toggery was put upon the impecunious Thompson, and he [sic] was

sent out on the chain gangs to work the streets. An immense crowd of curious idling people about to see the

changed figure of the thick lipped, foul mouthed scamp, and finding it impossible to drive them off,

Thompson was sent to the lock up again. (1)

For white conservatives and racists, Thompson’s monstrousness was intrinsically tied not only to her race

and gender identity but also her testimony about the violence she experienced. It is critical to understand

that Thompson’s gender identity, which was also deeply connected to her as a Black woman, was used to

justify racial and gendered violence against all Black people. Similar to Mary Jones, Thompson argued

that she was seen as a woman within the Black community, thus, nullifying the conditions of her arrest as

cross-dressing. Rosen (2009) points out:

After her arrest, Thompson protested the findings that she was ‘a man and not a woman in any respect.’ She

turned not to her body but, rather, to social practices and community recognition as evidence of her

legitimate gender identity. A reporter from the Memphis Daily Times claimed that in an interview,

Thompson insisted her arrest and imprisonment were unjust because she ‘was always regarded as a woman,’

having worn female attire since she was a small child. (238)

However, this was wholly disregarded.

Several threads emerge from the lives of Mary Jones and Frances Thompson. First, while cross-

dressing laws were enforced against a number of gender non-conforming groups, the spectacles of the

arrests and incarcerations of Jones and Thompson reveal that the alignment of Trans Women with the

monster was deeply connected to anti-blackness. Second, the arrests of Jones and Thompson were used as

a means to bolster anti-Black structures. The publicity of Jones’ arrest connected Blackness with gender,

racial, and sexual deviance, while the aftermath of Thompson’s arrest provided the impetus to dismiss,

and thus justify, racialized gendered violence against Black women. In other words, the arrests of Jones

and Thompson have implications that impacted Black communities at large. At the same time, these cases

also reveal brief moments of Black trans life in the Nineteenth Century. Based on the accounts made by

Jones and Thompson, Black Trans Women were accepted in their Black communities. This hints towards

the possibility that there was a vibrant existence of Black Trans Women in the nineteenth century that

only became visible through the arrests and constructions of Jones and Thompson as monstrous. Lastly,

as Nyong’o pointed out via the omission of Jones from Black historical narratives, we can think of Puar’s

call to reimagine our genealogies and see Jones and Thompson as part of a disability genealogy because

Black Trans Women experienced the disabling effects of the law (after all, if Thompson could have paid

her fine, she would not have been incarcerated). Additionally, Thompson was recognized in her life as

disabled. The Pulaski Citizen (1876) article that spewed vitriol towards Thompson noted, “A quartette of

medical experts who worked upon the case also discovered that the dusky Thompson’s lower legs were as

crooked as a young dogwood tree or a ram’s horns.” (1) Such mentions, while ableist, give us space to

imagine disabled kinship and genealogies.

The second thread of Trans Women constructed as monstrous has stemmed from the ideologies

of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF), who argue that sex and gender are indistinguishable

categories. These ideas have in turn permeated mainstream transmisogynist rhetoric. In Gyn/Ecology,

Mary Daly (1990) explicitly connects Trans Women to Frankenstein’s monster, “Today the Frankenstein

phenomenon is omnipresent . . . in . . . phallocratic technology . . . Transsexualism is an example of male

surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes” (70-71). Daly sees vaginoplasty, the

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54

surgery to create non-intersexed Trans Women vaginas, as the means by which Trans Women become

monstrous. Specifically, Daly sees Trans Women as being Frankenstein-esque in the ways that they

become “female substitutes.” At the core of her argument, Daly cannot see Trans Women, regardless if

they have had a vaginoplasty or not, as women. Instead, it is this pursuit of womanhood that makes trans

Women monstrous. Janice Raymond (1994) extends this blatant transmisogyny by considering the very

presence of Trans Women in lesbian/women’s spaces as violent and monstrous. She writes, “The

transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, having castrated himself [sic], turns his [sic] whole body and

behavior into a phallus that can rape in many ways, all the time. In this sense, he [sic] performs total rape,

while also functioning totally against women’s will to lesbian-feminism” (112).12 Raymond avoids using

Daly’s gothic horror image of the monster and instead configures Trans Women’s very existence into a

monstrosity.

The legacies of Daly and Raymond’s construction of Trans Women as monstrous have not

disappeared from the transmisogynist imagination. In the 2015 campaign against Houston’s Equal Rights

Ordinance, opponents of the ordinance reframed the measure by stoking fear that Trans Women were

“really men” who were going to sexually assault women while in the women’s bathroom. A New York

Times article describes the opposition to the ordinance as a “public safety” issue rather than a civil rights

matter (Fernandez and Blinder 2015). This rhetoric was successful in swaying voters to reject the

ordinance, even by voters in communities that the ordinance would benefit. At the root is a deep

investment in transmisogynist rhetoric that echoes Raymond’s belief that Trans Women are really men

whose gender presentation was used to assault “real” women sexually.

Marquis Bey (2017) argues that Blackness and transness are category nodes that operate in

relation with one another:

They are, rather, nodes of one another, inflections that, though originary and names for the nothingness

upon which distinction rests, flash in different hues because of subjects’ interpretive historical entrenchment

. . . Manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, black and trans*, though

pointed at by bodies that identify as black and/or trans*, precede and provide the foundation condition for

those fugitive identificatory demarcations. (278)

While Bey acknowledges their separate categorizations, his framing of Blackness and Transness requires

us to think about their relationality to one another. As such, the work of TERF scholars and the Houston

ordinance must be read in relation to one another. After all, the rhetoric opposing the Houston ordinance

comes from a genealogy of white racial fear of Black men preying upon white women (Bederman 1995,

47). It is important to think, in these shifting genealogies, about the racial absences of Blackness. For

TERF scholars and their transmisogynist rhetorics, anti-Blackness lingers beneath an uninvoked surface.

Additionally, these structures, and the genealogies I have employed here, push us to think about how

disability is entangled with these logics and constructions.

In these episodes of casting Trans Women as monstrous, it is important to return to the ways that

cross-dressing laws, the arrests of Mary Jones and Frances Thompson, and TERF rhetoric all deem Trans

Women as “unnatural,” as a force intrinsically violent to the social order, and with the potential to

sexually violate “real women.” As such, the construction of Trans Women as monstrous is inherently

disabling as it has literal consequences for Trans Women to have social, political, and even physical life. It

is also important to consider that all of these constructions of Trans Women as monstrous are deeply

racialized. While the connections are more explicitly present in the episodes of Jones and Thompson, it is

less so in TERF and anti-trans bathroom bill rhetoric. However, the latter is deeply rooted in maintaining

the virtue of white women that developed in the South following the Civil War (Bederman 1995 , 45).

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

55

Moreover, similar to the ways in which Thompson’s arrest was used to justify violence against Black

women, so was the emphasis on Trans Women in bathrooms in the Houston ordinance campaign used a

cover to justify legal discrimination against all non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-able-bodied, and

non-gender conforming peoples. In this section, I have used the case of the monster to think about how

the roots of oppression can potentially be mapped into a genealogy between trans and disabled people. In

the next section, I move beyond oppression experienced to see how potentials can be built.

Potentials of Trans-Disability Activist Genealogies

A part of the possibility of thinking about the potential overlap between Transfeminism and feminist

disability studies is looking not just at the contemporary ideological similarities, but the genealogies of

Trans Women of Color activism. Further, the roots of this activism, in particular, that of Street

Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), can be read in a way that establishes itself in relation to the

genealogy of disability activism and scholarship. In this section, I lean heavily on Stacey Milbern’s (Sins

Invalid 2016) approach to Disability Justice, which she describes as:

Disability Justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and

spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in

everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority — black and brown people — share common ground

confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been

resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been

disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.

(15)

Via this approach, I argue that we can conceptualize the activism of STAR as an important part of a

resistance that is at its core a part of disability resilience and resistance. By emphasizing STAR in

particular, I am suggesting that Trans Women’s activism, especially that of Trans Women of Color, has

always been connected to disability resistance and should be read in a genealogy as such. By making this

reading, I suggest that solidarities do not need to be reinvented, or thought of as something new. Rather,

the tools already exist and the methodological question is more about how we should use what has been

provided by the activists that preceded us.

A critical connection that is possible between disability and Trans Women is to restructure our

genealogies, a project that is already beginning in disability studies. The most notable of these recent

restructurings of disability genealogies is the positioning of Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lorde as disability

ancestors. Both Kim (2017) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2012) have noted that Audre Lorde and June

Jordan have had their disabilities and work engaging their “disabilities” by the educational institutions

they were employed at, as well as their work being often overlooked by disability scholars as relevant to

the field of disability studies. Gumbs describes Lorde’s importance, “The shape of Audre Lorde’s impact

includes her achievements, her words, her losses and everything she went through that we should not

repeat as if we did not know.” (17) In a similar vein, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) describes

her connection to Anzaldúa in a letter addressed to her,

Gloria, we meet in bed. You never said you were disabled, that I can find — every inch of evidence you left

resisted that label. But whatever you felt about that world, this is where you dreamed and lived too. This

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56

place of bodily difference, a tired body that comes in pain and suffering, that allows us to work part-time

weird jobs, to rest, to fly. (182)

Both Gumbs and Piepzna-Samarasinha point towards their ancestral kinship with Lorde and Anzaldúa.

Such restructurings of disability kinship tap into the project of critical disability studies methodology and

“Crip of Color Critique.”

Kim (2017) describes a pointed practice of critical disability studies methodology (or potential

methodologies), which she calls a “Crip of Color Critique,” that centers Women of Color and Queer of

Color scholarship and activisms,

[a] crip-of-color critique thus aligns itself with the analysis of state violence central to the works of [Cathy]

Cohen and other women-of-color/queer-of-color feminists, which — in distinction from nationalist,

identitarian, or rights-based movements — refuse to frame the nation-state as a haven of protection. (5)

Kim’s imagining of a crip-of-color critique would then importantly see Lorde and Anzaldúa as ancestors in

terms of their scholarship and activisms, even as they extend past the limits of what some might see as the

limits of disability studies or rights movements. Returning to Minich’s (2017) notion of disability studies

as a methodology, she emphasizes looking at “social justice roots” outside the disability rights movement,

[f]urthermore, when I locate the origins of the field in social justice work, I mean not only the widespread

U.S. disability rights movement but also other movements for the liberation of people with bodies and minds

that are devalued or pathologized but who do not consistently identify (or are not consistently identified) as

disabled. (6)

I want to take up this project that Kim and Minich describe and think about how the activisms of Marsha

P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, as manifested via STAR, can be constituted as part of a disability genealogy

in a similar vein to Lorde or Anzaldúa.

The present remembrance of Johnson and Rivera’s activisms often limits them to their

involvement in the Stonewall Riots and ignores the organizing that Johnson, Rivera, and STAR were

doing before and after the Riots. In the remainder of this article, I focus on the activist works of Johnson,

Rivera, and STAR to highlight how we can situate them within in a genealogy of disability activism. STAR

described part of their project as “[t]he end to all exploitive practices of doctors and psychiatrists who

work in the field of transvestism” (Cohen 2008, 36). This accompanies the call for, “[t]he immediate end

of all police harassment and arrest of transvestites and gay street people, and the release of transvestites

and gay street people from all prisons and all other political prisoners” (36).13 Stephen Cohen (2008)

notes:

Grounded in the rigors of street life, street transvestites developed a platform to address injustices — lethal

prison conditions, police harassment, an inimical legal and mental health system, discrimination in housing

and employment—and demand social revolution. STAR, along with GLF [Gay Liberation Front] and GAA

[Gay Activist Alliance] organized pickets, visited prisons and mental institutions, publicized inmate

mistreatment, and helped form the Gay Community Prison Committee. (92-93)

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

57

It is frustrating because many of the goals that STAR strove for are still largely out of reach for many

Trans Women to this day. To address these issues, STAR built community space for street kids and the

gay and trans community.

Beyond the rest of their activisms, STAR did two things to hold space for gay and trans

community. First, along with the GLF (Gay Liberation Front), they helped found the collectively run Gay

Community Center (GCC). The GCC was

[a] place to dance in. A place to hold classes on things we’ll need to survive and grow: karate, theatre, crafts,

discussion groups, history of gay oppression. We need to provide services for the gay community: legal,

medical, housing, jobs, a gay switchboard. A free food program, day care for children. We need to have a

space in which to start to understand the things that keep us apart: sexism, racism, loneliness, fear. We need

to discover what we can become as fully actualized gay people. (Cohen 2008, 130)

STAR had representation in GCC’s Collective, which allowed them some influence in the decision- making

process, allowed to have a monthly benefit for STAR, yet their request to have their own room was denied

(130). Second, STAR created a house, STAR House, for street kids to have a place to live. Cohen furthers

that, “STAR House was significant as the first communal shelter on record that explicitly served street

transvestites. It provided sustenance, emotional support, and a sense of spiritual harmony. Free gender

expression was the norm” (131). Johnson, Rivera, and the other older leadership of STAR became

maternal figures for many of the street kids they housed. They would work the street in order to pay for

rent for the building. STAR House also served as the organizing center for all of STAR’s activisms. Rusty

Moore, co-founder of Transy House, where Rivera lived during her final years, describes the importance

of STAR House and the organization, “I think the historical significance of STAR is that it was pr obably

the first political/social initiative of the trans community in New York City, and certainly the first focused

on the problems of throw-away youth in our community” (131). Even though the organization collapsed in

1973 following the Christopher Street Liberation Day,14 they had intentions to expand the work of the

organization. Johnson explained the future goals of STAR,

[w]e’re going to be doing STAR dances, open a new STAR home, a STAR telephone, 24 hours a day, a STAR

recreation . . . And plus we’re going to have a bail fund for every transvestite that’s arrested, to see if we can

get a STAR lawyer to help transvestites in court. (Untorelli Press n.d., 29)

For Johnson, STAR was not only an organization to protest against the oppression experienced by

transvestites but was also connected with the pride in being “gay” and trans. When asked about trans

people in small cities and cities without STAR, Johnson responded:

Start a STAR of their own. I think if transvestites don’t stand up for themselves, nobody else is going to stand

up for transvestites. If a transvestite doesn’t say I’m gay and I’m proud and I’m a transvestite, then nobody

else is going to hop up there and say I’m gay and I’m proud and I’m a transvestite, because they’re not

transvestites. The life of a transvestite is very hard, especially when she goes out on the streets. (28)

It is key to understand that an underlying importance in the formation and activities of STAR was the

need for trans people to look out for another because gay activists were unable to do so.

Returning to disability genealogies, the activism of STAR reflects several practices of Disability

Justice activism. Disability Justice activist Patty Berne lists the “10 Principles for Disability Justice” as:

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58

intersectionality, the leadership of the most impacted, anti-capitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity,

recognizing wholeness, sustainability, commitment to cross-disability solidarity, interdependence,

collective access, and collective liberation (Sins Invalid 2016, 16-19). Many of these same principles are

evident in the activisms of STAR In their Mission they declared:

We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals,

puerto ricans, indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat

us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throws us into jail to rot. This

government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.

(Cohen 2008, 37)

The world that STAR imagined was one where not only trans and “gay” people were free—but everyone.

To do so, they sought activist alliances not only with the GLF and GAA, which began to disintegrate as the

two organizations continually distanced themselves from trans people, but also other radical

organizations of the time. STAR marched with Young Lords of New York to protest police violence and

built connections with the Black Panther Party (Cohen 2008, 131). Additionally, it is vital to acknowledge

STAR’s activism against psychiatric institutions and other disabling institutions and structures. It is also

important to think of Johnson and Rivera as disabled figures, a detail that often gets lost.

STAR emerged out of sit-in protests in Weinstein Hall at New York University (NYU), which

denied the use of the space to the gay community. Following their eviction from Weinstein, a protest in

the Fall of 1970 against NYU mixed with the protest against Bellevue Psychiatric Prison. Not only did

STAR, which had organized shortly after the Weinstein protests, demand that NYU provide,

(1) Space for a 24-hour gay community center, to be controlled by the gay community;

(2) Open enrollment and free tuition for gay people and all people from the communities NYU oppresses;

[and]

(3) All NYU students, employees, and faculty have the right to be openly gay, without fear of retaliation by

NYU.

But they also demanded:

(1) An end to oppression of homosexuals and all people in Bellevue Psychiatric Prison—the end of shock

treatment, drugs, imprisonment, and mental poisoning; [and]

(2) Free medical care, dental care, and preventive medicine under community control, including free

abortions controlled by community women, with no forced abortion and no forced sterilization, without

regard to age or obtaining permission from anybody. (Cohen 2008, 122)

STAR, in the same activist breath, were arguing for space for the gay and trans community, self-

determination of their health, and against the institutional violence of medical institutions. It is critical to

understand that STAR was fighting against the violence of mental institutions at the same time that

disability activists were demanding for deinstitutionalization. While there is no historical record of

collaboration between STAR and disability activists of the time, the two were making the same demands

about the violence their communities were experiencing.

Writing in the aftermath of Marsha Johnson’s death, Rivera noted that,

Timmons: Towards a Trans Feminist Disability Studies

59

Marsha had been on SSI (Social Security Disability) for quite some time because she had several nervous

breakdowns. She had been locked up several times in Bellevue and Manhattan State . . . Marsha lived in her

own realm, and she saw things through different eyes. She liked to stay in that world. (Untorelli Press n.d.,

44)

Not only was STAR protesting against the violence of mental institutions at large, but they were also

protesting against the violence Johnson, and several other STAR and community members experienced

while in these institutions as people with psychiatric disabilities. They fought against institutional

violence based on what disability activists and scholars might consider their experiences as disabled

people. This intersected with their gender and sexual identities, which was institutionally rendered as

deviant, and in need of treatment. STAR’s activisms were very much rooted in speaking against the

disabling violence they experienced and sought to make a better world for those that were marginalized

from other activist campaigns.

In this approach to STAR, it is necessary to center the kinds of disabling violence they protested

against but also the ways they strove to create a better world for their community. They wanted to build a

world that was rid of oppression not just against trans people, but all oppressed people. If disability

studies is moving towards a genealogy that sees figures like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Gloria

Anzaldúa as disability ancestors, I argue that there is an imperative to include activists like Marsha

Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and STAR To do so would center the activist roots of a critical disability

methodology, as Minich (2017) desires, and the breadth of potential trans and disability genealogies. By

centering STAR and its activisms, we practice the possibilities of new critical disability methodologies and

genealogies. By centering STAR, I am suggesting that the core of a feminist disability studies and trans

studies should be in the activisms of Trans Women of Color, as they have already been doing the work

that these fields pursue via their activisms. This is especially crucial for the project of feminist disability

studies which has thus far alienated itself from Trans Feminine people. Centering the histories and lives of

Trans Women of Color is especially important in that anti-blackness and the ugliest forms of

transmisogyny emerge here. The activisms of STAR, along with the principles of Disability Justice, point

us to activisms available to us and future generations.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors for their help, Orion Benedict for their support, and Qwo-Li Driskill whose guidance

has greatly shaped this project. I’m also indebted to the activism of Black Trans Women, such as Tourmaline, who

have been doing amazing work revitalizing these histories.

Endnotes

1. Tourmaline is continuing her work on Mary Jones in her upcoming film, Mary of Ill Fame.

2. I capitalize “Trans Women,” “Transfeminism,” and “Trans Feminine” to mark their status as political and

politically affecting identities and categories. Similarly, I capitalize Black throughout this article.

3. Koyama also points out that Transfeminism is open to “queers, intersex people, trans men, and non-

transwomen” but that it must center Trans Women.

Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Vol. 17 [2020], Iss. 17, Art. 4

60

4. I use the label “Trans Women” to refer to Trans Women, Trans Femme, and Trans Feminine folks. This is

an imperfect label and I want to recognize how I use the label as not perfectly encapsulate the gender identities of

non-Trans Women Trans Feminine and Trans Femme folks.

5. In As Black As Resistance (2018), William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi and describe patriarchy as

pivoting around Transmisogyny at its core. I share their sentiment here.

6. “Cishetero” is shorthand for Cisgender-heterosexual. In other words, gender identities and sexualities

deemed “normative” by society.

7. This is a process of scholars in academic disciplines claiming their works as “original works” works within

settler colonial logics, which claims ideas and intellectual space as “new” or “empty” without acknowledging the work

done, often by Black, Indigenous Peoples, and People of Color.

8. Several texts within the field which engage “feminist disability studies” do not engage Trans Women.

Feminist disability studies’ texts such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2005) review of the sub-field, Kim Q. Hall’s

(2011) anthology with the same title, and Stacy Clifford Simplican’s (2017) work on feminist disability studies

methodology would all be richer and more nuanced if they addressed the role Trans Women potentially have in

relation to the field.

9. Gender Identity Dysphoria was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

(DSM) in 1980. In 2013, the diagnosis was replaced with Gender Dysphoria, which remains in the DSM manual.

10. I think that Baril and Leblanc’s claims are a bit of an exaggeration. There are scholars who engage both

fields and discuss people who are both Trans and Disabled, most notably Eli Clare.

11. I am choosing to read these figures as Trans Women despite the conflicting historical records on how they

gender-identified.

12. I believe disability studies scholars should look at Raymond and other “radical feminist” writings in order

to unpack how they describe the “natural” gendered body/bodies.

13. At the time, “gay” was an umbrella term that often incorporated what we might recognize as a pluralities

of genders and sexualities.

14.Rivera suggested the collapse of STAR in part on lesbian women and other gays who ostracized

transvestites.

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