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In today’s trans-antagonistic backlash to increased rights and visibility, transness is scapegoated, framed as thought virus, a social contagion spread through the hyperlinked internet. When the backlash began, around 2015, the right-wing attacks focused on physical space, like bathrooms, and while they still target such spaces, they have engineered a new tactic: Attack the links to thinking trans. At breakneck speed, the administration has scrubbed federal websites, deleting links that mention transgender, gender, or simply the letter “T.” (On the National Park Service’s site for the Stonewall Monument, you can read about “LGB civil rights,” a familiar acronym dismembered – to obstruct re-membering.) One executive order enforces “patriotic education” to stop trans “indoctrination” by defunding schools that teach “gender ideology.” What we cannot think, they suppose, we will not be.
Trans people have risen up in resistance. The Transexual Menace, a 1990s activist organization, has returned, reprinting their Rocky Horror-style t-shirts, revivifying the twentieth-century’s “bad trans object” (Keegan, 2019), which is good. At Stonewall rallies, calling back queer riot, activists dislodge bricks from the sidewalk and hold them aloft, with the slogan, “Be the brick.” While no bricks have yet been thrown, the idea is in the air – with its accompanying affects, a collective gesture forming a “trans affective commons” (Malatino, 2022).
As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance.
In the earlier 2000s, neoliberalism deployed trans-normalization to de-link trans from negativity. TIME announced “the transgender tipping point” into the mainstream and trans people, mostly transfeminine, appeared in more television shows, movies, and advertising. My transition began in th