The spectre of the tranny: pedagogical (im)possibilities

ABSTRACT

Transfemininity marks a site of social upheaval, an encounter that sparks discord. Transfemininity is always otherworldly, posing trans girls and women as figures sought out for capture and eradication. In this manuscript, I elucidate the affective contours of what I describe as the spectre of the tranny, which is a technology of capture and dispossession that seeks to confirm the killability of trans women. Mirroring broader social discourses about transfemininity and trans women, the spectre of the tranny haunts the institution of higher education, shaping pedagogical realities for trans women. In this manuscript, I attend to how the spectre of the tranny attenuates pedagogical (im)possibilities for trans women faculty, particularly those who are pre-tenure and/or in contingent roles. Additionally, I gesture towards how trans(girl) sociality may provide a significant site of momentary resistance from the spectre’s haunting absent-presence.

KEYWORDS:

• Transfemininity
• transgender
• affect
• spectres
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The catastrophe of socially regulated gender is itself an anti-Black and colonial construct indicates a racialised and colonised specificity to how the spectre of the tranny haunts individual transfeminine subjects. In other words, due to how anti-Black racism and settler colonialism – both separately and in tandem – attenuate possibilities for gendered life, the iterative occurrences of the spectre of the tranny will feel different across racialised and Indigenous transwomen and/or two spirit people. For example, my experiences with/of the spectre of the tranny as a white trans woman – and with transgirl sociality – will invariably look, feel, and be different from people who experience this absent-presence and who have different relationships to their racialisation and Indigeneity. Which is to say, though there is a racial specificity to my experiences in this manuscript as a white trans woman, all transfeminine people experience the spectre of the tranny, and our various racial and Indigenous subjectivities likely highlight different contours of its haunting reality.

2. Again, I cannot recall his name. Or perhaps I have actively forgotten it. It is striking to me as I type that the people’s names who I can recall the least through this narrative are nontrans men. There is something about the activity of forgetting men that signals my own desire to move as far away from them, from all they embody, and from the harm they continue to enact on transfemininity and trans women. Perhaps in addition to being an act of survival, my active forgetting is also a practice of cleansing my body, the transfeminine body, of the masculinity that continually works to mete out my/our being.

3. I discuss episodic utopias as something altogether different from the utopia Stewart rightly suggests does not exist. Specifically, I highlight how the fleeting temporal nature of utopic feeling can sync up with the underworlding possibility Gossett and Huxtable discussed, and how these provide a way to feel through the omnipresent haunting technology that comprises the spectre of the tranny. I agree that utopias are impossible as static and ongoing things/places. However, I assert they can exist as structures of feeling that allow for trans sociality in ways that momentarily confound the spectral forces destined on transfeminine being.