Toward a richer rhetoric of agency: shaping the identity category transgender in public discourse

ABSTRACT

This essay critically considers the rhetoric of agency—the attribution of varying levels of agency to a person or persons as a premise in an argument—focusing in particular on arguments for human rights that depend on attributions of low agency. For example, many have advanced the idea that LGBTQ people deserve legal protection because they do not choose to be that way. However, scholars have argued that relying solely on this kind of argument may not be the best way to advance human rights. Examining public rhetoric surrounding the identity category transgender, I ask, what might alternatives to low-agency human rights arguments look like? I analyze the pejorative attribution of agency in six anti-trans petitions, some formulaic low-agency rejoinders, and an alternative option drawn from transgender memoirs. The option chronicled here is to move beyond etiology (causes), focus on the agency involved in enacting identity category membership and redeem that agency by giving it a positive character. Three positive characterizations are offered: conviction, authenticity, and transcendence.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• agency
• choice
• transgender rights
• identity categories

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this project were presented at the 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication and at After Marriage, a 2016 conference hosted by the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). I owe a debt to the largely transgender audience at the latter conference for their insightful reading(s) of the anti-transgender petitions. I am also grateful to Linda Flower, Lisa Langstraat, Kate Kiefer, Tom Dunn, Allison Prasch and others for reading earlier versions of this work. Finally, I thank the three anonymous reviewers who offered substantive and generative feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The rhetoric of agency (and the choice/no choice division) partially map onto the essentialism/constructionism debate of the 1980s and 1990s. Biological causes (which impute low agency to members of stigmatized identity categories) are often key ingredients in essentialism. But low agency and essentialism are not synonyms. Representing an identity category as low agency may imply essentialism in that it may make that category seem pre-discursive, or “inevitable and natural” (Bucholtz and Hall 2003, 374). However, a category can be socially constructed and still not a choice (Epstein 1987, 11, 25–27). In the case of transgender identities, one may speak of “choosing” one's gender identity—a high agency representation—and still dabble in essentialism by reinforcing a rigid gender binary (Sloop 2004, 16). Essentialism can be high agency. Constructionism can be low agency. It is better then, to be specific and refer to arguments from agency, rather than make the leap to the label essentialism. This distinction also appears in Cloud (2017, 185).

2. Scholars in cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and other fields have offered more elaborated and technical conceptualizations of agency. See Gunn (2009) for a good introduction.

3. For a consideration of rhetorical agency within transgender studies, see West (2008, 256–259).

4. It is noteworthy that all of the petitions resist a civil rights frame (Hull 2001; Snow and Bedford 1992) for transgender rights, instead opting for government overreach and safety/privacy frames. This could be an attempt to help signers reconcile a felt conflict between a commitment to human rights and their opposition to rights for a particular group, a conflict present in late-stage conservative rhetoric resisting same-sex marriage (Cloud 2014).

5. One might well ask if the abstracted figures in these scenarios represent transgender people at all. They could be seen as predators who fake transgender identities to take advantage of policies designed for actual transgender people. However, these bathroom invaders are the only figures described in many of the petitions; they are the only human characters to which readers can affix the label transgender. As the only figures in a petition about transgender rights initiatives, it would be reasonable for a petition-signer to “read” them as transgender.

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Doug Cloud

Doug Cloud is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition in the Department of English at Colorado State University. His research focuses on rhetoric, social change, and identity in three areas: LGBTQ rights, climate change, and atheism.