In the final parts of TheHistory of Sexuality, Volume I, Michel Foucault arrives at the claim that the bourgeoisie “must be seen … as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based in it, a ‘class’ body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race.”1 The achievement of the right kind of sex “marked and maintained” the “caste distinction” of this class as it consolidated its position of cultural dominance in the nineteenth century. While aristocrats claimed a divine authority symbolized by ancestral blood, bourgeois elites legitimized their power via their supposedly superior capacity to rationally govern populations and manage global affairs. They found their complementary symbolic credential in “a specific body” — healthy, able, sane, reproductive — which they would reproduce intergenerationally via diligence regarding rooting out heritable maladies in the partners with which their children would breed; in this sense, for Foucault, “the bourgeoisie’s ‘blood’ was its sex.”2 Bourgeois power directs eugenicist campaigns, criminalization, and vital massacres to manage or destroy bodies and populations via reinforcement of racialization, colonial difference, compulsory wage work, and production of lumpen populations excluded from the wage. These modes of “dynamic racism” and proletarianization define the epoch of bourgeois control.3 This is the age of distinguishing the prized bourgeois body, distinguished by the correct sexuality, from the perverse, extractable, and expendable bodies that compose non-bourgeois populations. These populations, in turn, only belatedly absorbed as their own the social more that had been the pretext for their immiseration and destruction: “the working classes managed … to escape the deployment of sexuality” until the late nineteenth century.4

In the following pages, I propose that what Foucault calls sex or sexuality can be more accurately and capaciously thought as cisness. In a limited sense cisness is, simply enough, the ideology that posits a biological basis for dividing human beings into two mutually exclusive and compatible kinds of bodies based on sex assigned at birth. But, as I’ve recently clarified in conversation with Sophie Lewis, this modality of cisness — the direct citation of organs or hormone levels — is far less central to its actual operation than the conceit that cisness is a question of medical assignment might suggest.5 Rather, cisness — as it emerged historically and as it is inflicted on us daily — is a modality of class and racial supremacy that only resorts to the citation of viscera and bodily chemicals when confronting political challenge. Cisness is the practice of the powerful — the racial, propertied, colonial — claiming possession of a natural sex through the practice of attributing artificial, exaggerated, or perverse sex to other populations and the individuals who are made to represent these populations in the individuating instance.

Analysis of the historical emergence of cisness grows out of the diversity of nineteenth-century contexts in which bourgeois, racial, and colonial power secure their unique claims to proper sex through the criminalization and stigmatizing of lifeways that do not operate in accord with sexual dimorphism as recognized by bourgeois authorities. American law and transnationally produced racial theories treated Black people in ways that held Blackness outside of mores regarding sexual difference, the social expectations of men and women.6 Indigenous populations did not properly honor biologized sexual dimorphism according to the policies of settler regimes in North America. This charge was also made in non-settler colonial contexts, including India, by colonial administrative bureaucracies. Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, that came under colonial cultural influence via European influence over state modernization schemes likewise found their erotic and romantic socialities remade in the image of the newly enforced norm of the biologized sexual compatibility of male and female. Proletarian and lumpen populations of urban centers from New York to San Francisco and London to Berlin had — as George Chauncey, Clare Sears, Neil McKenna, and Robert Beachy have variously demonstrated — recognized lived social sex based on presentation, often evidenced in the brutal misogynist treatment of trans women. These populations were brought under heightened forms of municipal control that attacked the widespread recognition of social sexed roles by making it a crime to masquerade in the clothes of the other sex.7

By the 1940s, the non-cis sexual socialities of proletarian city neighborhoods became increasingly illegible. The proliferation of the idea of homosexuality reoriented people to the sovereign importance of assigned sex for determining social (and particularly sexual) roles. This is what Foucault counts as the working class being taken up in the “deployment of sexuality.”8 An output of this transformation was the firm partitioning of trans life from its former working-class context. While gay desire and identity became an obsessive bourgeois secret, transness became fixed as a lumpen formation abjected from the socialities of working-class life. An analytic of cisness, then, reveals the bourgeois charge that various populations understood sex incorrectly as a context and correlate to this speciation of trans life.

In their introduction to Transgender Marxism, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke note the contemporary effects of this history. They attribute the appeal of Marxist and revolutionary theory among trans people to the difficult structural conditions of trans life, which are “harsh enough that many are easily led to conclude that … no centre-left party … can be relied upon to truly loosen the grip of oppression.”9 Most transfeminist accounts agree that the material conditions of our society expose trans people to significant precarity because most nation-states use legal sex to manage access to public and private services including housing, healthcare, employment, and education, and identity documents. They show how trans people experience vastly disproportionate exposure to the state violence of policing and incarceration.10 In this analysis, trans people experience these forms of marginalization to maintain their collective availability as part of a “reserve army” of labor and, in the case of trans femmes, as part of the lumpen sector that performs sex work, as I have argued elsewhere.11

In this essay, I’m arguing for an expansion of this materialist analysis to address the class and racial politics of cisness. This analysis provides an understanding of reactionary socialisms or hodgepodge political claims that borrow socialist arguments or postures on questions of gender. Such political positions have proliferated in recent years: from TERFs who pretend is the stuff of coddled undergraduates; to Elizabeth Breunig’s culture war natalism, to Joe Rogan’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders.1213 In fact, it seems that the fastest way for the rhetoric of socialism to enter mainstream publications in the US is through conservatism on matters of gender. The assertions of whiteness, cisness, and (often but not always) heterosexuality that are central to these writers’ political postures prove that they are in touch with people who struggle to pay the bills, in contrast with the empty rhetorical commitment to racial, sexual, and gender justice that a Democratic Party devoid of class analysis speaks in lieu of material commitments to any constituency other than the wealthy donor class. If class — understood not in Marx’s dialectical sense but in terms of the discrete social categories put forth by mainstream social science — is primary to other forms of difference, and the unmodified category of worker is supposedly the true and singular protagonist of this phase of history, then politics organized around other forms of social difference is a distraction from the consolidation of a class-based politics. Although the Breunigs and Rogans of the world aren’t versed enough in class politics to articulate even this reductive position explicitly, the way such false class politics privileges their perspective leads them there anyway. In the case of trans people, the arguments that flow so easily from bourgeois media personalities have found amplification in anti-trans political organizing that attacks trans healthcare and access to public space, retaining the claim that average people just don’t get trans life.14 This essay aims to offer a Marxist analysis that moves beyond the liberal inclusion of transness on a list of identities that capital may instrumentalize, to argue that, contra the reactionary populist argument, it is not transness but cisness that is the historically bourgeois formation.15

Cisness is part of the bourgeois cultural ferment that the nineteenth century installed as a socially enforced norm both within lumpen metropolitan neighborhoods and colonized spaces, overriding many and various forms of social organization that were not organized by a binary based on assigned sex, or, in other words, by cisness.16 Medical authorities standardized a narrative of bodily entrapment and gatekept bodily modification from all but a vanishingly small number of people who met their standards for diagnosis and treatment.17 Bourgeois doctors thereby installed themselves as the authority that would diagnostically legitimize the tiny minority of true transsexuals.18 They were, in fact, containing the social force of genders resistant to bourgeois social mores. This ideological containment of gender difference within the narrative frame of medicine was part of the cleaving off of bourgeois subjects — gender normative gays and lesbians and those the medical establishment deemed legitimate transsexuals — from the collectively produced forms of queer and trans life that did not (and still do not) abide by cis and straight social organization. This double operation — the creation of the gender normative gay defined by sexual object rather than gender difference, and the creation of the proper transsexual defined by a regrettable but correctable gender difference — is the process through which queer and trans were reinvented as a private matter; a historical process through which the gay or trans individual replaced the gay and trans collective as the frame for common understanding. Previous to this medical enclosure social sex was a collective affair, both in the sense that non-cis gender understandings were collectively held and (to view the same matter from the other perspective) because bourgeois and colonizing forces understood non-cisness as a population-level trait of these same subjects. The political implications of this historical reality should be clear: a misunderstanding of the cultural substance of proletarian life is at the center of a transphobia that presents itself as giving voice to regular working-class reality over rarefied queer and trans identity politics. Leftist transphobia is indeed a class antipathy but not, as it often presents itself, an anti-capitalist one. Rather, these sentiments reflect the historical residue of the bourgeois imposition of that class’s own atomized nuclear family — an arrangement in which division of labor was naturalized into sexed dimorphism. This process covered over the fact that an actual division between a husband who earns and a wife who only oversees domestic management and never works for money was never a reality for most proletarians. The naturalization of a sexual division of labor via cathexis with the biological division of people has been one of the most potent forces in the enthronement of bourgeois cultural authority.

Cisness and the Nineteenth Century

In her field-defining book, How Sex Changed, Joanne Meyerowitz first narrated the historical emergence of transness through the chronology of twentieth-century medical innovations. This story begins in the categories of sexual and gender difference produced by nineteenth-century European sexologists, which were then attached to surgical procedures and hormonal regimes in the early twentieth century. With the transfer of the center of this research and these services to the United States in the post-World War Two era, the story culminates with the founding of the first American sex reassignment clinics in the 1960s.19 Along with other scholars, I then looked beyond this story to ground the historical emergence of trans in vernacular trans feminine individual accounts, mostly drawing on sexological case studies and collective histories, and on records of criminal punishment and sensational media accounts (which often appeared after assigned sex was revealed after death).20

But beyond the recovery of these vernacular forms of identity, both individual and collective, understanding the nineteenth century consolidation of trans femininity requires understanding how cisness emerges as a regulatory ideology. The long nineteenth century is the period in which non-cisness as an exclusively racial, colonial, and class order readjusts to incorporate the reality that same sex activity and forms of gender irreconcilable with emerging bourgeois gender norms were not only present in white metropolitan bourgeois elites and declining aristocratic cultures but were in fact central to them, from Oxbridge colleges to the last German Imperial court. Thus, homoerotic sexual relations moved from being an acceptable stage of development for otherwise normal boys to being a possible indication of a feminine disposition that defined an aberrant individual within white and bourgeois populations. This contradiction was resolved by medicalization, the association of a white man’s internal androgyny with the atavistic perversions of the racialized, colonized, and proletarian; but a fundamentally individual problem in nature.

As the endpoint of this nineteenth century process, trans femininity in the US and Western Europe became two things: firstly, it continued on as a real social collectivity formed by social practices and economic structures that predated the apprehension of non-cis femininities by medical science. Scenes of mollies, molles, fairies, femeniellosorganized around sex work and other precarious feminized employment continued to operate relatively unchanged. But secondly, via its incorporation into bourgeois medical science and adjacent social sciences, the social category of trans femininity also took on the status of regrettable individual malady. From this emergence of bourgeois invert as a sick individual over the proletarian fairy as representative of a blighted social order, first doctors and then municipal governments enacting anti-vice policing shored up the cisness of the bourgeoise. If a non-ethnic, white bourgeois was that way, he would have to go to that part of town to indulge himself and risk extortion or arrest. If he wished to remain in the neighborhoods and families that were the emblems of bourgeois uprightness, he would have to submit to the sexologist’s intervention. This is the story of the coerced consolidations and categorizations of a diverse array of social positionings that might have had as much to do with spiritual, kinship, or labor roles as they did with a notion of personal gender. In what follows, I select examples of the breadth of lifeways that don’t operate according to an ideology of cisness. What draws together the following nineteenth-century examples of disciplinary social agents is their common contribution to the contouring of cisness as an attribute of the dominant cultural group, whether they be propertied, white or otherwise racially dominant, settler, or any combination of these.

To begin we can look to the case of the Indigenous Americas and the colonial project against Indigenous genders that contemporary Indigenous communities and thinkers refer to with the contested umbrella term, “two spirit.” In Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonization and Indigenous Decolonization, Scott Lauria Morgensen provides examples from three Indigenous nations. First he recounts the story of Och-Tisch, a Crow boté, who lived from 1854 to the late 1920s, and became a focus for the US Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs Crow Agency’s program to “[target] boté for gendered and sexual reeducation.”21 The tactics of this program included “[incarcerating] the boté, [cutting] off their hair, [making] them wear men’s clothing … and [forcing] manual labor.”22 Crow Historian Joe Medicine Crow recounts the community response to a US Indian Agent who targeted Crow boté in 1890, cutting their hair and forcing them to wear trousers: “the people were so upset with this that Chief Pretty Eagle came into Crow Agency, and told [the agent] to leave the reservation.”23 This communal resistance reflects the position of boté as part of Crow social life and resistance to the colonizer’s gender regulation as Indigenous resistance. Morgensen periodizes the success of the substantial suppression of boté life within Crow communities as occurring by the 1920s and 1930s with the gradual transition of this regulatory violence from white agents of the American government to what he calls “Christianized” Indians who spread the idea of cisness among native communities.

Similar practices became common across North America in the early twentieth century: Morgensen also highlights the example of a Navajo woman who was taken to the Carlisle Indian School as a child in the 1930s. He cites an interview conducted with a Navajo woman by the anthropologist Walter Williams in which the woman remembers her cousin, who was a nadle, a Navajo two spirit identity, being taken away from school. “Since [they] dressed as a girl … school officials placed [them] in the girl’s dormitory. The Navajo students protected [them] and [they] went undiscovered,” but then following a lice infection “the white teachers scrubbed all the girls” and were upset by the cousin’s body, so they sent them away and the family never knew what happened to them.24 Other sources confirm similar processes and timelines across the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific Rim, as colonizers tried to suppress the socialities that were formed around social categories they viewed in relation to their own developing sense of sexual aberration.25

But the vast bureaucratic effort that wrested Indigenous youth from their kin and communities in order to enforce settler cultural norms in, among other areas, comportment, dress, language, and grooming habits was, of course, not limited to two-spirit people. Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories (1921) recounts the author’s experience of being removed, along with other children, from her Sioux community and placed in an Indian boarding school in 1884. In “The Cutting of My Long Hair” she describes a scene of mass hair cutting; one of many experiences in which the white staff violently imposed their ideas about sex onto Indigenous children. Ša’s friend Judéwin:

had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy.… Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards. We discussed our fate for some moments, and when Judéwin said “We have to submit, because they are strong,” I replied “No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!”26

Sa runs away but is caught and tied kicking and screaming to a chair, where the white school officials cut her hair. “Then I lost my spirit,” she wrote. This vignette, which resonates so strikingly with the stories of attacks on Crow boté, points to the way that Indigenous socialities were policed via the elimination of forms of life that colonizers viewed as gender deviance. It is Indigenous lifeways that are attacked when hair is forcibly cut, regardless of whether or not this violence is done to a two-spirit person. It was the collectively and relationally produced Indigenous social orders that settlers viewed as antagonistic to the maintenance of an orderly settler society. The violent act of haircutting is just one of the emblematic, dramatic, public displays of settler attempts to destroy Sioux lifeways that Sa’s writing documents.

This specific modality of enforcing cisness on Turtle Island resonates with other colonial contexts. Morgensen traces the origin of the conceptual enclosure of gender by cisness back to “[sixteenth-century] Spanish, French, and British encounters with Native cultures,” which produced the category of “berdache” to collapse Indigenous genders marked for suppression and eradication. The word was imported from its original usage as a term used to “condemn Middle Eastern and Muslim men as racial enemies of Christian civilization”; “as kept boys” or “boy slaves” whose “sex was said to have been altered by immoral male desire.”27 This link between the settler-colonial apprehension of non-cis gender in the Americas on the one hand, and Orientalist understandings of the Middle East and Islamic sex-gender roles on the other, reveals the constitutive relation between racialization and cisness across colonial contexts.

In Women with Mustaches, Men Without Beards, Afsaneh Najmabadi studies Qajar Iran, the period that corresponds with the long nineteenth century.28 Her book highlights the modernizing project of disappearing the categories of amrad and mukhanna — younger beloveds who were central both to classical Persian poetry and to pre-Qajar social structures of eros — from cultural view. This project, Najmabadi argues, was required to heteronormalize Iranian culture as one of the necessary components for achieving modernity. Najmabadi insists that the amrad and mukhanna were not likened to women or understood as antecedents to later trans feminine Iranian identities (the focus of her subsequent book). Rather, age and power differentials in relation to their older lovers determined their role in the sexual order as celebrated ideal objects of adoration. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the beloved became feminized and associated with feminized sex work rather than intra-masculine devotions. It was the amrad’s feminization that precipitated the process of culturally disappearing these previously normative, indeed celebrated, social types. This process involved the re-organization of the social understanding of bodies into two mutually exclusive and compatible sex types: penetrable and penetrator, woman and man. This, in my view, marks the emergence of the bourgeois ideology of cisness.

Crucial to Najmabadi’s argument is that the same modernizers who worried about and ultimately abruptly denied the existence of the amrad were also worried about Iranian women. It was the backwardness of sex segregated spheres that gave rise to same-sex practices where they existed in Iranian society. If only Iranian wives could be more like European wives, Iran could move forward both socially and politically. The twinned vices of sodomy and prostitution would disappear. These arguments represent the reevaluation of Iranian social mores in light of the importation of French and British bourgeois understandings of sexuality and kinship that had, by this point, been reformulated around the figure of the homosexual, as Foucault recounts. But they also rested on racialized and colonial disavowals that were distinct from the Euro-American regulation of sexual difference, in that they did not incorporate the abject as a medicalized, pathologized sport within the race. Rather, the Iranian context required a disappearance, not only of the amrad but of Iranian cultural ways. Modernizers connected the amrad/mukhanna to the veiled Iranian woman, both figures inadmissible to the project of modernization. But whereas the veiled woman would remain a question for constitutionalists and Islamists, modernists and feminists, and a vast array of commentators who speak without knowing anything about Iranian history, the amrad disappears.29 Modernizers saw themselves as rescuing Iranian women from the social structure that artificially sequestered them and thus as making space for the revelation of real womanhood, exhumed from the false roles that a backwards culture had imposed. As the social roles governing sexuality resolved into cis sexes, the center of Iranian sexual culture disappeared.

Contrast this history with the apprehension of non-cis genders by the British Raj in the South Asian nineteenth century. In her study, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India, Jessica Hinchy provides an overview of the extensive efforts of the British Raj and the various local bureaucracies across the subcontinent to criminalize and often explicitly to eradicate the gender roles that have various terms in the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken across the subcontinent, but are reductively and collectively referred to in English as hijras. Hijras are characterized by feminine gender presentation, the formation of independent kinship structures organized around a guru, and the work of dancing at weddings and births and other forms of performance which is paid in the form of badhai or “gifts of money to which they [are] spiritually entitled.”30

Unlike the amrad and mukhannas in the Iranian context, hijra are often defined by feminine adornment and labor roles, and have historically not been subject to the same sort of celebration in classical culture. Hijras were and are, rather, regarded as part of South Asian cultures across regions and religions. Their enduring acknowledgement as part of South Asian society is reflected in the 2014 Indian Supreme Court decision federally recognizing a third gender, and the bureaucratic recognition of a third gender across Nepal, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.31 These actions are in contrast to the total overhaul of Iranian social mores that saw amrads go from being viewed as the ideal object of eros to being wholly erased from the cultural landscape by the end of the nineteenth century.

Like the nineteenth-century trans feminine types of Western Europe and the US — the fairies, mollies, molles, and feminiellos— hijras had a class position. They lost the caste statuses they were assigned at birth and entered a lower position on the social ladder that, at least by the nineteenth century, also became categorically associated with sex work. Unlike the trans femmes of the metropoles and provinces of empire, however, hijras were not criminalized under colonial legal codes and Indian administrative cultures via their association with sex work. Rather, as both Hinchy and Gayatri Reddy have noted, the criminalization of hijras was achieved via their inclusion in criminal castes, in a legal structure that calcified caste identities into administrative and labor categories. Navyug Gill’s work further documents the use of caste by colonial bureaucracy as a nativist cover for enacting colonial population management goals, or otherwise targeting populations for incarceration, work in caste-prescribed sectors, or eradication.32 This fact is particularly significant given that, as Durba Mitra has meticulously documented, the category of the prostitute was a central figure though which the Indian administrative state — and the social sciences that rose in tandem with it — defined their purview and purpose.33 Unlike widows, unmarried women, religious minorities, low caste women and others, hijras were evidently not targeted by the laws and scholarly analyses that saw “the prostitute” as a catch-all socio-legal category for all women deemed incommensurable with colonial bureaucratic management of Indian populations. In other words, in the South Asian context it seems there was not the kind of collapsing of cis and trans women in the criminalization of sex work that occurred in the metropoles of the US and Western Europe that informed my own previous argument that sex work served as the material basis for the vernacular categories of trans femininity in the US and Western Europe. Rather, the sex difference of hijras is understood as part of the fabric of South Asian lifeways that run contrary to the bureaucratic management of the colonial state.

This essay aims to provide a framework for a larger project: a more complete account of the nineteenth-century endeavor to consolidate cisness as the trans-cultural basis of sex through the identification and disavowal of myriad racialized and proletarian non-cis social identities. This process was already well underway, in some cases for centuries, when medical and social science turned attention to non-cis femininity in the mid nineteenth century. My understanding is that what actually arose through the sexological apprehension of trans femininity into a medical diagnostic was the opening of a possibility of bourgeois transness. The fundamental paradigm of this bourgeois emergence was psychic injury and bodily entrapment, a paradigm foreign to the myriad experiences of those occupying non-cis social roles even in the very streets of Berlin, Paris, and New York City where sexologists forged and proliferated their medical narratives during the period from 1860 to 1920.

There was a sex binary present in many of these contexts: men and women were two mutually exclusive groups. The presence of boy beloveds in Qajar Iran didn’t mean that there weren’t rigid rules about how men and women had to behave. What the amrad represented to the cultural colonizers from Britain and France was the reality that genitals didn’t reliably place every person on one side or another of the binary of sexual subject versus sexual object, as was the bourgeois European standard. The Iranian context was understood as in relation to the reality, visible on the streets of London and Paris, that assigned sex and genital configuration did not prescribe sexual role or sexed social role. Other sex-gender systems had different rules about bodies, in fact most did. What sexology offered, as it refined and developed separate nosologies for homosexuality and transness, was a racializing narrative that reconciled the vast and various ways that vernacular sexual cultures violated cisness (albeit not the gender binary) with the demand that white bourgeois subjects be made to have their difference named, taxonomized, and filed as something other than racial or class degeneracy. Gayness and transness went from socialities to be engaged in, lived in, indulged in, collectively, to being something an individual suffered alone.

We live in the wake of this colonial and capitalist consolidation of cisness as a classed and racialized quality, as a guarded possession of the international bourgeoisie; its status as a group-forming attribute is obscured by our faith that the stuff of our body is the most personal, the most individual thing we own. The last decade has seen the leaking of trans life out of the permissible class-bifurcated narratives of mid-nineteenth-century sexology and late nineteenth-century escalations of criminalization. No longer is trans life held as either a bourgeois individual’s vanishingly rare medical anomaly or as a racialized and criminalized lifeway associated with sex work and death. Rather, transness has been revealed to a larger public as it has largely been for the last century and a half: a lifeway constrained by cis social structures, accompanied by bureaucratic and interpersonal violence, productive of an aesthetic and social genealogy. When myriad New York Timesop-eds reinforce the idea that unprecedented numbers of young people identifying as trans is evidence of social contagion, this organ of bourgeois self-regard pathologizes the very heart of trans and queer life: these are collectively held socialities that have always been available to all, given endlessly, taken more or less graciously, never individually held, never owned.

In the United States, there has been a dramatic surge in cis men seeking injectable testosterone in the past two years. This is occurring both via existing medical standards for verified hypogonadism and in response to reported symptoms of lack of pep via the blossoming of para-medical clinics that specialize in getting you your “first dose […] within an hour” of walking in the door and encourage patients to promote testosterone among their social circles with requests to “refer a friend for $50 off your next weekly treatment.”34 A recent article in the New York Times Magazine dishes on the trend of cis women using testosterone to pursue more and better sex.35 This trend adds to the long-standing list of medical protocols that provide cis women with the hormones they need, including for birth control and IVF, to halt precocious puberty and to manage the symptoms of menopause. This multi-sectoral infrastructure that supports the increase in access, destigmatization, visibility, and variety of forms of sex modification for cis people occurs as a Trump executive order denies the existence of trans people.36 More consequentially, American legislators write laws that forbid pediatric gender-affirming care. In Tennessee, this legislation forthrightly declares that its purpose is to satisfy the state’s interest in “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.”37 This is the landscape through which the quotidian techniques of sexed body modification are hoarded for people whose needs and desires reaffirm a cis story about what bodies should be able to do and be. In this context, trans adolescence becomes the fulcrum on which bodily autonomy tips. This essay has aimed to contextualize this contemporary reality in a long history of bourgeois states’ and their cultural attachés’ claims to a monopoly on understanding what bodies are and how bodies compose social units. This surety has always relied on racialized and criminalized counterexamples. What happens when the most sacrosanct achievement of the bourgeois class is challenged by its own children? Recently, we’ve seen just what.

1. 1Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 124.
2. 2Foucault, History of Sexuality124.
3. 3Foucault, History of Sexuality137.
4. 4Foucault, History of Sexuality121.
5. 5Emma Heaney and Sophie Lewis, “On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie,” Pinko Magazine Issue Four,November 2025.
6. 6See Snorton’s reading of Hortense Spillers in C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
7. 7Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
8. 8Foucault, History of Sexuality 21.
9. 9Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, “Introduction,” Transgender Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2021) 3.
10. 10See Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Nat Smith and Eric Stanley, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Second Edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015); Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
11. 11Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017) 162.
12. 12For Breunig’s combination of social welfare advocacy and social conservatism see Elizabeth Bruenig, “It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try,” Washington Post, March 6, 2018, Accessed July 9, 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-give-socialism-a-try/2018/03/06/c603a1b6-2164-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html and “Make Birth Free,” The Atlantic, AccessedJuly 9, 2022 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/post-roe-pro-life-parental-support/661473/.
13. 13For an affirmation of Joe Rogan’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders in the socialist magazine Jacobin see Michael Brooks and Ben Burgis, “It’s Good that Joe Rogan Endorsed Bernie. Now it’s Time to Organize,” Jacobin, Accessed January 26, 2020 https://jacobin.com/2020/01/its-good-that-joe-rogan-endorsed-bernie-now-we-have-to-organize.
14. 14See Jules Gill-Peterson, “Caring for Trans Kids, Transnationally, or, Against ‘Gender-Critical’ Moms,” In Feminism Against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024) 197–216 and Joanna Wuest, “Assuaging the Anxious Matriatch: Social Conservatives, Radical Feminisms, and Dark Money Against Trans Rights,” Feminism Against Cisness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024).
15. 15For another way to break through this limited Marxist analysis of trans life, see an account of trans people’s experience of the role of their trans identity in labor organizing in Michelle O’Brien, “Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline and Gender Freedom,” eds. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, Transgender Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
16. 16The contrast between Sharon Marcus’s Between Women and Jen Manion’s Female Husbands accounts of nineteenth-century marriage forms reflects this class structure. The bourgeois and aristocratic women involved in female marriages were thought of as women, and somewhat protected from ridicule by financial security. Manion’s proletarian female husbands, on the other hand, had male social identities, were subject to ridicule, and increasingly to incarceration throughout the nineteenth century. In many of the cases Manion recounts, the assigned sex of the female husband is made public either in criminal court proceedings or when their wives make claims in divorce proceedings. Cisness functions either as a bourgeois quality or through these forms of state apprehension. Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (New York: Princeton University Press, 2009).
17. 17See Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
18. 18See Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child.
19. 19Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed.
20. 20See: Heaney, The New Woman; Emily Skidmore, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2017); Snorton, Black on Both Sides; Manion, Female Husbands.
21. 21A Crow social position that colonizers apprehended into the category of berdache and which Indigenous people have more recently incorporated under the umbrella of two spirit. Scott Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 40.
22. 22Morgensen, Spaces Between Us39.
23. 23Morgensen, Spaces Between Us 82.
24. 24Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 180.
25. 25See Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (New York: Atria Books, 2014) chapter 8 and Kai Pyle, “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 574–588.
26. 26Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2003) 90–91.
27. 27Morgensen, Spaces Between Us36.
28. 28Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
29. 29See Najmabadi, Women with Mustacheschapters 3, 7, and 8.
30. 30Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny(New York: Verso, 2024) 30.
31. 31Julie McCarthy, “In India, Landmark Law Recognizes Transgender Citizens” NPR News, April 15, 2014, Accessed January 28, 2026 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/15/303408581/in-india-landmark-ruling-recognizes-transgender-citizens.
32. 32Navyug Gill, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024).
33. 33Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
34. 34See “American Men Are Hungry for Injectable Testosterone,” The Economist, July 8, 2025, Accessed January 28, 2026 https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/08/american-men-are-hungry-for-injectable-testosterone.
35. 35Susan Dominus, “‘I’m on Fire’: Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — and Then Some,” New York Times Magazine, October 22, 2025, Accessed January 28 2026 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/magazine/testosterone-women-health-sex-libido-menopause.html.
36. Dominus 2026.
37. 36U.S. President Executive Order 14168 of January 20, 2025, Federal Register 90, no. 19 (January 30, 2025): 8615–8618.
38. 37Tennessee Legislature, Senate, Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity, SB 1, 113th Gen. Assem., passed February 23, 2023, https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default?BillNumber=SB0001&ga=113.