Trans Lives Matter: Embodiment and Agency
In our feature story for the Isom Report for the 22/23 academic year, we discussed embodiment and the struggle to claim one’s own body, in an environment in which partners, families, and the state want to discipline and regulate ‘appropriate’ embodiment. We wrote,
A participant in the 2022 Oxford Pride Parade carry a Trans Pride flag.
“We are in a sorry state as a nation, where discourse across the country equates knowledge with grooming, nurturing with abuse, and bodily autonomy with felony. The regulation, exploitation, and punishment of certain bodies–assigned female at birth, trans, queer, brown, black, and poor–is endemic to cultural norms. In a fundamental way, your body is not understood to be yours. It is for others to regulate: teachers, doctors, police officers, husbands, fathers.”
This trend has come to Mississippi with a vengeance this year: the Mississippi legislature has proposed over 30 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including many anti-trans laws that will make life worse for a population that has already been scapegoated and targeted in our latest round of “culture wars.”
Understanding why backlashes like this emerge in our culture is part of what Gender Studies explores and explains. As an interdisciplinary practice, Gender Studies evolved as a response to a system that only accepts and recognizes certain kinds of bodies, demanding disidentification and denunciation of bodies that fall outside these norms. Resisting that cultural hegemony is an essential part of gender studies, which has created a brilliant body of work that foregrounds the right of multiple kinds of bodies to survive and thrive in the world and the agency to make one’s own decisions concerning embodiment. As part of that work, we are bringing Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson to campus to deliver the keynote address and Trans Studies Lecture at the Isom Student Gender Conference on March 23, one example of the brilliant body of work that trans studies is creating.
We ended our essay on embodiment last fall by discussing the book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a book “by trans and gender nonconforming people for trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive people” to “give the tools we need to be experts on our own lives” and serve as “a resource for educators, medical and mental health providers, academia, legislators, family members, partners, and everyone else.” That focus has been sorely lacking in our public discourse, as Molly Minta’s recent article shows.
According to the article, no one in the legislature bothered contacting the Spectrum Center, Mississippi’s only clinic that provides gender-affirming care for trans people. Stacey Pace, of the Spectrum Center, “wished that just one lawmaker — Democrat or Republican — had asked her or Lee to come testify to the health care they provide every day. Maybe then, she could’ve told them what she’s heard from patients nearly every day since HB 1125 passed the House. ‘I’ve had so many people, before any of this happened, who came to us and said, “the only reason I’m alive today is because I knew you were here,” Stacie said. ‘Now these same adults are saying, ‘this would have crushed me.’”
Trans Mississippians and allies are speaking up and organizing. There is a rally in Oxford on February 11 and in Jackson on February 15
Trans Mississippians are valued and important members of our larger community–our neighbors and friends, parents and siblings, sons and daughters. They deserve better than the latest round of vilification and fear-mongering in the state and in the country as a whole. The political grandstanding sweeping our national politics can have deadly consequences. We call on all Mississippians of conscience to support and defend the trans community.