To listen to an edited version of their discussion and the rest of the episode click here. What appears below is a more complete transcript of their conversation. The essay, which explores the origins of transness in desire on the one hand and in feminist politics on the other, sparked a debate long in the offing about whether desire, and in particular sexual desire, should be seen as the new frontier for social justice.
The patterns of desire certainly seemed to follow discriminatory pathways. Was there something we could do about it? Should we try? Amia Srinivasan wrote for the LRB that while no one has the right to demand to have sex with anyone else, perhaps we have a duty to engage with our desire in the hopes of rendering it less exclusionary and less unjust.
Is there a back story? And it was like this really intense erotic experience for me. So I was looking for signs. And this bus ride seemed to be demonstrative of something, of a way that I sort of felt without knowing that I felt that way. ALC: Oh, absolutely. Transsexuality and transvestitism are understood as being essentially erotic projects, you know. One hears an echo of that in the discourse around the bathrooms, for instance, as if the reason that trans women transition is so that they can have easier access to little girls in bathrooms.
AB: Why did that—transsexuality as having to do with desire—become something that got denied and replaced with the model that you discussed of identity? ALC: Well, the problem with the Hirschfeld model or the models that followed, the difficulty with those accounts is that the sexual valence that was treated to transsexuality was a pathologizing one. That was a part of a way of marking it as a form of perversion, which is something that again continues to today.
This is, again, widely recognized as a pathologizing transphobic model, and so people are rightly skeptical of reintroducing sexuality in the equation. And where they have met seems to have been dominated by transphobic attacks on trans people. This actually is often extremely copacetic with the thing we call social constructionism—which is spoken about now as if we all sort of understand what that means.
