Coombs It seems to me that the insistence on understanding individuality in terms of property is a problem across the political landscape. We continue to write and debate policy of the body as if it is something we have, rather than something we are, or indeed, the object of perception rather than it's subject. This finds it's way into all sorts of well-meaning rhetoric regarding ability, gender, and reproductive rights, along with the bad-faith arguments.
I think you have many fair points here. I would point out a particularity of trans politics is that it must—arguably even more than the politics of reproductive choice, certainly more than vaccination—fall back to the politics of bodily autonomy. The individual's body is the vessel in which the hormone supplements circulate.
In western societies, the broader effects of the body's social presentation as "the object of perception" have incrementally been ruled out as an object of politics. Put simply, in the west it is mostly forbidden to put forward political claims about how individuals should look, or what they wear. This prohibition is celebrated as exemplifying social progress, and often accompanied by an unfortunate, chauvinist ridicule of religious and cultural practices (prominently, variations of Islam) enforcing specific dress for men and women. One of the vestigial contests is whether there is any dimension of accountability for women being assaulted while wearing "provocative" clothing.
All of these questions bound regions in public discourse which have been complicated in various ways by the emergence of the trans rights movement (for example, the dress of Muslim trans women, or the scary rate at which trans women are assaulted). But I would agree with what I take to be your overall point—that the tendency of all these contests is to dwell on a limited model of how things are changing based around the expression or denial of individual rights and freedoms in relation to transhistorical claims such as the "biological sex" of anti-trans reactionaries (or my own above).
In Latour's scheme, some of the most important actors left out this agonism about trans rights are the hormone products in commercial circulation. These are now available in various prescribed and non-prescribed forms—you can find trans-identifying kids discussing how they access their "anticistamines" (or other jokes) all round online.
The situation can be compared to the Pill after WWII—whatever your politics of sexual freedom, the availability of reliable contraceptives was going to change sexual expression. Not in wholly liberating ways, as the commercial availability of the female contraceptive did not just open the possibility of sexual encounters without concern about pregnancy, it also fostered demands for sexual encounters that were unwanted.
Foucault's HISTORY OF SEXUALITY is very good on this point—the Pill and the "sexual revolution" were not a movement from repression to liberation, but from one organisation of power to another, each with its own modalities of repression and freedom, its own scientia sexualis and structuring biopolitical questions.
We're in a moment where Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of desire, which allows us to picture a kind of "socket world" in which individual and collective, human and inhuman desires, the forces of the "production of production", are fluxes contoured by potentialities of connection. Once testosterone or oestrogen can be bought, they will be desired, for any number of reasons.
Coombs The body is always-already modified, already technological, already cyborg. It never was anything else.
This is a Stieglerian vantage point, I guess. Stiegler's definition of the human as the bearer of tertiary, epiphylogenetic memory has its utility. I'm not aware if Stiegler wrote on trans politics. In the years prior to his death, he was particularly concerned with the Islamophobia resurgent in France, and was what many leftists would think of as conservative, a strong advocate of a restoration of social democratic institutions and norms in the face of intensifying pharmaco-capitalism (it's a potential faux ami here, given "pharmaco–" is a reference to the pharmakon). Writing and more broadly, technics are the human curse—the curse that leads us to be having this conversation drawing on many reference points, for example.
Coombs The truly "natural" body is a mutable body, and it's mutability is what makes it a body in the first place. To fix the body through the rhetorical trick of naturalization is to claim to solve it, which is always a false claim because of the affective insoluble. Basically, it doesn't matter whether scientific inquiries dispute that rhetoric or confirm it - they simply aren't relevant because they lack the methodology for even setting up the problem, let alone finding the solution.
I would agree with you, and I think it's a very easy way to destabilise anti-trans rhetoric. One can simply point out that change in bodily expression is a fact of all human lives, that any human body's endocrinal circuits are already subject to extrinsic factors in any social context, and that bodily expression has always been subject to a vast landscape of regulating and altering technologies. The same, of course, goes for the geographically, culturally and historically variable expression of gender and sexuality—my go-to example usually being the extraordinary wigs and make-up worn by men in the great cities of Enlightenment Europe.
Coombs I find it not only wholly inadequate, but axiomatic in a manner similar to how Mitropoulos critiques the natural disaster as an essentially rhetorical device in service to hegemony.
It is inadequate, as are all representations of a society's particularity. However, I'd suggest trans politics may not be the easiest front on which to mount the critique. The vaccination politics of the pandemic offered easier leverage, given the clear ways in which the political logic of bodily autonomy could be contradicted by the social need to mitigate the transmission and severity of coronavirus cases. That's one reason why biopolitical theories were so challenged by the pandemic—Agamben could be found ranting about the abandonment of the sacraments amid human carnage in Italy.
Coombs Democracy does indeed become the site of contestation. People conflate it with a lot of other ideas that I'm not sure are necessarily even related. It is not nomocracy, nor is it necessarily majority rule. I've been really enjoying Derrida's Politics of Friendship recently, where democracy becomes a trajectory, a direction, rather than any fixed system. It makes sense in the context of Stiegler's reading of Heidegger re: Mittsein, and it also just feels right.
The Derrida sounds interesting. I find democracy a frustrating instrument, in part because we tend to speak of it as "working" or "not working" or being "the only system that works" while leaving aside the development of compelling arguments about how it can be improved (there are many bad arguments, belonging to liberal technocrats and dwelling on poorly framed system questions).
As I've been saying in a few different ways in this thread, I struggle to tolerate commentary that simultaneously valorises democracy, and refuses to allow it to function as it's hypothetically supposed to. For example, the FT editorial up the thread which celebrates candidates without clearly articulated programmes of change. Actually existing democracy, like capitalism itself, is a system that has been "mad from the beginning, and its madness is what grounds its rationality" (D&G again) … a system that "works by not working". We are very far from where we could be.
Coombs Re: gender and mutable bodies, the fault of epimetheus is originary, and technics are not bodily extensions, but constitutive of what it means to be human, and therefore, what it means to be together. We are already prostethetic, and therefore (self-)destructive, because prosthesis implies a lack. It's less that the dumbass gender critics see that lack in gender-queer bodies, but more that they fail to recognize it in their own normative, cishet selves.
Being more on the Deleuzean side, I would frame it in terms of particularity (or haecceity) rather than lack. The dumbass gender critics operate with a perfect rationality, but by way of (mis)representations of "biological sex" and "socially constructed gender" that erase the manifest imbrication of these conceptual strata—there are no biological human bodies that are not social, and no human society not formed of human bodies—and also the empirical encounter with actual trans people, now and historically. Consequently the procession of gender-critical reason flits unstably from one fixed point to another in a kind of delirium.
