Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt

In February 2019, Zapatista women in a letter to the “women who fight all over the world” wrote:

Maybe we do not know what the best feminism is, maybe we do not know how the words change, or what is gender equality. And it is not even fair that they say “gender equality,” because they only speak of the equity of women and men, and even we, who they call ignorant and backward, we know well that there are people who are neither men nor women, who we call “otroas,” but who can call themselves as they please, and it has not been easy for them to gain that right to be who they are without hiding, because they are mocked, persecuted, violated, murdered. Are we still going to force them to be either men or women? . . . How can we complain that they do not respect us as women if we do not respect those people? (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 2019)

This letter is a bold challenge to white/western/Global North feminism and its limited understanding of sex and gender. For Zapatista peoples, gender is not a binary but rather an expansive spectrum beyond the binaries imposed by colonial norms. The letter demonstrates that the rights of the “otroas” peoples is central to the Zapatista liberation. Further, it exposes the hypocrisies of trans-exclusionary cis-feminist movements, which more than often are white and Global North based. It calls out their imperialist tendencies in how they engage with the Other women. Denying any agency of the Other women, for white feminists: first, Indigenous, racialized and “Third World” women are always perpetually oppressed; and second, trans women are not women.

Burt’s (2020) article, “Scrutinizing the U.S. Equality Act: A feminist examination of definitional changes and sociolegal ramifications,” is consistent with the Zapatista critiques of white feminism whereby “women” are homogeneously and universally oppressed across temporal, spatial and cultural frames. Further, Burt’s article reflects the inherent transphobia and cisnormativity within white feminisms. My goal is to demonstrate how these transphobic and cisnormative arguments are rooted in coloniality, and that white feminist transphobia is actually colonialism and white supremacy in praxis. In other words, I contend that transphobia should be seen as integral to white feminism due to its roots in colonialism. Finally, in this comment, I am not interested in making a case for trans existence or highlighting trans suffering to make them/us more worthy of solidarity from white feminists. This is not to erase the violence that we face, but rather it is a refusal to claim humanity to those who adamantly deny it to us.

I am not making any new critiques of white feminism and feminists, as these critiques have been put forward by Black, Indigenous, women of color, Third World, and transnational feminists for decades, if not centuries. The reduction of the category of “woman” has been long challenged, as Bell Hooks (1994) so clearly argued over a quarter of a century ago:

“the efforts of black women and women of color to challenge and deconstruct the category ‘woman’—the insistence on recognition that gender is not the sole factor for determining constructions of femaleness—was a critical intervention, one which led to a profound revolution in feminist thought and truly interrogated and disrupted the hegemonic feminist theory produced primarily by academic women, most of whom were white” (p. 63).

Unfortunately, in 2020, these Black, Indigenous, women of color, Global South, and transnational feminists critiques of white feminism, which center the intersections of heteropatriarchy with white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism, continue to be ignored by white feminism in the academy and beyond. Moreover, these critiques illustrate how transphobia is enmeshed in white feminism’s colonial and white supremacist epistemological frameworks, and that their transphobia, in turn, continues to reproduce gender as a colonial myth, what Lugones (2020) calls the “coloniality of gender.”

Burt’s analysis is within this realm of white feminism because of her reductive and simplified framing of the category “woman.” Her conceptualization of “woman” remains, quite shockingly in 2020, white; even as she speaks on behalf of incarcerated women and women in shelters who are demographically overrepresented by Black, Indigenous, im/migrant, and women of color. Further, her citations continue to center white and transphobic feminist scholarship, seemingly oblivious to the significant contributions of Black, Indigenous, women of color, Third World, transnational, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming feminist scholars, activists, and feminisms. I am more invested in challenging Burt’s colonial and imperial lens, however, than her resulting transphobic conclusions. Instead, I address the erasure of racial, colonial, and imperial processes in this response with the hopes that in the future, cis-white feminists reflect on their own colonial epistemological frameworks before they analyze trans liberation struggles and reinforce transphobia. None of this is to say that all precolonial societies were trans-friendly, or that transphobia does not currently exist within racialized and colonized communities. Oyěwùmí (1997) already established more than twenty years ago that “due to imperialism, this [gender] debate has been universalized to other cultures, and its immediate effect is to inject Western problems where such issue originally did not exist” (pp. 9). Thus, contemporary transphobia is a product of colonialism.

We cannot understand contemporary experiences of trans and gender nonconforming folks without understanding the last 500 years of colonialism. ¹ As much as race is a product of European colonialism, so are gender and sexuality. Feminist scholars have demonstrated, cisheteropatriarchy and binarism were/are central to the colonial project. European notions of gender and sexuality were not only imposed on colonized and racialized peoples but were also used to deny their humanity. Lugones (2020) has shown how colonialism enforced the European gender system on the colonized, which gendered the colonized on the basis of European Christian bourgeois normatives and values. She has argued that biological dimorphism, patriarchal and heterosexual organizations of relations are central tenants of this system. “Coloniality of gender,” according to Lugones (2020) is “the dehumanization of colonized and African-diasporic women as lacking gender, one of the marks of the human, and thus being reduced to labor and to raw sex, conceived as non-socializable sexual difference” (p. 33). This imposed colonial/racial/gender system continues to deny humanity to racialized and colonized peoples.

Oyěwùmí (1997) has shown that while in Europe biological determinism was used to define gender relations, in many precolonial non-European societies this gender system was not the norm. Writing about Yorùbá society, she argues: “social relations derive their legitimacy from social facts, not from biology . . . the Yorùbá social order requires a different kind of map, not a gender map that assumes biology as the foundation for the social” (pp. 12–13). Alternatively, in the European context, biological determinism was used to create binaries and hierarchies between “male” and “female.” Challenging feminist discourses of social construction, she argues that social construction and biological determinism reinforce each other, as “when social categories like gender are constructed, new biologies of difference can be invented” (pp. 8–9). Thus, “the woman question is a Western-derived issue” (p. ix). Spillers (1987) adds to this discussion by focusing on the role of chattel slavery and the afterlives of slavery on gender formations within Black communities in the Americas. She argues that the conditions of enslavement and captivity made black female and male flesh fungible with each other. As the “the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor” (p. 67), the black flesh is rendered genderless, fungible, enslaveable, and non-human. Drawing upon Spillers’ work, Snorton (2017) argues that since the captive black flesh was rendered outside of the gender system, black flesh forms a “critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being” (p. 57). Further, adding to Oyěwùmí’s point above, Snorton also asserts that “gender socially constructs sex” (p. 33). Thus, ungendering of blackness through chattel slavery unsettles the colonial binaries of sex and gender.

Indigenous feminists have also long theorized cisheteropatriarchy as one of the primary tools of colonization used by white settler states. Finely (2011) argues that colonialism gendered and sexualized Indigenous women as well as men. She writes: “It is not only Native women who are (hetero)sexually controlled by white heteropatriarchy, for Native men are feminized and queered when put in the care of a white heteropatriarchal nation-state” (p. 35). Analyzing the Indian Act in the Canadian settler state, Lawrence (2004) demonstrates how the state entrenched heteropatriarchy within Indigenous communities through series of legislations and acts; and by 1874 the Indian descent was determined exclusively through male lineage. Native women marrying non-Native men lost their status, while non-Native women marrying Native men became Indigenous. Thus, indigeneity and gender are intrinsically tied in the settler state and both categories remain mutable. At the same time, it is critical to note Indigenous peoples who were outside the European binary system were even more brutally targeted by the settlers. The 1515 massacre, in Panama, of over forty “men dressed as women” by the Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and his army is a prime example of this violence (Leo 2020). Killed Indigenous peoples were fed to the dogs for trespassing Spanish gender norms and being non-human. Leo (2020) argues that: “It is this mutilation of trans flesh that makes possible the integration of certain assigned male and female bodies of color into the gender binary and thus the realm of ‘human’” (p. 465). These legacies of mutilation and elimination, Driskill (2004) argues, haunts Two-Spirit peoples: “We were stolen from our bodies/We were stolen from our bodies” (p. 51).

From exploring Black and Indigenous theorizations of un/gendering, it should be clear that to talk about sex or gender is to talk about race and colonialism. Unsettling these relations, Lugones (2020) argues is a decolonial task, “one that I pursue because I continue to be interested in questions of liberation, and possibilities for those of us who have survived in spite of the coloniality” (p. 32). She offers us tools to unsettle the violence of gender, and also makes visible the resistance of those who were and continue to challenge the imposition of colonial/modern system of gender on them. However, Leo (2020) thoughtfully cautions us against the erasure of Two-Spirit and trans of color lives in Lugones’ work. They write: “Lugones’s analysis of the colonial/modern gender system performs a type of silencing and erasure to trans of color narratives insofar as it fails to see within colonial difference” (p. 456). Further, they argue that cisprivilege reproduces trans erasure from both colonial and decolonial systems. They add: “Decolonial feminisms, without an awareness of Two-Spirit wisdom, will continue to enact modes of erasure, will reinforce cisgender privilege, maintain practices of unknowing, and uphold the coloniality of gender” (p. 470). Leo’s critical engagement shows how Two-Spirit and trans of color visions can make Lugones’ critiques of “coloniality of gender” more expansive. These liberatory visions go beyond the transphobic, colonial, and imperial calls by Burt for protecting the category of “woman” from trans peoples. Unsettling the “woman” figure, decolonial Two-Spirit and trans of color visions allow to dream a world where all those outside of the colonial/modern gender system can be “protected”; including ciswomen without the need to make the category of “woman” hierarchical, biological, and exclusive.

Trans and gender nonconforming identities are not new; rather, colonial processes have worked to annihilate these identities, expressions, and relations globally. This destruction worked in North America against colonized Indigenous peoples through genocidal violence that impacted/s Indigenous women, Two-Spirit and gender nonconforming peoples, as well as African diasporic/Black peoples, as they were ungendered to make them fungible and enslaveable. In other parts of the world, colonial transphobic laws like the Criminal Tribes Acts of 1871 in British-occupied India were imposed by European colonizers to criminalize Hijras and other gender nonconforming communities. I outline these examples not to conflate all forms of colonial/racial/gender violence into each other. Rather I offer them to demonstrate the “coloniality of gender”, and instead center transness as a decolonial analytic which has, as Green (2016) argues, “ontological, ideological, and epistemological ramifications” (p. 67). Two-Spirit visions, Driskill (2004) writes, is “part of the healing of the wounded bodies of ourselves, our lands, and our planet” (p. 610). Further, Chen (2019) argues, trans of color frameworks provide “a set of counterimaginaries and analytics that mobilize potential points of solidarity and kinship between those who experience embodiment as a form of racial gender displacement and subjugation within radically different yet interrelated transnational U.S. histories and systems of genocide, captivity, colonization, and imperialism” (p. 5).

In this comment, I attempted to demonstrate how colonialism shaped Burt’s transphobic analysis. I argue that Two-Spirit, Black trans, and trans of color futuristic visions are needed to unsettle the coloniality of white feminisms and their inherent transphobia.