Artifact 3 - Fear of Trans Bodies - Lily Alexandre

In Lily Alexandre’s “Fear of Trans Bodies,” she primarily explores the ways in which cisgender society treats and understands the bodies of trans people. This includes all categories of transition that have an effect on the body, such as expression through things like clothing/makeup/mannerisms, as well as medical interventions like surgeries and hormone replacement therapy. Namely, she claims that cisgender society treats these bodies with fear, and aims to emphasize the “deformities” that arise, such as loss of fertility and poorly-researched claims about overall health. She describes how cisgender society is predisposed to viewing someone as disgusting if they know that person is trans, even if they look entirely normal without that colored perception. She attributes this to a breakdown of the ability for cisgender people to classify trans people in their mental models of the world, leading to hostility for the unknown.

This work clearly relates to queer performative theory—the idea that queer identities challenge and destabilize the assumptions of gender as it should be performed (Gendered Lives, pg. 48). Much of gender performance in cisgender society is used as the fundamental justifications for many institutions built on top of that, so when trans bodies call that into question, the shaking of those institutions is terrifying to those who seek to maintain those traditionally valued institutions. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t just apply to the stereotypical fundamentalist evangelical institution, but to our everyday lives: what restroom we use, what sports we play, and what programs we benefit from. Trans bodies bring all of these categories into question, and that proposition may be terrifying to many cis people.