Last week I talked to my friend Jessica, the brilliant astrologer-psychic, and one of the things she told me was that my job is preventing me from expressing my gender

Last week I talked to my friend Jessica, a brilliant astrologer-psychic, and one of the things she told me was that my job is preventing me from expressing my gender.&n= bsp; I think that would surprise most people. After all, I work at a non-profit = that is one of the leading voices for gender deregulation in the country, and my= job is to provide legal help to trans and gender non-conforming people and to f= ight for changes in policies and laws that fuck us over. The thing is, doing this work puts= me at the crux of debates within trans communities, and within government bureaucracies about how and where the state and institutions can recognize gender and intervene to promote or discourage various gender expressions. These debates, sadly, frequently e= cho one another and involve horrendous distortions of trans realities and dange= rous enforcement of regulatory norms.

Honestly, the community side of it worries me less. Yes, all communities that come tog= ether around shared identity traits regulate each other through ideas of realness. Yes, every time som= eone walks into the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and says, “You’re Dean Spade?” with a disappointed and aghast tone and then tells me they thought I’d be older, taller, more confident looking, look like a law= yer, and most importantly, look like a man, it’s a little bit of a bummer. On some days its funn= y, and the part about not looking like a lawyer I take as a compliment, but I can’t say that their disappointment in my inadequate masculinity doesn’t sting just a touch. My emergence into public trans poli= tics was hastened by my arrest for trying to use a men’s bathroom in Grand Central Station in 2002. Immediately following that, I was pretty heavily slammed on several trans list serves by people writing about how I must not pass if I’d = been arrested and I probably didn’t even take T and I was an asshole and n= ot a real trans guy for getting myself and my friends arrested. It felt horrible at the time. I remember being afraid the first t= ime I went to a big trans conference after that, of having people see me and know= my name and judge me for how I looked. As much as I didn’t believe in a vision of trans politics that required me to be traditionally masculine and passing in order not to be blameworthy for my false arrest, I still felt insecure and I remember tryin= g to ‘butch it up’ in community spaces where I might come under fire. People were pissed that= I was representing myself in public as trans and was not passing as a non-trans m= an. Folks were concerned that the legi= timacy of trans identity in the eyes of a transphobic culture is frequently tied to how normal and traditionally masculine or feminine trans people appear. I was ruining it for everyone.

&nbs= p; But as I said, I’m far less concerned, overall, about the authenticity hierarchies operating through social and political networks in the trans communities I participate in than the ones operating in government policies= and practices. The level of coerc= ion operating in prisons and shelters, the level of violence and the vulnerabil= ity of the trans people in those contexts, is far more concerning to me. State gender coercion disproportio= nately affects poor people, people of color, people who don’t pass, people without educational privilege, people without health care, and immigrants.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> I have spent the last four years g= etting intimately acquainted with the variety of ways that coercive gender norms a= re worked into the policies and practices that the government applies to low-income people, and building analysis and strategies about how to resist= and undo these coercive mechanisms. There are a few different threads that seem= to run through all of the battles we’ve been fighting, whether those bat= tles are about drivers licenses or name changes or Medicaid or juvenile justice facilities. All of these thre= ads are about the authenticity of trans identities, and all based on the idea t= hat the state should determine people’s gender identities using binary ge= nder as their standard.

&nbs= p; A primary premise running through policies that endanger trans people is the belief that no matter what a trans person says or does or how we understand ourselves or act, we are male if we were identified as male at birth, femal= e if we were identified as female at birth.&nbs= p; Policies, laws and practices that rely on birth sex to measure gender endanger trans people in sex-segregated facilities. You can see it in place in prisons, juvenile justice facilities, foster care group homes, and homeless shelters when they place trans women in men’s facilities and trans men in women’s facilities and gender non-conforming people in whatever facil= ity matches their birth gender. Y= ou can also see it when facilities that are gender-based like women’s drug t= reatment facilities or domestic violence shelters refuse to admit trans women. Their logic is often that other wo= men will be triggered or made uncomfortable by trans women. This is what is called the “bigot’s veto” in the law—a policy that allows the = misunderstandings or biases of a general population in an institution to excuse the exclusion= of a person with a characteristic that marks them as different. By shaping policy around the presu= med biases or beliefs of the women in these facilities, administrators and othe= r bureaucrats are verifying those biases or beliefs and saying that yes, trans women are = not really women and do not deserve access to women’s services.

&nbs= p; Another theme running throughout the policies we are working to change is the idea = that gender confirming health care for trans people is not legitimate health care. I specifically use the = term “gender confirming health care for trans people” here because m= ost of the policies that exclude this care provide the exact same procedures for non-trans people to confirm their birth gender identities. (Mattild= a, is that last sentence confusing? Eliminate this sentence if you think its not helpful. Let me know if= I need to better address the concern you put in your notes here.) Some= times it is cast as “experimental” or “cosmetic.” Sometimes it is available partiall= y with extra regulation and arbitrary rules governing its availability, in a way t= hat suggests that this kind of care should be discouraged. Other times it is framed as someth= ing that may be legitimate for some people, but that people under a certain age= are incapable of making decisions regarding this care. Examples abound. Many states have explicit exclusions of gender confirming health care for trans people under their Medicaid plans. So, even though they provide the same procedures and medications for other condition= s, if your reason for needing a particular drug or surgery involves trans identity, the care is excluded. Federal law prohibits “diagnosis discrimination” by state Medicaid programs: they aren’t supposed to be able to choose to give = care to people with certain conditions and refuse care to people with other conditions just because some medical diagnoses are associated with politica= lly unpopular groups—but nonetheless most states do just that in this cas= e. Prisons are the same way. Many state correctional systems pr= ovide no trans care at all, but several have a stranger rule. Several states have written polici= es that will allow a person to access hormones in prison only if they can show that they were receiving hormones with a prescription from a doctor before = they were locked up. This is certa= inly the only condition I know of that you can get health care for only if you c= an prove you already had health care for it.&= nbsp; Granted, prison health care is atrocious for every prisoner, but the oddness of this policy illustrates the belief that this care is somehow not real health care meeting a real need. This thinking is also reflected in the majority of juvenile justice = and foster care systems that still deny trans youth in their custody access to hormones or any other gender confirming care, forcing folks to get their ca= re in informal and criminalized economies.&nb= sp; You can also see this thinking reflected in the policies of our “community” clinics which refuse to give trans health care to people under 18 because they don’t think that young people have the capacity to know their own gender. This sets up a situation where young trans and gender non-conforming folks who want hormones end up locked up from trying to get these medicatio= ns on the street and trying to raise money to buy them on the street, or get H= IV from using unsafe injection methods when buying on the street. These clinics see themselves as “saving” young people from making a mistake about their genders, but only further endanger them through their neglect and transphobia.

&nbs= p; A final thread I’ll mention that runs through many of these policies is= the notion that gender realness should be verified by medical doctors. The most blatant examples of this = are the myriad institutions that will only recognize a trans person’s gen= der identity if we can prove we’ve undergone surgery, usually genital surgery. The Social Security Administration, the people who issue Passports, the Departments of Health w= ho issue Birth Certificates, and many DMV’s will only allow a person to change their gender on record if they can show they’ve had genital surgery. Of course, most trans people will never undergo those procedures, either because they do not want= to or cannot afford it, but will have to live day in and day out with an ID th= at does not match their gender identity or expression. The irony of these policies is tha= t they were usually made by people who knew nothing about trans health care, and y= ou can see that in their inconsistencies.&nbs= p; For example, right now, if you were born in New York City, you can only change your= birth certificate if you can prove you’ve had vaginoplasty or phalloplasty. However, if your neighbor who was born just over the city line in New York State’s area of authority wants to change hir birth certificate, ze will have to provide ze’s had penectomy or hysterectomy and mastectomy. The bureaucrats who came up with t= heir policy in the city wanted to see people with penises and vaginas to prove they’d become REAL MEN or REAL WOMEN. The bureaucrats up in Albany wanted to see people who had had= their most-gendered body parts (in the eyes of those bureaucrats) removed. From a layperson’s perspecti= ve, meaning genital-obsessed binary-gender-loving transphobia, both arguments m= ake a lot of sense.

&nbs= p; From what I have seen working at SRLP over the past four years, where we’ve provided legal help to over 800 trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming people, the tangled bureaucratic web that the state and the social services= it pays for spin around gender is killing trans people, especially poor trans people. The contradictions don’t seem to matter to the state.&n= bsp; Sure, they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of trans health care f= or Medicaid purposes, but then require it for ID purposes. Sure, they punish you for not havi= ng medical authorization to be yourself, but then refuse to see that medical authorization as legitimate when you need help paying for the care. Yes, being trans is real enough to= get you falsely arrested and beaten, raped, or killed in a prison, but not real enough to get you access to a domestic violence shelter, a drug treatment program that provides an alternative to incarceration, or a homeless shelter that recognizes your gender.

&nbs= p; We need to do more than hope that an anti-discrimination law passes in our state. WE need to look at whe= re binary gender is being required and enforced in the administrative institut= ions in our states and cities, and take local action to weed them out. How are trans people faring, not j= ust in your school or office, but in the shelter in your town? In the jail down the street? In the prison out in = the country? If we examine how the most highly regulated and surveilled people are doing—immigrants, folks on welfare, people who = are locked up, youth, people living in communities overexposed to the police—we’ll see where gender regulation and coercion is operat= ing most sharply and we can form shared analysis and coalitional activism to undermine those operations. <= /p>