Lost in Translation: Radical Politics of a Trans Trade Unionist
September 2, 2024
Image by Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa.
Imane Khelif: Working Class Muslim Hero
For the millionth time: Imane Khelif is not a trans woman. She is AFAB, has female body parts from birth, all the essentialist markers that transphobes use to justify their bigotry.
This truly is an instance of horse-shoe theory at its best. Transphobes start off by laying down these rather invasive and personal markers that women supposedly should be compelled to meet, they denigrate and ostracize those who do not, and then you come full circle with cis women who fail to accomplish their standard of feminine acceptability. (The Onion once had a great headline about the absurdity of this idea, ‘Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming.’)
On top of that, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite monograph by Joseph Stalin, the national question. Khelif is from a North African and conservative Muslim country. Her father is a welder in a poor province of Algeria, not a rich, Western-educated secular oligarch whose family lives in some privileged existence on a secluded hill, divorced from the masses of the working poor akin to Kennedys on Cape Cod.
Even if it were the case that Khelif wanted to initiate gender confirming medical care and identify as trans/nonbinary, it would be absolutely impossible because, oops, Algeria outlaws LGBT civil protections and rights, including gender transition, same-sex marriage, and even non-heterosexual coitus. Which is another way of saying that she comes from a country where her working class status makes it fundamentally impossible to safely identify as trans!
There’s also a distinct level of misogynoir, anti-Black/anti-Brown, and anti-Muslim ideology embedded in the subtext of this argument, which is not surprising considering how Brexit demonstrated those sentiments run rampant in the UK when it comes to postcolonial migration. “That devious Arab Muslim, he corrupted the sport and stole the gold from that beautiful European woman Angela Carini! The swarthy Saracens strike again!”
It’s a conspiracy theory that would make the Tory demagogue Enoch Powell proud and provides sustenance to the nativism and racialism unleashed by Brexit.
“Is Black Existence Valid? Over to Our White Correspondent Strom Thurmond!”
Obviously that analogy and rhetorical postulate is grotesque and offensive.
But it also demonstrates the way that the media gate-keeps the reality of trans experience and its validity. There are no non-cis correspondents in the major news media outlets that cover the LGBTQ+ beat in a fashion akin to the late Randy Shilts. The author of And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic and The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk was one of the first openly-gay journalists to write for a mainstream outlet, the San Francisco Chronicle. Today he is acclaimed by scholars and historians for that accomplishment.
But even then, he was far from perfect.
Mayor is fundamentally a book about white middle class men that barely acknowledges the plurality of ethnicities and nationalities contained in San Francisco. There’s no discussion of Chinatown, the Latin American community, the militant dock worker unions, or anything outside a narrow strip, Castro Street, that ended up being the locus for a wider LGBT+ participation in San Francisco’s gentrification. (It also seems like lesbians and non-cis people are nothing more than side-show attractions, “biker dykes” and “bearded ladies.”)
Band Played On ended up being even more disturbing by promoting the grotesque myth of Gaetan “Patient Zero” Dougas, a scientifically-impossible fever dream for neoconservatives during the Reagan administration. In Shilts version of events, the 23-year-old French Canadian flight attendant came to the US on the Bicentennial Fourth of July weekend in 1976 and transmitted the virus to 40 of the original patients that contracted HIV/AIDS. (After four decades of research, we now know the virus instead emerged out of Africa and came to the US via migration from the Caribbean, perhaps Haiti, a decade prior.) Shilts was so sloppy here he even screwed up what Dougas was actually labelled as by the Centers for Disease Control. In CDC coding terms, Dougas wasn’t “Patient Zero,” he was “Patient O,” as in “Patient Out of California.” This ineptitude may have been bad journalism but the Reagan-era readership and critical establishment wasn’t really concerned because it fed into one of Hollywood’s oldest stereotypes and leitmotifs of LGBTQ+ representation, “The Wages of Sin is Death to the Queers.”
In other words, Shilts was not only establishing a timeline for the epidemic, he was also constructing a Respectability Politics that ran contrary to the more libertine inclinations of the community he desired to profile. His button-up-and-tie persona, the classic American shoe-leather reporter, included an injection of his own personal biases and prejudices against those he feared to be equated with. Shilts was a “good” queer because he was “responsible.” This responsibility included his designation of gay bathhouses as dens of vice and death, geographic locations wherein the virus spread like wildfire among debauched men who were not only killing themselves but also risking the safety of the general public, as occurred when the blood bank supply became tainted with the virus, which in turn led to the deaths of heterosexuals like Ryan White and Isaac Asimov. This sensationalizing of queer eros and sex as potentially-fatal by default is not journalism, it is a Culture War fantasia.
The late historian Douglas Crimp wrote “The fact that Shilts places blame for the spread of AIDS equally on the Reagan Administration, various government agencies, the scientific and medical establishments, and the gay community, is reason enough for many of us to condemn the book…predicated on a series of oppositions; it is, first and foremost, a story of heroes and villains, of common sense against prejudice, of rationality against irrationality.” Crimp, using a Marxist vocabulary in an LGBTQ+ liberation politics at a time when groups like the Communist Party were viciously homophobic, dissects the literary and dramaturgical archetypes invoked by both Shilts and playwright Larry Kramer. Crimp was emphatic this Respectability Politics, which hysterically screamed the major vaccination for the virus was chastity and monogamy, not only failed to accomplish anything for those who had contracted the virus, it complimented the lunatic ramblings of Sen. Jesse Helms, who took the floor of the chamber frequently to block federal funding for life-saving safe sex instructional materials and educational programs run by LGBTQ+ organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Crimp pointed to a passage authored by Shilts regarding “AIDSpeak” (the literary allusions to Orwell are blatant and seem to underwrite a certain authorial modus operandi so as to lend suspense to the otherwise-mundane realities of epidemiology conducted by under-funded federal agencies). One of these suspenseful notes is that every “journalist knows the reason for the lack of investigative zeal on the part of his fellows: the people who were dying were gay men, and mainstream American journalists don’t care what happens to gay men. Those journalists would rather print hysteria-producing, blame-the-victim stories than uncover the ‘truth.’ So Shilts would print that truth in And the Band Played On…”
All this is to say that the non-cis journalistic beat reporter will confront a similar Respectability Politics. The contours of journalistic discourse in the mainstream press, film, television, and web will look for scapegoats, pariahs, tokens, and kapos. Kramer and Shilts, according to Crimp, became kapos for the neoconservative response to the epidemic.
The non-cis community cannot afford a similar mistake.
