Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice - Review in Colour | Lorelai Patnaik
Review in Colour is a literary review project that looks at queer literature from an intersectional perspective. The initiative was started by Lorelai Patnaik as part of her work as People of Colour officer at Glasgow University’s GULGBTQ+ society. For this month, she has reviewed Shon Faye's The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice.
At first glance, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye may seem like a mere introduction to transphobia in British society and culture. Yet this book goes above and beyond a simple introduction, as Faye literally and metaphorically argues for justice for the trans community, which it has been denied for ages. In the face of trans people being systematically deprived of their rights, liberties and inherent humanity, being reduced to a topic of debate while also being turned into a focal point of societal hatred, the “transgender issue” becomes an issue of justice and liberation.
Shon Faye substantiates her argument for justice by giving deep insight into the nature of the problem, explaining clearly where the roots of the problem lie. Her argument starts by describing how transphobia is ingrained in every part of life from the British media to schools, to access to healthcare and even the home itself. She has also highlighted how societal transphobia deprives a trans person of the safety and comfort of an accepting home and goes even as far as to deprive them of a right of shelter that corresponds to their gender identity. The work also explains the role played by the British government and institutions in perpetuating and sustaining transphobia, from inequality in laws to the role of police and prison industrial complex that deprives a community of its rights and penalises them for existing.
What’s more important is how she sheds light on the inherently transmisogynistic nature of society. She has undertaken great efforts to describe what transmisogyny is, and how it manifests in forms of violence, the degree of which is worsened by factors such as race and occupation, e.g. violence faced by trans sex workers. It is also further emphasized that the fetishization of trans women is a vicious form of transmisogyny that dehumanises their existence. One of the noteworthy arguments Shon Faye has put forth is about how transmisogyny has emerged in Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism, a dominant form of the feminist movement in the UK. The key premise of the same has been accurately described in the book as the systemic exclusion of trans women from all aspects of life and focusing on creating spaces for cisgender women only. The book further explores how this brand of feminism emerged and how it became a dominant influence from the media to the upper echelons of the government.
The author has also looked into the history of the trans community and LGBT Activism, and the differences that emerged between the trans community and the cisgender lesbians, gays and bisexuals and how conservative groups have used these differences to play the communities against each other, eventually pitting the LGB against the T as seen in the case of LGB Alliance. She ends the arguments with a powerful concluding statement that there can be no liberation under capitalism, and in reference to the works of Angela Davis, it is important to destroy the system that has denied this justice. To actively resist and work towards ending systems of oppression, that will result in collective liberation.
From an intersectional perspective, as this is her first work, she must be credited for making it a guide that has adequately examined issues of race, gender and sexuality when it comes to introducing the nature of transphobia in Britain. She has centred trans folks of colour where required, from Robyn’s case in Trans Life Now to Miriam Rivera’s story in the final chapter. She successfully pointed out the extent of violence faced by trans women of colour who happen to be sex workers, and how police and the prison system disproportionately target trans folks of colour, especially trans women of colour. She sheds light on the fact that it’s trans women of colour who are at risk of violence, and more particularly it’s black trans women who are at greatest risk of violence. In her chapter The Ugly Sister: Trans Women in Feminism, she has pointed out how the problem lies in the particularly dominant group of white cisgender women who have entrenched themselves in apposition of power, and fear losing the same, hence espousing the politics of exclusionary feminism.
Criticism however is that while it is her debut, it cannot be ignored that the first proper mention of race as an important point of consideration only became relevant after reading through forty pages. Race should have been mentioned as a crucial factor at the beginning itself. In Faye’s approach to the history of the trans community and sex work, she never looked into the correlation between British colonial laws that criminalized the trans community in India, and how the attitudes that framed such laws persisted through time and are present in today’s societal transphobia. It is vital to understand the link between colonialism and white supremacy. It is important because it helps the reader realise how Britain imposed its white supremacist notions of the gender binary and biological essentialism in countries it colonized, thus actively destroying the gender-variant communities that were once thriving in these places. To link white supremacy and colonialism with the imposition of rigid gender norms based on obsolete grounds is a crucial point of introspection to understand how white supremacy shaped ideas of gender that we see in modern-day transphobia in Britain. These are relevant points that the author can reflect upon if she decides to engage in writing more about this in her future works.
To conclude, The Transgender Issue is definitely an essential read to critically understand how transphobia has manifested in British society and its institutions, and most importantly why the issue of justice needs to be addressed, especially in the light of justice being denied to the trans community by a transphobic society for ages.
About Lorelai
She/they
Lorelai Patnaik is a Masters in Law (LLM) student at the University of Glasgow and is currently the People of Colour officer at Glasgow University’s Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer/Questioning Plus Students’ Association (GULGBTQ+ society) of which she is the a first trans woman of colour to hold that position. Her interests involve researching, reading and writing about how law, human rights and justice intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. In Lorelai’s spare time they enjoy reading fiction, cooking, baking, gardening and love hiking and cycling through the countryside.
