Can the Scapegoat Speak?

On the Structural Silencing of Transgender Americans in a Time of Anti-Trans Panic

It’s been one hell of a week in these United States. Emphasis on the hell, especially if you’re transgender or have a trans person in your life that you care about. So, with apologies to the brilliant cultural theoriest Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (and with awareness of intersectionality and my relatively privileged position as a white trans woman), I’m going to set down some thoughts and whether and to what extent transgender Americans are able to speak under contemporary social conditions.

I’ve sat down to write something for The Bugbear Dispatch every day since Thursday and so far come up empty. The reason for the writer’s block isn’t that there’s nothing to write about—it’s that there’s too much to write about in a country that’s going off the deep end.

And as a trans woman who at this point in her transition often doesn’t pass as cis, the vicious and rapidly escalating scapegoating of trans people in GOP-controlled states and by bigots in “the paper of record” made it hard to sleep this week. My anxiety got so bad it was like I was carrying a palpable lump of it around in my chest for several days, which also happened when, as a teenager, I thought I had committed the “unpardonable sin,” the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, by masturbating after I’d promised God I would quit.

Anyway, today I finally seem to be succeeding at expressing some more or less coherent thoughts about being transgender in contemporary America. This isn’t what I want to write about (always or even often). I don’t want to be defined entirely by my queerness. But the country seems to insist on defining me that way, and sometimes I just have to respond, even if my response amounts to “a voice crying in the wilderness.”

Is it really Saturday already? Holy white Jesus, Batman!

The Scapegoat’s Paradox

I feel like a ghost who’s trying to move your hand over some Ouija board in the hopes I can spell out my name. - Aimee Mann, “Invisible Ink”

One aspect of the scapegoat’s paradox, I suppose, is that when you belong to a scapegoated group, you feel both invisible and all too visible at the same time. I’m a transgender writer, but I prefer not to make being trans and trans issues the central foci of my work. Unfortunately, lately I have been forced to write a lot about trans issues because many American states are much too far along a trajectory toward the potential genocide of their trans residents for comfort.