Transnational Transphobias: Anti-trans Advocacy Coalitions

• In Event: 50 Years of LGBTQ Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: The Global Backlash to LGBT Rights

Abstract

Across the globe, actors and interest groups from conservative and traditionalist Right-leaning movements and Left-leaning feminist and gender-critical movements are organizing transnationally to erode trans rights. Where right wing anti-gender movements perceive trans rights as an unwelcome threat to traditional gender roles and the patriarchal norms they seek to protect, the increasingly active pocket of anti-trans feminists see trans rights as extensions of the patriarchal norms they seek to bring down. Despite their fundamentally opposing views on what a woman’s sex should mean for her place in the social order, both anti-trans and traditionalists and feminists are allied in their rejection of gender-based rights in favor of sex-based rights. This project takes up the question of how these ideologically diverse groups appropriate sex-based rights discourses and shared anti-trans frameworks to advance contradictory political projects. Through discursive analysis of mission statements and advocacy materials from anti-trans feminist and traditionalist organizations, this project reorients the direction of norm diffusion and relocates normative contestation from the end of the norm life-cycle and argues that the presence of competing anti-trans frameworks within these transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and the ensuing normative contestation generates new anti-rights languages and norms. Though anti-trans norms—and specifically the regimes of cisnormativity— revolve around the primacy of sex-based recognition and thus may often be tied to specific policies and legally formalized, anti-trans norms are not subsumed by policy. I find that the true ideological and socially transformative content of norms lies in the normative justification of why these policies matter and to what end and is therefore linked to informal and non-state practices.

Author

• Mary McLoughlin