Crisis claims of trans genocide: towards a sociocultural account of transphobic violence


Althea McIntosh, Western University

Public discourse on claims of trans genocide has been ongoing since at least 2015. Interlinked forms of patterned violence (symbolic, structural, and direct) materially hinge on definitional conflicts, both sociocultural and political. Conversely, trans genocide claims have their counterpart in reactionary claims of a threatening trans ideology or trans agenda (“transgenderism”), meriting investigation of how the respective actors iteratively reproduce these latent, but increasingly potent, crisis claims (Sendroiu, 2022). The key questions become: 1) how do such crisis claims reflect shifting sociocultural contexts, and what futures do they posit? And 2) how do actors choose to either change or persist in their thought and actions in either accepting or rejecting a crisis claim? Drawing on Ann Swidler’s (1986) concept of culture as a “repertoire”, and Ioana Sendroiu’s (2022a, 2022b) concept of crisis as a generative “crisis claim” (a social form of “guesswork” within “shifting sociocultural scaffoldings”), this researchs aim is theoretically assessing the changing contexts of these crisis claims. I pose these shifting contexts as macro-level political and cultural phenomena of discourse, existing in relation to the meso-level (interactional) production, articulation, and circulation of crisis claims’ discourses. By explicating how individuals’ crisis claims of trans genocide are experienced, conceived, and expressed, this research theoretically extends and deepens Graff and Koroloczuk’s (2022) inductively conceptual account of the opportunistic synergy between (often high religiosity) ultraconservative anti-gender activists and (relatively irreligious and/or secular) right-wing populists. Thus, crisis guesses are conceptually bound in a fourfold nexus, wherein crises either exist or do not, and crisis claims are either accepted or denied as “correct”. I similarly consider empirical research on anti-gender crisis claims, which is critical to understanding crisis claims of trans genocide , because drawing on an emic approach to the “ugly movement” (Avanza, 2018) of anti-gender crisis claims gives empirical purchase on theoretical analyses of trans genocide crisis claims. I argue that crisis claims of trans genocide and a trans agenda are both predicated on and subsequently condition macro-level changes in the cultural status of transgender people, alongside changes in their real and/or claimed relations to society. To theoretically grasp the political and sociocultural roots and ramifications of this “transgender debate”, I analytically explicate how the mutual exclusivity of the justificatory frameworks of these crisis claims shape sensemaking processes. The starkness of competing claims of gender crisis suggests their justificatory frames will be monosemous (i.e., formed by unambiguously exclusive and discrete categories). Relatedly, we must ontologically distinguish crisis claims of trans genocide from associated phenomena of varyingly systematic violence which trans people face, because a crisis has its own proper being in society. Correspondingly anti-genderist ideologies are only one frontier among other multifacetedly specific and contingent manifestations of the reactionary sociocultural and political projects of cisheterosexist patriarchy, undertaken for a complex range of motives among different interconnected actors. Thus, if activist-advocates have overstated crisis claims of trans genocide, opposition to the anti-genderist movement qua a key branch of this opportunistic synergy will still have been worthwhile for all those with an interest in emancipatory democracies and anti-hierarchical gender orders. In relation to praxis, what therefore may be most important about crisis-claims of trans genocide is the generative basis they offer in counterhegemonic mobilization against novel formations of cisheteropatriarchal violence. Crucially, by relating crisis claims of trans genocide to the aforementioned opportunistic synergy, my theoretical exposition both fosters the explication of individuals’ meaningful experiences, conceptualizations, distinctions, and responses to specific forms of transphobic violence via crisis claims of trans genocide , while opening onto a more international and transnational sociological perspective on the intertwined flourishing of anti-genderism and right-wing populism, now especially in the US-dominated Anglosphere. In the context of public polarization around trans people (Jones and Brewer, 2018), other things being equal, the exclusivity of the respective crisis claims drives a mutual repulsion and intensification which entrenches polarization. People who express assent or dissent to crisis claims of trans genocide or trans ideology do so in drawing on macroscale discourses that assign blame for a range of violences (symbolic, structural, individual), and in so doing contribute both to the dynamic reconstitution of discursive fields and thus to emergent patterns of different kinds of resultant violence between these groups.

This paper will be presented at the following session: