Moving from individual discrimination to norms in population management highlights different legal areas as sources of harm for vulnerable groups.
The goal of achieving equality through anti-discrimination and hate crime laws diminishes as focus shifts to legal systems distributing security and vulnerability.
These systems categorize the population, cultivating some lives while abandoning, imprisoning, or extinguishing others.
Administrative law, involving agencies responsible for government activities, becomes crucial for analyzing the distribution of life chances.
Critical trans politics necessitates analyzing how gender norms impact trans people's lives and how administrative systems produce and implement various forms of discrimination under the guise of neutrality.
This analysis is essential for developing effective resistance strategies and understanding the role of law reform.
Trans people face challenges with gender categorization in daily administrative processes, such as in homeless shelters, prisons, immigration documentation, and public bathrooms.
Control Through Categorization
Population-level interventions rely on categorization to sort people, influencing vulnerability and security.
Administrative processes often involve contests about categorizations, such as in public benefits hearings and immigration proceedings.
Administrative categorization can have lethal consequences by affecting the distribution of life chances.
Historical uses of race and gender categorization in US law have led to a false belief that these issues are resolved.
Explicit targeting has been replaced by reorganized functions of maldistribution, preserving disparities.
Examples include high policing levels in minority neighborhoods, tiered public benefit programs, and targeted immigration enforcement.
Population-Level Programs
These programs are designed to address perceived risks and distribute resources, aiming to increase health, security, and well-being.
They reflect understandings of who is "inside" and "outside" the group deserving protection, influenced by norms related to race, gender, sexuality, national origin, ability, and indigeneity.
Population-level programs include population surveillance as a core function.
Mitchell Dean and Foucault describe these programs as "apparatuses of security," encompassing institutions and practices that defend and maintain a national population while optimizing its wealth, health, and prosperity.
Data Collection and Modern Nation-State
Standardized data collection is essential for governments and agencies to understand the population's health, vulnerabilities, needs, and risks.
James C. Scott's work demonstrates that gathering information and creating population-level programs define the modern nation-state.
Decisions about relevant data and classification rarely appear controversial but are informed by societal norms.
Common classifications may become embedded in state-created institutions, shaping daily experience.
Categories used by the state shape the world, becoming taken for granted and appearing ahistorical.
Data collection projects have faced controversy, impacting particular populations and expanding government reach.
These mechanisms establish norms essential for population management and defining who belongs to the nation.
Gender Data Collection and Trans Politics
Gender data collection is prevalent in government and commercial systems, impacting trans people significantly.
Gender classification governs access to spaces like bathrooms, shelters, and prisons.
Misclassification has severe consequences, especially in systems targeting marginalized groups.
Identity surveillance has increased vulnerability, particularly post-War on Terror.
Administrative Gender Classification
Administrative gender classification is a major source of violence and diminished life chances for trans people.
Problems concentrate in identity documentation, sex-segregated facilities, and health care access.
Mitchell Dean's description of Foucault's analysis highlights the complexity and incoherence of sex classification systems.
Regimes of Practices
Examining regimes of practices helps understand gender classification's significance across regulatory locations.
In the US, administrative systems manage racial and gender categories, impacting life chances.
Racializing and gendering are nation-making activities, exposing some to premature death.
Consequences occur from gender classification problems, creating complex, long-term difficulties.
Identity Documents
Problems arise due to incorrect, outdated, or conflicting information across agencies.
Many trans people cannot change gender markers on essential documents due to policies requiring medical proof.
Policies vary widely, causing inconsistent records.
Self-identification is sometimes accepted, but rarely, and the policies differ drastically.
Inconsistent documentation creates heightened vulnerability in interactions with police and public officials.
Surgical requirements in gender reclassification policies are problematic due to cost and personal choice.
A 2009 study indicated that 80% of transgender women and 98% of transgender men have not undergone genital surgery.
Identity documentation discrepancies serve as barriers to employment.
Sex-Segregated Facilities
Misclassification creates obstacles in accessing public bathrooms, shelters, and hospitals.
It also increases vulnerability to violence, particularly in mandatory institutions.
Lack of access to addiction and homeless programs increases the likelihood of ending up in criminal punishment systems.
Trans women are rejected from women-only programs and placed in men's facilities, which leads to guaranteed sexual harassment and possibly assault.
Trans youth and adults seek to get medical treatment through the in-formal market, but run the risk of imprisonment due to criminalized work to pay for the care.
Health Care Access
Gender classification impacts access to health care, and most Medicaid policies exclude gender-confirming care.
Medicaid provides similar procedures and medications to nontrans people for various conditions.
Denying care to trans people constitutes "diagnosis discrimination," though legal challenges have been unsuccessful.
Denying trans health care results in significant mental and physical health consequences, such as depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
Intensified Surveillance
There are extremely high rates of HIV infections among transgender people.
Increased identity verification procedures since 9/11 have exacerbated the danger.
Data collected by different government agencies is shared and compared, targeting undocumented immigrants.
Inconsistencies in gender reclassification policies increase vulnerability for immigrants.
Enhanced Focus on Identity Surveillance
Employees face being outed, losing licenses, and encountering difficulties with administrative systems.
The augmentation of US security culture has raised the level of stability demanded of our identities.
New proposals are aimed at identifying undocumented immigrants and bolstering military recruitment.
The aim of creating increased security for the nation hangs on the assumption of a national subject that deserves and requires that protection.
Trans Politics and Law Reform
Administrative, population-level intervention is a high-stakes area for trans well-being.
Attention to the distribution of life chances exposes locations that generate vulnerability.
Surveillance Critique
A trans politics critical of surveillance moves away from uncritically "being counted" by violent systems.
It allows strategizing interventions with an understanding of their operations.
It sees recognition and inclusion as potentially forgoing such politics.
A critical understanding of surveillance avoids simplistic demands to have policies "fixed."
It understands expansion of identity verification as maldistribution of security.
Role of Law and Policy Reform
Critically examining law reform work that threatens to engender tools of legitimacy for harmful and dangerous arrangements.
Trans people's lives are mediated by legal barriers related to gender classification.
Legal work can be part of tools, but requires careful analysis of potential impact.
Criminal Punishment Systems
Hate crime laws do not prevent violence against trans people, but do add punishing power to a system that is a primary perpetrator of violence against trans people.
Attention must stay focused on improving life chances and not building up the criminal punishment system.
Efforts should focus on decarceration tactics.
The matrix of administrative programs that rely on gender classification is another location where we should apply this analysis in order to determine a path for legal reform.
Government Surveillance
We can join forces with other populations facing heightened vulnerability to surveillance, and devise shared opposition to the new practices and policies.
Examples of administrative system issues include lack of driver's license access to undocumented immigrants.
Focusing on policies of sex-segregated facilities addresses violence trans people face within them.
Neoliberal Trends
Attention to how the work is being done, how it interacts with the broader context of neoliberal trends and it's impact on trans survival is required.
Individual rights-focused law reform operates as a cover for population-based practices of abandonment and imprisonment.
Reform projects always carry the danger of compromise and co-optation.
There must be reflection about the common traps–building and legitimizing systems of control, dividing constituencies along the lines of access to legal rights, and advancing only symbolic change.
We must not only refuse reforms that require dividing and leaving behind more vulnerable trans populations, but also try to assume that the most easily digestible invitations to be included are the very ones that bring us into greater collusion with systemic control and violence.
We need to conceptualize the ways that population-level interventions interact with regimes of gender classification and enforcement and utilize gender as a technology of control.