Porcelains, Château du Bréau, by Walter Gay
On Sunday, a leaked report in the Times revealed that the government had finally formulated a response to the Gender Recognition Act consultation. However, deliberately ignoring the majority of responses, not only was it shelving considerations of introducing gender self-identification in lieu of the current process of application for a gender recognition certificate (described by Amnesty International as “dehumanising, long and costly”), but it also seemed to be considering reinterpretation of the Equalities Act in such a way as to ban trans people from using single-sex provisions according to their identified gender unless they have undergone genital surgery. Trans people and allies responded quickly by lobbying MPs to challenge the reforms, but as of writing the situation is still uncertain. What is concerning about these measures is that, if they go ahead they will certainly result in further exclusion of trans people from public life. Despite this, they are supported by a vocal minority of voices,[1] some of whom occupy influential positions within society,[2] not in the least including many Catholics.
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis offers us a model of inclusion that makes use of a spatial metaphor: a ‘polyhedron’ in which which everyone is incorporated in their “distinctiveness”, rather than a “sphere” in which each part is homogenised in equidistance from the centre.[3] The risk of spatial narratives for inclusion is that we intuitively think of space itself as a kind of neutral field onto which various objects are plotted. Seen in this way, inclusion is a matter of taking this neutral space and translating more elements into it, like putting plates into a plate rack; a process which leaves both the nature of the space itself (which is taken to be no nature at all), and the elements which sit inertly within it, fundamentally unchanged. The problem arises when we come across someone who doesn’t ‘fit’ within this space – like a bowl in the plate rack. If neither the space nor the people already within it change to accommodate it, the only option is to transform the new element so that it ‘fits’ (for example, by smashing the bowl to make it flatter). As a result, it is disciplinarian and conforming - much like a society that coerces trans people into undergoing surgery to access the spaces vital to their participation in public life.
However, one of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to drastically reshape the spaces in which we live, which in turn brings the nature of those spaces themselves to our attention: once busy streets are now empty, transformed into liminal spaces dominated by an eery quiet. The stultifying supermarkets through which we once drifted in semiconscious ennui have been transformed into anxiety-provoking mazes of one-way systems and dividers. Here we see the effect of a new kind of inclusion which, far from leaving a supposedly neutral space intact, fundamentally changes it: the virus, with its vectors and infection ranges, has forced us to reconstruct our environments, in the process revealing the qualities of those spaces themselves which have now been lost.
Moreover, within these new spatialities, we enter into new relations; as a result we ourselves are also transformed. Space is now a context for infection, and we as vectors within it have become marked with that threat. Even the material reality of our bodies themselves, which Catholicism often treats as both gift and a given, has been reinscribed within this viral imaginary: our breath is no longer just the animating spirit breathed from God’s nostrils,[4] but an exhaust-cloud of sickening vapour. We can no longer reach out to “touch the suffering flesh of others”[5] as Christ touched the leper[6] without leaving a handprint of disease that will grow invisibly upon the unblemished skin.
Finally, just as the space shapes us, we with our new meanings come to shape it in turn. Others cross the road when we approach them on the pavement, and we do not even question it. We keep within the lines on the supermarket floor because they are there to protect others from us. Space ceases to be a bounty to be shared with others: it is our own negation, as we shrink away from each potential recipient of a disease we may not even know we have.
In his Urbi et Orbi blessing, Francis compares the COVID-19 pandemic to a “tempest”, which “lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls”. The pain of the pandemic is thus an ambiguous one: scoured by these winds, we can learn to see anew the things which we once took for granted. We have already submitted to this painful pedagogy, and learned a new mode of inclusion; an inclusion which fundamentally reshapes the space, ourselves, and our relationship to it; an inclusion into a space which, in a painful paradox, negates us as the very condition of the qualities which give the meaning to our presence within it. This is the inclusion not of a beloved Other, but of the unwelcome figure of the virus itself.
Trans people, at least as we might gather from recent events, are such unwelcome others. Our exclusion in this regard becomes all the more profound in light of the metonymic slippage between us and images of viral infection. We are still marked with the shadow of AIDS-era homophobia, which built on rhetoric around venereal disease in 18th century sex workers to associate queer people with sickness and death.[8] Pseudoscientific[9] narratives of ‘social contagion’, along with the biopolitical shadow of rhetoric around ‘gender ideology’ or medical interventions as ‘destroying human nature’[10] reproduce these associations in the popular imagination today, both within Catholicism and secular society. These virological threat narratives are mirrored by others, such as baseless concerns linking trans women’s access to single sex accommodations to increased rates of sexual assault,[11] which compound this fearful exclusion.
However, COVID-19 teaches us how to include even when it is uncomfortable, and that authentic inclusion sometimes involves inhabiting a space with our unwelcome Others in such a way as to demand a reconfiguration of both the space and ourselves within it. As such, we must let the transformations of the pandemic teach us to see Francis’ polyhedral metaphor with fresh eyes. We realise that although the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the form “reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness”.[12] That is, as each part is included, the space itself is reshaped, and the other parts are situated in new relationships of convergence within it. A pyramid turns into a cube, an apex turns into a corner, and we, perhaps painfully, learn to see ourselves anew.
Following from this, we must also learn to interrogate our unwelcome towards certain Others, including trans people. COVID-19 is a deadly threat to the most vulnerable within our communities, and the transformations it demands are a desperate response to real danger. To fear this is wise. However, it is also a tempest that teaches an important lesson, and is more ambiguous in this regard. When the unwelcome element is the vulnerable, and the pain of the transformations the price of their inclusion, the situation is very different. Thus, when we feel threatened by trans people, or indeed any other unwelcome Other, we must learn to ask: are they the virus, or are they the scouring wind?
Dr Nicolete Burbach is a consultant research associate in the CCSTP, as well as a member of Action for Trans Health Durham.
[1] ‘Relationships and Gender Identity: Public attitudes within the context of legal reform’, British Social Attitudes Survey 36 (2019), Online: https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39358/5_bsa36_relationships_and_gender_identity.pdf, p. 17.
[2] Perhaps most prominent in the news recently has been JK Rowling, whose powerful testimony to her experiences of domestic and sexual violence found widespread sympathy, especially when her story was cynically exploited by the Sun, but which was delivered bound up in deeply misleading transphobic rhetoric.
[3] Evangelii Gaudium, §236.
[4] Gen. 2:7
[5] Evangelii Gaudium, §270.
[6] Matt. 8:3.
[7] Pope Francis, ‘Pope at Urbi et orbi: Full text of his meditation’, Vatican News 27th March 2020, Online: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2020-03/urbi-et-orbi-pope-coronavirus-prayer-blessing.html [Accessed 07/04/20].
[8] Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October 43 (Winter 1987), pp. 197-222, pp. 211-212.
[9] See Lisa Littman. ‘Correction: Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria’, PLoS ONE 14.3 (19th March, 2019) e0214157 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214157 [Acccessed 18/05/20]; Angelo Brandelli Costa. ‘Formal comment on: Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria’, PLoS ONE 14.3 (2019) e0212578 https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0212578; Arjee Javellana Restar, ‘Methodological Critique of Littman’s (2018) Parental-Respondents Accounts of “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria”’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour 49 (2020), pp. 61-66.
[10] E.g. Pope Francis, interviewed in Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi, This Economy Kills: Pope Francis on Capitalism and Social Justice (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press), pp. 149-150.
[11] See Amira Hasenbush, Andrew R. Flores, and Jody L. Herman, ‘Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Laws in Public Accommodations: a Review of Evidence Regarding Safety and Privacy in Public Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Changing Rooms’, Sexuality Research and Social Policy 16 (2019), pp. 70-83; Timothy Wang, Danielle Solomon, Laura E. Durso, Sarah McBride, and Sean Cahill, State anti-transgender bathroom bills threaten transgender people’s health and participation in public life: Policy brief (Online: Fenway Institute and Center for American Progress, 2016) https://fenwayhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/COM-2485-Transgender-Bathroom-Bill-Brief_v8-pages.pdf, p. 6; Janet A. Laylor, ‘A battle over bathrooms: A solution without a problem’, American Journal of Public Health 106.8 (2016), p. 1349.
[12] Evangelii Gaudium, §236.