Notes from a former 4tranner on “A Peek Behind the Curtain: A 4Tranner’s Response to ‘4transfeminism’”

The seeds of materialism in the least respectable corner of trans politics

If you value the essays, theory, research, and free educational work I put out, you can support me directly through Ko-fi. My Bottom Surgeey is a week from today and I would deeply appreciate it

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx

I read 4transfeminism when it came out, and after reading junelikethemonth’s response, A Peek Behind the Curtain, I think the argument between them becomes more useful once you stop treating it as a referendum on whether 4tran is politically good or bad. Terror is trying to explain what 4tran does politically. She sees a culture organized around passing, racialized beauty standards, hostility toward some trans people, and the desire to become socially indistinguishable from cis people, and she argues that these tendencies import reactionary assumptions into transfeminism. June responds from inside the culture and argues that Terror has turned jokes, coping mechanisms, resentments, and shared language into a coherent ideology that does not really exist in that form.

I think June is right more often than Terror probably wants her to be, especially when the subject is passing. Terror understands the obsession with passing largely through assimilation and argues that the culture surrounding it can become hostile toward women who remain visibly trans. That hostility is real, and anyone who has spent enough time around trans women has watched passing become a status hierarchy. June still catches something Terror flattens when she points out that many transsexual women want to pass because being perceived differently changes the conditions of their lives.

Passing is constantly discussed as though we need to settle its moral meaning before describing its social function. I find that approach increasingly useless because the effects exist regardless of how anyone feels about them. A passing transsexual woman can enter a social situation and be classified as a woman without also being classified as trans, and that classification can alter how she is treated. If her history becomes known, the interaction can change again. Passing therefore gives us a clear way to observe how classification produces consequences.

That question sits close to the center of my own work. Bodies matter because people interpret them, medical transition matters because bodies can be altered through institutions that control access to those alterations, and passing matters because social interpretation shapes the field of possible treatment. We can study those changes directly instead of treating privilege as something metaphysical that transfers between identities.

This is one reason I developed invariance as a method. If we want to understand sex politically, we can follow the relation while its material elements change. A transsexual woman can alter her endocrine profile, secondary sex characteristics, documents, anatomy, appearance, and social recognition across one lifetime, and each change gives us another point from which to observe what institutions respond to and which relations remain operative. Transsexuality is theoretically useful because sexed embodiment and sexed classification are changing in front of us, which allows us to study the machinery while it moves.

June approaches the same problem when she discusses medical transition. Mainstream trans politics became comfortable with identity because identity can be recognized without redistributing very much. Medical transition immediately forces the conversation into questions of production, access, medicine, cost, law, and bodily autonomy because someone has to manufacture the drug, control its distribution, determine whether it requires a prescription, decide which procedures are covered, and determine who qualifies for care.

This is where trans politics becomes materially serious because recognition alone cannot meet those needs. Calling someone a woman does not produce estrogen or pay for surgery, and affirmation does not answer what happens when institutions deny someone the resources required to alter her body.

June’s discussion of DIY matters for the same reason. 4tran communities have spent years circulating practical information about hormones and transition among people who often arrived in those spaces after formal medicine failed them. That history complicates the idea that the culture can be understood primarily as reactionary contamination entering transfeminism from 4chan. A space can materially assist people while also developing norms that make those same people miserable, and understanding that contradiction makes 4tran much easier to explain without romanticizing it.

The disagreement over socialization exposes another weakness in June’s response. She argues that if socialization produced gender, trans people should simply become the gender society attempted to raise them into. I think this gives socialization more power than feminist theory actually requires it to have. Socialization describes the ways people are acted upon according to the sex other people believe them to be, and the subject can comply with those expectations, resist them, or experience them as alien without erasing the fact that the expectations were imposed.

Transsexual lives complicate this process because the social position itself can change. A trans woman may spend childhood being interpreted one way and later move through the world under a different sexed classification, which means the expectations directed at her can also change. Some earlier conditioning can remain, some can lose relevance, and some may never have taken hold in the way outsiders assumed. Invariance gives us a cleaner method because we can follow what institutions believed the person to be, what treatment followed from that belief, how she responded, what transition changed, and which effects remained.

The racial disagreement between Terror and June is less developed. Terror points toward 4chan’s history of racism and the circulation of racial stereotypes through 4tran culture, while June emphasizes the number of nonwhite users in these spaces and argues that 4tran sometimes discusses the racial character of passing more directly than mainstream trans spaces do. The demographic defense does little for me because a racially diverse community can reproduce anti-Blackness perfectly well.

June becomes more interesting when she turns to racialized passing because femininity has never operated through a raceless standard. Black women have been masculinized through racial ideology for centuries, which means a Black transsexual woman enters transition inside a culture where the standards used to judge femininity were already racialized. Acknowledging that condition is useful, although recognition alone does not explain why the standard exists or why it continues to shape how women are read.

This is one of the places where 4tran regularly reaches toward materialism without having the theory necessary to finish the thought. The culture notices that race changes how femininity is interpreted and can turn that observation into a prediction about individual fate. A feminist analysis has to move further by explaining the historical relations that produced the standard and the institutions that continue reproducing it.

The disagreement over trans men raises the same methodological problem. Terror wants transfeminism to remain capable of describing harms experienced across the trans community, while June is skeptical of frameworks that derive a distinct oppression directly from every identity category. The useful question is what produced the harm. If an institution regulates a trans man through reproductive capacity, for instance, feminism already has tools for studying that relation, while his position as a man can still change how the harm is experienced. Theory becomes more precise when it explains the mechanism instead of assuming the identity of the injured person can explain the mechanism by itself.

Contemporary politics has become extremely good at generating precise names for injured populations while becoming less confident about describing the systems producing the injury. I want the machinery back because political theory loses explanatory power when every analysis stops at identity.

Terror’s argument that 4chan culture should be excised from transfeminism is not convincing to me. People can be removed from communities far more easily than the conditions that produced them can be removed from their lives. If young transsexual women continue gathering in anonymous spaces because those are the places where people will discuss dysphoria, surgery, passing, beauty, medical access, and failed transitions without immediately retreating into affirmation, then condemning the language of those spaces leaves the underlying demand untouched.

I have been writing about this problem through cancellation and community for months because exile is routinely mistaken for resolution. A contradiction can be pushed outside the respectable boundary of a community while remaining fully alive, and once that happens it develops its own culture around the people willing to speak about it.

This is where the exchange becomes useful to our own canon because I think 4tran contains the seeds of a materialist politics. Its users have already discovered through experience that bodies matter, money matters, hormones matter, passing changes social treatment, racialized beauty standards shape femininity, and affirmation cannot substitute for material access to transition.

The problem is that those seeds have very little theoretical ground in which to grow.

There is no developed account of class capable of explaining unequal access to transition, no serious theory of racial formation capable of explaining why standards of femininity are racialized, and no materialist theory of sex strong enough to explain why changing the body changes social treatment without turning every bodily difference into destiny. The observations are already present, while the framework capable of organizing them remains underdeveloped.

That absence matters because ideas still grow in whatever soil is available. In 4tran they often grow through doomposting, folk biology, passing taxonomies, resentment, and attempts to turn social probability into personal fate. A girl measuring her brow ridge at three in the morning may be misunderstanding the source of her distress, but she has still understood that her body is being judged according to standards with material consequences. The problem begins when the standard itself is treated as natural rather than historically produced.

That is what fascinates me about 4tran. The materialist impulse appears repeatedly because the people inside the culture keep encountering material reality whether their politics are prepared for it or not. They notice that transition changes the body, that embodiment changes social treatment, that medicine is distributed unequally, and that beauty is socially consequential. Without a theory of the relations producing those facts, the observations can harden into fatalism.

This is where I disagree with both essays. Terror looks at what grows from this environment and focuses on the reactionary conclusions, while June sees the experiences underneath those conclusions and wants them taken seriously. I think the more useful project is creating the theoretical ground in which those observations could develop into something better.

Mainstream transfeminism cannot accomplish that by purging 4tran language because the questions that generated the language will remain. A politics that cannot explain why passing changes someone’s life, why access to hormones matters differently from affirmation, why racialized beauty standards affect transition, or why some people experience their bodies as politically urgent will leave those questions available to whoever is willing to answer them.

4tran became one of the places where those abandoned questions went.

Its political importance therefore reaches beyond the memes and slang because it shows transsexual materialism repeatedly resurfacing after liberal trans politics increasingly organized transness through identity. The body never disappeared during that shift. Medical dependency remained. Sexed classification remained. Passing remained. Beauty remained. Race remained. The material world continued producing consequences while political language became less willing to describe them.

Invariant Feminism should take these seeds seriously enough to give them somewhere to grow. We can study the body as a material object whose political meaning is historically produced, examine passing as a change in classification that alters social treatment, and follow hormones, surgery, documentation, race, beauty, and recognition through the same life to observe what changes and what persists.

This gives transsexuality a significance to feminist theory that extends well beyond trans discourse because it allows us to watch sexed embodiment and sexed classification transform in real time. The transsexual subject gives us a vantage point from which to study how medicine alters sexed characteristics, how bureaucracy records sex, how strangers infer it, and how institutions reorganize their treatment of a person as those variables change.

After reading June and Terror together, my claim is that 4tran contains the seeds of materialism and has spent years trying to grow them in ground that cannot sustain them. Its users correctly perceive that transition is material and that social recognition changes the conditions of life, while the culture repeatedly converts historically produced constraints into personal destiny because it lacks an account of the relations producing them.

Terror sees the results and wants to remove the culture that produced them. June sees the experiences underneath and wants them understood. I think feminism has to build the garden in which those observations can develop into a theory of sex, race, class, and social relations capable of explaining transsexual life without turning material constraint into fate.

The girls on 4tran have already found the seeds. The unfinished work is giving them somewhere better to grow.