Making and Unmaking Categories: Queer/Trans/Disabled Resistance and Joy

(from a keynote given at the the Trans, Disability, and Sapphic Knowledges Conference in Toronto, 2024)

This evening I want to dig into the power of categorization, starting by thinking some more about books and libraries, specifically examining Library of Congress (LOC) subject headings. At first glance this exploration may seem to be an absurd place to start. The classifying of books holds so little power over people’s lives compared to other systems of classification—the gender binary or diagnostic categorization for instance. Yet the ways in which the LOC system interlocks with diagnosis and gender^⁠ reveal much about how classification systems in general build and maintain authority.

As I flipped through the card catalog searching for homosexuality, I had no idea that someday I would become a published writer, my books assigned subject headings and call numbers and shelved in libraries across the country. I think of the LOC headings assigned to my first book. They read, “1. Clare, Eli. 2. Women political activists—United States—Biography. 3. Cerebral palsied—United States—Biography^⁠.” In 1999 holding the newly published Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation in my hands, I remember glancing at the copyright page and skimming the subject headings. I grumpily thought, “Wait! Those words don’t describe the book I wrote.” But quickly I resigned myself, believing somehow that those categories were immutable…..

Let me turn now to Women in the headings assigned to Exile and Pride. It, too, is used as a descriptor, and locates me and my book in relationship to the gender binary. In the current dominant US version of this classification system, brought to Turtle Island by European settlers, two categories exist: female-feminine-woman and male-masculine-man. These two pre-determined options corral the thousands of ways humans combine hormones; grow hair, curves, muscles, genitals, reproductive organs; understand and name our sexed and gendered selves. By design, this hierarchal system values men over women, attempts to erase the existence of transgender and non-binary people, and frequently punishes transgression and variation.

As a classification scheme and system of power, the gender binary never functions in isolation. For example, diagnosis interlocks with and polices the binary in intense ways, pathologizing people whose genders and sexes don’t conform. I think of how Congenital General Hypertrichosis pathologizes bearded women, how Testicular Hypofunction pathologizes beardless men, and how a whole raft of diagnoses under the umbrella of Disorders of Sex Development pathologize intersex people whose bodyminds don’t match medicalized definitions of female and male. Tellingly, there are no diagnostic categories that explain, pathologize, and shame the sexed and gendered bodyminds of white, blue-eyed, masculine (as defined by US white middle-class non-disabled expectations) males easily read as heterosexual cisgender men.

Fundamentally, diagnosis is used only to name and police conditions and bodyminds deemed abnormal or deviant. Certainly the diagnostic process sometimes helps individual people in a variety of sexed and gendered struggles. But on a systemic level, diagnosis as a classification scheme functions to undergird, gatekeep, and authorize the binary. It joins with other systems of power—patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and on and on—all of them interlocking to make woman and man appear overwhelmingly natural, scientific, and unquestionable.

In using Women as a descriptor in the subject heading Women political activists, the LOC piggybacks on this intertwined set of systems. The heading is of course authorized by the binary. But additionally it is bolstered by the interlocking of diagnostic, racial, settler colonial, and sexual orientation categorization schemes, among many others. At the same time, the LOC’s gendered headings aren’t only reinforcedthrough these schemes but also play a role in reinforcing them. This entire network of mutually reinforced and reinforcing systems creates a façade of unyielding authority.

Within this facade, the descriptor women assigned to Exile and Pride makes invisible the expansive queer and transgender frameworks I call home. Without a doubt being a girl/woman for more than three decades before medically and socially transitioning to live in the world as a white guy has totally shaped my work. But slotting my book into the binary distorts who I am and how I write about the tangle of gender, both in my life and the world around me….

***

I love the places where categories fail spectacularly. Where ocean meets sand—a pounding of water and softening of land. Where current encounters current—a swell at the confluence. Where ecosystem overlaps ecosystem—an overflow of life. In these places, categories bend, strain, break. They can’t contain the messiness and plenty….

For decades I’ve named my gendered self a boulder who splits the current and dreams. I adore how unclassifiable this gender is. Diagnoses, LOC subject headings, and the binary simply cannot contain it.

I enter a portal where there are simply too many genders to count, sort, and define, much less gatekeep. A portal where the shorthand of non-binary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming doesn’t exist anymore because we no longer live in relationship to gendered normalcy and conformity. A portal where we’ve untethered ourselves from the gender binary and refuse to replace it with some other classification scheme.

Inside this portal, I experience deep gender belonging^⁠. I join with others who understand their gender(s) as boulder—that slow steadiness always at the mercy of water and wind. And I also gravitate toward multi-gender space. Genders run the gamut from feather to stud, woman to punk, cupcake to spiderweb, ripple to man, queen to velvet ruby, femme to infinity, disco ball to heat-rising-off-the-sidewalk^⁠. I often taste the sweetness and contentiousness between us as we unlearn gender hierarchy and domination and begin new kinds of solidarity.