Living Dead: Trans Cooperations with Mad Necropolitics and the Mad Trans Coalitions that Might Replace Them.

Abstract

Trans subjectivities continue to be included in major compendia of mental illness, despite recent moves to depathologize "cross-gender identification." Regardless, the inclusion of "gender dysphoria" is often framed as a formal mechanism to support access to gender affirming care as transgender subjectivities are re-conceptualized as part of sex/gender diversity and away from madness. The latter permits trans individuals to evade sanist oppressions. However, moves to disassociate from mad individuals also often serve to condone sanism. For instance, a contemporary policy landscape often sees transgender advocates arguing for the "medical necessity" of gender affirming care for gender dysphoria as a "recognized medical condition," thereby skirting the inclusion of gender dysphoria as a psychiatric condition and implying that gender dysphoria carries a special ontological status that separates it from madness (reified as "mental illness"). More though, this framework endorses material violences toward mad individuals that are often advanced via the workings of the state to consign marginalized constituents to death by withholding the means of life, i.e., necropolitics. In the following, I argue that trans disassociations from madness often endorses or assents to mad necropolitics. Drawing from Mbembe's (Necropolitics. Duke University Press, Durham, 2019) framework, I suggest that medicalizing trans narratives, despite being used to object to anti-trans laws in contemporary context, ideologically support mad "death worlds" organized through the U.S.A. welfare state and prison industrial complex. However, I also suggest alternative strategies, i.e., intersectional collaboration, that may uplift mad and/or trans communities.