Review: Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights, by Melissa R. Michaelson and Brian F. Harrison

Abstract

Melissa Michaelson and Brian Harrison’s Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights starts from a commonly held notion: that contemporary political discourses surrounding the rights of transgender people in the United States carry within them echoes of political discourses surrounding gays and lesbians in the United States in the late 1980s and 1990s. Throughout their study, Michaelson and Harrison both problematize and build upon this idea, utilizing extant literature about mass attitudes toward gays and lesbians as a means to theorize strategies for building acceptance for transgender people among the wider cisgender public. In drawing from research about mass attitudes toward gays and lesbians to develop their hypotheses, Michaelson and Harrison articulate a new theory that they term Identity Reassurance Theory, a means of “softening the ground” by reassuring ingroups of their own identities, so that they may become more supportive of stigmatized groups (47). Or, as Michaelson and Harrison put it, “[Identity Reassurance Theory] is about making [ingroups] feel better about themselves so that they can be more open to accepting others” (148).According to Identity Reassurance Theory, reassuring cisgender people of their own identities—that is to say, validating the gender identities of cisgender people—does not necessarily make cisgender people automatically accept transgender people as part of their gendered ingroup. Instead, Identity Reassurance Theory posits that reassuring cisgender people of their gender identities allows for more willingness to move past initial stigmatizing biases. This reassurance—combined with an emotional-moral appeal to selflessness and the creation of conditions to push past discomfort to allow cisgender people to “change their minds” and relinquish those stigmatizing biases—allows for more openness to new attitudes, new ideas, and new conceptions beyond the hegemonic, misrepresentative, and often-dangerous images of trans people that make up the mass cisgender imagination. By appealing to morality, acknowledging discomfort, and identity reassurance, Michaelson and Harrison posit that advocates and advocacy groups can shift mass cisgender attitudes toward trans people, opening up the possibility of increased expansion of legislative protections for transgender people.As such, in many ways, Michaelson and Harrison are writing less about transgender people per se, and more about cisgender attitudes toward transgender people in a society structured by cisgender people, for cisgender people. Although there are some transgender respondents in almost all of their survey experiments, Michaelson and Harrison do not select for transgender respondents. In fact, instead, they focus on how different forms of priming can draw out more or less support for trans-inclusive policy from cisgender people, how appeals to different emotions and attitudes can make cisgender people more likely to push past “discomfort” and biases against transgender people, and the types of conversations that cisgender people must initiate with other cisgender people in order to shift attitudes toward acceptance. Although the focus of this book is on public opinion toward transgender people, the research focus, survey respondents, and intended recipients of the theoretical interventions in this book are cisgender allies—for it is the job of cisgender allies to open up uncomfortable conversations, to push past that discomfort, and to “soften the ground” to move toward a “society where everyone is treated with equal dignity and respect” (162).Michaelson and Harrison, though not focusing on trans people themselves, are doing key work in advancing both public opinion research and potential policy by developing a concrete approach to challenging transphobia in a society that centers cisgender people and cisgender people’s stigmatizing biases. That said, Michaelson and Harrison’s work still leaves open two questions about the applicability and future of their research. First, how—if at all—do their proposed solutions apply to trans people outside of the gender binary? Second, and perhaps more pressing, how can we account for the racialized elements of the Euro-Western gender binary?Although Michaelson and Harrison note that the focus of this book is on transgender men and women, and that much more work needs to be done both in the discipline and in a cisgender-dominated society to expand the meaning of gender (158), in terms of thinking nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer, agender, and other trans subjects outside of the gender binary, how might these subjectivities problematize Identity Reassurance Theory? After all, Identity Reassurance Theory relies on reassuring cisgender people of their own identities, and this is often achieved by means of not posing an immediate challenge to long-held beliefs about gender as a structure. Nonbinary and genderqueer people, by nature of their gender identities, fundamentally challenge long-held perceptions of gender’s binary nature. With this in mind, would Michaelson and Harrison’s strategies to “soften the ground” of cisgender attitudes toward transgender women and men still be salient in the project of making a world where nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer, agender, and other transgender subjectivities are included and accepted? If Identity Reassurance Theory can be used as a strategy to change cisgender mass attitudes toward transgender men and women—and stigmatized groups as a whole—how do we utilize the strategies offered to us through a careful engagement with Identity Reassurance Theory for those populations whose very subjectivities unsettle the identity categories of hegemonic groups? Especially as the visibility of nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, and multi-gendered people increases, and as more people challenge the hegemony of gender and sex binaries both socially and legally, the question of the salience of strategies borne out of Identity Reassurance Theory to people outside of the gender binary might become ever more salient.While people outside of the gender binary may problematize the toolbox of strategies offered by an understanding of Identity Reassurance Theory, an engagement with the intersection of race and gender might further problematize such strategies. In his 2007 book The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire, Greg Thomas writes about how gender categories are not only not fixed through space and time, but the binary gender categories of “woman” and “man” are culturally specific and imposed as “cultural and historical artifacts of empire” (25). Similarly, C. Riley Snorton, in his 2017 book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, articulates a “tetheredness” of Blackness and transness—a “tetheredness” that, as he notes in his preface, is especially and frequently articulated through state policies that dispossess transgender people of public protections and eliminate forms of protection and redress against forms of workplace discrimination, including racial discrimination. Or, to quote Snorton in Black on Both Sides: “Media focus on transgender people’s abilities to use the bathroom of their choice obscures a more urgent conversation about what modes of dispossession are possible under the ruse of state inclusion” (xi). This is all to say, race and gender—including race and conceptions of transness—are historically and politically interlinked and intersect with one another. As such, the question of the impact of race in shaping mass attitudes toward transgender people is a fundamental one. While Michaelson and Harrison note that “[r]ace is not a predictor of attitudes [toward transgender people]” (34), this is a measure of race among respondents—rather than race of the imagined trans subjects themselves. In Michaelson and Harrison’s experiments that include representational images of transgender people, for the most part, the transgender subjects meant to prime their respondents are white subjects. A mother’s journey to accepting her transgender child, for example, is illustrated by a blonde white woman and her blonde white daughter. A photograph accompanying a series of questions about transgender people in the US military, similarly, is that of a white transgender man. Given what has been written about the historical and political “tetheredness” of gender and race, especially with regard to transness, what sort of insights might experiments that center trans subjects of color draw? For example, if we change the image of a transgender person from a white transgender man serving in the US military, or a white transgender child to a Black trans woman, how might respondents react? Would attitudes showing increased levels of support for transgender people change, if the image of transgender people is paradigmatically of transgender people of color? Incorporating the intersectionality and “tetheredness” of race and gender into work on Identity Reassurance Theory—and public opinion on transgender people as a whole—offers rich, crucial possibilities for future study.Ultimately, Michaelson and Harrison’s Transforming Prejudice offers insights into the ways that the anti-transgender attitudes of mass cisgender audiences may be combated. Their theory of Identity Reassurance posits an approach that cisgender advocates, organizations, and officials can adopt to combat the affective modes of transphobia that permeate cisgender society. It is this “real-world” application in the form of data-driven guidelines for cisgender people that sets Michaelson and Harrison’s work apart. By providing a toolkit for cisgender people invested in doing the necessary work of combating the prejudices and biases held by other cisgender people in a society that centers cisgender people, Michaelson and Harrison offer much more than a necessary contribution to the study of gender, sexuality, and politics. In articulating Identity Reassurance Theory, outlining the sources of cisgender resistance to protections for transgender people, and creating actionable strategies for cisgender allies, Transforming Prejudice bridges the gap between research and on-the-ground practice and “softens the ground” for cisgender allies to begin taking action against widespread and dangerous anti-transgender biases.