Beyond Autopoiesis

Abstract

Abstract As the notion of biological sex becomes increasingly invested with binary, anti-trans meanings in US discourse, some scholars suggest that “reimagining biology” as diverse and not dichotomous might help affirm trans identities. Instead of ignoring science and emboldening its reductionist forms, it is said that theorists should celebrate trans identities as biological diversity. This essay explores the fraught terrain of this hopeful project. The first section examines how dominant histories of the sex-gender distinction autopoietically flatten trans lives by conflating them with the passive materiality of biological sex. The second section turns to two histories of trans life that challenge this historiographic tendency—Jules Gill-Peterson's Histories of the Transgender Child and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides. Following Sylvia Wynter's call to forge liminal sciences, the article shows how Gill-Peterson and Snorton reimagine biology by encountering marginalized modes of trans scientific practice. In the margins, gaps, and opacities of the archive, there are encounters with trans experimentation, rearrangements of biology and science that do not “affirm” transness as much as they rebel against the racist order of cis-normativity.