The Anxiety to Know: Producing Trans as a “Sensitive” Issue in LGBTIQ+ Diversity Training

ABSTRACT

In this article I examine the ways in which trans and gender nonconforming people are produced as both a sensitive and triggering “issue,” particularly through sensitization practices that are characteristic of LGBTIQ+ diversity training. I discuss the work that different modalities of the sensitive do in the clinic and training of cisgender professionals by bringing together research materials from fieldwork in Chile. In doing so, I show how sensitivity sticks to trans people by making them vulnerable to medical gatekeeping practices, which end up producing a particular way of knowing the other marked by what I call the “anxiety to know,” reproducing forms of gender panic that construct nonnormative genders as still needing an explanation. My discussion joins the call of scholars and activists who interpellate cisgender practitioners to account for our own gender anxieties as a means to facilitate an encounter with opacity that might trigger a desire to know more about our gender nonconformity.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Clare Hemmings for her careful reading of and generous feedback on earlier versions of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions. I also express my gratitude to Leticia Sabsay, Trinidad Avaria, and Francisco Ojeda for our insightful conversations during the early stages of my writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Notes

¹ Hereafter, I use the prefix “psy,” both alone and coupled with the words “discipline,” “professionals,” and “knowledges,” to refer to a set of discursive associations, practices, and professions connected to disciplines and fields as heterogeneous as psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy (see Rose, 1996).

² The Gender Identity Law was adopted after five years of intense debate in 2018. It enables trans people over 14 years to change their legal name and sex on the registry without needing surgical intervention. Among other reasons, the law and the whole debate were subject to fierce criticism by LGBTIQ+ activist groups because they left nonbinary people, children, and youth under 14 years outside the law (see Saavedra and Valdés, 2018).

³ The expressions “diversity work” and “diversity professionals” draw on and adapt Sara Ahmed’s (2012) critique on the politics of diversity in higher education’s race equality policies, which I take to point to a varied range of practices aimed at changing the structures of inequality that discriminate LGBTIQ+ people as knowledge producers, and that exclude them from institutions and disciplinary fields. Instead of using the expression “diversity worker” as Ahmed does, I use the word “professional” to signal both the growing professionalization of diversity work in Chile through the figure of the sexual diversity expert or gender expert, and the identity of those who introduced themselves or were addressed by others by virtue of their professions or university degree.

⁴ Santiaguino (of/from Santiago) works as an adjective or noun used to denote the geographical origin of people according to the locality, city, region, or district they come from. Chile is a remarkably centralied territory, with almost half of the total population concentrated in Santiago, the capital. The country as a whole follows a centralist politico-economic administrative model that shapes differential access to health and educational services.

⁵ Although the examples I work with in the article belong to the field of LGBTIQ+ diversity training, it is important to mention that content warnings serve different purposes at different times and spaces, and their effectiveness should be measured accordingly. From early discussions on trigger warnings in the classroom and feminist blogs, alongside their uses in trauma-informed teaching practices, content and trigger warnings have been the subject of intense and productive debates by queer, trans, and feminist scholars and activists. See, for example, the work of Jack Halberstam (2014, 2017), Sara Ahmed (2015), Alexis Lothian (2016), and Morgan Bimm and Margeaux Feldman (2020), to name but a few.

⁶ On the difference between anxiety and angst, both as a problem of cultural translation and in the clinic and popular culture, see the discussion of Fernando Castrillón (2014) and the work of Fernando Aduriz (2018), respectively. On the diagnostic trajectory of anxiety in the DSM and its contemporary resonance in the “feeling good” culture and economy, see the work of Ana Carolina Minozzo (2019).

⁷ Eric Plemons (2017), for example, shows how the affective dynamics at play in the practice of facial feminization surgeries shape trans people’s experiences of care and the notion of womanhood they seek to achieve through surgical techniques. Here, the anxiety to know I am describing appears in the form of authoritative knowledge about the patient’s “true gender,” which becomes transparent to the cisgender specialist: The surgeon knows what the client wants and why, which is also confirmed by the professional’s staff who mediate the patient–surgeon relationship as “arbiters of gender” (p. 80), by conveying “an affirmative recognition” (p. 81) of femininity that leaves no room for doubt and uncertainty.

⁸ Abbreviation for lesbians, gays, travestis, transexuals, trans, bisexuals, and intersex, commonly used in the Argentinian, cuir-activist context.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID)/Scholarship Program/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2017 under grant 72180458, and the Economic and Social Research Council under grant ES/X006913/1.

Notes on contributors

Tomás Ojeda

Tomás Ojeda, Ph.D., is a queer researcher and trained psychotherapist. He held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (2022–2023), and a visiting fellow position at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His research interests lie in the intersections of queer theory, psychosocial studies, antigender politics, and LGBTIQ+ mental health, with a special focus on activist and academic responses to current attacks on gender-affirming care. He is the co-editor of the volume Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan), and is a member of the Engenderings editorial collective.