【by SHIMIZU Akiko, June 2024】
The current intensification of transphobia in Japan is said to have started in 2018, when one of the leading women’s universities in Japan announced that it would accept applications from transgender girls, to which some “feminist” accounts on twitter reacted with “concerns” and also anger, arguing that this was part of a trend of misogynous transgenderism that seeks to invade women’s space and threaten women’s safety.
The phobia has since spread so much so that, in 2020, the then Chair of the Board of Directors of the Women’s Studies Association of Japan published an article in a “feminism” issue of a well-known journal arguing that cis-women’s fear of and aversion to trans women should be respected because they are not necessarily based on discriminatory intentions. In 2021, a prominent far-right LDP politician and a member of the house of councillors, effectively facilitated the dropping of a bill to promote awareness of sexual minorities in Japan (a.k.a. LGBT law), by claiming that promoting transgender rights will lead to all kinds of “absurd things”. In 2022 and 23, a respected feminist novelist published two books of extremely transphobic contents. Deliberation on a bill to protect LGBT rights was delayed with both the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, supported by moral conservatives and the religious right, and the “concerned women”, working with GC (gender critical) feminists, arguing that the reference to “gender identity” in the bill will violate women’s rights and safety by forcing them to “accept” trans women; when the bill finally went through the Lower House Committee on the Cabinet in 2023, it was with the alterations so retrogressive that several activist groups working on LGBT+ rights immediately made statement protesting its current form. The same year, one of the more publicly vocal trans women, a trans lawyer revealed that she had received violent hate messages through the website of the law firm she works for threatening to maim and kill her. And around the same time, one of the most conspicuous queer celebrities in Japan, who had married a woman and had a child, before coming out as more feminine than they used to present themselves and getting a divorce, was found dead at the age of 27; many suspect that the severe queer- and trans-phobic bashing and hate massages they received after coming-out must have had something to do with the tragic and untimely death, although there was no official confirmation as to the cause of death. Most of us, who are in one way or another belong to, or work close to, queer/trans communities in Japan, have directly known or have heard of someone, or two, committed or attempted suicide since the surge of online transphobia.
What I just went through is a very short list of extremely notable events of the rise of transphobia in Japan in the last five years, but it should be enough to see how transphobia has spread from anonymous online “feminist” accounts to feminist community, academia, and then to the powerful moral and religious right.
The irony is that, as can be observed in other countries such as the U.K. and the U.S., transphobia is here being utilized to draw the self-proclaimed “feminists” and “ordinary women” into forming an alliance with the moral/religious right that has long opposed promoting women’s rights. The most startling example of this may be the well-known radical feminist novelist, Shouno Yoriko, mentioned above, who professed right before a national election that she now had no other choice but to vote for a prominent far-right politician who was one of the central driving figures in the severe backlash against feminist and women’s movements in Japan in the early noughties. She must be “forming a common front with [the said politician] on this single issue,” Shouno says.
What, however, has fuelled this recent rapid spread of transphobia in Japan? What is it that has made some feminists, even feminist academics and activists, feel compelled to ward off the attack of “the trans(sexual) empire”, so to speak, even if it means to join hands with undeniably anti-feminist political factions?
In an attempt to offer a tentative answer to this question, I would like to introduce a tweet by a transfemme activist and the reaction to that tweet by anti-trans accounts as a symptomatic case that reveals what is at stake here. The tweet was posted in 2012 as part of a conversation between the trans activist and her (perhaps younger) non-binary friend. More than five years later, however, the tweet was excavated and spread by anti-trans accounts as evidencing that trans women are invading (cis-)women’s space, causing a near-panic reaction among transphobic feminist twitter-verse and beyond. The tweet itself reads as follows:
I would just tuck my dick between the legs and be like “S up?”, going into women’s bath, you see. Am I being too sloppy or what? Also I’d be using men’s toilet when in hurry because it’s easier. When I say X-gender (non-binary) I have that sort of zigzag in mind.
(Retrieved in 2019. Not long after the tweet was excavated, the activist decided to delete her twitter account)
In the original context, the tweet was quite innocuous: the activist was trying to cheer up a younger nonbinary friend who wondered if they had the right to claim a non-binary identity when they could pass and use a single-gender space in their daily life. When it was taken up five years later out of context, however, it quickly became one of the earliest and the most notorious posts to incite fear and outrage. Since the “women’s bath” here was referring to a Japanese-style public bath, where you go in without putting any clothes on, and most of which are binary gendered, it is understandable that this story caused a certain amount of uneasiness or even fear. Many argued that the tweet evidenced a dire threat to women’s safety, sexual safety in particular, posed by transfemmes.
A close examination of what the outrage was about, however, will show us that the fear is not exactly for the sexual threat per se as many were claiming (and still seem to believe). The episode is clearly about passing — a case where the said person wasn’t read. In this story, for the transfemme person to use the women’s bath did not become a problem; other women in the bathroom either did not detect the tucked penis or decided not to intervene and hinder the passing of the body with a tucked penis. Nobody reported it to the manager of the facility even afterwards (under current registration, if anyone had done so, it was more than likely that the activist got into trouble).
Of course, one may well argue that perhaps other female customers were aware of the transfemme’s tucked penis but were too shocked or scared to speak up on the spot, or even to report afterwards to the managers of the facility. Curiously, however, that was not how the majority of the reproach and outrage went: instead, the denouncers repeatedly talk about the fear caused by a “male-bodied” trans person entering a female space with their penis exposed. In fact, the episode has even become often referred to as “dick-dangling” episode, despite the fact that exactly the opposite was the case: the whole point of the episode was that the penis was there, but tucked in and made invisible or overlooked, let pass.
Why the slide, we have to ask then, from a story about a hidden penis and passing to one about ostentatious exposure, in the fearful and fearmongering discourse surrounding the original tweet? Is that because the latter is scarier and better fit to trigger panic and fear? I would argue to the contrary. If what truly threatened the women outraged at the tweet had simply been the fact that a transfemme with a penis dared to use a “women’s space”, it should not have been necessary to change the story, bringing in a hyper-visible “dangling dick” that was completely non-existent in the original. I would argue, instead, that the reason why the tweet about the tucked penis induced such a strong reaction is the ex post facto revelation of an invisible transgender difference; revelation of how easily and casually the difference could elude detection. The post was understood as threatening to women’s safety and security because it revealed the fantastical nature of the safety and security founded on some visible, detectable gender differences. It was outrageous because it rudely pointed to the possibility that the difference between cis and trans women are not as detectable as one would hope. That is precisely why the outraged online criticism of the tweet had to conjure up the visibly exposed penis. Undetectability must be denied; the fantasy of always visible and detectable differences must be maintained.
The outrage surrounding the “dick-dangling” episode is symptomatic of the affective underlining of the current transphobia: what is at stake here is the illusion that the difference is detectable, always visible as such. Contrary to what anti-trans “feminist” groups and individuals have been claiming, the true concern is neither that transfemmes may start using women’s facilities, nor that cis women may become unable to effectively detect and eliminate cis-male sex offenders (who are imagined to be visually indistinguishable from transfemmes). The scandal, rather, is in the realization that transfemmes have already been living among us, both within and outside of women’s space, without being detected: that, in other words, they have been going stealth, and successfully so.
Since it is fuelled by the fear of the invisible differences, it is no wonder that the current transphobic panic has led to a call for detecting the difference, the desire to pin down what is invisible and turn it into transparently visible. This is why the transphobic feminists would never give up the claim of “we can always tell” even after repeatedly being proven wrong. They incessantly post, for example, images of transfemme or AMAB trans persons to show how supposedly visibly different from “biological female” they are. It is also important to note that, in the Japanese twitter-verse, the images used for these purposes are very often of non-Eastern-Asian persons: racial difference is exploited in order to make trans difference visible. Some have even started to argue that trans people should be wearing a badge to literally mark them as trans before they can enter a single-gender space.
In fact, as many trans theorists have pointed out, trans people have always been dogged by the rhetoric of deception (and therefore of the truth that is supposedly hidden and needs to be revealed). This, in turn, has inevitably invited calls for surveillance. In this sense, trans politics has always kept an ambivalent distance from the politics of visibility. Queer politics, born out of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, where silence and invisibility could directly lead to abandonment and death, has often been characterized by its affinity with the visible: in-your-face, theatrical and hyper visual are the terms often used to describe queer politics. Since sexuality per se is invisible, the queer politics of visibility has often depended on the figures of visible gender crossing such as drag and butch/femme. While this promoted feminist and queer community’s understanding of the subversive political potential of visibly gender variant and/or gender nonconforming performances, it also implies that trans people, whether they are binary and passing or visibly gender nonconforming, have been kept most exposed to scrutiny and surveillance.
In the society of both increasingly heightened and permeating surveillance and also increasingly aggravating transphobia, it seems imperative that we should reassess both the potential and the risk of visibility politics.
I argued elsewhere that one way to resist the desire for detection may be to make visible the undetectability of difference. One example for this would be some transfemme activists and individuals speaking up while putting up their photos or video footage online. Putting their own image up there on-line, they claim they pass as cis-women. This is radically different from an attempt to pass. Of course, they know all too well that any images of themselves posted online would be scrutinized, judged and harshly commented on. However, the simultaneous showing and claiming, especially when done online, makes it actually difficult for the viewer to completely counter the claim. One may be able to talk of one of those transfemmes as looking too feminine or not feminine enough, too sexy or too unattractive, too fashion-conscious or not fashionable enough; but no matter what one says, one could not completely refute her claim that she’d pass “in spite of” that “flaw”. Of course she may be just lying. Still, one cannot wipe away the suspicion that she may not be lying, that she may still pass, with the difference undetected in the daily life where people are not vigilant enough.
In the best-case scenario, this strategy demonstrates how pointless and possibly useless the surveillance can be, and help dissipate the call for one. It may well, however, aggravate the fear of the invisible and push even further the transphobic call for surveillance, just as we have seen in the example of the “tucked penis” tweet.
Could it be the case that one possible way is to argue that we should stop trying to detect differences and ward them off, that surveillance will never lead to the total eradication of risk factors and will instead only increase the risk of heightened authoritarian state power and social pressure; that we should remind ourselves that we cannot have social diversity without tensions and risks brought by the different, the unknown, and the other. In fact, this is in a sense very much along the line of queer politics— as in, turn-of-the-century, early-stage queer politics.
One representative example would be the famous queer chant, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”, popularized by Queer Nation. While the chant is usually understood as expressing the defiant visibility that Queer Nation was known for, we can also take it as a political message that reveals a little less straightforward, and a little more stealthy strategy of invasion: that is, “we are and have been already here among you, living the queer difference, without you knowing it, without you detecting it, and we are telling you that only now”. The chant, read that way, is a declaration that the straight society cannot but live with undetectable queer differences, no matter how uncomfortable or threatened they feel about it, because they already are living with them. The chant then becomes less about visibility and more about uneasy coexistence.
It is precisely this uneasy coexistence that Judith Butler refers to when they talk about the “unchosen proximity” as a mode of living together:
One political point probably has remained pretty much the same even as my own focus has shifted, and that is that identity politics fails to furnish a broader conception of what it means, politically, to live together, across differences, sometimes in modes of unchosen proximity, especially when living together, however difficult it may be, remains an ethical and political imperative. (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 27)
They seem to be arguing that the unchosen proximity is “difficult”, but that it still “remains an ethical and political imperative” for us to live through that difficulty. Isn’t this perhaps what we should be emphasizing, that the fear and anxiety of living with the undetected, unknown differences will not, and more importantly, perhaps is not supposed to, be dissipated?
Perhaps that was exactly what happened in the trans-femme activist’s story of a tucked penis: other women may or may not have detected the penis, they may or may not have felt uncomfortable, even slightly scared, but in the end, they decided not to scrutinize and they let her pass; with a bit of anxiety, and possibly with a bit of unspoken fear, they still stayed and shared the space with the activist; they chose to co-exist. And perhaps that is what our immediate queer political goal looks like: a small utopian space where naked people are uncomfortably but also generously tolerating, not accepting, each other, because achieving even that is becoming more and more difficult these days.
AUTHOR
SHIMIZU Akiko, Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan
SHIMIZU Akiko (PhD) (she/her) is a professor of feminist and queer theories at the Department of
Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Her research interests are: feminist theories of bodies and self-representation; post-colonial feminism and cultural interpretation; anti-gender movements in Japan; proximity, fear and the possibility of coalition. She is a translator (into Japanese) of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?