TRANS LAW AND POLITICS ON A NEOLIBERAL LANDSCAPE

In order to effectively conceptualize political and economic marginalization, shortened life spans, and an emergent notion of organized resistance among the set of gender rule-breakers currently being loosely gathered under a "trans" umbrella, and to raise questions about the usefulness of law reform strategies in this resistance, it is important to consider the context in which these conditions are embedded. The concept of neoliberalism is a useful tool for describing the context in which emergent forms of trans resistance are appearing. Scholars and activists have used the term "neoliberalism" in recent years to describe a range of interlocking trends in domestic and international politics that constitute the current political landscape. The term is slippery and imperfect. Neoliberalism is used to mean lots of different things by lots of different people, and it is sometimes used to refer to conditions that we could understand as not new at all, like state violence toward people of color, US military imperialism, and attacks on poor people. However, I find the term useful because it allows space for critical insight into the range of practices producing effects at the register of law, policy, economy, identity, organization, and affect. It helps us look at a set of things together and understand their interlocking relationships rather than analyzing them in ways that make us miss key connections.

Neoliberalism has not only shaped the larger social, economic, and political conditions that trans people find themselves in, but has also produced a specific lesbian and gay rights formation that trans politics operates in relation to. The concept of neoliberalism is useful both for raising concerns about the effects of the lesbian and gay rights formation on trans people, and for calling into question the usefulness of the lesbian and gay rights model for trans law reform efforts.

Neoliberalism has been used to conceptually draw together several key trends shaping contemporary policies and practices that have redistributed life chances over the last forty years. These trends include a significant shift in the relationships of workers to owners, producing a decrease in real wages, an increase in contingent labor, and the decline of labor unions; the dismantling of welfare programs; trade liberalization (sometimes called "globalization"); and increasing criminalization and immigration enforcement. Neoliberalism is also associated with the rollback of the gains of the civil rights movement and other social movements of the 1960s and '70s, combined with the mobilization of racist, sexist, and xenophobic images and ideas to bolster these changes. Further, the emotional or affective registers of neoliberalism are attuned to notions of "freedom" and "choice" that obscure systemic inequalities and turn social movements toward goals of inclusion and incorporation and away from demands for redistribution and structural transformation.

At a broad level, the advent of neoliberal politics has resulted in an upward distribution of wealth. Simply put, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. The real wages of Americans have not increased since the 1970s, and the bargaining power of workers trying to improve the conditions under which they labor has declined significantly. Today fewer workers are part of labor unions, and major law and policy changes have made it harder for workers to organize and utilize tools like labor strikes to increase bargaining power and push demands. More workers have been forced into the contingent labor force, working as "temps" of various kinds without job security or benefits. At the same time, these developments are lauded by proponents of neoliberalism as increased "flexibility" and "choice" in the job market, where workers are portrayed as having more of an entrepreneurial role in their own employment as independent contractors. In reality, workers have lost real compensation, in terms of both wages and benefits. These changes in the relationship between workers and owners, and the reduction in unionization in particular, have resulted in the loss of certain important benefits that were fought for — and won — by organized labor forces in some industries and for some employees. Benefits such as old age pensions and health care that many used to access through their jobs have disappeared as labor has been restructured.

During the same period state programs to support poor people, people with disabilities, and old people have also been dismantled. As a result, more and more people have been left without the basic safety nets necessary to ensure their very survival. The real worth of already inadequate benefits has continuously decreased since the 1970s while the laws and policies governing these programs have simultaneously changed to exclude more and more people from eligibility. Lifetime limits, new provisions excluding immigrants, family caps limiting benefits for new children entering a family, and new regimes of work requirements imposed on those in need of benefits were introduced in the 1990s to "end welfare as we know it." These drastic policy changes have left millions of poor people with less access to basic necessities: these changes have destroyed public housing projects, greatly reduced vital health and social services, and produced a significant increase in the number of people living without shelter.

Globally, the upward distribution of wealth has been aided by trends of trade liberalization combined with coercive rules imposed upon poor/indebted countries by rich/grantor countries. Both of these elements create rules that reduce the ability of countries to protect their workers and natural environments from exploitation and build programs like education and health care systems that increase the well-being and security of their own people. Trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are used by corporations to attack rules that protect workers or the environment, arguing that such rules are barriers to "free trade." At the same time, organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank place limitations on what indebted countries can do, forcing them to focus on producing cash crops in order to make payments on debts instead of investing money in basic necessities and infrastructure within the country, or growing sustenance crops to feed their people. The structures of trade liberalization and coercive debt allow wealthy countries and corporations to perpetuate resource extraction against poor countries and their populations, leaving their people in peril. These conditions drastically impact the life spans of people in poor countries: deaths from preventable and treatable disease, hunger, and environmental damage are the direct result of economic...