THE SEXUAL IS POLITICAL

Segregated toilet doors are today at the center of a big legal and ideological struggle. On
March 29, 2016, a group of 80 predominantly Silicon Valley-based business executives, headlined
by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, signed a letter to North Carolina
Governor Pat McCrory denouncing a law that prohibits transgender people from using public
facilities intended for the opposite sex. We are disappointed in your decision to sign this
discriminatory legislation into law, the letter says. The business community, by and large, has
consistently communicated to lawmakers at every level that such laws are bad for our employees
and bad for business. So it is clear where big capital stands. Tim Cook can easily forget about
hundreds of thousands of Foxconn workers in China assembling Apple products in slave conditions;
he made his big gesture of solidarity with the underprivileged, demanding the abolition of gender
segregation As is often the case, big business stands proudly united with politically correct
theory.

So what is transgenderism? It occurs when an individual experiences discord between his/her

biological sex (and the corresponding gender, male or female, assigned to him/her by society at
birth) and his/her subjective identity. As such, it does not concern only men who feel and act like
women and vice versa but a complex structure of additional genderqueer positions which are
outside the very binary opposition of masculine and feminine: bigender, trigender, pangender,
genderfluid, up to agender. The vision of social relations that sustains transgenderism is the so-
called postgenderism: a social, political and cultural movement whose adherents advocate a
voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in biotechnology and
reproductive technologies. Their proposal not only concerns scientific possibility, but is also
ethically grounded. The premise of postgenderism is that the social, emotional and cognitive
consequences of fixed gender roles are an obstacle to full human emancipation. A society in which
reproduction through sex is eliminated (or in which other versions will be possible: a woman can
also father her child, etc.) will open unheard-of new possibilities of freedom, social and emotional
experimenting. It will eliminate the crucial distinction that sustains all subsequent social hierarchies
and exploitations.

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One can argue that postgenderism is the truth of transgenderism. The universal fluidification of
sexual identities unavoidably reaches its apogee in the cancellation of sex as such. Recall Marxs
brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of
Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the
anonymous kingdom of the Republic. The only way to be a royalist in general was to be a
republican, and, in the same sense, the only way to be sexualized in general is to be asexual.

The first thing to note here is that transgenderism goes together with the general tendency in todays
predominant ideology to reject any particular belonging and to celebrate the fluidification of all
forms of identity. Thinkers like Frederic Lordon have recently demonstrated the inconsistency of
cosmopolitan anti-nationalist intellectuals who advocate liberation from a belonging and in
extremis tend to dismiss every search for roots and every attachment to a particular ethnic or
cultural identity as an almost proto-Fascist stance. Lordon contrasts this hidden belonging of self-
proclaimed rootless universalists with the nightmarish reality of refugees and illegal immigrants
who, deprived of basic rights, desperately search for some kind of belonging (like a new
citizenship). Lordon is quite right here: it is easy to see how the cosmopolitan intellectual elites
despising local people who cling to their roots belong to their own quite exclusive circles of rootless
elites, how their cosmopolitan rootlessness is the marker of a deep and strong belonging. This is
why it is an utter obscenity to put together elite nomads flying around the world and refugees
desperately searching for a safe place where they would belongthe same obscenity as that of
putting together a dieting upper-class Western woman and a starving refugee woman.

Furthermore, we encounter here the old paradox: the more marginal and excluded one is, the more
one is allowed to assert ones ethnic identity and exclusive way of life. This is how the politically
correct landscape is structured. People far from the Western world are allowed to fully assert their
particular ethnic identity without being proclaimed essentialist racist identitarians (native
Americans, blacks). The closer one gets to the notorious white heterosexual males, the more
problematic this assertion is: Asians are still OK; Italians and Irish maybe; with Germans and
Scandinavians it is already problematic However, such a prohibition on asserting the particular
identity of white men (as the model of oppression of others), although it presents itself as the
admission of their guilt, nonetheless confers on them a central position. This very prohibition makes

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them into the universal-neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the others oppression
is accessible. The imbalance weighs also in the opposite direction: impoverished European
countries expect the developed West European ones to bear the full burden of multicultural
openness, while they can afford patriotism.

And a similar tension is present in transgenderism. Transgender subjects who appear as

transgressive, defying all prohibitions, simultaneously behave in a hyper-sensitive way insofar as
they feel oppressed by enforced choice (Why should I decide if I am man or woman?) and need a
place where they could recognize themselves. If they so proudly insist on their trans-, beyond all
classification, why do they display such an urgent demand for a proper place? Why, when they find
themselves in front of gendered toilets, dont they act with heroic indifferenceI am transgendered,
a bit of this and that, a man dressed as a woman, etc., so I can well choose whatever door I want!?
Furthermore, do normal heterosexuals not face a similar problem? Do they also not often find it
difficult to recognize themselves in prescribed sexual identities? One could even say that man (or
woman) is not a certain identity but more like a certain mode of avoiding an identity And we
can safely predict that new anti-discriminatory demands will emerge: why not marriages among
multiple persons? What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a
marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal emotions. Is to
exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of speciesism, an unjust privileging of the
human species?

Insofar as the other great antagonism is that of classes, could we not also imagine a homologous
critical rejection of the class binary? The binary class struggle and exploitation should also be
supplemented by a gay position (exploitation among members of the ruling class itself, e.g.,
bankers and lawyers exploiting the honest productive capitalists), a lesbian position (beggars
stealing from honest workers, etc.), a bisexual position (as a self-employed worker, I act as both
capitalist and worker), an asexual one (I remain outside capitalist production), and so forth.

This deadlock of classification is clearly discernible in the need to expand the formula: the basic
LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) becomes LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual) or even LGBTQQIAAP (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

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Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual). To resolve the problem,
one often simply adds a + which serves to include all other communities associated with the LGBT
community, as in LGBT+. This, however, raises the question: is + just a stand-in for missing
positions like and others, or can one be directly a +? The properly dialectical answer is yes,
because in a series there is always one exceptional element which clearly does not belong to it and
thereby gives body to +. It can be allies (honest non-LGBT individuals), asexuals (negating
the entire field of sexuality) or questioning (floating around, unable to adopt a determinate
position).

Consequently, there is only one solution to this deadlock, the one we find in another field of
disposing waste, that of trash bins. Public trash bins are more and more differentiated today. There
are special bins for paper, glass, metal cans, cardboard package, plastic, etc. Here already, things
sometimes get complicated. If I have to dispose of a paper bag or a notebook with a tiny plastic
band, where does it belong? To paper or to plastic? No wonder that we often get detailed instruction
on the bins, right beneath the general designation: PAPERbooks, newspapers, etc., but NOT
hardcover books or books with plasticized covers, etc. In such cases, proper waste disposal would
have taken up to half an hour or more of detailed reading and tough decisions. To make things
easier, we then get a supplementary trash bin for GENERAL WASTE where we throw everything
that did not meet the specific criteria of other bins, as if, once again, apart from paper trash, plastic
trash, and so on, there is trash as such, universal trash.

Should we not do the same with toilets? Since no classification can satisfy all identities, should we
not add to the two usual gender slots (MEN, WOMEN) a door for GENERAL GENDER? Is this
not the only way to inscribe into an order of symbolic differences its constitutive antagonism?
Lacan already pointed out that the formula of the sexual relationship as impossible/real is 1+1+a,
i.e., the two sexes plus the bone in the throat that prevents its translation into a symbolic
difference. This third element does not stand for what is excluded from the domain of difference; it
stands, instead, for (the real of) difference as such.

The reason for this failure of every classification that tries to be exhaustive is not the empirical
wealth of identities that defy classification but, on the contrary, the persistence of sexual difference

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as real, as impossible (defying every categorization) and simultaneously unavoidable. The
multiplicity of gender positions (male, female, gay, lesbian, bigender, transgender) circulates
around an antagonism that forever eludes it. Gays are male, lesbians female; transsexuals enforce a
passage from one to another; cross-dressing combines the two; bigender floats between the two
Whichever way we turn, the two lurks beneath.

This brings us back to what one could call the primal scene of anxiety that defines transgenderism. I
stand in front of standard bi-gender toilets with two doors, LADIES and GENTLEMEN, and I am
caught up in anxiety, not recognizing myself in any of the two choices. Again, do normal
heterosexuals not have a similar problem? Do they also not often find it difficult to recognize
themselves in prescribed sexual identities? Which man has not caught himself in momentary doubt:
Do I really have the right to enter GENTLEMEN? Am I really a man?

We can now see clearly what the anxiety of this confrontation really amounts to. Namely, it is the
anxiety of (symbolic) castration. Whatever choice I make, I will lose something, and this something
is NOT what the other sex has. Both sexes together do not form a whole since something is
irretrievably lost in the very division of sexes. We can even say that, in making the choice, I
assume the loss of what the other sex doesnt have, i.e., I have to renounce the illusion that the
Other has that X which would fill in my lack. And one can well guess that transgenderism is
ultimately an attempt to avoid (the anxiety of) castration: thanks to it, a flat space is created in
which the multiple choices that I can make do not bear the mark of castration. As Alenka Zupani
expressed it in a piece of personal communication: One is usually timid in asserting the existence
of two genders, but when passing to the multitude this timidity disappears, and their existence is
firmly asserted. If sexual difference is considered in terms of gender, it is made at least in
principle compatible with mechanisms of its full ontologization.

Therein resides the crux of the matter. The LGBT trend is right in deconstructing the standard
normative sexual opposition, in de-ontologizing it, in recognizing in it a contingent historical
construct full of tensions and inconsistencies. However, this trend reduces this tension to the fact
that the plurality of sexual positions are forcefully narrowed down to the normative straightjacket of
the binary opposition of masculine and feminine, with the idea that, if we get away from this

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straightjacket, we will get a full blossoming multiplicity of sexual positions (LGBT, etc.), each of
them with its complete ontological consistency. It assumes that once we get rid of the binary
straightjacket, I can fully recognize myself as gay, bisexual, or whatever. From the Lacanian
standpoint, nonetheless, the antagonistic tension is irreducible, as it is constitutive of the sexual as
such, and no amount of classificatory diversification and multiplication can save us from it.

The same goes for class antagonism. The division introduced and sustained by the emancipatory
(class) struggle is not between the two particular classes of the whole, but between the whole-in-
its-parts and its remainder which, within the particulars, stands for the universal, for the whole as
such, opposed to its parts. Or, to put it in yet another way, one should bear in mind here the two
aspects of the notion of remnant: the rest as what remains after the subtraction of all particular
content (elements, specific parts of the whole), and the rest as the ultimate result of the subdivision
of the whole into its parts, when, in the final act of subdivision, we no longer get two particular
parts or elements, two somethings, but a something (the rest) and a nothing.

In Lacans precise sense of the term, the third element (the Kierkegaardian chimney sweeper)
effectively stands for the phallic element. How so? Insofar as it stands for pure difference: the
officer, the maid, and the chimney sweeper are the male, the female, plus their difference as such,
as a particular contingent object. Again, why? Because not only is difference differential, but, in an
antagonistic (non)relationship, it precedes the terms it differentiates. Not only is woman not-man
and vice versa, but woman is what prevents man from being fully man and vice versa. It is like the
difference between the Left and the Right in the political space: their difference is the difference in
the very way difference is perceived. The whole political space appears differently structured if we
look at it from the Left or from the Right; there is no third objective way (for a Leftist, the
political divide cuts across the entire social body, while for a Rightist, society is a hierarchic whole
disturbed by marginal intruders).

Difference in itself is thus not symbolic-differential, but real-impossible something that eludes
and resists the symbolic grasp. This difference is the universal as such, that is, the universal not as a
neutral frame elevated above its two species, but as their constitutive antagonism. And the third
element (the chimney sweeper, the Jew, object a) stands for difference as such, for the pure

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difference/antagonism which precedes the differentiated terms. If the division of the social body
into two classes were complete, without the excessive element (Jew, rabble), there would have
been no class struggle, just two clearly divided classes. This third element is not the mark of an
empirical remainder that escapes class classification (the pure division of society into two classes),
but the materialization of their antagonistic difference itself, insofar as this difference precedes the
differentiated terms. In the space of anti-Semitism, the Jew stands for social antagonism as such:
without the Jewish intruder, the two classes would live in harmony Thus, we can observe how the
third intruding element is evental: it is not just another positive entity, but it stands for what is
forever unsettling the harmony of the two, opening it up to an incessant process of re-
accommodation.

A supreme example of this third element, objet a, which supplements the couple, is provided by a
weird incident that occurred in Kemalist Turkey in 1926. Part of the Kemalist modernization was to
enforce new European models for women, for how they should dress, talk and act, in order to get
rid of the oppressive Oriental traditions. As is well known, there indeed was a Hat Law prescribing
how men and women, at least in big cities, should cover their heads. Then,

in Erzurum in 1926 there was a woman among the people who were executed under the pretext of
opposing the Hat Law. She was a very tall (almost 2 m.) and very masculine-looking woman who
peddled shawls for a living (hence her name alc Bac [Shawl Sister]). Reporter Nimet Arzk
described her as, two meters tall, with a sooty face and snakelike thin dreadlocks [] and with
manlike steps. Of course as a woman she was not supposed to wear the fedora, so she could not
have been guilty of anything, but probably in their haste the gendarmes mistook her for a man and
hurried her to the scaffold. alc Bac was the first woman to be executed by hanging in Turkish
history. She was definitely not normal since the description by Arzk does not fit in any
framework of feminine normalcy at that particular time, and she probably belonged to the old
tradition of tolerated and culturally included special people with some kind of genetic disorder.
The coerced and hasty transition to modernity, however, did not allow for such an inclusion to
exist, and therefore she had to be eliminated, crossed out of the equation. Would a woman wear a
hat that she be hanged? were the last words she was reported to have muttered on the way to the
scaffold. Apart from making no sense at all, these words represented a semantic void and only

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indicated that this was definitely a scene from the Real, subverting the rules of semiotics: she was
first emasculated (in its primary etymological sense of making masculine), so that she could be
emasculated.[1]

How are we to interpret this weird and ridiculously excessive act of killing? The obvious reading
would have been a Butlerian one: through her provocative trans-sexual appearance and acting, alc
Bac rendered visible the contingent character of sexual difference, of how it is symbolically
constructed. In this way, she was a threat to normatively established sexual identities My reading
is slightly (or not so slightly) different. Rather than undermine sexual difference, alc Bac stood
for this difference as such, in all its traumatic Real, irreducible to any clear symbolic opposition.
Her disturbing appearance transforms clear symbolic difference into the impossible-Real of
antagonism. So, again, in the same way as class struggle is not just complicated when other
classes that do not enter the clear division of the ruling class and the oppressed class appear (this
excess is, on the contrary, the very element which makes class antagonism real and not just a
symbolic opposition), the formula of sexual antagonism is not M/F (the clear opposition between
male and female) but MF+, where + stands for the excessive element which transforms the
symbolic opposition into the Real of antagonism.

This brings us back to our topic, the big opposition that is emerging today between, on the one
hand, the violent imposition of a fixed symbolic form of sexual difference as the basic gesture of
counteracting social disintegration and, on the other hand, the total transgender fluidification of
gender, the dispersal of sexual difference into multiple configurations. While in one part of the
world, abortion and gay marriages are endorsed as a clear sign of moral progress, in other parts,
homophobia and anti-abortion campaigns are exploding. In June 2016, al-Jazeera reported that a 22-
year-old Dutch woman complained to the police that she had been raped after being drugged in an
upmarket nightclub in Doha. And the result was that she was convicted of having illicit sex by a
Qatari court and given a one-year suspended sentence. On the opposite end, what counts as
harassment in the PC environs is also getting extended. The following case comes to mind. A
woman walked on a street with a bag in her hand, and a black man was walking 15 yards behind
her. Becoming aware of it, the woman (unconsciously, automatically?) tightened her grip on the

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bag, and the black man reported that he experienced the womans gesture as a case of racist
harassment

What goes on is also the result of neglecting the class and race dimension by the PC proponents of
womens and gay rights:

In 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman created by a video marketing company in 2014, an

actress dressed in jeans, black t-shirt, and tennis shoes walked through various Manhattan
neighborhoods, recording the actions and comments of men she encountered with a hidden camera
and microphone. Throughout the walk the camera recorded over 100 instances coded as verbal
harassment, ranging from friendly greetings to sexualized remarks about her body, including threats
of rape. While the video was hailed as a document of street harassment and the fear of violence that
are a daily part of womens lives, it ignored race and class. The largest proportion of the men
presented in the video were minorities, and, in a number of instances, the men commenting on the
actress were standing against buildings, resting on fire hydrants, or sitting on folding chairs on the
sidewalk, postures used to characterize lower class and unemployed men, or, as a reader
commented on it: The video was meant to generate outrage and it used crypto-racism to do
it.[2]

The great mistake in dealing with this opposition is to search for a proper measure between two
extremes. What one should do instead is to bring out what both extremes share: the fantasy of a
peaceful world where the agonistic tension of sexual difference disappears, either in a clear and
stable hierarchic distinction of sexes or in the happy fluidity of a desexualized universe. And it is
not difficult to discern in this fantasy of a peaceful world the fantasy of a society without social
antagonisms, in short, without class struggle.

[1] Bulent Somay, LOrient nexiste pas, doctoral thesis defended at Birkbeck College,
University of London, on November 29 2013.

[2] See https://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2014/11/18/nice-bag-discussing-race-class-and-

sexuality-in-examining-street-harassment/.