Freedom to Precarity: the ‘transgender tipping point’ from the perspective of trans feminine wage labo

Since 2014, the ”transgender tipping point” celebrates a (supposed) paradigm shift of trans visibility in “the west”: Increasingly, the neoliberal gender regime embraces transfeminine visibilities. Since the 2010s legal “gender self-determination” has increased in the German speaking countries. However, the narrative of universal progress towards (trans)gender freedom – critically coined as “trans liberalism” (Raha 2015) – underplays the ongoing norming of all and abjection of many – especially gender-non conforming and BPoC – transfeminine lives. neoliberal workfare policies and discourses and post-Fordist wage labor relations structure how transfeminine individuals live and die in the German speaking countries. Thus, I argue that labor politics and wage labor relations are crucial for understanding the current sexual/gender politics. This also leads to more ambivalent understandings about the state of trans emancipation in “the west”. By drawing on archival material and interviews with transfeminine individuals, in my presentation I first trace a shift of transfeminine visibility in labor relations from the Fordist to the post-For - dist accumulation regime: To be out as transfeminine to (potential) colleagues, employers, or customers doesn’t abject transfeminine individuals as workers for most jobs anymore. Instead, specific forms of visible transfemininity are included in the wider labor market. Hereby, race, class, dis/ability are decisive if, how and where a transfeminine subject is included into the labor force. These inclusions differ between different occupations and fields of work. Additionally, transfeminine people mostly find themselves in precarious positions, often at the lower end of the organizational hierarchy of companies. Thus, I suggest to understand transfeminine gender transitions as – uneven – processes of precarization not only with regard to gender recognition, but in terms of class status, too. These precarizations take place in a neoliberal recognition regime that increasingly ties a subject’s respectability to participation and status in recognized wage labor. Thus, threats of economic precarization interweave with current and past dominant cultural images of transfemininity. Hence, images of transfemininity as perversion, irrationality, and decay haunt transfeminine subjects. These hauntings inscribe themselves into transfeminine subjects – as I argue in the third part of my presentation. Based on my interviews, I highlight that a dominant strategy to secure their status as recognizable employees was to either hide their transness or try to present it in transnormative – that is binary, biologist and normalizing – ways. This includes aligning with classist, neurotypical, two-gendered and racist norms that differentiate between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ transfeminine subjects. These attempts to distance oneself form stigmatizing narratives and images of transfemininty are only possible for privileged transfeminine subjects: Class, race, disability play crucial roles which trans subjects can present themselves as ‘proper’ subjects and workers. The aim of my presentation is to highlight that neoliberal policies and discourses interwine with precarizations by the cisnormative labor market. Further, it shows how this currently forms a powerful dispositive that pushes transfeminine individuals to adhere to racialized binary gender norms, and installs a hierarchic order among transfeminine lives. Thus, taking into account wage labor relations and neoliberal labor policies questions optimistic narratives about (trans)gender freedom.