This paper will examine the violence of heteronormativity against particular kinds of bodies. The two forms of heteronormative violence that I am concerned with are epistemic violence and brute physical violence. To establish my argument, I explore the killing in 2002 of trans woman, Gwen Araujo, and the legal defence (the trans panic defence) that the defendants at the legal trials that followed endeavoured to mobilise. Both forms of violence operate in a similar way, albeit through different mechanisms, to contribute to the maintenance and extension of a system of binary morphology that itself entails the perpetual materialization of bodies in particular ways. One of the factors motivating the writing of this paper is to seek to understand why compulsory heterosexuality and sexual dimorphism appear so recalcitrant, persisting in the face of exceptions that one might expect would, if not invalidate them, would at least problematize them. Drawing on Michel Foucault''s idea of normation, I argue that the reason why anomalous bodies do not undermine the prevailing gender order is because heteronormative knowledge production, as I term it, constitutes such bodies as perfectly intelligible or apprehensible within its own terms. What is ab-normal or ostensibly un-intelligible is internal to the process of categorization constitutive of the two-sex model and all that is entailed by it, not something outside or beyond that process. Heteronormative violence in its manifold forms thus helps to determine the bodies that count or "matter" (to borrow from Butler), as well as forms of violence that are recognizable as forms of violence worthy of state sanction and those that are not.
