As most readers will surely know, I am an historian by training, and an historian of Europe in particular. At the same time, I am one of a very few transsexual women working, not just in the academy, but outside of the sciences and on topics entirely unrelated to gender, queerness and transsexuality. I keep these two parts of my life fairly distant from one another. My investigations into anarchist networks and my daily tribulations as an unnormative woman are, to the best of my abilities, separate domains. However, as a voracious and globalizing accumulator of knowledge, I would be hard pressed to forgo visible analogies in some of the many domains which I chance across. Studying under one of the great living historians of European nationalism, it has been difficult to avoid some sense of familiarity to myself in the experiences of early Eastern European nationalist movements --- a similarity with troubling implications.
Many people prefer the sense that nationalism is a sourceless and irrational ideology, premised on imaginary shared characteristics pointed against an imaginary shared enemy. But the world is not so easy. Historian John Connelly argues that much of nationalism's appeal derives from a 'genocide anxiety,' the fear that your people and your way of life will be eradicated from the world. Max Bergholz made similar arguments about the Yugoslav lands where he discussed the ability for small groups attacking others in the name of ethnicity to indeed generate that sense of solidarity on the basis of shared victimhood. Eastern European nationalism arose from shared suffering and victimhood --- when you and some of your neighbors are being hunted by individuals calling themselves Croats, who want to kill you because you and your neighbors are Serbs, then whether you like it or not, the categories of Croat and Serb have suddenly become incredibly meaningful. In game theory terms, it makes no sense to disarm unilaterally.
Naturally, the origins in victimhood does not purify the ultimate trajectory of many nationalist movements. Genocide anxiety persists in the collective consciousness after the initial threat has passed, and instead is transposed onto other groups and subjects who can be construed as a threat to the now meaningfully constructed nation. We see this in the Serb case with the later transposing of Croat violence onto Muslim Bosnians, and of course with another Eastern European nationalist project in Zionism.
And yet, those early stages feel so familiar to me. Early consciousness raising for nationalism involves small groups collecting histories, weaving national narratives, reading new meaning into past events and past figures. Then, it's mobilized more broadly by grievances over schooling and how to raise children --- should Czech children be forced to learn German or should they be allowed to learn Czech? and what about vice versa? is it okay for Germans to adopt Czech children or is this indoctrination?
It's difficult not to see a 'family resemblance' here to contemporary issues of transsexuality. Our community is now able to narrate an 'origin story' which runs through temple priestesses and roman empresses in the west and 'third sexed' subjectivites elsewhere to the genesis of modern transsexuality in Weimar Germany, where we then experience our own cataclysm and dispersal, followed by a slow reconstruction ever since. Our understanding of these issues is the result of painstaking study by multiple generations of trans scholars now. And again, I can't help but see clear parallels to figures like Johann Herder or Frantisek Palacky. This is not at all to disparage this work; I believe it is legitimate to reread figures and movements in a modern light with our own subjectivity guiding us.
If that's the constructive side of our community efforts there is also of course the far bleaker side. If we consider ourselves a people with a culture, then naturally part of that subjectivity involves our access to sociolegal and medical transitions. I feel a certain sympathy now to a Czech of the 1830s outraged that his son will be unable to speak his own language at school, because this is now the outrage I feel at the ready abandonment of our claim to cultural pluralism by those who would surrender trans kids to the grist mill of cissexual society. Naturally these things are quite different, and I believe the psychological impacts of transsexuality are intrinsically greater, but again, there is a certain family resemblance.
I want to be clear that this is not a position I 'advocate.' I have already made clear the terrible impacts nationalism can have unchecked. This post is instead an open ended musing on how I've ended up at this place, where despite recognizing the pitfalls of victimhood nationalism, I've still ended up with very similar sentiments. Why should the right of our children to take hormones be abridged? Why should the right of our children to learn of our subjectivity be taken away? After all, our subjectivity was formed in violence --- just as ethnic identity can be formed by external persecution so too has transsexual womanhood been crafted from the fires of transmisogyny.
But of course, the resolution to any such movement lacks the recourse that nationalist movements had --- the establishment of a state. Not only would such a move naturally be idiotic, for us it's simply impossible. So I'm left with a basket of inconvenient feelings. A series of grievances which I increasingly interpret in cultural terms rather than absolute ones [a divergence which ultimately stems from one's answer to the political-theological question 'what does gender mean']. Under the eyes of the enemy I'm not certain of any path forward. I just know I'm angry, and indignant, and feel a deep protectionism for those I see as my People.
