Understanding ‘Cis’-temic violence: Surveillance of Trans bodies

Artwork by Anika Vijapur

Ken Booth’s ‘Reflections of a Fallen Realist’ made me rethink how far I myself had fallen from the mainstream understanding of security. My first encounter with Security Studies was in 11th grade Political Science class, although I am sure I had unwittingly engaged in discussions about security long before that. I was fascinated by the Realist understanding of security, the strategies of war, until I learnt about the concept of Human Security in 12th grade, which felt like a groundbreaking idea to me at the time. It was only in my second year at college that I realized that even the academic literature that veered away from the mainstream understanding of Security, still seemed restrained in its exploration of the dimensions of security. 

Mead’s concept of ‘Me’ vs ‘I’ had a profound impact
on me. ‘Me’ is a student of International Relations, with a keen interest in the gendered aspect of security, but has barely scratched the surface of what ‘gender’ means. It was ‘I’ who met people from all over the country, with different expressions of their gender, that began to wonder what non cisgender people must struggle with on a daily basis, pre, during or post conflict. ‘Cisprivilege’, the privilege of identifying with the gender/sex that one is assigned at birth, is something most of us take for granted. Security practices still consider gender as a binary, and create insecurity by adhering to and reproducing gender differences. A particular security practice that I want to scrutinize is the surveillance of trans bodies through Whole Body Imaging (WBI) at airports. 

Post 9/11, the U.S Transportation Security Administration (TSA) adopted very strict security measures at airports, which led to the ‘securitization of identity’. Gender was one of the most important identities that became securitized. If the gender/sex on a person’s documents did not match their physical appearance, then it was a red flag for the guards. I am using gender and sex interchangeably here because TSA has a very essentialist perspective of gender, where they assume that a person’s biological sex is their gender. There are many testimonies of members of the transgender community being harrassed by TSA. The situation is worse if the person is not Caucasian or Muslim. Their gender based insecurity is further inter-linked with their religious or racial insecurity. 

The Secure Flight Programme clearly views gender as a binary and tries to compartmentalize everyone into M or F. If you do not fit neatly into these boxes, then you are forced to undergo an invasive pat down, interrogation, scrutiny of all your documents, and much more. At this point, it is less of a security measure, and more of state sponsored harassment. 

In fact, the practice I have chosen for this blog is only one of the forms of structural violence that transgenders have to face. The immense difficulty in changing one’s gender in official documents, lack of accessibility to doctors for Gender Affirming Surgery/Hormone Therapy, and absence of ‘Non Binary’ as an option in official documents are systemic violences that the state inflicts. Add to these the micro aggressions of not having gender neutral spaces in most places, and it becomes impossible to ignore the cisprivilege enjoyed by most of us that we take for granted. 

My favorite ‘Lauras’ (Laura J. Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg) point out that historically trans bodies have been made invisible, and in the past few decades, they have been made hypervisible due to excessive surveillance. This begs the question, is gender a good marker for identification in airports? With the advent of technology, it is easier to catch criminals, but it is also easy to target certain communities by the state. I propose that while coming up with security measures, the state should not think of the needs of trans people as an exception just because they are considered a minority. Gender should not be such a staunch identification marker that non binary and trans people become targets. 

Another interesting point that I came across while reading on the subject was that this situation is usually looked at from two perspectives. Either transgenders are considered a threat, or they are infantilized, someone that needs protection. In both the cases, the agency is taken away from the individual, which is something that marginalized people often face. As Hansen has explained, gender becomes inter linked with a person’s other identities, and gender is almost never the sole reason for someone’s insecurity. Therefore, the ambiguity of gendered insecurity is something that needs to be taken more seriously when trying to form and study security measures. 

“The theory of the Copenhagen School argues that securitization takes place only when a referent object is declared existentially threatened. As a consequence, the definition of the referent object becomes crucial: it can block, or severely limit the qualification of issues as security problems.” (Hansen, 2000) Applying this to my chosen topic, the issue faced by transgenders won’t be considered a security problem because technically they are not being existentially threatened. However, the constant anxiety and terror of being interrogated and detained, if we assume that they are not being physically harmed, is an emotional and psychological threat. My train of thought led me to realize that ‘Me’ understood security issues only in a physical sense, but ‘I’ learnt the value of psychological trauma as a continuing security problem. Those who deviate from the roles of gender that are expected of them, are vulnerable to twofold violence, both physical and psychological, and it is an aspect of security that every student of International Relations must learn. 

References 

1. Currah, Paisley, and Tara Mulqueen. “Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport.” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 557–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347190.

2. Hansen, Lene. “The Little Mermaid's Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School,” 2000. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/03058298000290020501. 

3. Shepherd, Laura J., and Laura Sjoberg. “Trans- Bodies in/of War(s): Cisprivilege and Contemporary Security Strategy.” Feminist Review, no. 101 (2012): 5–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41495230. 

4. Sjoberg, Laura. 2018. “Feminist Security and Security Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of International Security, edited by Alexandra Gheciu and William Curti Wohlforth. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press