By: A.C.
The observation that gender-based violence is experienced differently by different groups of women served as foundational evidence for Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality. However, this does not just illustrate how different groups of women face different yet interlinked struggles for liberation, but points to how they each experience violence in recurring, systematic ways.
Understanding the reasons for this further requires a two-fold conceptualization of violence: firstly as a ‘language’ which tacitly conveys and reproduces values and beliefs about sexuality, womanhood and its intersections, and justice, but also as a ‘corrective mechanism’ employed to address a state of perceived imbalance or immorality, often in service of systems of domination and the prevailing social order.
While this framework applies to a variety of examples, it is easiest to describe using a personal one. In North America, transgender women are more than four times likely to experience sexual and aggravated assault, experience a 50% higher poverty rate due to housing and employment discrimination, and are four times more likely to be incarcerated due to police profiling and being disproportionately forced into survival sex work - statistics that only increase for those who are non-passing. In recent years, there has also been a rapid adoption of transphobic policies in the US to prevent us from participating in sports, using the bathrooms corresponding to our genders, and even accessing public spaces.
Taken together, the forms of gender-based violence transgender women experience serve several ends. Firslty, the sexual violence communicates the ways in which we are understood as feminine and are hypersexualized due to our status as ‘transgressors’ of the binary sex-gender complex, such that we become seen as the ‘sexual property’ of more powerful others; in this way, sexual violence can be understood as a ‘corrective mechanism’ to restore the ‘rights’ of these others in having them ‘lay claim to what they’re entitled to’. The other forms of violence we experience communicate the ways in which we are viewed as threatening to morality and society, which stems from our ‘transgressor’ status and the resulting associations with deviant sexuality, as well as the binary sex-gender complex which allows for us to be masculinized, such that we are seen as ‘male sexual predators’ that take ‘perverted pleasure’ in our ‘cross-dressing’. In this way, other forms of violence also become a corrective mechanism, both for resolving the gendered contradictions we embody, but also to remove us from society.
While this framework is clearly useful for explaining patterns in gender-based violence for different groups of women, it also lends credence to the idea that ending gender-based violence requires altering the complex network of beliefs and values associated with categories of identity. However, it further points to a neglected idea: that this framing of violence as an acceptable or even required response to a state of perceived ‘injustice’ is not a necessary one. Perhaps it is by moving away from punitive justice as a society that we will be able to end this epidemic of violence once and for all.